Most communicators we speak with find improving their leaders’ communication skills to be difficult. Leaders rise up the ranks by being very good at what they do, so many communicators acknowledge that convincing leaders they aren’t good at something is tough. They find actually changing their behavior is even tougher.

Teams often try to get buy-in from leaders by telling them they need to improve their communication skills. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t address the heart of the issue. When trying to change someone’s behavior, you are battling their natural human tendencies. So instead of telling leaders they need better communications skills, you need to start by helping them understand why their natural tendencies are not effective. You can build off of this eye-opening experience and use a structured approach to teach them a better way.  One company who has done this extremely well is Vestas Wind Systems.

Vestas’ Communications team worked with HR to develop the following multi-pronged approach to help leaders understand their role as communicators and develop their communications skills:

1.  Contemplation – Through assessing leaders’ specific communications strengths and weaknesses, Vestas’ program helps a leader acknowledge that their communications could be improved. CEC members, view a list of thought-provoking questions to ask your leaders.

2.  Preparation – By simplifying leaders understanding of what good communications looks like, leaders learn an easily applicable new model of behavior.

3.  Action – Vestas runs leaders through a workshop where leaders practice this new model of behavior.

4.  Maintenance – To prevent leaders from falling back into old habits, communications provides tailored support through dialogue, coaching, and tools. CEC Members, check out Vestas’ Leader Communicaton Toolbox.

So what’s different about this? Why is this program so effective? There are many answers to that question, but here are two overarching reasons:

AWARENESS – Every successful leadership communications method we see starts with some sort of self awareness exercise. Vestas is no exception. In fact, the entire project started because of an employee engagement survey where employees indicated their leaders weren’t effective communicators. This was a real eye-opener for the organization because it demonstrated the power of self-awareness. Leaders will not change their habits unless they see a reason for it, so show them!

STRUCTURE – In most organizations, communication is an implicit activity for leaders. It is assumed that leaders should communicate and we all know what assuming does… The problem here is often a lack of structure. Without structure, communication remains a fluffy, tangential activity in the eyes of leaders. Vestas was able to make communications a skill that leaders are hired, assessed, and evaluated for by placing a method behind their madness.

Have any of your executives had an “aha” moment when it came to communications? Do you have the right system in place to build on that moment?

Here are some other CEC resources that will help you build a leadership communications program:

• Executive Communications Topic Center
• Vestas’ Leader Communication Program (full case study)
• Vestas’ Leader Communication Tools
• Leadership Communication for the Agile Organization (webinar replay)

CEC Related Blog Posts

• The Polite Way to Tell Leaders They’re Bad at Communication
• 5 Communication Skills to Teach Executives
• 3 Steps to Better Leadership Communication

The greater complexity, uncertainty, volatility, and demand for transparency have led business partners to seek out Communications’ support. As a result, Communications is being asked to do more and is consulted more consistently.  Problem is, comms hasn’t grown up providing this type of support.  In essence, we want you to go from a reactive function to one where you proactively shape the strategy of the business.  However, in order to become this integral thought-partner, you need a systematic approach to make this a successful transition.  Fortunately, we have just the tool you need to get started, with many thanks to Toyota and their problem solving worksheet.

What’s interesting about this problem solving process is that Toyota wanted to incorporate the same process that they use on the assembly line and apply it internally to all of their functions.  You can imagine that there may have been some skepticism by the communications team on adopting this new process – and you’d be right.  But in the end, the comms team came around and was able to see the value that was added by including this process while working with their business partners was well worth the effort.  Let’s take a look at the steps of this process, which I’m going to call “5 plus 1,” and I’m not talking United Nations negotiations.

1.   Clarify Stated Problem

Once you and your business partners have identified that a problem exists, it’s now imperative to make sure that you’re both on the same page.  By     clarifying the problem, you’ll be able to assess the partners’ desired business outcome and understand the current state of performance and work to fill this gap.

2.   Redefine the Problem

Something I like to do when tasked with solving a problem is to try to break it down into as many smaller pieces as I can.  The logic being that it’s easier to solve several smaller problems individually than one big problem all at once.  Well the same holds true in this step where you and your business partners need to decide which sub-problem is significant and addressable.  This also helps to ensure that your skill sets are properly aligned with a problem that you can actually solve and is worth your time.

3.   Set a Target Outcome

Now that you and your business partners have identified, clarified, and redefined the problem, it is now appropriate to set a measurable goal that links to the sub-problem.  This is an important step for the communications team because it will allow for you to track your progress to show your business partners that you’re a valuable problem solving asset. Read More »

Increased media scrutiny and expanded opportunities for employees to share information have put executives in the hot seat. Basically, anything they say or do can be Tweeted, Instragrammed, YouTubed, and, surely, held against them in a court of law.

The openness and transparency demand by today’s society has top executives turning to the Corporate Communications function for guidance and support on what to say, when to say it, where to say it, and how to say it, both in terms of message and tone as well as the medium or forum itself.

Corporate communicators, especially those adept in handling crises, leading press conferences, and writing key announcements, are under pressure to help executives communicate more effectively. The best communicators out there are taking advantage of this opportunity to not simply polish an executive’s speech, but also to sensitize executives to the important of ongoing, continuous dialogue with stakeholders as a way to conduct better business, not just manage perceptions.

The 5 Communication Skills to Teach Your Executives

Here are the 5 most common types of communication support or skill building offered to executives mapped to CEC support for our members.

1. Speechwriting: Your leader needs to have a clear understanding of what they are trying to achieve and how audiences should take action as a result of the speech.Ask consultative questions to help executives to deepen their understanding of the desired stakeholder action of the communication | Use this 3-step Executive Communication Triage Process and learn why this process works on the CEC Insider
   
2. Storytelling: Help leaders to weave stories and personal experiences into their communication to make a concept feel much more “real” to the audience, driving their energy and enthusiasm to support it.Build executives’ ability to engage others in storytelling. | See how Continental Airlines breaks down storytelling into a simple, repeatable process.
3. Dialogue: Equip leaders to lead dialogues on the implications of company strategy to help employees understand goals and believe that they can impact them positively.Break dialogue into simple steps that executives can easily digest and practice. | See how Shell runs a Dialogue Workshop for Executives and run your own workshop with CEC’s out-of-the-box Dialogue Training Materials.
4. Empowering: In agile environments, employees need to proactively change their behaviors. Executives need to get comfortable and trust employees to take smart action by building an empowering environment.Help executives overcome perceived barriers to letting go of some control | See how GlaxoSmithKline CPSE structures its Empowerment Workshop for Executives
   
5. Communicating During Uncertainty: Executives feel uncomfortable not having “all of the answers”. Help leaders run structured dialogues where they’re expected to take part in a conversation, but not to have all the answers. 
   Capitalize on moments of uncertainty to quickly teach executives how to hold dialogues. | Nordea’s dialogue prep sessions help executives prepare for “critical and curious” questions and simulate conversations that will soon take place on the job

CEC Related Resources

• Build Executives Communication Skills
• Executive Communication Topic Center
• Help Executives Understand Their Communication Role
• Improve Coaching and Advisory Capabilities

CEC Related Blogs

• The Polite Way to Tell Leaders They’re Bad at Communication
• How to Measure Leader Communication Effectiveness
• The 5 FAQs on Leader Communication
• 3 Steps to Better Executive Communication

This is a retroactively posted live blog of Rick Delisi and Dorian Cundick leading CEC’s Executive Retreat on Communication for Performance.

9:13 ET: Rick opens up by promising a different vision for communications, a joke about laser eye surgery, and an announcement: this is the first ever CEC meeting supporting in-room iPad slides!  It’s fitting because the first page of the material is a review of select Communication milestones, reflecting not the increased complexity in our execution but as revealed on the next page, increased demand from business partners to help them navigate these “interesting times.”

9:25 ET: Audience members vent that as we take on more communications through more channels with more people, we’re getting good at building affinity and support but can’t necessarily connect it all back to business outcomes.  But Rick explains that have seen companies re-orient themselves toward business outcomes by focusing on a crucial missing link… (after the jump)
Read More »

B2B product launches don’t usually involve viral videos or mainstream media buzz, but that doesn’t make them any less complex than their B2C counterparts. In fact, B2B product launches are becoming more and more difficult as customers now rely heavily on third-party recommendations and wait until much later in the purchase decision process to engage with sales reps.

Pushing awareness of a new product is no longer enough to prepare customers for sales calls. We need to look deeper into customer challenges and motivations, and consider how to use what we learn to move customers toward the purchase decision.

Progressive companies are rethinking their approach to product launch and positioning products as unexpected solutions to business challenges their customers are experiencing. This insight was first uncovered by researchers in our sister programs the Marketing Leadership Council and Sales Executive Council.

This approach, called Commercial Teaching, allows companies to catch customers’ attention and prime customers to take action by placing their business needs at the center of launch communications. Rather than provide information about product features so customers can spot the opportunities the product provides for their business, Commercial Teaching focuses on providing customers insight about an unexpected solution to their business challenge that the product is uniquely suited to achieve.

Read More »

It’s not polite to tell your CEO, “Hey, you’re a terrible communicator.”

What is more polite (and, ultimately more pragmatic) is to benchmark existing leader communication effectiveness in order to prioritize the type of support the Communications function provides.

Leader communication is the composite of what leaders believe about the importance of communication, say in order to drive stakeholder action, and do to model open communication across their teams. In a previous post, I shared an earlier model of leader communication and a list of smart questions to assess the effectiveness of your leaders at these key drivers of performance. (CEC Members, access the full list of indicators on our site.)

It’s not enough to know what to ask to uncover leaders’ communication effectiveness. For the sake of implementation, you need to know how to uncover leaders’ communication effectiveness (or lack thereof!). Here’s a look at ways to determine leader effectiveness based on the audience you’re seeking information from—leaders themselves, their teams, or the organization at large.

How to Assess Leader Communication Effectiveness

1. Ask Leaders

Assessing leaders directly helps them to:

• Become self-aware of habits that undermine desire to empower the organization.
• Realize heightened responsibility to improve communication style.

Format for assessment:

• Existing leader forum (such as annual leaders meeting)
• In 1-on-1 conversations with leaders.
• Embed into existing leader training

What you’ll need

• Direct access to leaders.
• Conversation guide to draw out leader beliefs.
• Support guide to map Communications support to areas of leader need.

What you’ll get

• Understanding of leader belief in the value of communication.
• Personalized Communications support plan for a given leader

View these sample leader assessment questions from GSK CPSE

2. Ask a Leader’s Direct Team

Read More »

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

No Longer in the Driving Seat

It’s old news that comms doesn’t “own” stakeholder relationships anymore. Maybe we never did own them all – it makes complete sense for folks across the business to manage relevant relationships. For instance, your teams on the ground at your manufacturing site will certainly be better equipped to discuss the intricacies of their emissions with environmental NGOs than your average communicator!

The Challenge: Stakeholders View Corporations as Single Entities… But it Can be Hard to Act Like One!

The challenge comes, though, when the team who manage your supply chain, and the folks from Sustainability/CSR are all in dialogue with the same bunch of NGOs. How do you ensure consistency of messaging when, in some cases, folks don’t even know that their colleagues are engaging the same external stakeholders as they are?!

This can be particularly tough when the internal stakeholders don’t sit in the same office, or work for the same business unit, or even in the same country. As organizations become increasingly complex and siloed, it becomes ever more difficult for the right hand to know what the left hand is doing – one organization even told tale of business partners bumping into each other at the Capitol on their way to meet the same congressmen!

Enabling internal collaboration

In an ideal world, we’d have perfect visibility into every corner of our own companies. Business partners would share detailed notes of every stakeholder interaction they had, so that their cross-functional colleagues could be perfectly aligned and on-message while engaging the same external groups. For many of us, though, this level of integration would most likely occur in some parallel universe in which annual budgets were doubled, and the working week ended on a Wednesday! Business partners are busy, and often disinclined to take time out to share information across silos.

The Solutions

1. Narrow the scope of participation: Don’t demand an integrated approach for every stakeholder relationship. Leading communicators identify a finite number of their most important stakeholders, and limit the demand for intensive cross-functional collaboration to those to those relationships.

• CEC members, use this framework to determine the extent to which internal collaboration is required at your organization.

2. Don’t overinvest in technology: Going out and buying a CRM system for stakeholder management isn’t a solution for every company. Assess the complexity of your relationships – if your relationships are relatively simple (ie. requiring little internal collaboration) then don’t overinvest – email exchange, word documents, and even simple conversations can go a long way. If your relationships are more complex, across a wider range of internal touch points, then consider a more dynamic solutions (CRM systems, wikis, and the like).

• CEC members, use this framework to determine your technology requirements

3. Enable peer-to-peer collaboration: Leading communicators understand people’s personal motivations for sharing information. Namely, looking cool/knowledgeable/intelligent!

• C EC members, check these principles for enabling peer collaboration

Related Resources

• Stakeholder Mapping Toolkit
• Stakeholder Mapping: 5 FAQs
• Ideas From Your Peers: Stakeholder Mapping

Recently, we ran a one-question survey through our CEC Employee Discussion Forum to gauge members’ interest in using mobile technology (text messaging, mobile apps, etc.) for internal communication. More than 80% of respondents reported already using or considering the use of mobile technology.

However, as we spoke to members, we found that although there is keen interest, there isn’t clarity on how to best leverage this emerging technology.

To drive home my point, let me first ask you if the following statements sound familiar?

• “We need a mobile app for…”
• “We should redesign our intranet to make it accessible on mobile devices…”
• “We should record videos of our executives to…”

Do you notice a trend in these statements? The technology is being put ahead of the objective. Often, communicators and business partners put more focus on what the solution should look like, whether it is an app or intranet redesign or a video content, than on the desired goal that the solution should achieve. While it’s smart to think about technology, falling into a “technology trap”—using technology just for its novelty—isn’t a great idea. After all, the approach is not without pitfalls:

• Limited goal achievement: Many organizations consider redesigning their intranets to cater to the rising number of mobile employees. However, mobile employees have limited time, attention span, and needs different from desktop users. So, while the desired objective might be to improve their productivity, a mere replication of desktop solutions to mobile platforms may not serve the purpose.
• Wasteful resource expenditure: “There’s an app for everything” phenomenon seems to be fast catching up and giving corporate IT teams sleepless nights. You might have often heard IT complain about being bombarded with requests for creating apps from various business groups that often when probed are unable to justify the rationale for the app. This is not to say that apps are unnecessary, in fact, they are extremely effective in interactive communication. However, it’s a waste of organizational resources if the same outcome can be achieved without an app, by using other less resource-intensive mobile device capabilities, for example text messaging or MMS.

So, what’s a better approach? Think goal first, technology second. Before you begin planning for employee communication initiatives using mobile technology, answer these three questions: Read More »

As we’ve charted developments in the internal social media and collaboration  space, we’ve seen many overinvest in the latest and greatest technology platforms. These efforts, such as implementing internal Facebook or Twitter-esque applications, met initial enthusiasm only then to see early adoption rates plummet and to struggle justifying value created for the business. (Two that have worked well, however, are Sabre’s employee connection center or MITRE’s peer learning platform.)

For the most part, these efforts failed because the platforms were non-intuitive and without an obvious purpose or benefit. Many companies wasted time and effort on employee sharing solutions that simply couldn’t compete with employees’ personal options. Before your Communications team begins experimenting with new social media options for employees, here’s what you need to beware of:

• With significant investment and application of the right principles, companies can create tremendous value from tools that allow employees to connect with and learn from one another.
• Companies should beware of efforts that require significant investment but feel unnatural for employees to use; these efforts will disappoint.
• Communications can leverage existing live and virtual employee interactions to redirect energy towards strategies that encourage peer learning.

The question for communicators is not simply, How do I use internal social media to better communicate with our employees?, but also, How does my organization use social media as a collaboration and learning tool to drive employee performance and productivity?

The Four Fs of Social Media Collaboration

To answer this question, I turn to a framework in use by leading HR practitioners and developed by our sister program, CLC Human Resources. In their research, they simplify the 4 Keys to Effective Social Media-Enabled Collaboration into the easy-to-remember four Fs:

1. Focus: Aligning social media collaboration objectives with business objectives
2. InFrastructure: Selecting a platform that supports these objectives (admittedly a bit forced on the F here!)
3. Filter: connecting individuals with relevant, just-in-time information
4. Facilitate: Managing collaboration efficiently and effectively

Imagine if Communications, Human Resources, and Information Technology (alongside business partners) sat down and used these four keys as a starting point for a productive conversation and planning session about the future roadmap of employee collaboration? We can help you better understand these four pillars and how to use them as a guide for investments at your company by joining our upcoming webinar on Driving Collaboration through Social Media.

Join Us to Guide the Social Media Strategy at Your Organization

Be the champion for productivity-enhancing uses of social media at your organization by joining us on May 18^th for a webinar on Driving Collaboration through Social Media. In just one-hour you’ll learn how to:

• Make the business case for your organization on the benefits of creating a more collaborative environment
• Embrace three key imperatives in their internal leverage of social media to drive more effective collaboration
• Implement easy-to-use toolkits to adopt these practices at your organization

CEC Related Resources

• How to Use Social Media to Create Networks of Support Among Employees
• Fostering Supportive Peer-to-Peer Communication (The MITRE Corporation)
• Internal Social Media Vendors
• How to Work with IT

CEC Related Blogs

• 2 Reasons Why Internal Social Media Platforms Fail
• Discussions Spotlight: Using an Internal Facebook