Who doesn’t like a good statistic? In the CEC Newsletter a few weeks ago, we kicked off our new quick poll initiative with three questions on communications activities around reputation management.

When the results came back, we got a picture of how communications priorities have changed in the last 5 years. With the proliferation of social media, it’s no surprise that messaging through new channels came out as the activity most communicators are doing more of. Perhaps less predictably, corporate advertising and branding efforts have seen the biggest drop off.

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Top 3 activities communicators are doing more of:

1. Messaging through new channels
2. Preempting negative coverage
3. Increasing transparency

Top 3 activities communicators are doing less of:

1. Corporate advertising/branding
2. Thought leadership
3. CSR reporting and messaging (tied for third)
   Traditional media relations (tied for third)
   Leader speaking engagements (tied for third)

Bank of Goodwill — Worth Pursuing?

As part of our ongoing discussion about corporate reputation, we found that the “bank of goodwill” is still highly valued— by 100% of respondents — for softening the impact of a potential crisis and increasing the likelihood of being considered. To learn more about how leading companies are using their reputation to achieve business outcomes, check out the replay of CEC’s webinar on strategic reputation management that took place on Jan. 24.

Click the image to enlarge

Can’t get enough data? Neither can we! Expect to see another round of polling very soon in the CEC Newsletter and on Twitter. Is there a specific topic or question you think we should ask about? Don’t hesitate to e-mail me at jwohlmuth@executiveboard.com.

CEC Related Blogs

• Reputation Measurement – Is It Worth It??
• Focus on Business Goals, Not Just Comms Goals

CEC Related Resources

• Reputation and Brand Topic Center
• Protect Your Reputation
• Managing Reputation in Online Conversations
• Influencing stakeholders insight page

Managing a full blown corporate crisis is one of the hardest things a communicator will ever have to do. Of course, it’s always been vitally important to protect the profitability and reputation of your organization, but as scrutiny of corporate practice rises, so too does the importance attached to effective crisis management.

Failure to prevent or manage an incident can lead to a loss of your organization’s ‘license to operate’. Interestingly, your own personal brand can also be impacted by your response to a crisis – for instance, we’ve heard from several members that successfully managing a crisis instantly makes a communicator more employable, having navigated a course through heavy fire.

So, both for your organization and for you personally, a crisis raises the stakes like nothing else. With this in mind, CEC spent the last few months learning how the best organizations prevent, prepare for, and respond to major crises. CEC members can check out our new topic center for more detailed guidance, or call our advisory team to discuss your crisis planning.

1. Build a Preventative Culture

Most companies have a contingency plan of some description should something go wrong. But actually using that crisis response plan is a bit like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted – by then, the damage is already done, and you’re playing a game of damage limitation instead of damage prevention.

What the best do: Employees often have the most practical understanding of the risks that the company faces by virtue of their day-to-day business activities.  Instead of simply telling them how to behave and what to do, try to tap into their knowledge to identify and mitigate risks.

Featured Resource: Caterpillar seeks to identify barriers to risk-free behavior by asking their employees simple questions such as ‘What prevents you from working safely’. In doing so, they make their employees active participants in risk management, rather than simply the objects of communication related to risks.

2. Prepare the Enterprise for Crises

We heard stories of crisis plans which might have been better described as crisis encyclopedias! Under duress, human decision making is simplified. Lengthy documents will be ignored, at best, or hinder action, at worst. Keep crisis planning simple and action-orientated.

What the best do: Create dynamic crisis systems that provide critical information and enable decision making in the moment and at speed. Any information provided to employees should be instructional, and help them take action.

Featured Resource: Timkin provides their employees with a clear framework that enables employees to assess the criticality of an incident, and escalate it to the right people.

3. Respond to Corporate Crises

Don’t fall into a state of paralysis or wait for unnecessary details before communicating. If you wait too long, you leave your critics the opportunity to set the agenda in discussing the event. The 24-hour news cycle often demands instant updates, as soon as possible.

What the best do: Remember that corporate messaging may not be stakeholders’ only (or even preferred!) source of information during a crisis. Find out where key conversations are taking place, and look for opportunities to influence stakeholders on their own terms.

Featured Resource: We canvassed a whole host of members to get their top tips for navigating a crisis, and compiled their collective expertise onto a single page: Guidance for Responding to Crises

Share your experiences

Have you managed a major crisis? What did you find most difficult? What did you learn? We’d love to hear from you!

Currently, most stakeholder engagement is focused around reputation risk management and justifying or positively reinforcing existing reputation activities. Some of the ways in which communicators manage reputation with stakeholders include:

• Stakeholder mapping and monitoring: this involves keeping a pulse on what stakeholders are saying about you, so that you may identify and preempt potential risks. Think of this one as good “housekeeping” to prevent issues or crises from rising. For example, Monsanto utilizes stakeholder-centric monitoring to prioritize issues for specific stakeholder groups. Other companies identify and prioritize reputation risks by mapping “degree of sensitivity to issue” against “strength of company position.”
• Stakeholder conversations and thought leadership: more proactively, communicators identify influencers and discuss issues of concern with them to establish the company as a thought leader in the industry. This is in addition to other thought leadership and executive communications programs. Chevron for example, holds thought leadership stakeholder discussions on important issues to the company.

These tactics are great if you, the Communications team, were the only ones engaging with stakeholders! But more and more it is your business partners and employees who have more frequent interactions with stakeholders.  Adding additional pressure is the fact that the external environment is becoming increasingly complex as stakeholders become more resourceful about how they access information and form perceptions about you.

The problem is that business partners and employees don’t necessarily know all the risks to reputation as they are having conversations with stakeholders, and won’t think through those interactions as strategically as communicators do. One idea is to have CRM systems for stakeholder engagement – something similar to a Salesforce.com but for the entire stakeholder universe. This would impose some rigor around capturing all stakeholder interactions and sharing them with the business partners as they prepare to engage with stakeholder groups. This will allow a more 360 degree view of the stakeholder and help the organization prepare strategically for how and when to engage with specific stakeholders around specific business initiatives.

This leads to the second important point: taking a learning posture during stakeholder engagement and using these occasions as a diagnostic tool to understand how stakeholders make decisions. How much listening vs talking would you say you do when you meet stakeholders? Most members we have spoken with say that while they should be doing more listening, in reality, most of these conversations are around telling stakeholders all the things the company is doing to build a good reputation.

While Communications has a LOT of knowledge about stakeholders, it hasn’t been so good at sharing that information back inside the business at key decision points, to help business partners inform their strategy. Communicators are trying to take on a more consultative role with the business when it comes to managing reputation, but currently business partners don’t rely on insight from Comms in making decisions.  One company that has made some progress in terms of bringing “social intelligence” to inform business strategies is BBVA with its integrated stakeholder listening process.

How do you listen and observe when and how stakeholders make decisions around specific outcomes? Do you capture that knowledge anywhere – do you use CRM systems? Do you have examples of specific business outcomes that were shaped by information about stakeholder decisions that you provided as communicators?

We’d love to hear what you are doing in this space (through the comments box or by contacting the CEC team directly) and how you’re bringing stakeholder intelligence to business decisions!

CEC Related Resources:

• Building an Outcome-Focused Reputation Management
• Stakeholder Engagement

CEC Related Blogs:

• 3 Steps to Build an Outcome-Focused Reputation
• Is It Good to Have a “Good” Reputation?
• Reputation Management: 3 Tips to Cope with New Threats

Given the need to address this important topic, the CEC recently launched its next major research initiative —Building an Outcomes-Focused Reputation.  As part of the study we’ve already spoken with communications executives at several dozen leading organizations to better understand the challenges that they are facing in managing stakeholder perceptions as well as the tactics they use to measure, monitor, and improve and their corporate reputations. (Take our 2 minute Quick Poll and tell us what you’re doing to manage your reputation!)

Current Approach:

Faced with increased stakeholder scrutiny and fickle audiences, most companies are focusing on building their company’s reputation by turning up the volume on positive messages related to their organization.  This typically involves ensuring that more messages are sent to stakeholders, across more channels, and in a more consistent way to reinforce key company themes.  Whether it’s highlighting CSR efforts, taking thought leadership positions, or finding opportunities for leaders to speak at industry conferences companies are emphasizing core messages that illustrate who they are as an organization.

Being “Good” Is Not Enough:

While this approach might appear sound in theory, in practice it doesn’t move the needle towards actual business results.  Leading companies recognize that trying to reinforce positive perceptions about the company being generally “good” will not drive stakeholder behaviors. Instead, the best communicators focus on managing a few, targeted stakeholder perceptions and behaviors that are key to driving business outcomes, by providing information at key stakeholder decision points.

Outcomes-Focused Reputation:

The CEC has identified several elements that elements to effectively building an outcomes-focused reputation, including:

1. Identifying the key stakeholder decisions that can be scalably influenced through information
2. Providing “just in time” information accessible during key decisions
3. Aligning on measures that link communications activities to specific business outcomes

For an insider look into the very latest reputation management research, check out CEC’s Building an Outcomes-Focused Reputation work in progress page.  If you like what you see and would like to set up a conversation about how you are focusing your reputation-building efforts around specific outcomes send an e-mail to Jeff Schott.

Related CEC Resources:

• Building an Outcomes-Focused Reputation Work in Progress Page
• Reputation and Brand Topic Center
• Protect Your Reputation
• Managing Reputation in Online Conversations 

Related CEC Insider Posts:

• Is It Good to Have a “Good” Reputation
• The Real Connection between Corporate Brand and Company Success
• Reputation Management: 3 Tips to Cope with New Threats

When I think about what’s become of the news business, I don’t know whether to laugh, cry or go out on the front lawn and start eating grass (isn’t that what animals do when they think they’re about to barf?).

But I gotta say — although you may already be getting a little queased-out from the relentless coverage of this Joe Paterno/Penn State story — for once, this ain’t hype.  This really is the biggest scandal in sports history. More than just another ringing bell for the Pavlov’s Dogs of Media to salivate over, this is a cautionary tale for EVERYONE in a position of authority at any big organization in the world.

Here’s a strong recommendation from your friends and colleagues at CEC: Use this moment as an opportunity to have an important discussion with your CEO.  Particularly if he (90+% chance it’s a he) is a football fan (gut guess on my part = there’s a 75+% chance he at least likes football).

All you have to do is ask him, “So, uhhhh, whadda ya think about the whole Paterno mess?”, then sit back and let him spew. Whatever he says next will enlighten both of you about his understanding of “the way things work” in today’s media environment.

Chances are you’ll get one of three responses:

• What’s happening to Joe Paterno is so unfair.
  This might be an indication that your CEO isn’t fully aware of how easy it is to get caught up in a scandal — even when you didn’t think you were personally doing anything wrong. Hey, right and wrong don’t seem to matter to the media anymore — proximity-to-something-bad may be enough to bring you down. And it IS unfair. So, let’s talk about how your Comms team can help you prevent getting caught up in some unfair future situation.
• Paterno is an idiot. How could anyone be so irresponsible?
  This might be an indication that your CEO doesn’t realize how easy it is to lose one’s perspective within the insular inner-circle of big organizational power. Joe Paterno may be an 84-year old geezer, but he’s no idiot. So why did he think that merely reporting the first incident of child sex-abuse to his boss would absolve everyone of responsibility? Because sometimes that’s the way people in power think. So, let’s talk about how your Comms team can help you see the way the world looks at big companies — let’s make sure you have some true outside perspective.
• This whole mess is gonna be a field day for the lawyers.
  This might be an indication that your CEO believes that in the event of a scandal or reputational crisis, as long as your General Counsel and Legal department are able to win lawsuits, mitigate financial damage and keep the company from going out of business, everything will be OK. So, let’s talk about how Comms can help you avoid crises in the first place — cause what we can do will be much easier on your stomach lining, and SO much cheaper.

My Dad used to say, “Son, there are two ways to learn the big lessons in life — the hard way and the easy way.” In his mind, the hard way is learning from your own mistakes. The easy way is learning from things that happen to other people.

The Joe Paterno situation is an opportunity for your CEO to learn a hard lesson the easy way.

WHAT ABOUT YOU?  What do you (and more importantly) your CEO think about this scandal?

Building a Bank of Goodwill

Financial advisers often emphasize the importance of building a personal emergency fund.  What they’re referring to is a rainy day fund, consisting of a certain amount of money (e.g., 8 month’s salary) which can be drawn down during tough financial times.  Should you lose your job or get slapped with an unexpected major expense, you could rely on these savings to help you weather the financial storm.

In the communications world, a similar concept exists with regard to an organization’s reputation — this is the concept of the “bank of goodwill”.  Much like your rainy day fund, the idea behind the bank of goodwill is that companies can stockpile their reputation assets when times are good and lean on them as a buffer from negative stakeholder perceptions when times turn bad.

On its surface, the concept seems plausible.  After all, in the financial savings example, few would argue that having extra money in the piggybank wouldn’t give you some degree of financial breathing room.  But whereas money can be universally spent on a wide range of goods and services, perceptions are complex, specific to each stakeholder group, and increasingly fickle.  Additionally, academic researchers struggle to quantitatively prove the theory of the bank of goodwill.  Nevertheless, one need only look to the news for examples of big, well respected companies who have been recently blindsided by massive financial and reputation hits due to crisis or scandal.  I’ve spoken with some of these companies and they’ve all said that, if there is bank of goodwill, it gets exhausted quickly.

Outcomes-Focused Reputation Management

Here’s the broader challenge with this approach to reputation management — organizations are trying to build the company image around broadly acceptable themes, viewing a generically “good” reputation as the end goal.  If the tone of their media mentions is positive and coverage is high, then the reputation game is won, right?  Not necessarily.  Sharing messages about being generally “good” does drive stakeholder behavior. 

Rather than approaching reputation as an asset to be generally maximized, a potentially better approach is to think of it as a tool to help the business execute its very specific strategy.  Strategies are set based on the unique outcomes that a company is trying to achieve, whether it’s to sell more product, recruit top talent, or influence legislation.  The stakeholder perceptions that need to be considered are unique and specific as well.

I’m not advocating that companies stop sharing stories of their latest corporate social responsibility efforts; but rather that they think more comprehensively about the specific business objectives that the organization is trying to achieve and which specific perceptions ought to be managed. 

Now that I’ve provided some food for thought, I’d love to hear your perspective on the idea of reputational “goodwill.”  Post a comment below or send an e-mail to jschott@executiveboard.com.

Related CEC Resources:

• Reputation and Brand Topic Center
• Protect Your Reputation
• Managing Reputation in Online Conversations 

Related CEC Insider Posts:

• The Real Connection between Corporate Brand and Company Success
• Reputation Management: 3 Tips to Cope with New Threats
• 6 Steps to Facebook Reputation Management

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???

• They could all have been prevented
• They did significant damage each company’s reputation, and to their financial performance

With the stakes higher than ever before, CEC is updating its existing work on crisis management. And, with the above in mind, we’re looking at two different angles.

1. Building a Preventative Culture

In spite of the best efforts of companies to apply processes, rules, and expectations, this isn’t always enough to drive behavior change – we’ve all seen rules bent or broken to “get the job done”. And yet, we are reliant upon employees maintaining standards to maintain product quality, information security, legal and ethical compliance, and personal or public safety – if they fail to do so, the consequences for the organization can be disastrous.

Communications Challenges

CEC is looking at some of the reasons that employees don’t always act in accordance with the standards required by their organization, its regulators, and other crucial stakeholder groups. Our conversations indicate that many communicators spend a disproportionate amount of time building employee awareness without addressing the personal and systemic barriers to desired behavior. Indeed, research shows that only 6% of employee-observed misconduct is escalated to business leadership, preventing the business from responding to rectify the problem. We’ve thought about what prevents employees from acting in a way that prevents crises. Here’s our first shot, below:

Questions for you:
We’d love to hear your reaction to this brainstorm.  

• Which of these challenges do you struggle with most?
• How do you raise employee awareness of expected standards?
• How do you bring employee voice to leaders, to avoid potential crises?

 

Join us for a webinar on 29 September to learn how to avoid crises by creating a preventative safety culture.

2. Responding to Crises

Of course, some organizations will experience occasions where attempts at prevention fail. In these instances, as communicators seek to mitigate the damage done to their reputation, the increasingly networked online environment has decreased the amount of control communicators possess of their message.

3 Phases of Response

Conversations with members indicate that there’s only so much that you can plan for in a crisis situation. Under duress, 100-page crisis manuals, however ‘perfect’, will likely be ignored. Leading companies have told us that rather than fight fires, it’s vital to plan your response strategically. In the past, we’ve explored how the best companies build crisis communication systems that are able to respond quickly. In response to a crisis we think that there are three distinct phases:

1. Assess the Situation to determine the scope of the issue; get up to speed quickly
2. Coordinate Response to contain the damage caused by the event
3. Manage the Ongoing Debate to protect your company’s reputation

In each phase communicators face distinct challenges. Visit our latest observations on the website to learn more about how we plan to uncover effective ways to overcoming these crisis response challenges.

Our initial conversations indicate that the most successful navigators of crises are those who go beyond simply seeking to “get our point of view across” and to have their message heard. Successful crisis managers seek to involve themselves in conversations and to enable favorable stakeholders, such as employees, to speak on behalf of the company.

Questions for You:

• Have you experienced a crisis at your organization?
• How did you gather information internally, and use this to formulate a response strategy?
• How have you planned to manage future crises?

Interested in Sharing Your Perspective?

CEC would love to learn from your experiences and involve your perspective in our research. Please email Dan O’Keeffe-O’Donovan,  to discuss crisis communication.

CEC Related Resources:

• Crisis Management: Our Latest Observations
• Avoiding Crises: How to Build a Preventative Safety Culture
• Building a Crisis Communication System
• Crisis Communication Tools
• Communicating through a Product Crisis
  

CEC Related Blogs:

• 4 Lessons on How to Manage a Crisis (and it’s not how NewsCorp did it)
• What’s Worse than a Crisis?
• Discussions Spotlight: Crisis Alert Systems
• 6 Steps to Facebook Reputation Management

Simply hearing the words — CORPORATE CRISIS – is enough to spike anxiety levels and get hearts beating faster.  Crises present severe and immediate threats to organizations, often endangering people’s safety, the company’s financial position, and/or the organization’s reputation.  What’s worse, they typically occur suddenly, sending communicators scrambling to find their firefighting suits before leaping into the flames.

A new survey conducted by CEB’s Corporate Integrity Practice indicates that 76% of corporate leaders reported a recent increase in media attention on corporate crises.   I suspect that this increased scrutiny may not come as a total shock to you.  Whether it’s a media scandal, product recall, or environmental disaster, there seems to be no shortage of crises in the news these days.  Nevertheless, one statistic from the survey really stood out.

51% of respondents reported an increase in corporate crises that can be attributed to organizational lapses (only 6% said they thought this number had deceased).  This number, coupled with the increase in media attention ought to really concern senior leaders. –Why? –  Because the only thing worse than a major crisis situation is a major crisis situation that could have been avoided.

The CEC is currently working on a study focused on creating a preventative corporate culture.  We have spoken to dozens of communications executives to better understand the barriers that they face when trying to build a preventative culture.  The basic questions are these: Why don’t employees flag and report potential issues that they see?  And, why do employees engage in risky behavior themselves?  Here are some of the many reasons that we have heard from members:

Environmental/Cultural Barriers:

• I am afraid to raise the issue – Some employees fear ostracism by their peers.  Others think that they might be penalized for voicing concern.  Regardless, both situations hold employees back from reporting potential risky behavior.
• I know who to tell, but they won’t listen –Whether it’s a manager who simply doesn’t seem have the time or a leader who sends signals that they “don’t want to know,” employees might want to tell but feel that they can’t.
• I’m incentivized to engage in risky behavior– Some risk taking is healthy, but not when it could lead to a crisis.  Consider the employee who is incentivized to maximize productivity and, as a result, compromises his safety or that of others, leading to a major accident.

Knowledge Gap/Skill Barriers:

• I don’t know how to spot issues – Though an employee might know what to look for, that doesn’t mean that he understands how the issue manifests itself.  In order to prevent the issue, employees must know what to look for AND how to spot it.
• I can’t see the interdependencies – A theme that we’ve heard often from members is the idea of silos.  Many employees work in a “functional bubble.”  They are so focused on their day-to-day roles that they don’t appreciate how something that seems benign to them, could do major damage to another part of the business
• I simply don’t know it’s an issue – It could be as simple as a lack of understanding or training.

These are just a handful of potential reasons, but we want to hear from you!  In your experience, what are some of the challenges that you have experienced in trying to create a preventative culture?  Are you currently working on creating an open culture of communication at your organization?  Post a comment below or send me an e-mail (jschott@executiveboard.com).

CEC Related Resources

• Accelerating Communications’ Response to Crises
• Crisis Communications “Cheat Sheet”

CEC Related Blog Posts

• 4 Tips on Handling Crisis Communications in a Social Media Era
• Two Hidden Lessons from BP’s Crisis
• Discussion Spotlight: Crisis Alert System

Communicators are often regarded as the ones who can put “lipstick on the pig.” Or, as Diane Gilman, Enterprise Communications Global Leader at W.L Gore put it, “perfume on the goat.” We’re often asked to communicate a message that is positioned in a rosier and more sugarcoated version than reality. Do we push it out for the “good of the business?” Or do we take a stand and partner with our business partners to find a truthful alternative. In other words, what is the role of integrity in Corporate Communications?

This question was raised after we received thoughtful feedback on our competency model from Diane. She wondered whether integrity should be one of the core expectations on the competency model. Below you can see Diane’s question and our response (published with her permission, of course – thank you, Diane).  Leave a comment and let us know what you think too.

—–Original Message—–

From: Diane L Gilman

Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2011 11:51 AM

To: Canan, Rebecca

Subject: Feedback on CEC Skill Development Grid

Hi Rebecca,

Just want to chime in with an observation about the framework and grid.

But first, thanks are due to the whole team. The framework is a solid description of competencies that I believe will resonate with both communicators and business leaders. I intend to use it to start conversations with senior leaders about the communicator’s role, and especially to help lift the mindset that communicators are implementers, rather than strategic partners…

One competency that does seem to be missing is integrity. In my experience, the most effective communicators are those who understand, and can help others see, that the only messages that really work are those that are real. “Truthful, authentic, honest” — you pick the word, but surfacing the truth of a situation is a critical part of the communicator’s skillset. We are often the ones who counsel leaders to be more real in their communications. Too often, communicators have been seen as the ones who can “put perfume on the goat” and use our wordcraft to make messages that shade or even misrepresent reality in tone and/or content.

For many reasons, including the proliferation of information available through online media, this is no longer a path that works, especially with younger employees and emerging leaders. It’s often up to the communicators in an organization to “call the process” and help move everyone toward being genuine at work, and this is when communications really gains power and credibility in an organization.

Would be interested in your thoughts and whether this came up at all from your team or the other companies that provided input.

Many thanks again.

Diane

Enterprise Communications Global Leader | W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc. |

—–Response—–

From:   “Canan, Rebecca”

To:       ‘Diane L Gilman’

Date:    06/28/2011 12:05 PM

Hi, Diane,

YES, this definitely came up. Most loudly at the CEC’s “guru” meeting we held earlier this year when the framework was in its early stage of development. A CEC member at that session said that he thought communicators had a very serious role to play in identifying “say / do” gaps between what leaders say and what is actually going on in the organization or environment. I.e., to call leaders out (tactfully, yet forcefully) when there is a discrepancy between what’s happening behind the scenes and what they want communicated. We attempted to represent that competency in “Foresight.” I.e., having the perspective (and you’re so right, the “integrity”) to anticipate and identify gaps between behavior and requested communication. Within the Leading category on the Skill Development Grid, we included these bullets:

• Can proactively advise management on the implications and risks for company operations when choosing between certain communication strategies.
• Can take a stand to coach or advise senior management when internal behaviors/signs are not aligning with the outgoing messages.

I agree that we can more assertively make this point.

Thanks for your time and your thoughtful critique!

Rebecca

Related CEC Resources:

Online Skills Assessment

The Modern Communicator’s Skill Set