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!

Leading communicators work with change leaders to conduct change-readiness assessments in advance of any change initiatives. They get a feel for skill gaps before the event, leaving themselves time to close them via targeted training sessions.

CEC has identified four key competency groups required by managers during change – use CEC’s change competence diagnostic to assess how change-ready your managers are:

• Core communication skills: managers need to be able to articulate and personalize change for their employees, enabling them to understand both the organizational and the individual implications
• Performance enablement: managers must create an environment of performance, removing unnecessary red tape, encouraging considered risk-taking, and helping employees to network with relevant peers
• Project management: managers must be able to help employees prioritize their workload, and to help them to anticipate and avoid potential challenges
• Encourage agility: managers need to empower employees, contextualizing the change by bringing strategically relevant information to their teams, and seeking practical feedback on how existing processes can be improved

Featured Resources From CEC

Of course, when you identify competency gaps, you’ll want to close them. The following resources from the CEC canon will help you to do so:

1. Prepare managers for specific change events: enable experiential learning between managers (Nordea)
2. Create manager self-awareness: make managers aware of how their actions can inhibit employee agility and decision making (GSK)
3. Enable managers to hold dialogue: let managers take CEC’s E-Learning module to help them hold dialogue with their teams

Communicators are successfully enlisting line manager support in limiting reputational risks by erring on the side of simplicity in developing tools and processes for managers to use. Clear decision rules guiding the frequency, nature and venue of stakeholder interactions — plus making clear when to involve the communications team — line managers can play an essential role in local stakeholder engagement.

Line managers represent a powerful resource in identifying reputational threats as well as mitigating risks through engagement with key stakeholder groups. In companies with widely varying stakeholder groups across many locations, managers are much better suited to handle the basics of local stakeholder relations than a centralized corporate communications team. Leading communicators account for the real challenges in developing line managers as players in stakeholder engagement.

Case in Point: Alcoa

Alcoa recognized the great potential of their worldwide ranks of line managers and created a Stakeholder Relations Playbook. This condensed set of guidelines and tools made it easy for managers to achieve baseline competence in managing stakeholder relationships. The company discovered that it was not only able to reduce exposure to reputational risks, but better local stakeholder relations yielded direct business benefits.

CEC members can learn more about how Alcoa’s communications team turned line managers into allies in stakeholder relations.

CEC Related Resources

• Equipping Managers to Engage with Stakeholders
• Stakeholder Relations Playbook (Alcoa)
• Refocusing Reputation Management: Build Enterprise-Wide Reputation Management Skills

CEC Related Blog Posts

• Are You Limiting Your Communications Potential?
• Why Is Cross-Functional Collaboration SO Hard???

That said, something that was discussed in CEC’s recent webinar, “Avoiding Crises: Building a Preventative Safety Culture”, is that some (but not all!) of this passion, energy, and expertise has been misdirected. Communicators are doing more than ever to raise employee awareness of the need to be safe, but awareness alone may not be sufficient to drive the desired safe behavior.

Conflicting Messages

The safety messages that employees receive telling them to take care of themselves, or reminding them of the risks inherent in their jobs, aren’t the only messages that they’re receiving. What about the pressure they receive from their supervisor to hit production targets? Or the pressure from peers, who insist that “real men don’t wear gloves/helmets/goggles?”

A Better Way Forward

Some of the smartest communicators we’ve spoken with are taking an employee-centric, rather than a hierarchical, approach to safety. What do we mean by this? According to Joyce Schroeder, one of our webinar panelists, there are two things to think about here:

• Smart companies seek to understand the barriers to safe working practices from their employees’ perspective; instead of telling them to be safe, ask your employees what prevents them from being safe.
• Employees need to own safety – not the EHS function, not HR, not their manager, and not Comms. Employees are the ones who are most at risk, and are therefore best placed to identify solutions to unsafe practices

Bryan Boyd, who has revolutionized Caterpillar’s safety performance, discussed how he has put this into practice.  At Caterpillar, Bryan’s team has given their leaders a lot of support to help them hold dialogue with employees to identify both safety risks and solutions. For instance, many of companies we spoke with have their leaders conduct ‘Safety Walks’. But at a lot of the companies, leaders look for violations and try to ensure compliance. Instead of communicating at employees, Caterpillar’s leaders are provided with questions to ask when they conduct their safety walks – such as these:

• “What obstacles prevent you from doing your job safely every time?”
• “How can I help you create a safer working environment?”
• “Where do you see the next accident occurring in your facility?”

There’s a real difference in tone – at Caterpillar, employees are treated as active participants in a safe culture, rather than a passive recipient of information related to safety. Bryan and his team work to unlock the safety information that’s often trapped at the frontline by asking questions and holding dialogue, instead of telling people what to do and how to act.

CEC Related Resources

• Avoiding Crises: Building a Preventative Safety Culture (Webinar deck)
• Crisis Management: Our Latest Thoughts

CEC Related Blogs

• Engaging Frontline Employees in Safety Dialogue
• Communicating Before and After Crises

Coming soon from CEC

Also, look out for a CEC’s toolkit, “Workplace Safety: Toolkit for Communicators”

Finally, if you have any thoughts on last week’s webinar, or suggestions for our work in this space, get in touch! Email Daniel O’Keeffe on dokeeffeodonovan@executiveboard.com. Thanks!

As with learning any new skill, it might sound impossibly daunting at first. But then I’ll show you how to kick like your legs are stuck together and use your arms to pull in tandem. We’ll put it together in a full-body rhythm that will probably feel like you’re trying to do the snake in Jell-O — except less graceful. And that will be it. A little practice, some gentle reminders to breathe when it’s most natural to the stroke and you’re done. You can swim butterfly.

Learning most things is a matter of willingness, aptitude, and finding a competent teacher. As we talk about the importance of Communicators as enablers, it’s clear that this coaching function is more of a ‘when’ than an ‘if’.

Breaking down a communications strategy to make it more accessible is the first step in teaching a new communications skill to noncommunicators. The soft skills — a.k.a. interpersonal skills — that communicators deal in can be intimidating because they aren’t often thought of as something that can be taught. More often than not, people have developed a static perception of their own soft skills and will get anxious if they think they are being pushed beyond their comfort zone. If Communicators are going to help them improve, the first step is to convince them that it’s easy.

Professional communicators can help demystify these skills by breaking them down into easily actionable components. Though basic guidelines may seem overly simple to the pros, they can overcome the greatest hurdle for many to unlocking their soft skills — the perception that they can’t improve.

Take a look at how Continental Airlines broke storytelling into four simple steps to train managers to use stories to emotionally engage with employees:

1. Design a Story
2. Tell the Story and Receive Feedback
3. Tailor the Story for Specific Audiences
4. Tailor the Story for Specific Objectives

The airline got such positive feedback and had such success with their first storytelling practice sessions that they rolled it out to all of their managers. For more information on helping managers overcome their fear of communicating and telling stories, CEC members can learn how to equip your managers with story telling skills.

CEC Related Resources

• Equip Your Manager with Storytelling Skills
• Driving Engagement with Corporate Strategy
• Storytelling Workshops (Continental Airlines)

CEC Related Blog Posts

• Whose Story Is It, Anyway?
• Stories are Gifts – Share Them

Back in the day* we used to think, “It’s not what you say…it’s how you say it!”

TRANSLATION: We communicators are crafty enough to be able to get our stakeholders to swallow just about anything, if we say it in just the right way.

Today, however, as we’ve entered a more stakeholder-centric, “the-people-control-the-message” era: ”It’s not what you say…it’s what people hear.”

This new reality requires us to make adaptations in our value proposition.  It’s not hard to do, and it’s SO well worth the mental effort.  Because once you shift your self-image as a communicator — away from thinking of yourself as a world-class wordsmith, to becoming an increasingly excellent interpreter of how things sound to people who don’t always “get” what we’re trying to accomplish — it’s amazing what kinds of results you can create.

A couple of examples we’ve been sharing with CEC members around the world:

The subject of “management empowerment” is a tricky one.  While we know that leaders who emphasize the power of  ”taking action when you see something you can fix” over “waiting to be told what to do” are positioning their employees to be much more effective in these times of constant change, we ALSO know that the word empowerment sounds negative to some managers.

That’s why in our current presentation “Building a Change-Ready Organization” we show examples of companies like the UK-based pharma company GSK, where they’ve created a workshop that is aimed primarily at helping leaders increase their productivity (something everyone wants) instead of emphasizing empowerment (something a lot of leaders naturally resist).  Same concept, but presented in a way that honors the mindset and understanding of managers.  Their results have been VERY impressive.

We’ve also profiled a “dialogue workshop” Shell created as part of their management training curriculum.  It used to be called Communications Skills for Leaders– but it was clear that most leaders either already believe their communications skills are just fine, or that communications is something that we in Comms do, not something that leaders do.

So, using the “…it’s what people hear” approach, Shell modified the emphasis of the workshop away from “here’s how to communicate with your employees” toward “here’s how to achieve greater operational results” (which, of course, can only be accomplished through more effective dialogue and communication with your employees).  The workshop is now called Getting the Right Results. Same basic concept, but presented in a way that honors the perceptions of the people we’re trying so hard to reach.  That shift has made a HUGE impact.

HOW ABOUT YOU?  How are you using your listening/perception skills to connect better with your stakeholders?

[*Specifically, as I recall, it was a Tuesday in December of 1992]

CEC Related Resources:

• Empowerment Workshop for Leaders (GlaxoSmithKline CPSE)
• Dialogue Workshop for Leaders (Shell)

CEC Related Blogs:

• Why Your Leadership Communication Misses the Mark
• Harness the Power of EmPOWERment

But, as a manager, the word empower can be much more ferocious. From a manager’s perspective, empower means one thing—chaos. It means losing control, taking on risk, exposing the ego, relying on others but being accountable for results. Dilbert accurately describes what empowerment typically means to a manager:

(click to enlarge)

Leaders and managers don’t publicly fear empowerment; like in Dilbert, they often advocate for the right and authority for employees to make decisions and feel ownership. The word empower is easy to say, hard to act on, and easy to misinterpret. We in Communications can help make this fluffy word translate into concrete actions.

Here are 10 of the 20 tips for empowerment that GlaxoSmithKline’s CPSE group provides its managers to help them get into new habits that empower their teams. Use them in your day-to-day, share them with your managers, take a look around the organization and ask yourself if you see leaders and managers behaving in this way. For the full set of 20, visit the CEC website.

10 Ways to Empower Your Team

Open up Decision-Making

1. Clarify extent of decision-making authority without manager approval.

2. When leading a meeting, get everyone else’s opinion before expressing your own.

Build Confidence

3. Reward and recognize employees who act in an empowered way.

4. Paint an exciting vision of the future to help employees develop their own plans to achieve the vision.

Clearly Define Expectations

5. Spend more time at the beginning of a project to determine its scope and goals.

6. Ensure that each individual on your team understands what they are accountable for.

Support Risk Taking

7. Do not penalize mistakes; create opportunities for individuals to share what they’ve learned.

8. Share problems and challenges transparently to create a sense of team unity and support.

Encourage Communication

9. Encourage your team to take a dialogue or personality assessment, and then share results with the team.

10. Embed time in project planning for idea sharing and feedback from the team (not just the manager).

Empowerment may sound wishy-washy, but it can carry huge weight when backed up by the actions of leaders at your company. Communications, in partnership with HR, can work with leaders and managers to build a culture of action by way of empowering employees. To really start a transformation within your organization, I’d recommend facilitating a conversation among leaders to determine what empowerment looks like in action. Agree to a set of behaviors that foster empowerment and think about what those actions will help employees do differently and help the business to achieve.

Visit the CEC site to get the full 20 Ways to Empower Your Team, inspired by GlaxoSmithKline’s CPSE group.

CEC Related Resources:

• Leadership Communication that Empowers: GSK CPSE’s Empowerment Workshop for Leaders
• Line Manager Communications Topic Center
• Manager Dialogue Online Training Module
• Dialogue Workshop for Leaders

CEC Related Blog Posts:

• Why Your Leadership Communication Misses the Mark
• Harness the Power of EmPOWERment
• 3 Ways to Build a Change-Ready Organization
• The Surprising Truth About Communications’ Role in Motivation

Alas, you can’t change the past or recapture time lost, but you can do something about the rest of your 2011. You can make a commitment to spend more time being proactive and thoughtful in your role instead of feeling reactive and at the mercy of change—change in your team dynamics, your industry’s environment, your business partner’s expectations, or even your office coffee! And, we at CEC can help.

We took a look at the top tools and templates downloaded and used by your CEC Communications peers. These tools have helped your peers get their jobs done faster and more effectively, and they can help you do the same!

Download a tool, give it a try, and share your feedback (right here on this blog post) on how we can improve certain tools. See below the jump for the Top 5 Tools for Communicators.

Top 5 Tools for Communicators

1. Communications Metrics Selection Framework
   Selecting appropriate metrics is a difficult process for any communications team. This tool provides a framework for potential metrics, organized by stakeholder audience. Use these examples to guide your thinking on metrics selection for your function.
   If you’re interested in our latest research on measurement, check out our Communications Measurement & Reporting advice which details how leading communicators are winning points with business partners by planning upfront what success against communications objectives looks like and how it will be measured.
2. Social Media Strategy Builder
   Most companies dabble in social media without a clear purpose. Fortunately, the path to a great strategy is pretty straightforward. Your “right answer” will be based on the relative importance of the core things you can do with internal and external social media.
3. Dialogue Workshop for Managers and Leaders
   This PPT deck will help you run a dialogue skill-building workshop tailored to a specific business context. Specifically, the workshop will give managers hands-on practice in planning and executing a comprehensive dialogue strategy to support a shared business objective
4. Intranet Strategy Tool
   The intranet can do three things: feature content, organize content, and generate content. The best intranet strategies focus on improving one of these capabilities to drive maximum benefit. Use this tool to pick the functionality that’s right for you.
5. Facebook Toolkit
   This toolkit provides communications professionals with an evaluation checklist, strategy template, success metrics and operational guidelines to setup a Facebook page for Corporate Communications. This research also contains Facebook policy guidelines from Kraft Foods Inc.

• Provide strategy talking points and FAQs
• Create scripts and decks for presentations
• Maintain an online portal with news and information
• Facilitate presentation and storytelling training

What if I told you that this effort and energy were all for naught?

You’d probably call me a quack research analyst!

And you’d be right.

Right, that is, if your goal in supporting leaders and managers is to drive employee buy-in into changes happening around the organization.

But, if you’ve been following our work on Building a Change-Ready Organization, you know that we think there is a goal far superior to employee buy-in…employee agility. When employees (and ourselves) are agile, we as communicators don’t need to ratchet up the change-management machine every time a “change” happens within the organization.

And if the goal is agility, not buy-in, then the role of leadership, and therefore, Communications’ support for leaders needs to change. In short, leadership—while unable to “exhort” agility—still matters, but it looks a bit different as shown in the graphic below:

Think of Communications’ typical support I bulleted out in the opening paragraph. It primarily focuses on helping leaders determine what to say and how to say it to be seen as transparent and human in order to drive buy-in. When employee agility is the goal, these tactics fall short because communication is more than what leaders say, it’s how they act and the subsequent signals that employees receive. This requires a different-in-kind approach from Communications, one that we’ve seen leading companies adopt.

These leading communicators help leaders feel comfortable empowering employees by building leader self-awareness of their common habits to identify and correct behaviors that send the wrong signal.  Here are just three examples of questions that we’ve seen communicators ask leaders to think about to help them realize ways in which they may be inadvertently disempowering their staff:

1. Decision Making: When an employee comes to you with a problem, who typically solves it, you or them?
2. Management Style: What percentage of time in your one-on-one meetings do you spend listening and asking questions vs. directing and giving instructions?
3. Confidence Building: In the last week, what have you done to help build your employees confi dence in their own ability to solve problems?

Want to learn more about how you can start building a culture of empowerment at your organization? CEC members, join us on Wednesday, 22 June for a webinar on Leadership Communication that Empowers: GSK CPSE’s Empowerment Workshop for Leaders. You’ll learn how the Communications and HR teams within a GlaxoSmithKline business unit facilitated workshops that help leaders to overcome barriers to empowering staff.

If you join us you’ll get:

• A blueprint for conducting similar sessions with your leadership
• An empowerment self-diagnostic for leaders (or yourself!)
• Empowerment guidelines for managers
• Tips and tricks for how to embed the principles of the sessions into your everyday interactions with leaders and managers

CEC Related Resources:

• Webinar: Leadership Communication that Empowers: GSK CPSE’s Empowerment Workshop for Leaders
• Line Manager Communications Topic Center
• Manager Dialogue Online Training Module
• Dialogue Workshop for Leaders
  

CEC Related Blog Posts:

• Harness the Power of EmPOWERment
• 3 Ways to Build a Change-Ready Organization
• The Surprising Truth About Communications’ Role in Motivation

That said, safety often comes at the cost of efficiency (and sometimes a little bit of fun). In parts of our lives there is still someone there to demand a certain level of safety from us—be it a traffic cop, a TSA security guard, or a Mom (yep–she’s still around!). But at work, even if it is a small part of a manager’s role description, no one can be a full-time “safety cop.”

Many companies, particularly those in the energy/utility, manufacturing, and other heavy industries have been asking us about how to increase awareness of safety goals within their organizations. What is most critical for communicators, however, is to understand our role in helping employees align their everyday behavior to these safety goals—independent of a manager being there to remind them to use the handrail, drive more carefully, wear a helmet, etc.

Through a large quantitative study, the CEC identified the two main factors that mobilize employee behind company goals: their level of personal connection and their feeling of peer-to-peer support.

1. Personal Connection: The best way to drive employees’ personal connection with safety priorities is through improved dialogue between line managers and employees to drive an understanding of how these priorities impact employees’ daily role.

The Communications team at ITT supported front-line manager/team conversations around company goals (e.g., safety and quality) by engaging employees and managers in more interactive communication. Through an audit of the current barriers to success against these goals, they realized that a communications breakdown was getting in the way of their success. This simple addition of dialogue helped realign their plant culture around performance goals that included both safety and efficiency. CEC members: read the full best practice here.

Also, see how Nordea uses this simple “workshop in a box” as a prep session to help mangers see the benefit of and feel comfortable discussing safety goals with their teams.

2. Peer-to-peer support: One key driver of engagement with goals stems from a sense of support from direct colleagues.

Peer recognition can be a strong driver of employee-to-employee engagement. See how the Communications team at TD Bank created social norms around peer support by creating a simple but high profile way for employees to celebrate one another’s contributions on the company intranet. Visible recognition of employees encourages other employees to also align their behaviors and support one another toward company goals (like safety).

Alternatively, internal ambassadors of safety goals can act as champions of these priorities and spread awareness of them at a grassroots level through the organization. Allstate created an Ambassador Movement based on the idea that every company has a set of supporters around specific initiatives, who, when given the opportunity, will be more vocal about their support.

For your organization, this may be creating a safety team to equip a select group of employees to act as champions in favor of these goals.

What are you doing in your organization to drive a culture of safety?

Related CEC Resources:

• Driving Behavior Change Topic Center
• Mobilizing the Workforce Key Findings
• Help Leaders Learn to Dialogue Trainings and Tools

Although they may sit near us, we probably don’t talk as much as we should.  With that in mind, I thought it would be valuable to take a look at the joint objectives that we share with our partners in HR.  Each quarter, our sister program, CLC Human Resources announces the latest trends from the HR world.  As we just begin to step forth from the recession, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the latest insights (from Q4 2010) made for some pretty depressing reading.  I’ve pulled out some of the key HR challenges facing businesses below:

• Decline in Engagement / Increased Retention Risk: As the job market begins to pick up, disengaged employees who had been ‘sitting tight’ have begun to look for new pastures.  Levels of intent to stay have fallen every quarter since Q4-2009 (from 26% – 22%). Crucially, line managers are identified as key to influencing engagement, and to customizing retention strategies to manage turnover risk…
• Performance Management & Productivity: Managers’ effectiveness at stewarding the performance of their employees continues to decline.  While productivity increased slightly in Q3, the overall downward trend in productivity across the year indicates that managers are struggling to provide effective performance feedback (18% decline in manager effectiveness), and to articulate clear objectives to their direct reports (7% decline in manager effectiveness)…

• High Potential Employees: High-Potential Employees (HIPOs) are those employees earmarked for future leadership positions. Having their HIPO status communicated to these promising employees has seen a 130% improvement upon their retention outlook.  An important note: this must be frequently communicated to them via formal and informal means.

So, notice a common denominator?

You may not even realize it, but your counterparts in HR likely care about many of the same things concerning you.  The quality of line manager communications is key to employee engagement, to improving productivity, and to keeping the organization’s next generation of leaders in seat.

What next?

First step, take a look at CEC’s Line Manager Communications Topic Center. You’ll find a variety of resources geared towards making your managers better communicators.  This material could be a great conversation-starter with your colleagues in HR down the hallway.

Additionally, if you, or your HR colleagues, would like to speak to a member of the CLC Human Resources team, please call us directly on +1-866-913-6447 (US and International).