It’s interesting to see the similarities between market researchers and comuunicators. Take a look at what our sister program, the Market Research Executive Board, has to say about how to disagree with others in your organization.

If we are really doing our jobs right, we should be spending a lot of time saying “no.”

• Project Scoping – Getting to the right question is tough, and we have to make sure that we are spending time on the most valuable work.  Not only is it important to screen out low value work , but we have to help our business partners ask smarter questions .
• Insight Generation – A fact about your customers or competitors does not an insight make, and sometimes we need to tell our team members or business partners that the information they have isn’t enough
• Taking Action – Communicating research often turns into a war against conventional wisdom.  We’ve got to break down business partners’ existing understanding to help them internalize insights

A couple of summers ago I asked whether we were too nice, and judging from the popularity of the post we might benefit from some training on disagreement.  A recent article on CBS MoneyWatch outlines five smart ways to disagree with your boss, and I think that these lessons translate nicely to help you take a stand with anyone in your organization:

1. Ask clarifying questions – Sometimes a well-placed question or two can help guide someone to the realization that their plan isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
2. Pick your time and place – Know your audience and pick the time that will work best for them.  And of course, avoid public places to make sure your feedback isn’t taken out of context.
3. Accentuate the value to the team – Phrase your feedback as an improvement that will help the group. Lead with the value that your suggestions will create.
4. Speak up early and often– If you have provided feedback consistently you will not be viewed as defensive or negative when you have a counter-opinion to share.
5. Ask permission to provide feedback – For those with a more formal relationship, asking if it’s ok for you to share some feedback sets the tone for the conversation to come.

What do you think?  What are your favorite tactics for sharing tough feedback with your business partners?

CEC Related Resources:

• 3 Ways to Be More Assertive with Clients
• To Communicate, First Question: 4 Tips for Asking Good Questions

One of my favorite parts of the job is moderating and reading the conversations on our member discussion forums. Recently, questions around Communications’ mission statements in both our External Stakeholder Relations Forum and our Employee Communications Forum caught my attention. I have been wondering about Communications missions and how the function positions itself to business partners in the last few weeks, as we work on our main study for this year Unlocking Communications Business Impact…what if with our function’s mission statements we are creating the wrong expectations with the rest of the organization on what kind of value can Comms add? When I speak with CEC members, I often hear frustration that Comms is seen as a service provider. Are we setting incomplete perceptions with business partners through our mission statement, and limiting our full potential to contribute to business results – or even the way we view our own role as communicators?

With these questions in mind, I went on the lookout for other CEC research around mission statements to see what commonalities I would find to the ones shared on the discussion forums…to paraphrase, some of them include: Read More »

It’s an exciting time to be a communicator! That is, of course, you get excited, and not overwhelmed, by the frantic pace and swift shifts of focus characteristic of today’s complex, unforgiving, and uncertain business climate. In these “exciting” times, how are Communications functions responding to increased demand from business partners? Early results from 50 respondents to our survey on Unlocking Communications’ Potential for Business Impact (add your two cents here) tell a foreboding tale of incremental improvements that may leave communicators doing ever more work, while feeling ever less connected to the bottom line.

Let’s start with the good news—Communications’ support is in high demand. Business partners’ growth ambitions coupled with a deepening appreciation for the importance of communication has increased the demand for Communications’ services. In fact, 78% of communicators surveyed report significant increases in the number and type of requests from business partners over the past two years. Even more telling of this demand is the fact that 52% of respondents say that business partners proactively come to the function for support on strategic business initiatives such as increasing sales or driving up recruitment. In short, demand for Communications’ services is up.

In response to this heightened demand, Communications teams are adding capacity and capabilities to their teams while simultaneously focusing on driving greater efficiency. Here’s what communicators are telling us:

• 22% of respondents have added capacity to their teams. Though budget growth slowed in 2011, communicators shifted their dollars to increase staff sizes and insource previously outsourced activities. View a list of the most common roles that Communications teams have been hiring for to boost capacity.
• 22% say they’ve increased the efficiency of their teams. Whether streamlining decision-making between central and local communicators or creating online communication networks, Communications teams are finding ways to keep up with the speed of information flows.
• 20% have responded to new pressures on the function by adding capabilities to their teams. Capacity without real capability doesn’t get you much. That’s why many teams are focused on training their teams and embedding a learning posture among communicators. Many within the CEC network have already adopted the 18 Communications Competencies of the Modern Communicator and begun practicing different-in-kind business partnership skills such as critical thinking and active listening.
• Perhaps not so surprisingly, exactly 0% of survey respondents have stopped any communication activities!

And now, the not-so-good news—Despite growing demand for Communications’ support, the function is still deemed a “nice to have” by the business. Read More »

Last week we wrote about CEC’s upcoming research study for the year, and how communicators need to focus beyond just improving perceptions and more on actually getting stakeholders to DO something and modify their behavior. We also talked about how this requires close collaboration with business partners because behavior change is hard in general and something that Communications can’t do alone. But, getting business partners to work with you on impacting behaviors is only half the battle. Communicators themselves will have to change the way they currently do things, if they are to really do this well.

Change is hard, for every human being, even for us as communicators (who often have to communicate about change!). So I started thinking about my recent conversations with many heads of communications and wondered why that is? Why do communicators find it hard to let go of some of the activities they do to increase share of company’s voice across channels and audiences, and start to focus more on those audiences’ drivers of behavior? Some of the reasons that I have heard in my member conversations that I found interesting include:

1. Communications’ own perception about where and how to add value: with so much emphasis on highly visible activities around building the company reputation, the brand, and creating a “one company” vision, Comms views itself as the owner of reputation (not of behavior change). If we do these well, we get a pat on the back from senior leadership…and who doesn’t like to be praised in front of everyone?!  While reputation and image are important (and CEC has resources to help you with these big initiatives), focusing on these big things shifts attention away from the places where you can actually affect behaviors and outcomes. Read More »

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

Communicators often need to use numbers to narrate a story. However, for people who love playing with words, it can be a “scary” prospect to conduct quantitative surveys. The challenge lies in asking the right set of questions, gathering information that meets the desired objectives, and analyzing the data to build your story. The question then becomes, “What is the best way to gather the information required to fulfill my desired objectives?”

When researching on best ways to conduct quantitative surveys, we discovered that launching a quant survey is much more than pressing a launch button that sends out a questionnaire. Communicators need to focus their efforts on building a solid hypothesis to test and developing clear objectives for the survey.

The four steps below will help you get the most out of your survey efforts:

1. Build a Plan – Communicators should think about why they are doing a survey and how they plan to use the results. This involves creating a hypothesis of what you want to show with the study, understanding the central problem, and identifying the variables that influence it. Learn how to integrate the problem and its causes into a description of reality.
2. Spend Time Designing – Once you have the built a survey model, you need to do much more than make a list of questions. Designing the survey involves developing and testing hypotheses as well as thinking about whether you will want to track results over time or not. Read more on survey design to understand how to select your target audience, data collection tools, and the survey parameters.
3. Maximize Participation – Getting a high number of responses on surveys can be a frustrating process. You need to convince a large number of people to take 15-30 minutes out of their schedule to respond. Find out how you can maximize survey participation by creating a launch and promotion plan before even making the survey.
4. Conduct In-Depth Analysis – Sorting through vast amounts of survey data can be daunting.  Start cleaning your data by looking for outliers (high or low responses), which can really skew the validity of your results. Look at how you can analyze surveys and build correlations to tell a story with the data.

CEC Members: Download the complete tool for How to Conduct Quantitative Surveys. This is one of the accompanying tools to Step 4 in Building an Outcome-Focused Communication Plan.

Related Blogs:

• 3 Steps to Be a Better Listener
• CEC’s Top 4 Internal Communications Tools
• Integrate Your Listening Efforts

Related Resources:

• How to Conduct Focus Groups
• Building an Outcome-Focused Communication Plan
• Anatomy of a Business Value-Focused Communication Function

As we close the book on 2011, most of us are probably drafting our plans for how we intend to achieve our 2012 objectives.  If you’re like many of the communicators who I have spoken with recently, you are eager to structure your communication plans so as to demonstrate the value that Communications can create for rest of the business.  Perhaps you’re even using the CEC’s recently published toolkit on building an outcome-focused communication planand starting off the planning process by gaining a deep understanding of your Comms objective and target stakeholder audience.  After all, how can you begin to think about creating an action plan if you don’t first fully appreciate the communications goal?

While this advice might seem intuitive, communicators often lose sight of or altogether fail to consider the specific Comms outcome that they are hoping to achieve through their efforts.  But even more important than asking ourselves “What is the Communications objective that we hoping to achieve?” is another intuitive, yet critically important question — “What is the business outcome that we’re hoping to achieve?”

Reverse Engineer Your Comms Plans  Read More »

For many of our members (and for CEC as well), January is the month when the annual performance review process kicks off. The review process is a great way to evaluate what you did well in the last year, but also to focus on your key areas of development. For most of us, the review process ends at the individual level, but it is equally important for the Communications function as whole (and for the team members who together constitute “the function”) to take thorough stock of its achievements and future objectives.

Based on our research and partnership with hundreds of companies over many years, we have identified the 20 key attributes of business value-focused communications function and compiled them into a compact Anatomy Game board . The Anatomy showcases the best practice for each attribute to help our members achieve functional excellence in each of the functional responsibilities. We found that a truly business value-focused communications functions focus their efforts in 4 key areas:

1. Sense Opportunities for Creating Value

Truly valued communicators don’t just fulfill clients’ requests, but proactively identify opportunities to meet stakeholder needs, address areas of potential reputation exposure and surface internal business partners’ communications needs and priorities.

2. Optimize Resources to Highest-Value Work

Many communications’ teams reported stagnating budgets in 2011, with only slightly more optimistic forecast for 2012. Scarce resources place lots of pressure on allocating them in the most efficient and impactful manner. Most successful members create a strategic high-value activities focused plan, and optimize their most important resource – their staff.

3. Extend “Reach” by Enabling Others to Communicate on Your Behalf

Most of our members have 1 to 5 communicators per 1,000 employees. This ratio makes it virtually impossible for the communications team to really connect and touch every employee and stakeholder out there. Top communications teams successfully leverage their stakeholders by getting managers, leaders, employees and external stakeholders to advocate on their behalf.

4. Create Value by Crafting and Disseminating Messages

Almost every communications team out there is focused on creating and disseminating message. However, what distinguishes the truly best communications teams from all the rest is their ability to not only have their message heard, but to actually motivate their audience to take action and to actually change stakeholders’ behavior in way that has a concrete and measurable impact on company’s business objectives.

Why don’t you take a look at our newly updated Anatomy and let us know how your function stacks up?

Recommended Resources

The Anatomy of a Business Value-Focused Communications Function

Managing the Function Topic Center

Skills and Roles of Modern Communicator

Listening to audiences is important to any communicator. But how often do you sense that what people say is different from the way they actually behave? Nod your head if you agree that there is a need to observe audience behaviour firsthand, understand their reasons for irrational behaviour, and do this in the most efficient way possible.

While ethnography has traditionally been used by marketers for understanding consumer behaviours and more recently by companies like Intel to inform strategy and planning, communicators can use ethnography to uncover the underlying behaviours and values of their audiences.

Thinking about how to apply ethnography? While it may sound like a daunting academic exercise, anyone can do some version of an ethnographic study without necessarily needing to use outside resources.   In the CEC ethnography tool, we propose that you consider a combination of participation, observation, and interviewing to find out more about your audience.

Here are three key steps to help you become a better ethnographer:

1. Design Ethnographic Study – Select the location, audience, duration, and observers.

2. Prepare Field Observation Guide – Develop questions and focus areas of investigation.

3. Conduct Post-study Debrief and Analysis – Analyze, and interpret the information gathered.

Sound complicated? Use our Ethnography Toolkit  to learn how to navigate each step.

Case in Point: How Southwest Airlines Uses Ethnography for Stakeholder Listening Read More »

We sit at the center of a global network of over 350 Heads of Communications and their teams. This privileged position gives us a unique vantage point into the shared challenges and priorities of executives who, regardless of industry or company size, all aim to boost the function’s performance in a wildly complex business and communications environment. Our daily conversations, executive retreats, workshops, and Q&A session on webinars, have yielded tremendous insight into the future of the function, but none quite like these!

Here are three top insights from CEC members that portend a very different posture for Communications in 2012 and beyond.

1. Communications as Business Partner, not Trusted Advisor

“A trusted advisor is someone who might know media relations or the Communications business cold, but they don’t necessarily know the business cold. A business partner is someone who really understands the organization’s business, reason for being, and goals and objectives.”

–Teresa Paulsen, Vice President, Corporate Communication, ConAgra, The Modern Communicator’s Skill Set webinar.

We would agree that it’s no longer enough to be an expert communicator; business partnership skills are paramount. This is mostly due to the dramatic shift we’ve witnessed as the function moves from acting as a message creator to an enabler of business outcomes. Yet despite many communicators’ desire to be a consultative partner with a “seat at the table,” seniormosts of the function lament that their teams lack the confidence and skills to meet business partners’ heightened expectations.

In 2012, we’ll look to help the CEC network build their confidence in consultation and business partnership through resources and training opportunities on critical thinking, being outcomes-focused, and business acumen.

2. Communications as Roadblock Remover for Leadership Communication Read More »