This is a retroactively posted “live” blog of Rick DeLisi leading CEB Communications Leadership Council’s 2013 Annual Executive Retreat on Adapting Leadership Communication to the New Work Environment. 

9:03 AM ET:  All 18 Communications Executives are now in the room, focusing on Rick as he kicks off the meeting with a monologue about one the top strategic priorities for communicators in 2013 – internal communication between leaders and employees.  An important note: the study refers to “leaders” as the top 200 or 300 leaders across your company.  Not all the way down to Line Managers, but we’re referring to C-Suite, VPs, General Managers, Division Heads, etc.

9:10:  Rick outlines the “Ideal Leader” as described by the membership – “authentic,” “inspirational,” “trustworthy,” “accessible,” etc. – and the typical Communications tactics for improving those traits – stylistic coaching, content creation, and channel management.  Essentially, these leaders should be able to drive effort and performance by helping employees understand company goals and how their work aligns with those goals, and by creating a culture where employees are fully committed to the company.

9:15:  Rick outlines a quick agenda for the day.  It seems like most members are still not seeing a boost in employee performance despite their best efforts, so we are going to spend the next several hours learning how the most successful communicators support leaders and employees.  Rick gives a quick teaser about how the “Ideal Leader” may not be so ideal after all and then breaks for introductions…

9:18:  One audience member went to “the biggest party school in the country,” which prompts Rick to invite the room to do Jägerbombs with him later.  This should be a fun day!

9:45:  The audience is nodding in agreement as Rick shows some data illustrating today’s new work environment that is more complex and interdependent than ever before.

9:46:  It turns out that, in this new work environment, high performing employees are no longer those who just excel in individual task performance.  Rather, they excel in both individual task performance and network performance (e.g., the degree to which employees share and learn skills, knowledge, and tools among themselves).

9:55:  To much of the surprise of the communicators in the room, the relative importance of both components of employee performance is roughly the same.  Rick turns to Scott to explain how we used MANOVA analysis to come to this conclusion.

10:00:  I awake to applause; Scott must have just finished his explanation.

10:05:  Interesting data here – only 17% of employees are high “enterprise contributors” (e.g., strong individual task and network performers).  Rick does a quick math lesson with the room – if a company were to double that number to 34% (i.e., where one-third of employees are high enterprise contributors), the company profit would increase 1.2%.  For an average company in the CEB Communications membership, a 1.2% increase in profit would be in the tens of millions of dollars!  Looks like we are on to something…

10:25:  Rick drops another bombshell – increasing an employee’s commitment to their company does not do anything to improve individual task or network performance.  On the other hand, an employee’s commitment to their co-workers has a significant impact on both components of employee performance.  There is definitely a “whoa” feeling in the room, but the audience seems to understand why this is the case given the backdrop of “the new work environment.”

10:34:  The room disperses for coffee, tea, or a Jägerbomb.

11:29:  After a long technical glitch in the simulcast room, we’re back.  Rick and the audience are in the middle of talking about a common challenge with regards to “Leadership Communication” – how to coach leaders to be less directive and more inclusive.  Practically everyone agrees that such a shift is nearly impossible.

11:38:  There’s no need to fear…Rick DeLisi is here!  It turns out that there is a third set of leadership communication behaviors that is a much more natural shift from a directive set of behaviors, and that has a much greater impact on network performance than directive and inclusive behaviors.  Rick describes this set of behaviors as enabling (i.e., encouraging employee interaction and giving context behind decisions – ultimately, enabling employees to solve problems on their own and with their peers).

11:46:  Rick’s original teaser about the “Ideal Leader” not being very ideal is coming to fruition now.  He is showing the room a compelling pie chart indicating that four out of five employees prefer leaders who enable over leaders who inspire.

11:54: Here’s the road-map for the next 30 minutes before lunch.  Looks like we are going to start with an exercise focused on creating enabling messages for (and with) leaders.  Following that exercise, Rick is promising to show two great best practice case studies from Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (something about using town halls to showcase the behaviors of leaders that the company wants employees to emulate) and Hallmark (looks like we have some neat tools coming out of this case about using a survey to keep track of leaders’ reinforcement of desirable employee behaviors).

12:01 PM ET:  The simulcast is continuing to experience technical difficulties.  Looks like I’ll have to attend one of the other upcoming Retreats or Regional Briefings to see how this all plays out.  I suggest you do the same!

CEB Communications Related Resources:

• Help Executives Understand Their Communication Role
• Coach Senior Leaders
• Employee – Employee Communication

CEB Communications Related Blogs:

• Are You Only Reaching Half of Your Potential?
• Authenticity Doesn’t Cut it Anymore
• Who Really Has the Biggest Impact on Employees’ Performance?

As part of the latest research project on intranets and internal social media, we spoke to a variety of companies, ranging from pharmaceutical manufacturers to financial service providers, from airplane manufacturers to energy providers, and found that irrespective of the size, industry, or global reach of organizations, their intranets are in a major state of transition. Companies are aspiring to transition their intranets from a static, standardized, content repository to an interactive, personalized, collaboration tool.

We recently conducted a webinar – Three Must-Have Principles for a Successful Intranet and hosted about 300 participants where we presented our ideas on how companies can achieve success as they plan for this transition. In case you missed the webinar, we present some highlights in this blog post; you can listen in to the replay for more details.

Our research found that while most companies are thinking of taking their intranets to the next level, their efforts are meeting only limited success. They’re finding it hard to enhance employee adoption, prove real value of the intranet, and build resource capacity to manage the intranet.

So, what’s causing this difficulty?

We found that there are three mindsets that get us in trouble in communications:

• Do It All Mindset: tendency to fall for the shiny object syndrome, the urge to implement all the latest tools, be it blogs, wikis, discussion forums, or workspaces, without identifying the business impact of these tools.
• Know It All Mindset: tendency to decide what’s best for our employees or assume that we know everything about our employee needs, without realizing if the employee-stated needs are same as their underlying needs.
• Do It All By Ourselves Mindset: tendency to manage all aspects of the intranet, from determining which platform to use, to managing multiple forums, to working with stakeholders to get content on the site, often finding ourselves exhausted and resource-constrained. Read More »

You’re buying a house, and you want the following features:

• 3 bedrooms
• in central London
• has a garden

You see four houses, which all sound OK.

Now, let’s ignore the fact that £300,000 wouldn’t buy you a shoebox in central London – this is a hypothetical world, in which the rungs of the property ladder are incremental jumps rather than quantum leaps.

Clearly, you’d disregard House 4 – it doesn’t meet the criteria you want. But Houses 1, 2 and 3 DO meet the criteria. They’re all central, they’ve all got the 3 bedrooms, and they’ve all got the garden.

Of course, in the real world, you go along and view the properties. However, until you do so, none of the houses have demonstrated any unique features, characteristics, or attributes. Presented with the information above, it’s pretty hard to differentiate options 1-3 on anything other than price.

The Importance Of A Unique Offering

Funnily enough, this is a challenge similar to those facing stakeholders when it comes to choosing a corporate brand to associate with. Although seventy percent of communicators view their corporate brand as differentiated from their competitors, stakeholders can’t always tell the difference—only 20% of companies have brands that stakeholders can meaningfully differentiate from the competition. Attributes such as “trustworthy,” “customer-focused,” and “innovative” are so commonly used that they rarely distinguish one brand from another.

To truly differentiate your company from your competitors, it’s vital to position your brand in much the same way that you’d advertise a house you were selling – by accentuating its unique features and characteristics. Your house has got a garage, and is near a good school? Lead with that! Similarly, your company’s offerings are different-in-kind to those of your competition? Use those unique attributes to stand out from the crowd.

Accentuate Your Company’s Unique Brand Attributes Read More »

What do potential candidates think about your company? Today, Communications is frequently being asked to partner with HR to distill and communicate compelling employment strategies and to attract new talent. Most organizations recognize the need for a cohesive and clearly articulated employment brand (i.e., coworker quality, work-life balance, customer prestige) to attract candidates. But the path to communicating and attracting potential candidates with a dynamic employment brand is often blocked by several obstacles, including:

• Near-constant threat of talent competitors
• Negative events that can damage employment reputation
• New technologies that transform how companies, potential candidates, and customers interact

Not suprisingly, in a recent conversation with the Head of Comms at a manufacturing company, we heard it’s pretty tough to recruit top talent these days. Especially in industries that are not as ‘trendy or alluring,’ recruiting the innovative, creative, culture-fit talent is often a daunting task.

For Comms teams that are engaged in recruiting efforts, we’re finding it’s crucial to first understand the company’s employment brand attributes and how these attributes differentiate the company from competitors. As eager as we might be to jump in and help with recruiting efforts, this assessment of the company’s differentiating attributes needs to happen way before penning a job description or creating a social media blast describing open positions. With candidates more overwhelmed than ever by frequent recruiting messages from multiple channels, an even greater premium is placed on differentiated brand communications that stand out from those of our competitors. Read More »

Many times we tend to think that we know other people, only to be surprised later on how much less we know about them. While it may be harmless to think like that in a normal scenario, it can be rather detrimental in a business environment, especially for communicators. Communications, after all, is all about people and getting the right messages across, which is feasible only when we know what stakeholders really care about.

Our assumptions, intuition, or gut feeling won’t really help to unearth stakeholder behavior and values. Even David Kahneman in his book “Thinking Fast and Slow” suggests that our intuition is flawed. Just imagine, managers evaluating their subordinates based on intuition – “Oh, I feel there’s something wrong about this person, don’t think he should be promoted.” No objectivity, just plain INTUITION! Scary, isn’t it?

We therefore need some sound logic-based techniques to deepen our stakeholder understanding . Quantitative surveys, Focus groups, and Ethnography are some of them. Each technique has its own pros and cons. For example, surveys are a great source of large amounts of data but can help you identify only symptoms and not causes. On the other hand, ethnography gives a much better picture of stakeholder behavior but can be too time and resource intensive. Evaluate the pros and cons and pick up a technique based on the time at hand and budgets.

Where to find these techniques?
We at CEB Communications Executive Council have practical guides on when and how to use each of these techniques. Not just that, accessing these techniques has just got simpler with our newly launched The Communicator’s Toolbox .

Here’s how you can access the full suite of tools: (a) click on The Communicator’s Toolbox , then (b) select “Stakeholder Understanding” from the “Topic” dropdown, and Voilà! You’ll see a complete list of tools to get you started.

With The Communicator’s Toolbox , you also get access to a whole bunch of other tools at one single place. Feel free to scan them and let us know your feedback and suggestions for improving the Toolbox.

Related Resources:

• The Communicator’s Toolbox
• Six Ways to Build Your Audience Understanding
• Deepen Your Stakeholder Understanding
• Audience Understanding

Related Blogs:

• The Communicator’s Toolbox: CEC’s Top Resources in One Place
• REALLY Know Your Audience
• Are You a Good Listener?

It should come as no surprise that corporate hiring rates continue to remain below historic averages.  As a recent article from Reuters points out, the net employment outlook for the United States is flat, while Europe faces weakening numbers.

Yet we should also not be surprised that demands on us corporate communicators have not reduced.  In fact, if anything our business partners are asking us to do more than ever — a recent CEC survey revealed that 76% of communicators report an increased workload in the past two years.  This leaves us stuck between a rock and a hard place.  Demand for our services is increasing but there is no additional help coming.

So what’s a Communications function to do?  Throw up our collective hands and just hope for the best?  Well, I may not have the silver bullet, but before you get too frustrated, here are a few resources from CEC which I think will help.

• Assess the value-to-cost of your activities – Face it – we can’t do EVERYTHING.  Take a page out of ConAgra Foods communicators’ book and partner with the business to run a simple value-to-cost analysis.  This straightforward process will help you to identify those workflows which your business partner value most, while also highlighting projects to potentially discontinue or reduce involvement in.
• Assess your strengths and weaknesses – Join the other 2,000 communicators in the CEC network who have taken the Skills Maturity Assessment to surface your strengths and opportunity areas to target with additional training.  Those reinforcements are unlikely to come anytime soon, so now is the time to invest in yourself.  Start here with this great resource. Read More »

Social media: love it or hate it, it’s here to stay.  While for some it’s an addiction and for others an annoyance, and for others still an annoying addiction, social media has made its mark on society and continues to do so.  As social media acts as a great platform to stay in touch with friends and loved ones it would make sense that it’s also a great tool in the business community.  Not so fast, especially if you’re in a highly regulated market.  Many communicators within the membership are eager to harness the power of social media; however, this is especially challenging for those of you in highly regulated industries, because there are limits on what you can and can’t do.

So how do we maneuver around, through, and over the regulatory hurdles?  Well first take a deep breath as I’m sure you’ll be interested to hear that while we here at CEB’s Communications Executive Council are well aware of the regulatory concerns; in talking with our members about this topic, we’ve heard success stories from members in regulated industries who have made social media work for them!

As with any problem, I like to break it down into several smaller problems.  This makes solving the problem easier, plus you start to look at the problem from several different angles, which gives you a more holistic view.

Now while we have put together a list of 6 principles to help guide your social media strategy, I’m only going to focus on a few of them here.

• Listen, Listen, Listen

Whether you like it or not, people are talking about your company.  Some have nice things to say and others, well…not so much.  Yet one way to stay current on the “chatter” is to increase your monitoring.  Fortunately, there are companies in this space that track messages about your company and even provide context.  This listening can help you make sure that when you do utilize social media, you’re using your words in a strategically targeted manner.  See how to select the right social media vendor.

• Start on the Inside, and Share the Love

If you find yourself in a highly regulated market or you’re just curious to know how the public may perceive your messages, try utilizing an internal social media platform.  This will allow you to garner feedback from your colleagues on what works well and what doesn’t before you send it off into the real world.  Check out how to get started!

• “Friend” Your Legal Department

Regardless of whether or not you face strict regulatory hurdles, this is a sound strategy.  The best way to begin this relationship is to have an open dialogue policy.  That way everyone is on the same page and Legal will have a better understanding of your messaging strategy and likewise, you’ll better appreciate Legal’s constraints.  In times of crises management, this relationship can prove invaluable, especially if you already have a plan of action should a crisis occur – which we recommend.

We know communicators are itching to put their social media knowledge to good use in the workplace.  While the regulatory landscape may be hard to traverse, even for Legal, if you have something worth saying then you should feel confident that working closely with other departments within your firm will ensure a successful social media strategy and you’re the communicator – so lead the way!

CEC Related Resources:

Principles for Social Media Success in Highly Regulated Industries

Social Media Monitoring and Vendors

Implementing Internal Social Media

Reducing Legal Risks and Liabilities

Periodically, I write a post on a resource or case that is a personal favorite.  In a way, it’s kind of like a “CEC-Choice Award” or “Best Of” to help direct our members to a helpful piece of content that they might not have yet come across.  Last time I wrote this post about CEC’s Dialogue Assessment Tool.  This time I’d like to showcase the Intranet Strategy Builder, a great tool that has been used by many Communications teams in our network to shape the direction of their companies’ intranets.

So, let’s get right to it.  What do I love about it the Intranet Strategy Builder?  Here are three things:

1. It’s Prescriptive – Whereas many assessments stop at the diagnostic phase, this one takes it a step further and actually tells you what you need to do.  While it is all well and good to know that my existing intranet isn’t up to par, wouldn’t it be so much better to know what to do next — for example “your existing site focuses on featuring content, but actually you need to focus on generating dialogue.”
2. It’s User-Centric – By this, I mean that it’s not about designing an intranet that is best in class.  Why?  Because what is best in class for YOUR intranet depends wholly on the audience who is using it to be more effective at their job.  Different intranets serve totally difference purposes from connecting with colleagues about a project, sharing critical documents, learning about helpful training.  No single format is best, but rather what your employees need to DO should drive how the site is designed and organized.
3. It’s Easy – This strategy builder is a simple one-page document that will require some genuine reflection on your part, but not much more.  We’ve laid out the critical questions that you need to consider.  All you need provide scores to each of the questions and add them up.

I encourage you all to check out this tool.  Also, if there are other fan-favorite CEC tools, we’d love to hear about them and showcase them in the future

CEC Related Resources

• Intranet Strategy Builder
• Intranets Topic Center
• Create a User-Centric Intranet Webinar

In an age of information overload, in which employees (and pretty much all stakeholders) are bombarded with information from all angles, we’ve long suspected that the value of an individual message has diminished.

Well, CEC wanted to find out what employees really make of the messages they receive from Corporate Communications, leaders, and line managers. And in many ways, the results were concerning! Here’s a summary:

Finding #1: Employees Deem Messages To Be Largely Irrelevant

Employees rate nearly half of the messages they receive (49%) as irrelevant. Furthemore, they rate just 7% of messages they receive to be highly relevant to themselves and their team.

-          CEC Members: Check these 7 tips for writing in a more engaging way

Finding #2: Employees Don’t Deem Messages To Be Credible

Employees are extremely skeptical about the messages they receive. Only 2% of messages were deemed to be highly credible, whereas 75% were deemed to have low credibility.

-          CEC Members: Leaders and managers will often be best placed to build connections with their staff – learn how to become a better coach for executive and leader communications.

Finding #3: Employees View Messages As “Command & Control”

Although organizations such as GSK and L’Oreal have found success in coaching their managers to enable employee agility and innovation with interactive communication styles, 42% of employees actually view the messages they receive as command and control, whereas only 15% view messages as interactive.

-          CEC Members: Check how GSK enable their leaders to self-discover communications habits that stifle employee agility.

So, you’ve seen what the data says. How does this match with your experiences? Are you surprised by these results? Or do they match your expectations? Let us know!!

Earlier this summer on a Friday afternoon at 4:58 PM, I came across 5 Things That Waste Your Time at Work from Mashable. Eek, “Busted!” I thought.

Turns out, it’s not surfing the internet that’s keeping you from getting your work done efficiently. (Some argue that brief interludes on the interwebs help restore your sanity and productivity during a day.) In fact, it is the very nature of your job as a knowledge worker and the tools provided by your company that waste your time. Fortunately, Corporate Communications teams, ever aware of the increasingly overwhelming information flows, are taking a hard look at what’s getting in the way of knowledge worker productivity and leading their organizations to adopt practices and tools that make it easier for everyone to save time and mental frustration.

Let’s take a look at 3 of the top 5 activities that impact knowledge worker productivity and good and better ways we are seeing Communications teams solve for these challenges.

1. Trying to Contact Customers or Colleagues
According to the Mashable report, knowledge workers waste 74 minutes per day trying to contact customers or colleagues.

Instead of providing customer service, making a sales pitch, holding a cross-functional meeting, or resolving an HR issue—read getting work done—knowledge workers waste tons of time just trying to get in touch with people!While a basic corporate directory or “phonebook” on the intranet is standard at most organizations, if the directory is not easy to keep up to date or its use not a part of onboarding efforts, rest assured that most employees will continue to waste time emailing and asking around for contact information. Why? It’s easier to get answers from a person than a system!

The best organizations we’ve seen, such as Sabre, have created online platforms explicitly designed to encourage employees to share both personal and business information. This allows for people to connect on a human level via virtual systems. Sabre’s platform, dubbed SabreTown, makes it easy for employees to find others with the expertise needed to solve a business challenge. Watch how an employee at Sabre used the platform to quickly find an Italian-language expert to support a business engagement with the Vatican! Read More »