Blogs

In a post on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network by Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind, the authors shared the results of a small survey they conducted focusing on the high rate of change in the practices of internal communication at most companies. While a small survey set (about 3 dozens participants), I do agree with the findings of the authors:

“That survey result reinforces a finding that we've observed elsewhere in our research: in company after company, the patterns and processes by which people communicate with each other are unmistakably in flux. The old "corporate communication" is giving way to a model that we call "organizational conversation." That shift is, for many people, a disorienting process. But it also offers a great leadership opportunity.”

The authors share four steps to helping companies make leadership more conversational:

1. Close the gap between you and your employees
2. Promote two-way dialogue within your company
3. Engage employees in the work of telling the company story
4. Pursue a clear agenda

Generic enough to almost be helpful. While I agreed, I found myself reading a lot into each of their points, and will be interested to read more as the authors further explore each idea in future articles. Until then, I started jotting down notes of how I would expand on these ideas, and shared the link out to my network through Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ only to get a reply from my friend and business partner Clayton Cobb at Planet technologies, expressing his frustration at the lack of detail. “Christian, what did you get from this article? I didn't really see anything of substance in those 4 bullets. The writer(s) didn't really make a point, though I may have missed it.”

Remember that scene from Jurassic Park where the film explaining how they cloned the dinosaurs mentioned filling in unknown gaps in the dino DNA with something known, like the DNA of an amphibious frog? That’s kind of how the human mind works, filling in gaps with personal experiences and stories (like my Jurassic Park reference), sometimes taking content (like this) in a direction that may be different than what the authors intended. But dialogue and ideas are good, right? Here is how I interpreted the post:

1. Get out and talk to your employees and peers more often. Sometimes referred to as “management by walking around,” I am a big believer that many communication issues are the result of self-imposed barriers between manager and direct report. It’s silly, it’s counter-productive, and it often leads to a lack of transparency of priorities in both directions (managers not communicating priorities to the team, team members not communicating priorities and status to management). You cannot manage through email and dashboards. You need to talk to people (which is often harder than email/dashboards).
    
2. In an old Dilbert cartoon, the term “bungee-manager” was an excellent description of this communication error. Always one-sided, a manager would “drop in” to share info, and then immediately depart for a phone call, another meeting, or to hide behind a closed door rather than have an actual conversation about what was happening within the business, and feedback on any proposed change. You see this more with skip-level or upper management leaders, and it tends to be driven by deep cultural issues. Social tools are one way that many companies are attempting to “democratize” communication, helping all voices to be heard (at least on the surface). Again, transparency into what is being done (or not done) with the feedback will ensure that these kinds of communication improvements are embraced, and that the culture changes to the positive.
    
3. The fundamental problem I see here is that employees don’t know how to represent the company vision and/or objectives. What is the company’s elevator pitch? What are the rules of engagement with customers, partners, or the media? In a startup environment, every employee tends to understand the goals and positioning statements, as it is understood that promotion and evangelism is the responsibility of every employee. The same should be true no matter what the company size or maturity. Management should prepare their employees to be better advocates, and as a result, they will get much richer dialogue out of their employees about what the company is doing well, and where it needs to improve its messaging.
    
4. There is a reason why new projects, internal or customer-facing, tend to have a launch or kick-off event: it is an opportunity to get everyone on the same page about goals, budget, timeline, and roles and responsibilities. The corporate version of this is often the annual kick-off event, or for many the quarterly kick-off. Some organizations go even further, with monthly business reviews – or they may even incorporate broader goals and commitments in more frequent planning meetings. The point here is that you are consistently disseminating what is happening within the business, where you are succeeding, where you are failing, so that employees feel they are a part of the business, not just a “resource.” The more you involve people in the process, the more people will take ownership of that process.

I agree with the author’s summary: Leadership is conversation. The hard part for every organization is institutionalizing the conversation, making it part of the company culture. But the benefits of improved dialog are clear.