Change Communications

Liam FitzPatrick, from Competent Communicators and the Black Belt Dojo blog, offered this in a comment and it made me chuckle so much that I thought it would be best as post in its own right. Unfortunately I see many of these every day… ouch!

1. Regard any new idea from below with suspicion – because it is new and because it is from below.
2. Insist that people who need your approval to act first go through several other layers of management to get their signatures.
3. Ask departments or individuals to challenge and criticise each other’s proposals.
4. Treat problems as a sign of failure.
5. Express your criticisms freely and withhold your praise (that keeps people on their toes). Let them know they can be fired at any time.
6. Control everything carefully. Count anything that can be counted, frequently.
7. Make sure that any request for information is fully justified and that it isn’t distributed too freely (you don’t want data to fall into the wrong hands).
8. Make decisions to reorganise or change policies in secret and spring them on people unexpectedly (that also keeps people on their toes)
9. Assign to lower-level managers, in the name of delegation and participation, responsibility for figuring out how to cut back, lay off or move people around.
10. Never forget that you, the higher-ups, already know everything important about this business.

Source: Rosabeth Moss Kanter via an interview with the BBC.

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

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.

Ubuntu, from the Zulu and Xhosa languages, means “I am because we are,” as South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu translates it. (Other translations have it as, “A person is a person through other people.” But that’s not quite as catchy.)

Ubuntu — I am because we are — is an appropriate mantra for leaders. It crystallizes a wonderfully inspiring attitude to hold toward all associates in the organization that you jointly serve.

A leader can be no more successful than the quality of the trust and relationship between the people she leads. And so the spirit of ubuntu, of humility and connectedness, permeates a good leader’s every relationship — and all healthy relationships.

Source: Don Blohowiak, Clarifier. Catalyst. Coach.

Let’s start with the hypothesis that change communication is a management process. No change initiative can suceed on communication alone; it requires management sponsorship. The role of a communication department or professional is therefore to advise, coach and execute communication actions to support the change leader.

So what role does a leader play in this process? A leader communicates:

A) a sense of confidence and control (or lack thereof) to employees.
B) his or her own feelings about the change.
C) the degree to which he/she trusts the abilities of the employees to get through the change.
D) a sense of purpose and commitment (or lack thereof).
E) the degree to which he/she accepts the reactions and feelings of employees.
F) expectations regarding behaviour that is seen as appropriate or inappropriate (ie. rumour-mongering, back-room meetings).
G) the degree to which he/she is “connected to” employees situations and feelings or is “in-touch” with them.

It is clear that if the leader communicates effectively, he or she will be sending messages that decrease resistance, and encourage moving through the change more effectively and positively. The bottom line with all of this is if you screw up communicating with employees, even the smallest changes can result in ugly problems.

Source: Nicholas Ranken

In a recent survey by the Conference Board, 539 global CEOs were asked to list their top concerns. In Europe and Asia as well as in North America, organizational flexibility and adaptability to change consistently ranked at the top of the list. Only revenue growth was of higher concern.

Source: Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D., Communitelligence

Did you know that 60 percent of workers who are kept in the dark by their bosses plan to leave within the next two years?

Communications consultancy CHA, which carried out over 1,000 interviews with UK workers, found that 60 percent of workers who are kept in the dark by their bosses plan to leave in the next two years.

That figure drops to just 23 percent among those who don’t feel they’re kept in the dark. But when workers receive clear communication, their motivation increases dramatically with 80 percent motivated to add value, dropping to less than 36 percent in organizations where the communication is confusing.

Workers who know what the company plan is are five times more likely to be motivated, while 65 percent say too much of the information they receive isn’t relevant to their job and 39 percent say they are told too late about major changes in their place of work.

Source: CHA PR report, A little more conversation. For more information visit: www.chapr.co.uk

Replies to a debate posted to Melcrum’s CommsNetwork:
What is the role of strategy in internal communication? Should we leave strategy to the business managers and concentrate on doing what we know how to do, the craft of communicating, well?

Chris Smithers Internal Communications BT Global Services

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Chris,

I think there’s a balance. Don’t expect to contribute to thestrategy if you can’t do the day job, and you can mess up communication pretty thoroughly if you can’t write or speak

• People’s expectations of involvement at work are rising
• ‘Knowledge workers’ need to understand much more, take more decisions themselves (so ’strategy’ is the purpose and direction, not the detailed plans)
• There’s a need to bring larger, more disparate organisations together
• We need to react more quickly to changes
• Businesses are cutting costs by devolving more and more activities to managers
• One of the key drivers of this is the growing importance of service within the mix of what companies deliver, as well as globalisation, consolidation and other trends.

All this makes communication, particularly two-way communication, key.

Keith Hardie
Head of Communication, Premier Travel Inn

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Chris and brethren,

Fair enough. I’ll bite. Ask yourself a couple of basic questions:
What is the purpose of all thoseinternal newsletters and web sites? Why do companies devote scarce resourcesto them?It is not to make people feel good. It is not to win Quill awards. It is notto keep “communicators” employed. None of that is fundamentally important.

Rather, it is to enable the company to succeed in ways it has never succeeded before. Just as you do not buy gasoline for the sake of owning it, but rather because it can take you places, so a company doesn’t publishvnewsletters for the sake of having them, but rather because they can takevthe company places it wants to go.

But the newsletters and web sites are irrelevant by themselves because theydo not operate in a vacuum. They cannot enable the company to succeed unlesstheir messages are consistent with other messages, far more powerful, beingsent by leadership behaviors, programs, policies, day-to-day decisions, anineffable passion for the enterprise, and so much more. That’s the stuffthat employees pay attention to.If we don’t speak up about inconsistent messages, no one will. Theinformation and messages in our publications and web sites must absolutelybe consistent with the reality experienced by employees. If it isn’t, the company cannot change and it cannot succeed.

Thomas J. LeeFounder and CEO, Arceil Leadership Ltd.
Extraordinary Tools for Extraordinary Leaders

Statistics taken from Melcrum research on Senior Leadership Communication:

• 57% of survey respondents do not think that their leaders’ verbal communication skills are good, and 17% say they have an autocratic CEO
• 39% of executive team senior leaders don’t agree that their involvement in communication is important to business performance
• 64% of companies don’t measure senior leaders’ communication performance at all
• 45% of communicators think that convincing their senior leaders to even make the time to communicate is a top challenge

Source http://www.melcrum.com/

According to Melcrum’s latest study into leadership communication, 45% of communicators say convincing senior leaders to make the time to communicate is one of the greatest challenges they face.

40% say getting senior leaders to communicate on a regular basis — not just when company results are announced — is a major problem; and 38% say their senior leaders think of communication solely as the role of the communication department.

Melcrum, The Source for Communicators, 6 October 2005