Increased globalization, rising number and diversity of stakeholders, and faster and faster speed at which information spreads have heightened the importance of communication within our member organizations. Other functions are turning to communications to help them deal with this new, more-complex communication environment and expecting communicators to bring more “to the table” than ever before.  These expectations put pressure on communicators to deliver new, innovative ideas and products as well as demonstrate a clear impact on bottom line.

In our functional capabilities diagnostic, we have asked communicators to evaluate 20 attributes of successful, world-class communications function based on their importance and effectiveness. The 3 key things that participants found the most important were: reducing low value work, selecting work that will create value, and testing and measuring communications effectiveness. However, when asked to rate how effective they are in achieving these, reducing low value work and testing effectiveness were the two things that communicators rated themselves as being the least effective in.

However, with flat budgets, and more complex demands from the business, these are the 3 things that the communicators need to excel at, now more than ever. So what does being great look like at these and how do you get better at it?

Reducing Low Value Work

Communicators who are good at this consistently evaluate their portfolio of offered communications activities and weight each of them in terms of both their effectiveness as well as their ability to crate business value.  For example, ING has put together a great Service Level Tiering Process for stepping away from low-value activities both by co-opting partners in prioritizing Communications’ activity portfolio and supporting partners as they undertake lower-value communications activities on their own.

Selecting Work that Will Create Value

Communicators who excel at this focus on selecting work with an explicit linkage to measurable business outcomes and resist work that is unrelated to business objectives. Toyota has put together a Problem-Solving Process to help communicators diagnose the business problems underlying partners’ requests for communications support, ensuring that communications solutions target and help drive business outcomes partners truly value.

Measure Function’s Effectiveness

The best communicators evaluate the impact of their efforts by measuring and assessing actual changes in stakeholders’ behavior—tied to specific company priorities rather than focusing on transactional metrics that cannot be directly tied to business impact. CEC has put together a great Communications Measurement and Reporting Toolkit to help you do just that.

Key Resources:

Reducing Low Value Work

Selecting Work that Will Create Value

Measure Function’s Effectiveness

The path to corporate leadership used to be simple: join a Fortune 500 company; grind your way up the corporate ladder for twenty years; and then voila, wear an Armani three-piece suit, sip 100 year-old scotch, and smoke fine Cubans. Success!

The path to leadership today is far less defined, and the “end-goal” for most leaders is not necessarily suits, scotch, and cigars. It is the comfort with this lack of a defined path or materialistic measure of success, however, that is a hallmark of business leaders, so argues Fast Company’s February cover story “This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business.”

The article’s thesis is simple: Today’s (and tomorrow’s) business leaders are agile learners who thrive on change. They’re quick to pick up new skills and even quicker to join a team of people who complement their unique talents and help bring their vision to reality. Some, of course, are entrepreneurs, but others, like Beth Comstock, the CMO of GE, or Raina Kumra, the Codirector of Innovation at the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a federal agency, are upending even well-established organizations to keep pace with the speed and opportunity of change.

Leaders Send Daily Signals that Discourage Agility in their Organizations

Building a “change-ready organization” takes time and conscientious effort. After all, most companies that grew in the second-half of the 20^th century were designed for efficiency, stability, and security, not holistic sustainability, adaptability, and uncertainty. Its people, then, grew up with the expectation that a long-career in one place would be rewarded. Those of Generation Flux entering the workforce understand and respect four-year careers, and look forward to continuous growth through multiple, though not necessarily predictable, changes in the work that they do.

So what? In short, young talent with agile propensities are entering your workforce. Yet, we know from our research that at least 50% of these individuals’ natural desire to innovate and improve the organization will be stifled, silenced by the drone of corporate cultures that (whether consciously or not) reward conformity and process over innovation and collaboration. At most organizations, then, agility needs to start with a dramatic shift in the mindset of leaders, those individuals who set the cultural tone of companies and have the most immediate ability to inflect change.

Leaders Must Broaden their View of Key Stakeholders

Susan Peters, the head of GE’s executive-development efforts, is grappling with this exact challenge. As shared in the Fast Company piece, she’s been at the forefront of developing a new set of expectations for GE’s top 650 leaders. The need for faster innovation, flattened hierarchies, collaboration, and systematized change is driving this shift:

“We know recognize that external focus is more multifaceted than simply serving ‘the customer,’ that other stakeholders have to be considered. We talk about how to get and apply external knowledge, how to lead in ambiguous situations, how to listen actively, and the whole idea of collaboration.”

Read More »

This blog is part of our Building a Global Mindset Series to help communicators increase their own cultural awareness and global perspective.

Crafting and executing communication strategies when entering a new market is hard. This is especially true if the cultural DNA of the country in question differs widely from home markets.  So, it’s not surprising that we get a lot of questions from our US and UK members about communicating effectively in Brazil –  an intensely multi-cultural society that is also one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

If you are tasked with steering your company’s communication efforts in Brazil, one of the first thing you will need to do is understand communication technology trends. Appreciating ground realities will help you leverage technology effectively across key activities such as PR, CSR, and employee and consumer communication.

Here are three key trends that you should know about technology in Brazil.

1. Mobile phones are ubiquitous: Although only the well-to-do can afford “luxuries” like landlines, mobile phones are commonplace – Brazil has 116 mobile phones per 100 inhabitants. While text messaging is extremely popular in Brazil, mobile internet usage is also increasing with 29% of Brazil’s internet users browsing through their mobile phones. In fact Brazil’s middle-class, spends most of their 3-4 hour long commutes consuming digital content.
2. Internet penetration is low, but rising fast: Unlike mobile phones which are extremely popular, Internet is not widely available to the masses. While currently 22% of the population have access to the Internet, this number is expected to up sharply by 2015. Mobile phones are expected to break the digital divide and drive the growth of internet penetration in the coming years. Another thing to keep in mind is that Portuguese is the most popular online language, not English.
3.  Sociable Brazil leads social media usage: Brazilian culture is equally social online as it is in real life with 91% of Brazil’s online population using social media. In fact, Brazilians carefully craft their online persona – activities such as posting messages or joining communities help Brazilians reflect their desired image. Moreover, while social media is synonymous with Facebook in many countries, it’s Google’s Orkut which has traditionally been the most popular in Brazil. Facebook though has seen a whirlwind growth in 2011 with its user base tripling in a year.

CEC Members: Check out our full Communicator’s Guide to Brazil for recommendations on how to leverage these technology trends as well as to navigate PR, CSR, and employee and consumer communications in Brazil.

What challenges have you experienced steering your communication activities in Brazil? How are you dealing with these challenges?

CEC Related Resources:

• Building a Global Mindset: A Communicator’s Guide to Brazil
• Building a Global Mindset: An Overview of Cultural Values That Shape Interpersonal Communications
• Global Perspective/Cultural Awareness Resource Center
• Managing Communications Across Global and/or Virtual Teams

CEC Related Blogs

• Employee Communications in China
• Lost In Translation: How Cultural Values Shape Your Communications

As 2011 draws to a close we look back more than 200 blogs published by CEC Insider during the calendar year.  The posts featured below were our top 5, having been downloaded by more CEC Insider readers than any others.  They address five communications topics that, while all different, are sure to remain of interest to communicators in the new year.  

3 Skills to Improve Your Job Security

• Job security does not exist. One of the most effective ways to ensure your future employment is to develop new skills continuously.   Since launching the CEC’s overhauled competency framework in the spring, nearly 1,000 communications have already taken the Skill Maturity Assessment to indentify and address the skill gaps of themselves and their team. In this blog, we examine the three weakest skills of most communicators.

               Additional Resource: CEC’s Communications Skill Maturity Assessment and Diagnostic

  Spot the Symptoms of Change Fatigue Read More »

By now, you’ve probably caught on to our theme for the year: Change. When asking the question, “has your company gone through change recently?”, there isn’t a single CEC member who has said, “Nope. Everything is the same as it’s always been.” I think we all agree that Communications is paramount in times of change. In fact, if you take a look at CEB’s Executive Guidance for 2012, the number one priority for a company’s success is having a clear and consistent communications language. We’ve also learned from our study “Building a Change-Ready organization” exactly what drives employees during times of change and what Communications can do about it.

But how do we measure our impact in times of change? How can we prove, without a doubt, that Communications is driving the bottom line in an ever changing environment? Take a look at the following scenario: Read More »

Line managers are be critical in ensuring success when making a major organizational change. As we know, they have the greatest influence over employee behavior, and can play a particularly vital role in contextualizing change for their teams.

Both intuition and experience, though, tell us that that line managers aren’t always up to this task. Many simply aren’t strong communicators, and the turbulence of change can disrupt even those who are strong the rest of the time.

How does your organization prepare managers for the additional stress and difficulty brought on by change? Many communicators are so pushed for time that they simply rely upon managers to muddle through. Others provide manager training of varying quality, to help managers cope with the increased demand of navigating the change.

Assessing for change-readiness

Significantly fewer companies, however, formally assess how ready their managers are to lead the change before it all begins. Although everyone knows how important they’ll be, many organizations enter a period of change without a clear view of their managers’ strengths and weaknesses; often, it’s only as the change unfolds, or else retrospectively, that managers’ skill gaps become evident. Of course, by this stage, it’s too late – the damage is done! Read More »

Ongoing change is a new reality. In the last two years, employees worldwide have experienced, on average, 3.5 major changes (enlarge graphic to the left). That means that most communicators have spent a lot of time planning for and talking about change. To help you craft a change communication plan that works, I suggest that you ask yourself the following 5 questions:

1. What is the desired stakeholder behavior change?
2. How will this behavior change impact the stakeholder?
3. What information should we share with stakeholders about the change?
4. How do we help leaders and managers to drive stakeholder behavior change?
5. How do we sustain change over time?

These questions will help you craft a change communication plan that builds your employee’s agility—their ability to adapt to any change—because as you plan to communicate about one change you are really:

• Creating communication systems that connect employees to people and information
• Equipping leaders and managers with the skills to help employees make their own decisions
• Enabling employees to lean in to change (rather than simply process and accept that change is happening to them)

Let’s take each question in a bit more detail. Read More »

Can leaders do anything right?  A lot of our work over the last few years – especially on Mobilizing the Workforce and Building a Change-Ready Organization – has challenged conventional wisdom around leadership communication:

• Be transparent?  Insufficient.
• Build buy-in?  Misses the mark in a high-change environment. 
• Give clear direction?  May actually do more harm than good.

But this doesn’t mean that leaders don’t matter or can’t communicate in ways that motivate employees and boost their productivity.  It’s just that we need leaders to play a different role – to empower:

• Seek employee feedback and input.  I don’t mean a “suggestion box,” which puts the burden to act back onto the leader.  Empowering leaders ask employees questions that they can answer to take action within the scope of their day-to-day work.
• Coach, don’t tell.  Empowering leaders – when possible – guide staff to figure out what to do rather than tell them what to do.
• Provide opportunities to experiment. Empowering leaders point out learning opportunities and help staff seize them and other employees share in what is learned.
• Connect employees to helpful people and tools.  Empowering leaders’ broad reach within the organization lets them make staff more productive by making smarter connections.  Read More »

If someone asked you today how you feel about your job you might say all positive things—you’re on a roll on your current project, you’ve gotten some good feedback recently from your manager, and right now you’re contributing to the organization in a way that you might not get to do elsewhere. But how did you feel about your job six months ago? And do you think you’ll still be at your company in a year?

The various changes and related stress that employees have faced over the past few years may not impact engagement today but it does have a great impact on their engagement capital—a look into engagement that includes employee perceptions of the past, present, and future.  Creating an organization with high engagement capital is a top priority of both Communications and Human Resources team.  How aligned are your current efforts? Read More »

Job security does not exist. The only way to ensure your future employment, in my opinion, is to develop new skills continuously. Now on that somber note, I present you with some hope—a look into three critical, but typically weak skills for corporate communicators complete with resources to jump start your learning and application.

Note: This is the continuation from CEC’s Back-to-School Special where we explored 3 of the 16 critical skills for the modern communicator.

Global Perspective/Cultural Awareness

I consider and proactively prepare for how stakeholders in other countries or cultures will respond to a communication strategy.

Why it Matters: This skill is the least-developed among communicators, but it’s also the most important to work on for two reasons. First, most of our CEC members tell us that their company is expanding into new, emerging markets. Suddenly, their audience has shifted from being U.S.-only to include employees and stakeholders on five continents. Second, whether or not their company is expanding or contracting, many Communications functions are reorganizing. For example, Communicators formerly aligned to a specific region are now formally reporting to Corporate.  In short, broader and more formalized networks of communicators are being employed at CEC member companies, which creates a whole new set of collaboration and ownership challenges.

Featured Resource: Managing Communication Across Global Teams—Use a simple framework to reveal how best to communicate and collaborate with communicators worldwide. The advice and resources contained within will help to build your sensitivity for and appreciation of differences in your business and develop decision-making mechanisms to respond quickly to potential crises or issues.

Business Acumen

I have an understanding of my company’s “ecosystem”, including the industry, global trends, macroeconomic changes, and regulatory changes.

Read More »