Category: Coaching Points
In our current economy, uncertainty seems to be the only thing that’s certain when it comes to organizational finances. As a result, cost cutting is a recurring theme for organizations around the country and across the globe. While there’s no single right way to cut costs, organizations are finding that successful cost-cutting efforts require employees to understand the situation, know leadership’s expectations, and see a need to cut costs if they expect employees to buy in.
Similar to other organizational priorities, cost cutting should follow a typical communication protocol (i.e. communicate consistently and frequently through various vehicles and channels to ensure all employees receive the message). But there’s more. To garner employee support for major cost-cutting efforts, we recommend the following:
1) Explain financial goals simply.
Enlist senior leaders and managers to translate cost-cutting messages for their teams. Managers know what works for their teams and understand how to make cost cutting a real priority in their department. Employees are more likely to take part in the process if they know how they can make a difference in their daily work.
2) Walk the talk.
Lead by example – your cost-cutting message will lose credibility if you don’t practice what you preach. If you tell employees to be fiscally conservative and then openly purchase expensive decor for the office, employees will disregard all the hard work that’s gone into the cost-cutting effort. As a leader, everything you do communicates a message, so be sure that your actions illustrate the importance of cost cutting. A recent Wall Street Journal article states:
Before asking others to sacrifice, first volunteer yourself. If there are sacrifices to be made – and there will be – then the leaders should step up and make the greatest sacrifices themselves… Everyone is watching to see what the leaders do. Will they stay true to their values? Will they bow to external pressures, or confront the crisis in a straightforward manner?… (You can read the full article here.)
If you’re open and honest about your spending choices, employees will follow suit.
Achieving employee support for organizational cost cutting is no easy feat and requires dedication from everyone involved, especially leadership. Therefore, following the two points mentioned above will not only position your organization for a better financial situation, it will increase employee support so your workforce is aligned around your cost-cutting priority.
“Does the strategic message really matter?”
Simply put, the answer is yes. We know, now more than ever, that a strong strategic message not only reduces uncertainty among employees and provides the context necessary to make sense of initiative-level actions and messages, but it also aligns and guides the leadership team. On the other hand, a poorly designed strategy message can lead to a skeptical workforce and a severely misaligned leadership team.
As a result of the economic downturn and to survive the financial slump, companies are changing how they operate. In doing so, some organizations are going back to the drawing board to revise and refresh their strategic message to align with how they’re now doing business. Others acknowledge the need to update their strategic message, but are hesitant to do so for fear that employees will resist the change and leadership will lose credibility.
If you’re thinking about revisiting your organization’s strategic message, here are a few recommendations for doing so in a way that promotes employee buy-in and builds leadership credibility.
Review recent decisions and messages.
Hold up your current strategy message against the most recent actions and decisions of the leadership team. If one of your current strategic priorities is to ‘invest in innovation” and you’ve recently cut your research and development budget for 2009, then it’s probably time to re-think your business priorities and change your strategy message for the year.
Measure employee understanding.
Research offers a credible, concrete, data-driven way to validate or support your argument, and having a sense of the pulse of the organization often yields access to the leadership team. For example, conducting a strategic alignment survey that assesses the credibility of the message set and the leadership team, as well as the level of employee understanding of and engagement with the current strategy message, may give you just the ammunition you need to gain senior leadership support for a revised strategy.
Get leadership on board.
Brief the leadership team, discuss the importance of a strong strategy message, and address the need to and consequences (positive and negative) of updating the message set. Be prepared to talk candidly about the fact that everything they do as leaders sends a message. Share the findings from your employee research to help shape your argument and support your proposal.
Don’t underestimate the importance of a clear, actionable strategy message—and don’t let your leadership underestimate it either. To read more about why the message really does matter click here.
Given the current state of our economy, it shouldn’t be surprising to any of us that it’s difficult to get people to pay attention to anything else. But, when you’re making changes to keep the organization afloat, you need your employees to hear and believe what you’re saying.
So, how do you get some instant credibility; how can you demonstrate that you really mean what you say? Whether you want to highlight the importance of a new initiative, a shift in direction, or compliance issues—as a researcher, I’ve found one of the strongest “convincing decisions” that leaders can make to demonstrate they really care about something on their leadership agenda is to measure…then act.
As organizations increasingly rely on metrics and dashboards to guide employee efforts, a highly effective way to get people’s attention is to ask for their feedback about whether (and how well) your efforts are moving the organization in the right direction—and then to be very transparent about what you heard from them and how you plan to act on it. And, this approach offers some nice side benefits: (1) You make better decisions when you know the landscape in which you’re operating and (2) you’re more likely to get employee buy-in for your plans when you’ve listened to their input first.
Amid the current financial crisis, leadership teams and C-suite executives in organizations of all shapes and sizes are having discussions about ways to reduce uncertainty and boost employee morale. While leaders realize that communication is critical to transparency and credibility, executive teams are exploring additional ways to increase employee engagement during these turbulent economic times.
In doing so, researchers are finding that well-connected employees, those who have extensive social networks that bridge gaps between departments (or silos), are more likely to do better at work. As a result, social networking tools are becoming an integral component to enhancing employee engagement and elevating employee performance.
Consequently, maintaining consistent leadership communication paired with opportunities for employees to build social relationships with others at work will not only build employees’ level of trust, but will also give them a sense of community within the organization.
Prior to getting started, keep in mind that some social networking tools might fit better in your company than others. To that point, before implementing a social networking tool in your organization, consider the following critical next steps:
- Create a social networking advisory council of well-connected employees who can audit the organization and evaluate employee needs and wants.
- Identify social networking tools that work best inside your organization and fit into your company culture.
- Recognize potential obstacles in the implementation of these tools in your organization.
- Set realistic expectations around tasks and timelines for implementation.
For more information about social networking at the office, click here. Or, to read more about communication advice for leaders during the financial crisis, click here.
This is the first installment of a four-part series.
At CRA, we use Aristotle’s three methods of persuasion—Ethos, Pathos, and Logos (found in his Rhetoric)—as the foundation for creating quality messages. We gloss these terms as Believe, Do, and Know. In other words, a good message makes the audience believe we are credible. It establishes a personal connection, which helps to encourage that the message is acted upon. Finally, a good message helps the audience to know something new and important by presenting reasonable and intelligent arguments.
I thought it would be useful to return to the source to help fill out these concepts a bit more. One interesting point to begin with is that there are only three ways for a person to be persuasive according to Aristotle. These can be characterized broadly in terms of: 1) the character of the speaker; 2) the emotional state of the hearer; and 3) the argument itself.
Three posts, corresponding to Ethos, Pathos, and Logos respectively, will follow this introductory post over the next three weeks. Each will include practical coaching points designed to help translate Aristotle’s observations into the practical world of business.
What will all of this mean for me? It’s the question of the day as employees watch the stock market plummet, retirement savings shrink, and global currencies fluctuate. The financial crisis brings many questions to mind, and the role of senior leaders is to answer those questions and keep people focused on the right things.
We’ve learned a few lessons about communicating during uncertain times, and offer six quick tips here as you consider your communication approach.
- Get out there. A lot. If you think people are panicking now, closing your office door and saying nothing is the last thing that will help. During times of uncertainty, people want to hear from their leaders, and overcommunication is the strategy of choice.
- Set the right expectations and communicate using “probabilities.” You don’t know exactly what this will mean for your organization, but you do have some ideas. How will the end of the year wrap up? What does 2009 look like? Set expectations that are realistic and share your personal view. Regularly invoke probabilities (e.g., what will happen, what probably will happen, what we don’t know, what won’t happen) to set expectations for the upcoming months.
- Have a consistent elevator speech that you and your leadership team use. Leadership needs to communicate a consistent front during all times—especially during times of uncertainty. Get your leadership team clear on what to say and how to say it.
- Understand the questions that are on peoples’ minds. Walk in the shoes of your employees to better understand the concerns of the day. Speaking directly to these concerns will give you more credibility and relevance.
- Recognize it’s what you do more than what you say. Actions speak louder than words. The 440K spa trip? Probably not the right time.
- Lead with courage. Employees smell fear, and fear paralyzes. Leaders must set realistic expectations about the future while concentrating on moving people forward with confidence. Hopefully, the strategy hasn’t changed. Remind people, and help employees to understand what they can do and why.
We work very hard to teach leaders that human beings are sense-making creatures: We try, at every opportunity, to make sense of what we see, hear, and experience. A consequence is that when a vacuum of information exists, we try to fill it by creating meaning of our own, which may or may not be close to the reality a leader is trying to convey.
Thanks to an email forward by my wife Kate, this morning I saw a wonderful example of this: Over two hundred people deciding to freeze in place, simultaneously, on the main concourse of Grand Central Station in New York. Watch the video, and watch folks try to create meaning out of the event. Acting class? Protest? What in the world IS this? Everybody there has a different interpretation, but they all HAVE an interpretation, and it’s one they’ve crafted out of their past experiences and the overall context at hand. They fill the vacuum.
So the question is: What vacuums of information are your employees filling with meaning? You may not know, but you can count on the people you lead to create meaning for your every decision and action. Your job as a leader is to frame those decisions and actions, adding context so their interpretation is as close as possible to your intention. In times of uncertainty or change, when what you can communicate may be limited, this can be difficult. But there are things you can do to help:
- Refuse to allow vacuums. If there is information you’re not able to share because the facts aren’t settled or HR, your superior, or legal won’t permit it, frame the context by communicating probabilities: What’s certain, likely, unknown (or what you can’t say), unlikely, and impossible. Doing so at the very least contextualizes and constrains the meaning employees (or your peers, or your kids) can create.
- Refuse to let silence be a message. NOT communicating when employees know something is afoot sends a message, and it’s a relational one that employees will interpret as ranging from “I don’t care” to “I don’t respect you.” The act of communicating in the face of uncertainty, be it by sharing probabilities, or even saying “I don’t know” or “I can’t tell you and here’s why,” sends a message about your identity and the relationship. It says “I care” and “I respect you,” both of which are essential to maintaining relational capital during uncertain times.
- Aggressively challenge incorrect conclusions. If you find that employees (or the Board, or your kids) have filled the vacuum with incorrect meaning, challenge and correct those assumptions. Provide the facts, or if you can’t, the probabilities or even the “I can’t say,” but don’t allow the wrong meaning to exist. Not only does it keep bad information in the system, it can brand a leader as passive. In the face of very disruptive change or very bad news, an audience can easily interpret this passivity as cowardice.
Managing meaning during difficult or changing times isn’t easy, but it’s a leader’s burden. The point is to get folks through it with as much relational capital and loyalty as possible–and silence is antithetical to both.
For those of you who struggle to create unique, interesting presentations, we’ve talked a lot about presentation design (see here and here). The basics: each presentation’s content should be inherently interesting or important to your audience. Also, your audience’s information needs should dictate your presentation’s content.However, engaging audiences with your presentations often requires one more element: an interesting visual data display. Here’s the rub: you’ll likely think your data sets, by virtue of findings, are meaningful. But consider your audience’s understanding of complex ideas or messages. For example, many business-oriented presentations endlessly cite statistics, ROI, growth, and more to prove the value of projects or initiatives. But to most audience members, even basic percentages, currencies (foreign or domestic), and raw numbers aren’t meaningful without bases for comparison.
That’s where visual data becomes important. And I’m not talking about PowerPoint’s extensive selection of clipart. Pretty pictures simply aren’t valuable if they don’t speak 1,000 words—at least. You have a limited amount of time to make your points, and visuals should help you make them. Consider this: if your visuals are meaningless to your audience, you might as well put together a 12-page position paper and post it to your Intranet.
Also, your audience should have no questions about why you choose any single example or illustration in a presentation. Visuals should make difficult points clear, and illustrate your strategic messages in ways words simply can’t.
We’ve extolled Edward Tufte for his data design genius, but a number of great resources are available. One in particular, IBM’s Many Eyes, provides a website where you can load nearly any kind of data, choose a format for display, and the result? A simple, visually appealing way to display numbers, percentages, ratios, etc. The site will help you to add texture to simple, bivariate data, as well as lengthy spreadsheets’ worth. Granted, you may need to understand data analysis to use this site effectively, but it’s worth a look when you’re building presentations… Check out some examples here.
No matter what kind of resource you choose, be sure to think through your visual presentations. Treat them as what they are: crucial opportunities to reach your most important stakeholders. Done well, these assemblies will help build awareness of your strategic messages, while intelligently-presented data will drive critical messages home.
It’s everywhere you turn. Fortune names General Electric the most admired company, citing GE’s Ecomagination campaign. Arnold Schwarzenegger graces a recent Newsweek cover, touting California’s leadership in new environmental policy. And lest we forget Al Gore’s star turn in An Inconvenient Truth—the film that may have started it all—seeking to dispel misconceptions about global warming while chronicling the former vice president’s crusade for the environment.
More and more companies are getting on the greenwagon and the emerging discourse goes beyond corporate responsibility and box checking. No longer is “going green” just the right thing to do—some are saying it’s the smart thing to do, too. Thomas Friedman argues in a recent New York Times article that going green should be the centerpiece of U.S. foreign and economic policy, and GE says their efforts are “as economically advantageous as they are ecologically sound.”
Your firm could be next. We offer a few guidelines to consider as you contemplate your company’s efforts to go green and your approach to communication:
- Don’t call your company’s efforts a “program” or “project.” Programs and projects tend to have ends. Green is “in” and some might say it will be “out” before we know it. To avoid the “flavor of 2007” label, communicate permanence, not temporality.
- On that note, have a simple message that explains what your company is doing and why, and situate the message in a pre-existing, larger strategic context. Why and how will going green help your company achieve its strategic objectives? A compelling why will persuade the skeptics and eliminate any lingering “tree hugger” associations.
- Don’t spend an enormous amount of time with branding and flashy promotion. We can’t tell you how many efforts we’ve seen make a name for themselves, only to fail as a result of heightened employee expectations about the new thing from corporate that’s taking up so much space (and so many resources).
- Show that your efforts are real in leadership decisions and behavior. Is your CEO “serious about this,” yet still driving a gas guzzler? What investments can your company make in cleaning up operations or exploring environmentally friendly innovation? If there’s nothing that symbolically communicates leadership’s commitment other than the newly formed employee committee, then it’s all just talk.
- Hold employees accountable for their greenability. Yes, we’re serious. And if you’re serious, too, you’ll align your environmental strategy with your performance management and reward and recognition systems. Our experience tells us that most people will do what’s expected when they know what’s expected and the right type of consequences are following their performance (or non-performance).
Around Valentine’s Day, we hear more about relationships than any other time of year. Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal provides two interesting articles on relationships and technology. One story, its not u, focuses on ending relationships electronically– primarily through email or text messages. Its author calls the technology-arbited breakups, “techno brush-offs.”
Each article makes the point that our interpersonal relationships are changing for the worse. Tough conversations once reserved for face time are absorbed by people’s familiarity with—and inappropriate use of—technology. One woman, the recipient of a combination-text/email breakup, considers such a message “a product of our times.” “‘I hate what this has become,’ she says. ‘Every computer and cellular phone needs a little instruction manual to let people know what can be sent in a text, what can be sent in an email, what can be said on the phone, and what must be said in person.’”
Yet the appreciation for interpersonal interactions conflicts with our everyday tendencies. We check and respond to email constantly and depend on the web for to-the-minute information on both personal and professional topics. The WSJ article, Deleting the Habit, talks about the similarities between technology reliance and drug addiction. “Addicts” have a hard time unplugging during once-sacred quality time– on vacations, during family time, and even while honeymooning.
Global Ideas Bank, a London think tank, holds an annual “International Internet-Free Day” to encourage people to participate in face-to-face interactions. The Bank’s director said to WSJ, “It’s good to speak to people.” But getting off the Web grid encourages people to do things that seem archaic to techno-junkies, like reading newspapers, having face-to-face conversation, or making phone calls from (gasp!) land lines while sitting still.
Though the content of these articles isn’t groundbreaking, few of us relate these key learnings to our professional lives, like unplugging during meetings and conferences, and having phone or face-to-face conversations rather than instant or email messaging. Using one-way communication technologies, like the latter, cuts valuable interpersonal cues from our interactions. And like breaking off love relationships via email, breaking tough or sensitive news to colleagues is more difficult for recipients when they can’t hear your voice, ask immediate questions, or see your facial expressions.
We advise clients to consider the type of medium through which they send messages. The concept of media richness relates to the amount of feedback a medium affords to a sender or receiver of a message. Lean media are best suited to deliver specific, tactical, or historical information; while rich media are better suited to deliver strategic, persuasive, or emotion-invoking messages. And conversations with your colleagues, direct reports, clients, or leaders often fall into one of these three categories. Highly charged topics simply require face-to-face discussion, or at least a phone call. (Read more about CRA’s take on media richness here.)
So let this time of year remind you to move away from the computer, put down the cell phone, and take time to talk to your colleagues, friends, and family. Communicating this way may take more time (and sometimes gumption) on your part, but your relationships will more likely thrive and endure as a result.
(Read here about techno brush-offs and here about technology junkies. WSJ.com registration is required.)
