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

Ashridge training consultancy

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.

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.