CEC Insider

At CEB, mid-year performance review time is here.  Seven busy and slightly hectic months of 2010 have flown by (how is it already August?!).  I have lots of stories to share.  A few things I’m proud of.  A few goals to achieve in the next half of the year.  But how do I put the right story together to truly demonstrate my impact to my manager, let along my manager’s manager???  I doubt newsletter metrics or download numbers for my research pieces will do the trick.

Communicators, have you recently tried to demonstrate your team’s effectiveness?  One of the top cries for help we hear from CEC members is: “Metrics!  We need help with metrics… how to define them, how to present them, and how to link them to the business goals that senior leaders actually care about.”

In a recent poll about Communications dashboards, only 31% of communicators said they have a dashboard they present to senior leaders to demonstrate Communications’ effectiveness.  Of those, only 50% said they are satisfied with their current dashboard. However, this “satisfaction” is questionable if you look more specifically at these respondents’ satisfaction with their dashboard’s ability to do the following: Read More »

I’m a strong believer that Corporate Communications should lead a company’s intranet strategy.  Unlike other possible leaders in IT, HR, or the business units, communicators highly value—and are measured on—employee engagement.  The intranet has quickly evolved into a key instrument to achieving this engagement through functionalities that promote connectivity, collaboration, and productivity among employees.

That said, in most organizations, the Communications function has yet to embrace the mindset and activities necessary to transform the intranet from “digital landfill” to “employee productivity tool.”  Communicators may say they want the intranet to boost employee productivity and engagement, but then focus on superficial fixes, primarily improving the intranet’s function as an internal news distribution service.   Sharing internal news is important, yes.  Optimizing the intranet to do only that, however, is short-sighted.

How do you know if your heart is in the right place, but your activities are not? Ask yourself, “Do we…

• Focus improvements on the “look and feel” of the intranet—such as logos, layouts, typefaces, buttons, boxes, menus, etc.?
• Rely on annual “intranet satisfaction surveys”?
• Track and depend on broad metrics such as clicks and views on news stories? Read More »

How great would it be to have the title of Chief Communications Officer and a 200+ team of able communicators to help you create an impact at your organization?  How about a fleet of Ferraris while we’re at it?  It sounds nice, but sadly many of the Communications professionals we work with continue to feel under-resourced and underappreciated.  That doesn’t mean that we need to always sing Rodney Dangerfield’s tune, though!  (Am I the only one who loves this video?)

The good news is that the communication demands of today are accelerating positive changes in the structure and skill set of many Communications teams, and job titles are evolving to reflect the nature of the important work we do. Smart communicators are asking CEC for help in making the case for more resources now, in a time of great change, when they know their organizations are more likely to listen.  Here are three useful tips on making an effective case for more people, money, or, access: Read More »

By Lisa Schievelbein

Working with cross-functional partners is a common source of woe for Communications. Though the circumstances vary quite a bit, I’ve discovered a pattern over time in the villainous caricatures I hear most about:

• The party poopers
  Crime: Vetoing Comms’ best-laid plans to try new things
  Usual suspects: Legal, IT
• The land grabbers
  Crime: Asserting dominance—and taking all credit—in areas of overlapping audiences/interests
  Usual suspects: HR, Marketing

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Springtime means new energy, new chances, and a fresh outlook.  I’m a sucker for spring cleaning—and pretty much any opportunity for a new start.  (Case-in-point: I was the Catholic school kid who actually looked forward to going to confession.)  Spring in DC especially brings out this tendency in me—the cherry blossoms are in full bloom and the sun is finally shining after a very snowy and cold winter!

I think spring is also a great time for Communications to do a bit of cleaning and starting-over. To inspire your spring cleaning spree, I wanted to give you a few tips and ideas:

Spring Cleaning Checklist

• Clean out your list of projects. If you’re like many communicators, you have a habit of piling on activities and to-do’s without asking yourself, “Is this just clutter?  What’s the value of doing this?”  To strip out the inessentials, just copy this easy idea from PepsiCo.  Each year PepsiCo‘s Head of Communications challenges staff to fill out a worksheet with activities that they believe no longer merit Communications’ support.  This simple exercise has “turned off” ~15% of work volume for their function.  CEC members can access that worksheet here (page 15). Read More »

By Lisa Schievelbein

Here at CEC, the irony is not lost on us when we fail to practice what we preach to communicators.  For example, our team has produced some pretty cool insights about intranet management, yet few of us visit our parent company’s own “digital landfill” for anything but the cafeteria menu. (Like many CEC members, we wistfully covet information-sharing platforms like SabreTown and The WaterCooler.) But in the last few months, as Kayleigh and I shifted our primary focus from intranets to org structures, I’ve been encouraged by the potential for “human” solutions to make a real impact on information sharing.

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A big thank you to the 100+ Heads of Communications and staff who responded to our 2010 quick-poll, sharing their current strategies for external stakeholder engagement.  Were the responses interesting? Yes.  Did they make me feel warm and fuzzy about the state of Communications? Not especially.

Let me explain why. On the one side, it’s great that communicators are focused on proactively engaging stakeholders in the current climate—not just attempting to manage negativity. It’s more of their approach that worries me.  Here are some of the poll highlights:

I’ll add some quick thoughts on a few of the data points that stood out for me:

• Communicators are on the offensive—49% of communicators say that differentiating their company is their primary objective for 2010, and 39% are focused on directly supporting sales and marketing efforts.  This strikes me as Communications taking positive steps to help their companies get ahead in the ever-aggressive battle for stakeholder support and market share.  We’ve heard a lot of our members facing real pressure to get closer to the bottom line as budget and scrutiny tightens, which seems to be playing out here. Read More »

What’s your dream title?

If you envision your career as an ever-ascending climb, begun at sea level on the day you were first called “Intern” and continuing to rise ever-loftier toward some dare-to-dream pinnacle, then it would have to be true that your arc will peak on the day you finally get to take your rightful place as [fill in dream title here].

In the Comms world, I’ve been seeing interesting titles lately that might fit nicely into your parenthetic bracket.

Here’s a title I’d never heard of before—a new CEC member has recently joined the network as our first-ever VP, Communications and Change Management. That critical linkage between Comms and change is a theme we’ve been studying for the past year, and we’re really excited to see it reflected so blatantly in one company’s org chart.  Some other intriguing titles I’ve seen recently: Read More »

Among the few things I remember from Philosophy 201 is the quote from the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne: “It is good to rub and polish one’s brain against those of others.”

But for most of us grown-ups (personally, despite my advanced age I still feel compelled to add italics when thinking of myself that way), our days are spent in a mode of relentless multi-tasking—constantly putting out three fires at once, but hardly ever thinking.  How sad is it to be absent-mindedly checking your Blackberry while another person is standing there in the room trying to talk to you?  But we’ve all done it.

OK, constant distraction probably won’t kill you (smashing into a tree “texting while driving” being one notable exception), but to lead a truly satisfying life, it’s important for all of us to occasionally slow down and make the time to THINK.  To have a “spa day” to polish your brain.

That’s why this is one of our favorite times of the year at CEC—because we’ve just now opened up registration for our 2010 executive meeting series, Influencing Stakeholders in a Networked Environment. Read More »

By Lisa Schievelbein

Deep down, every communicator is a voyeur.

 How do I know?  For the last few months, Kayleigh and I have been analyzing the organizational design of CEC member teams, and let me tell you—communicators just love peeking at org charts. They have different reasons for this, but I think one is particularly powerful: a hope that some formula for success can be found in the neat boxes and lines on a PowerPoint slide.  (As you can imagine, the let-down factor is inevitable.)
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