Internal communicators are all too familiar with business buzz words—shareholder value, excellence, compassion—intended to engage employees. On the contrary, organizational strategy is often unclear to employees who don’t understand how their work fits into the mission. A Harvard Business Review piece (subscription required) explains that the “sweeping, general language” used in many organizational strategies and missions disconnects executives from staff. Authors and brothers, Chip and Dan Heath, explain this phenomenon as “The Curse of Knowledge” and offer the following definition:
Top executives have had years of immersion in the logic and conventions of business, so when they speak abstractly, they are simply summarizing the wealth of concrete data in their heads. But frontline employees, who aren’t privy to the underlying meaning, hear only opaque phrases. As a result, the strategies being touted don’t stick (HBR, December 2006).
To reverse the “curse,” Heath and Heath suggest making strategic messages sticky. Sticky messages are relevant and clear to staff, and encourage them to (1) remember what they learn about their organization’s mission, and (2) carry out that mission daily.
This is consistent with what we advise our clients. Perhaps more simply put, all strategic messages must be:
- Universal
- Simple
- Broad
- Actionable
- Accurate
- Explanatory of what you’re doing and why
The challenge, then, is how else you can increase stickiness. Like the Heath article, a chapter of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (which we recommend highly) identifies ways to do just this. For illustration, Gladwell presents two empirical studies of some of the least sophisticated, least biased audiences: preschoolers. From those studies, Gladwell highlights that people pay attention, and subsequently learn, when they understand the messages they hear and see. Taken together, Heaths’ and Gladwell’s arguments make a point that all employees echo: organizational strategies should appeal to common sense.
So how can you reverse the curse of knowledge? You can read more on sticky messages here, and consider these final tips. First, give people concrete language—even if it seems overly simplified. For example, “raising the value of our stock” is more concrete than the ubiquitous “creating value.” Next, the component parts of an organization’s strategy should be intuitive. Anyone can understand a phrase like, “Satisfy our customers’ needs.” The ways staff can satisfy their customers, of course, can be more complex and specific to each department or role. And finally, construct memorable stories that illustrate your organization’s values in action. Base the stories on what’s familiar—using well-known parables or examples of your staff doing great work—which will help eliminate business-speak, and create usable context for your staff.
In trying to catch up on my journal reading I’ve just been through the August 2006 edition (Vol. 34 No. 3) of JACR, which is a special section on “Best Practices in Risk and Crisis Communication.” The basis of the review is the NCFPD’s list of ten best practices, which are a result of an extensive synthesis of the body of risk and crisis communication scholarship. The best practices are:
- Process approaches and policy approaches (meaning, have formal processes for this stuff and have the communicator at the policy formulation table)
- Pre-event planning
- Partnerships with the public
- Listen to the public’s concerns and understand the audience
- Honesty, candor, and openness
- Collaborate and coordinate with credible sources
- Meet the needs of the media and remain accessible
- Communicate with compassion, concern, and empathy
- Accept uncertainty and ambiguity
- Messages of self-efficacy
Straightforward enough, and a good list. More interesting, though, was the response by Peter Sandman (HTML, PDF). First, he provides an interesting frame on the topic, noting there are important differences between when people are not worried enough about a serious hazard, too worried about a small hazard, and rightly worried about a serious hazard. Second, he notes:
My final comment on the best practices may be the most important. In an article as short as this, with only a few paragraphs on each of the best practices, they come out sounding pretty abstract but also pretty obvious–so obvious, in fact, that the reader may fail to notice that they are extremely difficult to implement and very seldom accomplished. They’re not so much best practices as they are aspirational goals. Any reader whose overall response is, ‘‘Yeah, we do most of that,’’ has been ill-served by the article. Odds are you don’t. Almost nobody does.
The best practices wisely concede that candor and openness are tougher goals than honesty (#5). But in fact, all ten of these recommendations are tough. They fly in the face of organizational culture, of individual ego, of technical hubris.
This sounded like the clear-eyed perspective of someone who’s done the thing and not just studied it. Ultimately, the matter one must solve for–in particular, that the leader must solve for–is execution. Strong communicative practice is tough stuff, made tougher by the fact that most approaches to communication problems are relatively unsophisticated and grounded in historical precedence and a journalistic tradition. The ultimate best practice is getting things done.
Let’s Start Meeting Like This summarizes “Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?” (Ann Majchrzak et al., Harvard Business Review, May 2004), a study of virtual workgroups:
E-mail, while essential in today’s workplace, quickly overwhelms team members, as multiple chains bounce back and forth. Videoconferencing is not quite ready for prime time; according to the study, desktop versions have too little bandwidth, and remote locations require too much travel.
But online team rooms, also known as virtual work spaces, received top marks from successful virtual teams. These networked, file-sharing spaces provide a place for team members to access the latest versions of files at any time, carry on asynchronous discussions (without getting sidetracked into multiple conversations), and keep track of deadlines and time lines. In sum, they collect all relevant information into one place.
The researchers make an interesting point about media richness:
It’s often pointed out that nonverbal cues are an important dimension of face-to-face meetings. For virtual teams, the absence of body language and facial expressions is actually a boon to productivity, the researchers said. Virtual meetings are more democratic than face-to-face discussions; participants don’t feel the effect of hierarchy as much.
“A particularly telling finding was the relatively low level of dissent expression to managers, supervisors, and coworkers about issues related to ethics and preventing harm.”–Kassing & Armstrong, Management Communication Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 1, August 2002 39-65
Not long ago, the standard practice for fostering upward communication in most organizations was to establish a suggestion box. With rise of information technology, however, we’ve seen the channels for fostering upward communication expand to include telephone hot lines, e-mail, and employee feedback intranet sites. But do these channels really capture the key information that internal communication strategists and leadership need to proactively respond to issues before they become crises? Recent research published in Management Communication Quarterly suggests not.
In the August, 2002 Issue (Vol. 16, Issue 1) Jefferey W. Kassing and Todd A. Armstrong of Arizona State University West present an interesting study on how the sources of employee discontent relate to how employees express that discontent. A key finding from the research: that employees appear to be significantly less likely to express concern or discontent to managers, supervisors, or coworkers when the topic that aroused their discontent involved concern over unethical practices or things that may be endangering employees or customers.
The authors call for communication processes that “layer” feedback tools such as e-mail boxes and Town Halls with others that further encourage openness. These might include anonymous “tip” lines, Ombudsman programs, or–an idea we often use–informal “pulse” networks that regularly provide employees with the opportunity to share sensitive information with other employees while retaining a measure of anonymity.
