Change Communications

I found this recently and wanted to share it. It came in some text after Maslow, Macgregor and Herzberg which are great references on the subject. However I was kind of taken by the simplicity of this contribution.

I looked up Spots & Myers on Google but I can find no reference. Anyone heard of them? Could this be Isabel Briggs Myers? Hmmm.

Things a manager should do to ensure his team is not productive:

• Ask as much as possible
• Criticise his employees in front of their colleagues
• Blame them for their mistakes
• Treat them without any respect for their feelings
• Do not consult before taking action
• Do not explain your actions
• Refuse to take your employees’ ideas into account

Things a manager should do to ensure his team is productive:

• Provide structure
• Inform
• Listen
• Encourage new ideas and responsibilities
• Consult before taking action
• Show your esteem
• Spend more time on building relationships than technical problems

And with that said, I think the above makes a good reminder of communication objectives for my next mission: communication and team coaching for a complex and pressurized IT project at a major French telecommunication company that is undergoing major contractual changes.

Bon weekend!

Nicholas

[updated with English translation on 6 June 2007,  original French is below]

Ce qu’un chef doit faire pour que l’équipe ne soit pas productive:

• Demander plus que possible
• Critiquer ses collaborateurs devant leurs collègues
• Les blâmer pour leurs erreurs
• Les traiter sans respect pour leurs sentiments
• Déclencher l’action sans consulation
• Ne pas expliquer les actions
• Refuser de prendre les idées des collaborateurs en considération

Ce qu’un chef doit faire pour que l’équipe soit productive:

• Prévoir une structure
  
• Informer
  
• Ecouter avant de passer à l’action
• Entraîner à plus d’idées, de responsabilités
• Déclencher l’action après consultation
• Montrer de l’estime
• Passer plus de temps sur les rapports humains que sur les problèmes techniques

Harvard Business School Professor, John Kotter, is considered the number one leadership guru in the United States. In his books, he offers eight steps for successful change:

1. create a sense of urgency;
2. build guiding teams;
3. get the vision right;
4. communicate for buy-in;
5. empower action;
6. produce short-term wins;
7. never let up;
8. and make change stick.

In a recent interview with Management Consulting News, Kotter highlights the need to pay “more attention [...] to the front end of the change process.” For me, this interview provides two very interesting points that got me thinking about what can be done in practice.

Lack of urgency

Firstly, Kotter states that many organisations vastly underestimate building sufficient urgency when preparing change programmes. Managers often say to him, “Our people understand how important it is to solve this problem. We’re beyond that.” They are keen to move on to communicating about the team or, more likely, they want to talk about communicating the vision for the future.

So what can we do to build urgency? Here are a few ideas from my past experiences. What has worked for you?

1. Honest and factual communication between management and staff about the current situation. Facts, figures and industry comparisons can help to explain the thinking behind the change of strategy.
2. Workshops based on a co-development model help teams to get to grips with the issues, understand and feel the need for change themselves.
3. Listening and take the temperature regularly: don’t just assume that everyone understands and agrees with the need to change. A short survey, poll or a conversation over coffee can shed a lot of light.
4. A clear switch or cut-off point. I have heard of IT system changes where the management are reluctant to switch off the old system and the possibility of maintaining parrallel systems is actively considered. This is crazy. You can’t build urgency around something that itself is not clear.
5. Lastly, something a bit more fun: a clock that counts down to the change can help make the urgency visible. You would be surpised by the reaction and discussion something this simple can generate.

Fear and a lack of credibility

At the heart of any change is, of course, fear. However, the problem is that words, images, arguments and promises on their own cannot alay fear.

As Kotter says, “The ultimate way to help people believe in what you are doing is not words, but deeds. Every time you do something well, fear goes down because credibility goes up.”

Effective change communication can support a competent team in building this credibility. It can provide a reliable source of information and serve to build trust around the team and initiative.

And this is where I have a problem with the idea of “marketing” change internally. By making un-attainable promises or appearing to “over-sell” the change, fearful staff will often smell a rat. If messages don’t correspond with everyday reality, if the promises made are hard to believe, then your credibility goes down and fear is increased.

If communication serves to reinforce daily reality or illustrate something has gone right, then trust can be progressively built. As Kotter says, people start to think “Maybe there’s a chance that they can pull this off and I’m not going to be pushed off a cliff after all.”

Here are a few tips for change communications that can inspire credibility:

• Provide impartial and balanced reporting of the facts.
• Communicate regularly and always at the date/time promised.
• Proof-read thoroughly to remove any spelling or grammar mistakes.
• Provide information in a professional format adapted to the context.
• Illustrate and explain the achievements, small or large, that constitute milestones to the change.
• Reply promptly to all feedback.
• Don’t be afraid to state that change is difficult.

This last point is frequently problematic on IT system changes where the first month following a major implementation is usually the hardest. By preparing users for this reality, explaining that it will be hard at first but that team is here to help, you create a message that can be believed. Promising full benefits or return on investment right from the outset is delusional. Of course promising support when the team cannot follow through would be equally catastrophic!

Read also: Kotter’s 8 reasons why change fails

Nicholas Ranken

A recent comment on the following post, “A definition of change communication“, got me thinking about what content we should be providing in this factual, fast and frequent manner?

Projects, and IT projects in particular, are usually run on a tight budget. Time, money and resources are often short. What I see happening is that any old information to hand is packaged and sent out to future users. The information I am thinking about is often extracted from progress reports, the sort of information that team managers give to hierarchy in PowerPoint files to track their progress.

However, successful change communication needs much more than this. It needs to be passed through a filter, a communicator, who will ensure messages are structured for a defined target audience. This should be someone that will digest the information into the following key points (a useful pense-bête):

• What is happening?
• Why is it happening?
• What does it mean (for me)?
• What are the next steps?

And there isn’t just one wise communicator in an ivory tower that can prepare this. It will require regular contact (surveys, conference calls, cups of coffee…) with the stakeholder groups being targeted, or at least a representative. In my experience, key users are invaluable change communication allies.

A simple, factual change message that goes straight to these points is more likely to be taken on-board; especially when it is competing amongst the hundreds of messages that we are “assaulted” with everyday via e-mail, press, radio, TV, intranets, websites, blogs, meetings, conference calls, workshops…

Maybe this sounds like common sense to some, but it surprises me that communications are rarely prepared in this way.

Nicholas

I thought I’d share a small pearl of wisdom that I recently heard on a training course. It’s about the profession of consulting and it struck a cord with me.

Consulting was described using the concepts of Yin and Yang that originate in ancient Chinese philosophy and metaphysics. In short, these concepts are attributed to two primal opposing but complementary forces found in all things in the universe.

I’ve noticed that consulting is often a balance between the opposing, but complementary, forces of “leadership” and “servitude”.

Ultimately a consultant is hired to provide a service. The definition of servitude given by Wiktionary is: the act or state of being in service to someone. So, I guess that implies that the client is in the driving seat, they are requesting a service.

Yet, a consultant is hired to bring specialised knowledge of a particular domain and should lead a client to make the best choices in relation to his/her stated objective. In change management this often involves challenging a client’s own convictions and resistance to change.

Too much leadership or inappropriate leadership and the consultant will be perceived as arrogant and trying to force his view or theories on the client. However, too little and a consultant is seen as ineffective and not really providing any added value to the client, a kind of (expensive) hired labour.

I thought this was quite an accurate representation of the challenges that a consultant can face. It appears to me that getting this right has just as much to do with relational skills as pure expertise.

Personally, I find this a fine balance; I am interested in hearing your thoughts.

Nicholas

A recent question posted to the Melcrum Communicators Network, raised the issue of using logos to brand internal projects. Some say too many logos can create confusion.

Below is my reply. I believe that there are cases when a new image and identity can be a very useful tool, in particular when communicating on a major, strategic corporate change programme.

I would say it greatly depends on the context. I worked on a major change project for a multi-national company where the company identity and colours were very consistently used in their internal communications.

Our project followed a previous attempt that had been a very costly failure. So we intentionally wanted to create a very different and clearly identifiable image and logo. The project was also of considerable strategic importance so we wanted it to stand apart from other projects going on at the same time.

Given that the corporate colours at the time were dark blue and grey, which we felt were quite conservative and understated, we chose bright, bold colours (orange with dark blue text as a link back to the corporate colours) and a dynamic pattern to reflect the modern, innovative nature of our project.

That said, as a consumer of internal communications myself (in a different company), I am definitely sensitive to the notion of too many competing logos and colours. If there is logo and project name overload, I feel this can really detract from the overall message.

Nicholas

EDIT 9/11/2006: Two further points surfaced in the course of the discussion and are interesting to note.

• It is important to ensure any project identity and logo does not contradict corporate branding policies. We followed the guidelines in place and ran all our proposals by the corporate communication director for his approval.
• Be very careful about who has access to the project identity and logo. On one occasion I discovered the logo had been re-used for a different purpose with the main colour altered. We put a stop to this immediately. But it does prove that once a logo is out there it can take on a life of its own. Like a sharp knife it can be a very effective tool, but out of control it can be quite dangerous.

Lee Smith, from Talking Internal Communication, made a great point about the role of strategy in our line of work. I recommend you check it out:

Chewing on Crescenzo’s nuggets

Below are my thoughts on the subject. You can also view the full discussion in the comments section at the end of Lee’s post.

Hi Lee,I really enjoyed reading this post and what you had to say about strategy compared to “practical ideas” (tactics and channels).

For me, I find it a balancing act: one can not go without the other. But I do find that, as consultants in particular, it can be easy to over-privilege the relative security provided by theories and strategies, especially when presenting ourselves to clients or colleagues.

I was given a humbling reminder of this at an internal presentation that I was recently asked to give with a colleague. The brief was to explain the value of change management and in particular my recent work on communications in large-scale IT deployments, to a hall of approx. 300 experienced IT consultants and engineers.

For a while we considered using the usual stock of graphs and matrices that describe emotional reaction to change and possible change and communication strategies to address this. However, my colleague and I both felt that this approach just didn’t sit right with us. Instead we decided to take a risk and try something different. We started our presentation with a practical exercise where we made the audience interact and experience a real change so that they could relate to how stakeholders would feel when we came and changed their “ordered universe”. We then went on to illustrate the kind of practical tools and tactics that, from our experience, could be used to communicate and facilitate this change.

We were completely stunned by the round of applause that we received at the end of our presentation (very rare in our department meetings!). After the presentation, I was even more surprised by the reaction of my colleagues: for many it was the first time that they had understood the value of what we did in concrete, practical terms.

For me, it was a reminder that even though theory and strategies underpinned our work, it is the tools, channels, tactics and ultimately the results that we are judged by. What we had put in place, and what had appealed to our audience could not be implemented without any understanding of the theories and strategy behind it. The two go hand-in-hand.

Just a couple of thoughts on the subject, I look forward to further discussions.

Nicholas

I recently had the opportunity to put into practice some crisis communication principles and I thought I’d share my experience with you.

“Crisis” communication is not just limited to big corporations facing a major incident, such as the recent Dell product recall or the Enron bankruptcy. These basic communication principles can be applied to any situation of any scale. Here, they are applied to project management in the IT sector.

Context

Complex fixed-price IT integration project; the timeline is very tight and delivery an imperative. Delay or mis-management of costs will directly impact the project’s profitability.

Half way through a project phase, financial imperatives cause our client to review the overall project timeline and postpone many activities we are currently working on to 2007. The team management and myself learn this news during a conference call.

Situation one hour after client’s announcement

The news has already spread amongst our teams by word of mouth. Many are talking of an immediate halt to all activities.

Communication objectives

• Correct and prevent rumours and false information from spreading.
• Reassure the teams and maintain focus and motivation on activities underway and upcoming delivery priorities.
• Inform of client’s new strategy

Impact analysis for the different populations concerned

Communication needs are not the same across the team. Teams located in the central project offices will be heavily impacted by the changes. An uncertain number will need to leave the project. Those in remote locations are less impacted as they are in the final phase of their work.

Immediate action planned

Meeting with all team members as soon as possible. Conference call for managers not in central locations. Key messages (communication brief) provided to those managers for relaying locally.

Summary of key messages

1. “The facts” Factual elements relating to the client’s change of strategy

• Strategy change for budgetary reasons: Capex / cash flow
• Completion of roll-outs currently underway
• Roll-out of next version (currently status: development finished, tests underway) postponed to July 2007
• Deployment next version +1 postponed to January 2008

Decision taken for budgetary reasons, not unhappy with our services. Read client feedback received by email.

2. “What is going to happen for me?” The impact of this change for the teams.

The team members are looking for some clear information about their personal future. For me, this is the most important part of the communication. It is currently too soon to communicate on what will change as a result of this decision. There is much uncertainty. Announce that the situation is very complex and not yet clear. We have contractual commitments that are still valid and require discussion and modification with client.

Be precise about what the Team management expects from the team members. This can be summarised as: “Do not change anything for the moment. Continue to work on what is underway. We will share more information as soon as the appropriate decisions have been taken.”

• Much uncertainty.
• Any change to planned activities will depend on the modification of our contract.
• Prepare yourself for change but do not pack your bags to go home tomorrow.
• We will keep you informed.

Moving forward

• Associate key team members in workshops taking place (defining the change).
• Accelerate communication: make available decisions as their are taken.
• Make messages very simple and very clear.

(Translated from French.)

Quotation: Crisis Communication

October 11, 2005: Bad leadership is cited most often as cause of poor performance, writes CIO Update columnist Theresa Wellbourne of eePulse.

On my current job working for an IT service provider, I am concerned with what measures can be taken to improve IT team perfomances in order to deliver on time and within budget.

This has brought me to question the role and impact of leadership (essentially project managers) on team performance and I have discovered quite a few articles on this topic in a “corporate” context. In the jargon, it is referred to as “Employee engagement”. What does this mean?

A definition offered by Melcrum Publishing is: creating an emotional connection with employees that releases discretionary effort.

And surely this is what we need in the tough, constraint-filled world of IT projects. That pzang that will motivate team members to go the extra mile and deliver top quality on time. And the only way to create an emotional connection is to understand where your people are - and where their heads are - at any given time.

The pitfall

The common tendency in management circles is to assume greater knowledge than is the case - the false consensus effect. Studies confirm this. The University of Chicago showed that when passing on a simple piece of information, nearly half of the test group (46%) were confident they had been understood by the listener when, in reality, they hadn’t been.

Survey tools are therefore a great way of cutting through all this a getting an honest image or benchmark of the current situation and then opening up honest communication about how people really are based on their verbatim comments.

Tapping into the corporate “energy”

I have discovered an exciting company and a promising tool, eePulse Inc, and it looks like (because I’ve only read articles about them, I haven’t got “hands-on”) they give corporate line management the tools to connect with their personnel.

A recent Melcrum case study of BT Wholesale describes the eePulse tool as having been “critical” in bringing leadership towards understanding employee attitudes and concerns. In a basic format, the tool assesses where employee’s “energy” is, based on research showing that trends in energy levels are a good indicator of levels of motivation and thereby performance.

“If we can understand what is driving people’s energy - not follow the absolute level but follow the trend - then we can start to indentify what are the key things to tackle to get barriers out of the way, so that employees can give that bit of extra discretionary effort because they feel consulted, heard and that they have a part to play.’”

The following are three standard questions used every week:

1. What is your individual energy level? Scale of 1-10, with 10 as “burned out”.
2. What worked well for you this week?
3. What obstacles got in your way this week? What could you do about them?

Taking action
The feedback and indicators collected can be used to shape leadership behaviour. According to Theresa Wellbourne, founder, president and CEO of eePulse and an adjunct professor of Executive Education at the University of Michigan Business School, “energy” is “catchy,” and if the senior leadership team is starting to become de-energized and lose confidence, those attitudes trickle down to the rest of the employee population. In fact, immediate attention to the leadership and management teams is warranted.

Steps for change

To create higher energy and confidence levels in your organization, Wellbourne recommends trying these simple steps:

• Start an open communication process. Specific discussions to diagnose energy, confidence and what’s affecting all employees will help any organization thrive. Give people a venue to voice their opinions, concerns and suggestions without fear of retribution for negative comments.
• Get current data. Collect data through communication efforts, online surveys or other processes. If you have a pulse on what is really going on within your organization, you’ll be able to solve small issues before they become major problems. This can save you time, money and a lot of aggravation.
• Take action. Once you have open dialogue and current data, actually use this information to make change happen. Take action and let all members of the organization know current issues and activities on a regular basis. Then, get feedback and use that data to fine tune your strategy execution.

The BT Wholesale experience

Andrea Wyatt-Budd, leader of engagement and internal communication for BT Wholesale, explains that it has enabled the leadership team to say “We are not really in touch with where our people are. This is what we think the environment of the organisation is. But look at what they are telling us we have created.”

Some of the successes seen at BT Wholesale:

• Changing the climate of responsibility: at first question number three was met with the familiar “It’s everyone else’s fault” or “Senior management should be doing more”… to more reflective responses that show employees taking more responsibility for change, such as “I disagree with the new pay review because I don’t think the communication plan is good enough. I am going to initiate a round of briefings with the head of communications to discuss this.”
• Progress on the difficulties being indentified by employees: during the first trials, “the barriers this week” most commonly raised were around: workload, teamwork and resource levels. By concentrating on these issues, they had moved into “what was working well” within six months. Wyatt-Budd explains this by “taking the comments from eePulse”, putting action plans in place to address these things, and that fed into us turning around our results on those topics”.
• Other parts of the organization are expressing interest in running the same kind of initiative in their units.

My experience

Before I had learnt about “employee engagement”, I called this “creating a dialogue” or “creating a conversation” within our team. Like any human endeavour how can you expect a team to succeed without information circulating in all directions? In my humble experience, I would use surveys to “take the temperature” and use it as a form of dialogue for talking to teams about their concerns in their own words.

Below are a couple of examples of how this can be applied to a project environment, taken from my most recent mission:

My personal conclusion is that this process works well. The results above form part of an in-depth audit; a snapshot at one particular point in time. However, this was a heavy process to manage and a lighter and shorter set of questions would be more efficient on a more frequent basis.

1. Keep it short

You know what it feels like to be given a questionnaire that is pages and pages long. I usually have a strong desire to run in the opposite direction.

I have a rule: if possible, no more than 10 questions.

If the questionnaire is too long or complex it can actually produce the opposite of what you are trying to achieve; a frustrated reader will either skip questions or give poor quality answers. A short, simple and clear survey is much more likely to encourage the reader to spend a bit more time on the responses he/she is going to give.

2. Know what you want to find out (and how you want exploit that information)

How can you possibly collect and effectively work with information if you don’t have a very clear idea of what it is you want? It’s like trying to go somewhere with a map but not knowing where you want to get to.

• For each survey: define clear objectives, what is it exactly that you want to learn? Why? What are you going to do with this information?
• For each question: make sure you know how you will interpret the results. How are you going to be able to illustrate what is being said? How will this help you make decisions?

If this planning is done carefully you will avoid the following pitfalls:

• Unquantifiable replies: for example, a quantitive measure (such as a rating of 1-4) may be more appropriate than the traditional open text box. If you have 200 text answers to wade through, or even 20, how can you get an effective idea of the group’s opinions or a trend? Text boxes are good for subjective information and suggestions and should be used sparingly.
• Repetition of the same question in different forms: this is very common in surveys where the objective is not clear. The questions end up being a series of stabs in the dark.

3. Simplify your life

Life is complicated enough. Why complicate it more with Excel spreadsheets, word documents, email exchanges, manual counting of results or - god fobid - paper answers?! Very good, reasonably priced survey and questionnaire tools exist on the Web. Not only does this solve the problem of distributing the survey and collecting the results, most sites also include tools for presenting and/or exporting the data collected. All you need to do is send an URL to your target audience and sit back and watch the data come in.

Here are a couple of places to start:

1. http://www.questionmark.com - a heavy duty solution, good if you need to do a lot of surveys and assessments.
2. http://www.surveymonkey.com - a light-weight option, quick and effective. Good when you need to go quickly.

Alternatively you could try some of the advertisements on the side of this blog… :)

4. Know who you are adressing

What you ask and how you ask it (phrasing) should be adapted to your target audience.

Example: A common mistake is to see the survey from your (management) perspective. You know you need to work out what from your team can take from its current experience (organisation, process etc) and apply to future projects. The mistake is to ask your team this question directly. The team members are not necessarily project managers and will not give you the answeres you require. It is much more effective to ask what worked well and with this information you can decide what would be good for future projects.

5. Make sure you have the required management support and means to act on any findings

Avoid doing a survey just for the sake of being able to say you have done one. By sending a survey you are sending a strong message that you want to listen to the opinions of those being questioned; a survey implies some sort of change. If the survey reveals problems and no action is taken you will de-credibilse yourself.

Furthermore, be as open as possible about the results, findings and actions (even if you don’t have the means to act on all points, at least recognise the issues identified) resulting from the exercise, it will work in your favour and show that the team or organisation is capable of listening and adapting.

And that is really what it is all about, no?

Nicholas Ranken

EDIT 28/8/2006 For guidance on responding to a survey, check out this post on Lee Smith’s Talking Internal Communication

Snowflakes are one of nature’s most fragile things, but just look what they can do when they stick together. — V. M. Kelly

Here is what you can do to create a winning team:

1. Make sure the team has a challenging goal to achieve. (*)
2. Ensure all team members understand the goal and are committed to it. (*)
3. Provide the necessary training to master the needed skills.
4. Stay the course even when things are tough. Keep all eyes on the ball. (*)
5. Resolve conflict before it distracts people and splits the team.
6. Measure the team’s progress, and make the score known to all. (*)
7. Ask team members for their input and find out what they need to win. (*)
8. Encourage diversity of styles within a shared dedication to the goal. (*)
9. The coach is to motivate and guide, but not hold players’ hands.
10. Celebrate small wins along the way, until you achieve the big one. (*)

(c) Communication Ideas

(*) Points that an active communication strategy can contribute to. I recently experimented putting these points into practice in a project involving 170 people over 10 months in three different geographic locations.