CRA Inc

The Financial Crisis: Communication Advice for Leaders

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.

Filling The Vacuum At Grand Central Station

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.

Speaking Their Language

If you’ve been living under a rock in recent years, we’ve got news: High schoolers are increasingly relying on on-line tools to express themselves and communicate with friends. See Pew Internet study with alarming statistics here. (e.g., Thirty-five percent of all teenage girls “blog.”)

Between text messages, Facebook pages, and personal blogs, it appears children need not leave their homes for any reason whatsoever any more. Before I digress about the demise of Kick the Can, a question we get from our clients: How am I, a Baby Boomer, and my company, [insert appropriate descriptor here], to reach the new generation?

If you can’t beat them, join them, right? Perhaps. But three quick tips to observe:

1. Use communication channels that are most appropriate for the communicator and your company’s culture. Authenticity is far more important than anything else. You don’t want the CEO who can’t turn his computer on starting his own blog.
2. Use particular on-line tools because they are helping to accomplish particular objectives. Start with your objective, the message you want to send, and then match these with the appropriate media, understanding that different media are appropriate for different messages. See more about media richness here.
3. Never use new media as a substitute for face-to-face communication. Remember the old-fashioned conversation? It is still the most effective means for communication.

As a new generation enters the workforce, we must get smarter about new media choices, and we may even need to adapt our approach. But, we should do it because it makes sense—not because that’s what the cool kids are doing.

Making Green More Than the New Black

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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).
4. 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.
5. 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).

Leadership Legacy

What makes a major project successful? Not many disagree that success is as much about leadership as it is about followership. Seems obvious. But how do really successful leaders actually get people to do what they want them to do, and do it willingly? How do successful leaders accomplish their own goals and bring others onboard? Less obvious.

Last month, a prominent Alzheimer’s researcher, with a loyal and industrious followership, died in a tragic plane crash. Among his numerous accomplishments, Dr. Leon Thal was the director of the Alzheimer’s disease Cooperative Study (ADCS) since its establishment in 1991. ADCS is a consortium of more than 70 research centers in North America, designed to test drugs for their efficacy in slowing down the progression or treating the symptoms of AD. Under his leadership, more than 4,600 people participated in these studies and significant advancements in understanding AD were made.

Dr. Thal, imbued with many talents, was the force that made ADCS so successful. He did this by using his ability to forge consensus. He started by earning the trust and respect of those around him, in him as a person and as a professional, and he continued by always staying true to his principles.

From the beginning, the ADCS Steering Committee meetings were virtuoso performances by Leon. He was the conductor of a process whereby 30 senior clinical investigators—each with opinions, egos, biases, and quirks—came together with ideas about which clinical trials to pursue and how. After many discussions, time after time Thal led the group to effective consensus. Subsequently, investigators consistently felt they had been heard and had contributed to the final decision.

In truth, Thal knew where he wanted to go from the very beginning and carefully brought everyone around to his point of view. He had a goal: to find therapies that would provide help to Alzheimer’s patients and their families. He had a strategy: to design a consortium of the most talented and passionate researchers in the field. But perhaps most importantly, he led by guiding principles: to treat people fairly and with respect, build relationships, and never lose sight of the goal. Under Thal’s magical direction, the group moved forward.

Someone close to me (and whom I admire deeply) spoke at Thal’s memorial, and his words reminded me of this lesson on leadership. There are many ways to get things done and leadership is nothing if not about producing results. But what distinguishes some leaders from others is how they produce results. Thal employed behaviors to manage relationships favorably and, by all accounts, he produced extraordinary results.

Reverse the curse of knowledge

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:

1. Universal
2. Simple
3. Broad
4. Actionable
5. Accurate
6. 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.

The Crystal Ball Post-Mortem

As part of my 2007 reading regimen I’m working through Gary Klein’s Sources of Power, which is a fantastic if slightly academic text on how people make decisions—especially in time-compressed, high-risk situations. In the book I came across something that strikes me as a practical and powerful tool to use as you prepare for important communication events (be they an important speech, presentation to the board, or a face-to-face with the CEO). Klein calls it a “Pre-Mortem” strategy, and it’s a means of identifying assumptions and mitigating risk. The original approach comes from Choen, Freeman, and Thompson’s “Crystal Ball” method (PDF), which the US military uses in war game exercises. The Crystal Ball method goes like this:

• Select a critical assessment, no matter how confident you are that it is true (e.g., that the enemy will cross the river at point X).
• Imagine that a perfect intelligence source, such as a crystal ball, tells you that this assessment is wrong.
• Explain how this assessment could be wrong.
• The crystal ball now tells you that your explanation is wrong and sends you back to step 3.

The Pre-Mortem is a slight variation on this: After laying out a plan, look several months into the future and assume the plan has failed. The task is to explain why. The idea is to break the emotional attachment to the plan, and turn your creativity and experience toward identifying its flaws and opportunities for breakdown. These are contingencies to revise the plan against, making the plan as a whole stronger (and your or your team’s view of the plan more realistic).

Here’s why it’s important: The research shows that people tend to “fall in love” with their own plans. We lend them more credibility than they deserve, especially if we are not highly experienced in the area and do not have a good sense of what’s typical. As a result, we tend to underestimate risks and be under-prepared for contingencies.

In our work with leaders and communication professionals we’ve taken a similar approach for years, building what we call a “Risk Mitigation Checklist” for any significant communication event. It’s the list of all the things we know can introduce significant risk into a communication, all other things being equal. A small example might be “Test the TelePrompTer equipment” before a speech; a more significant example might be “Brief the Audit Committee of the Board of Directors about any change to the capital budget” for a multi-million dollar technology initiative.

We arrive at the items for the Risk Mitigation Checklist through our experience. The issue is that with the communication opportunities or problems you face day-to-day, you don’t (and shouldn’t) have us by your side to identify problems in the plan and craft contingencies. So here’s what you should do: Before your next important communication, project several months into the future and assume the thing failed—miserably. Then explain why it failed, and come up with as many explanations for failure as you can. Then work alone or with your communication staff to resolve those failure points in the design of the message and plan.

We have an adage at CRA that is one of the first things we tell a new employee, regardless of their level or experience: “Plan for the worst, expect the best. Find the worst thing that can happen, and eliminate it. Repeat.” It’s served us well for years, and I think the Crystal Ball / Post-Mortem method is a great little tactic to keep in your back pocket while you communicate as a leader.