So you just took over the Communications function.  Maybe you were brought in to inject some new energy, or chart new waters, or fill the clownishly big shoes of a beloved predecessor.  Maybe you’re hailed as the one riding in to set right a series of unfortunate events.  Whatever your circumstances or level of enthusiasm, you’re doubtless also feeling a bit of pressure, and rightfully so—from what we see, most companies don’t do a great job of setting their transitioning leaders up for success.   The track record on transitioning leaders is clear:  Many of them fail spectacularly.

But Really?  Spectacularly?

Yes.  We’re serious.  Spectacular is a big word, so let us back it up with a big number.  Research shows that 46% of leaders underperform during the course of their transition.  That doesn’t mean they’re not full of great ideas and doing all they can to move things in the right direction.  It means that somewhere  in the environment, there’s an element of being left to their own devices that requires them to figure things out on their own and in some ways fend for themselves, and it’s severely hampering them in their efforts. 

As with most spectacular fails, there is severe collateral damage:   when it takes you longer to get up to speed, your team lags to the tune of a 15% drop in productivity.  All of this is in line with our work we’ve done on change management—we know that after a big change, it takes an average of 24 months for an employee to get back to a full level of engagement.  That doesn’t mean a person isn’t super-bright and working hard.  It means that it simply takes a while to make meaningful connections and establish relationships and figure out how to be most productive and most efficient.  Surely all of these challenges are only compounded with increasing responsibility—after all, a body can only do so much so quickly. 

Avoiding the Fail Whale

So how to avoid becoming just another bleak statistic?  We’d recommend you take advantage of our new CEB Leadership Transition Support services.  CEB has done extensive research into what it takes to make a transition highly successful, and we’ve found that providing more effective support through the early going makes the difference. 

Most companies offer a version of one-off support to a leader for roughly the first three months, at which point the onboarding plan tends to reach the bottom of the sheet of paper—and you’re on your own.  What our research shows is that we need to create a support sweet spot— we need a repeatable transition process which is also highly tailored to the new leader. 

And It’s All Part of Your Membership

We can help you with targeted support at three levels:

1) You!

We can help you size up your transition environment and take steps to adapt quickly to your new role. We can help you:

• Measure your transition risk — we’ll help you assess both the situation and your leadership style to best position yourself for success. 
• Understand cultural drivers of success
• Define your goals
• Prioritize quick wins with this tool

2) Your new team

Your direct reports play a critical role in helping your ramp up quickly.  We’ll help them:

• Understand their role in the transition
• Assess their capabilities
• Provide upward feedback

3) Your manager and peers

This can’t be treated as simply the transition of an individual.  You’re all in this thing together, and you need that team to help you diagnose your function’s capabilities and make sure everyone is clear on cross-functional support and expectations. 

We can help you:

• Strengthen the new leader’s support network
• Diagnose functional capabilities
• Align the new leader with business partners

Please check out our CEB Leadership Transition Support topic center for a little more color, and please drop us a note if you’d like to take advantage of support that we know can make a big difference for your career AND your company. 

Because did we mention the punch line?  Getting this transition stuff right can generate a 3-5% increase in revenue.  That’s a pretty great way to celebrate your new tenure. 

CEB Communications Related Resources:

• Anatomy of a Business Value-Focused Communications Function
• CEB Communications Skills Maturity Assessment
• Business Partner Alignment Survey
• Webinar Replay: High-Impact Leadership Transitions

At a recent TEDYouth event, Kevin Allocca, YouTube’s Trends Manager (i.e., he gets paid to watch and analyze YouTube videos) explained why, despite 48 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute, certain videos go viral and often become cultural phenomenons (dare we remember Rebecca Black’s “Friday” or, more recently, PSY’s “Gangnam Style“?).

While his talk focused primarily on videos that HR would prefer we watch outside of work, the trends he explores are very much relevant to the videos that communicators are being asked to create and/or publish more and more frequently.  In particular, he notes that the majority of videos that spread like wildfire among a given audience possess at least one of three traits: Read More »

I recently returned from a vacation with my younger sister. She’s just five and a half years younger than me, but that’s a generation gap when it comes to social media use. As we explored the streets of London, I tweeted and posted photos on Facebook. She, on the other hand, created vines, Snapchatted, and Keeked!  I had no idea what any of these things were, which made me think that the Communications teams I work with may also be in the dark when it comes to what the 21 and under set of the population is using these days to express themselves, create their own content, and connect with their friends.

To help you and me both stay hip and consider the ways in which we can connect with our younger audiences, I’m sharing a short primer on these three social media tools. In short, it’s all about the visuals. Please share how your company is thinking about taking advantage of these tools or if you’ve noticed other apps gaining popularity with your audiences!

1. Vine

Vine, developed by Twitter, and launched just this year, is an app that enables its users to create 6-second video clips. Its users right now are primarily teenagers and Vine video clips are primarily of the skateboarding, cheering, and goofballing type. Eager to connect with teens who are fleeing the social media sites that you and I use, companies, and consumer brands in particular, are starting to experiment with teen engagement through Vine. For example, General Electric, Tropicana, Nintendo, and Gap have taken advantage of Vine to engage followers with creative content, celebrate key milestones, and build excitement for product launches.

2. Snapchat

You may have heard of this one, possibly on a list of “apps to be careful of” distributed by your child’s PTA! This app allows users to send photos and videos to their friends. Doesn’t sound all that special, right? What makes Snapchat unique is that users set a time limit for how long—up to 10 seconds— they want the image to be on their friend’s device before it disappears from the device and Snapchat’s servers. Fewer corporate use cases of Snapchat exist today. One of the first ones, however, came from a yogurt store in New York City as a way to drive potential customers to their stores.

3. Keek

Keek is similar to Vine, but allows users to share 36 seconds of video content. Popularized by the Kardashian family, Keek is all about building an individual’s reputation. For example, Keek encourages you to build Kred by rating fellow Keekers (?!) for being funny, talented, and entertaining. A Top 100 List, currently saturated by the Kardashian clan, inspires its users to aim for social media glory in their video commentaries.

What Does All of This Mean for Corporate Communications?

Vine, Snapchat, and Keek are just the latest social media apps to gain seemingly overnight popularity. So what does this mean for corporate communicators of the world? Three immediate implications come to mind.

First, the rise of these new tools is a good reminder of just how fluid the social and digital communications space is. Instead of over-prioritizing the development of specific channel experts on lean corporate communications teams, be sure the team has the base skills to take advantage of any of these emerging platforms. These skills include the ability to create short, engaging content in multiple formats (video and photo) and the ability to understand key audience motivators and preferences.

Second, corporate uses of these tools are emerging, so we are essentially in an experimentation phase. As with all experimentation, be sure you start your efforts with some hypotheses you’d like to test and align your measurement efforts accordingly. This is all about learning!

Finally, each of these new tools creates an exciting opportunity for communicators to deepen stakeholder engagement and drive active support for their organizations. Remember, today it’s all about getting your content to flow through existing stakeholder networks. If the under-21 set is one of your key audiences for, say, attracting talent, garnering support for construction in new locations, or garnering support for sustainability efforts, then these tools could provide a new way to get your company’s voice heard. If this all seems far-fetched to you, the best—and safest—place to start is with listening!

We want to hear from you!

Share with the 10,000+ communicators in the CEB Communications network who read this blog weekly! Please share how your company is thinking about taking advantage of these tools or if you’ve noticed others gaining popularity with your audiences!

CEB Communications Related Resources

• Learn more about Millennials, Gen Xers, and Boomers Communication Preferences with Iconoculture Stakeholder Insights
• Check out the latest trends in Europe, China, Latin America, and the Middle East, too!
• Social Media Topic Center

CEB Communications Related Blog Posts

• Social Media: Where’s the Plan?
• 3 Surprising Trends about Social Media in Brazil
• A Marketer’s Guide to Vine

“Work smarter, not harder” is an old adage…but it’s actually true in today’s work environment! To illustrate: hard-working Harold is the first one to arrive and the last one to leave the office. We all have a hard-working Harold at our companies – he shows true dedication and a willingness to put in extra effort. He drinks 5 cups of coffee every morning, pours over paperwork at 1:00 in the morning, and types 80 words per minute. However, Harold will probably not outperform Agile Anna, who more effectively supports peers, seeks feedback, and adapts to changing situations.

CEB found through quantitative research that agile employees outperform hard workers. However, 75% of surveyed employees are not agile. As a result, communications teams are fighting an uphill battle when trying to help the organization adapt to ongoing change.

How can you use communication to help employees be more agile in the workplace? Take a look at these 3 ready-to-use tools:

1. 6 Important Questions to Ask Peers in order to accelerate learning: this self-reflection guide helps employees apply what they learned in interactions with colleagues or clients to their own work.
2. 4 Principles to Enable Peer Sharing and Learning: you can apply these principles to existing communications events such as town halls in order to facilitate employee best-practice sharing in a more natural way, as part of day to day work.
3. Turn One-Way Leader Messages into Structured Dialogues:  use this step-by-step map to choose your communications objective, plan messages to support your choice, and facilitate ongoing dialogue between managers and employees.

                What challenges has your company encountered when adapting to change? What strategies do you use to improve your employees’ agility? Feel free to add your tips and tricks in the comments below.

Related Resources

• Building a Change-Ready Organization
• Employee Engagement Topic Center
• The Modern Communicator’s Skill Set

Related Blogs

• 3 Ways You Can Be a High Performer in Your Job
• Do You Have What It Takes to Be an Innovate Communicator?
• 3 Employee Value Proposition Trends Affecting Your Job

Let me ask you some questions:

• What would be more engaging – going through an infographic or a PDF report?
• Would you feel more energized after watching an executive speak in a video interview or reading through the transcript?
• Which one has greater probability – you hitting the click button on a 2-min podcast or flipping through three pages of text?

If you answered the first part of each question in affirmative, it means you learn more by seeing or listening than by reading, a characteristic found in most people. Not surprisingly therefore, many companies are using multimedia—images, diagrams, charts, illustrations, and videos—to jazz up their otherwise text-intensive (and sometimes potentially boring) communications. This is even more important in the new media landscape where Communications is looking to create content that stakeholders would feel motivated to both consume and share within their networks.

Every message has the following three components that Communications must adapt in ways to promote organic sharing between people:

1. Substance – How to make the content more engaging?
2. Tone – How to make it more human and candid?
3. Packaging – How to make it “shareable” and less static?

Multimedia (i.e.: use of infographics, videos, illustrations etc) is an effective way to improve all the three aspects of the message. Here are some examples of how companies are utilizing multimedia’s potential to improve their communication: Read More »

Imagine that you’ve recently had a few incidents in your plants (this might not be imaginary for some of you, particularly if you’re in a manufacturing or utilities industry). And after a flurry of crisis communications, meetings with the leadership team and check-ins with the line managers, the company decides it’s time to do another safety campaign. Safety, of course, is integral to the business and how the organization operates, but maybe it’s time to do a refresh. Leadership decides the campaign needs to be specifically focused on the employees in the plants and it must be an effort aimed at changing behavior. OK, fine enough.

As the lead on this initiative, you have the goal in mind – seeing employees make conscious behavior shifts when it comes to increasing safety on the job. You have the content in mind – emotionally impactful messages about safety and how unsafe actions impact not only the individual, but their peers as well.

But shoot, you just can’t quite figure out how to share this information with plant employees in a way that will actually lead to behavior change.

You can’t send out an email announcing the campaign. You can’t  just start a discussion on your social media platform around safety. These folks aren’t checking their smartphones while working the machines (at least we hope not!). And they’re not sitting at their desks, scrolling through the internal blog on the intranet.

You might try more old-fashioned channels, making colorful posters, adding more paper onto a crowded bulletin board or even creating a video for the electronic boards in the lobby. But nothing seems like it will work and you’re fed up. It seems like these employees, also known as non-wired employees, won’t pay much attention to the information and they certainly won’t change their behavior in a visible way. You’ve tried all the above! Nothing seems like it will work.

What can you do?

Read More »

Our work environment has changed drastically in the last 5-10 years. We work with many types of internal and external stakeholders that sit in every corner of the world, within organizations that are more global and less hierarchical, and with an ever-increasing amount of information that we need to process to get our work done. Plainly put, both our personal and professional lives are more networked and our day to day has become more complex.  

CEB’s data on the changing nature of work supports this. CEB surveyed over 23,000 employees on how they think and feel that the work environment has changed.

Below are 3 revealing findings about the new reality facing employees in 2012 compared to just 3 years before:

1. Cross-border teams: 57% of employees said they work with more coworkers in another location.

Implication: Time zones and cultural differences across regions limit opportunities for observing performance. See our toolkit on managing communications across global teams and our cultural values primer to improve how you communicate with your global colleagues. Read More »

Good news travels quickly. But if there’s anything we know only too well in Comms, bad news travels a whole lot quicker, as Virgin Media learned the hard way recently. Just last month, Virgin Media landed in the social media “hot seat” when a scan of a broadband bill the company sent to a deceased customer (which included a fine for late payment) was posted by the customer’s son-in-law on Facebook, along with a message addressed to Virgin Media. The post was shared more than 53,000 times by Facebook users! Indeed a reminder of the importance of understanding our audiences in the networked environment, and responding quickly and publicly to complaints made on social networks.

Reading this got me thinking: We in comms do a very good job at promoting our organisations, and within the last few years alone have actually become a lot more savvy when it comes to increasing our company’s activity on new channels, e.g., establishing a Company Facebook page, Company Twitter account, LinkedIn presence etc. Some progressive communications teams are even starting to become aware of the stakeholder networks that surround their companies, harnessing and using the power of stakeholder networks to their advantage, motivating their stakeholders to pass on positive messages on the company’s behalf.

As good as things are when the network is working in our company’s favor, we communicators really feel the pain when we don’t have strategies in place to deal with the negative issues that can arise from those networks, being overwhelmed by the very same force that was promoting us only a few seconds ago.

Here are4 tips for how you can better inform your strategy through active social media listening: Read More »

Last week we at the CEB Communications Leadership Council hosted the first of a series of virtual networking discussions among communicators in global companies. Topic: how to evaluate and potentially adopt a shared service model in the Comms function. We facilitated a rich conversation among 12 communicators from 8 global companies (based in Europe, South Africa and the US), all dealing with the challenge of how to best structure the global function to improve collaboration, strategic value of Comms, and achieve economies of scale. I will share some takeaways from the discussion in a future post later this month, but one of the models we discussed as a group was Cisco’s shared services model in internal and executive communications.

In its journey to shared services migration, Cisco tried to answer 3 key questions about the Comms function’s structure:

1.     To centralize or decentralize?

There is really no right or wrong answer to this question, as it depends what you are solving for. Using insights from CEB Communications’ Resource Allocation Benchmark, Cisco found it was overspending in key areas of Comms. Its existing decentralized structure meant that there was duplication of work and inconsistent messaging across the global organization. Thus, to achieve scale and improve quality of the communication services, Cisco centralized its internal communications organization, creating a shared services model for key communications activities.

Not quite ready to change your entire Comms structure yet, but still needing to achieve alignment and clarity around ownership of activities? Check out this global process governance framework to better partner between the center and regions. Read More »

After the case has been made to grant employees access to social media at work, Communications can do a lot to make sure all goes well in the transition and capitalize on the potential benefits to the company. A recent question in the Employee Communications Forum on this topic got a significant response from members offering advice and guidance on their experience.

Take a look at the key themes and tactical tips, as well as CEB resources on supporting employee social media use:

Do: Have a policy and provide training.

Don’t: Leave employees unsure of what’s expected.

What Your Peers Say:

• “Make sure you have a place employees can go to ask questions.”
• “Explain why you’re doing this, what the business is doing on social media, and educate them on expectations during work and after work.” 
• “We also offered a webinar where experts across the company from HR, Compliance, Legal, IT, Corp Comm shared their thoughts and then answered employee questions.”

CEB Resource: Customize Your Social Media Policy

Read More »