A CEO from communications heaven

I was lucky enough to be invited to a town hall meeting with a CEO of a company. For multiple reasons I cannot share with you who the CEO is, or what name of the company is. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is what happened to me. I was inspired by this CEO. I was invited to the meeting by his communications advisor, and she told me beforehand how wonderful he is in town hall meetings, and what a pleasure it is to work with him.

In the meeting he addressed a crowd of around 300 employees, who were just told that their budgets were cut. Employees were given the opportunity to ask questions beforehand. My communications contact there told me that the CEO never wanted her to prepare questions. His philosophy is that he should be capable to formulate the answers himself, and boy do I agree with that!

Now, what did the CEO do that inspired me?

1. He used just one (!) slide, to reiterate the company’s strategy, explaining it in simple words, and stressing the importance of every word, not leaving room for any doubt about the fact that he had thought about it, made the choice, and was ready to defend that strategy to any audience.

2. He did not use any business lingo, on the contrary, he spoke in clear, personal, genuine words.

3. When answering the questions, he picked the most difficult ones, and answered them straight on, with great respect for the feelings behind the question, addressing that feeling and explaining very calmly the rationale behind his decision. Every question, no matter how hard, or sometimes unreasonable, was answered this way. Here, it really showed that he was not prepared by a Q&A session, but that he could answer from his own knowledge of the matter.

4. He took ownership of his decisions, admitting mistakes, explaining which parts were his call, and why he made those calls. He said: “I believe in chance before you have to chance”, which I think is a great one-liner, and explained that that was his duty. To chance the company’s direction before this chance would be enforced.

5. I came out inspired, and so did 300 employees, so whatever he did, it was successful.

Communications, it can be so simple if you keep it simple!

Secretaries are communication heroes

Way back, when I was a student at university, I was taught that secretaries are important communications hubs, both in formal and informal communications networks. So, if you want to do communications research, on how informal communications networks function, for example, secretaries need to be included in that research.

Over the years I have learnt another feature about secretaries: they may be the most important communicators in many organizations. Actually, it is fair to say that apart from organizing their bosses work, communicating is probably their main task. I dare to state that secretaries communicate as much as communications professionals and I feel that their work is underestimated and underpaid.

Think of it: they write emails, letters, make phone calls all day, organize meetings, make meeting minutes. And I have found that they often master digital communication tools, like Office programs and social media far better than their bosses, or most other employees in the organization. They are probably the group with the best communication skills in the workforce.

I feel that often they are a victim of the tendency in many organizations to delegate the real work as far down as possible. They don’t have anyone to turn to, and most often they deliver time after time. Just felt the need to write that down at least once in my life.

Value them, my friends, they are the heroes of the modern office!

Wiio’s Laws, or why communication always fails

About 10 years ago, I was a part-time lecturer at the Business Communications Faculty of a university in the Netherlands. The subject I taught was Communications Research Methodology. For the students it was one of the last subjects in their final year, before they would start to work on their Master’s thesis.

To set the scene in the first lesson, I always kicked off with a presentation of Wiio’s laws. Osmo Wiio is a Finnish researcher, who wrote these laws as a bit of a joke. Although these laws are a clear exaggeration, I always told the students, that once they would start their career, this might be a good framework to always keep on hand.

These laws typically received mixed reactions from the students. Some loved them, others were puzzled by them, and some even became almost angry with me, as they thought that my view on our profession was for too negative. This mix of reactions was – of course- exactly what I was looking for, as it would spark of a nice discussion about what communicators can and cannot achieve in an organization.

To this day, I always have a copy of Wiio’s laws on the wall of every office I work in. It serves as a reminder to me to never underestimate the difficult job that we as communicators have.

Wiio published his laws in 1978, but I think they are still valid today, or even more valid, probably. Well, judge for yourself, here they are: communications’ own Murphy ’s Law or Wiio’s laws*

1 Communication usually fails- except by chance

· If communication can fail, it will

· If communication cannot fail, it nevertheless usually does fail

· If communication seems to succeed in the way intended, it must be in the way which was not intended

· If your are satisfied that your communication is bound to succeed, it is then bound to fail

2 If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which doe the most harm

3 There is always somebody who knows better than you what you meant by your message

4 The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed

So, next time a communications project fails, you can now explain that Wiio’s Laws were to blame.

*In this version, I left out some of his laws that refer to mass communications, and I have seen some other versions with minor changes.

Keep It Simple Stupid!

A few years ago I came across this thought provoking statement for the first time. It was used in the context of a communications plan, and it was referred to as the KISS principle (the first letters of Keep IT Simple Stupid, obviously). It is such a nice phrase to use in discussions about communication plans, as it always provokes a reaction; it always puts people off guard. I have noticed so often that people really started to pay attention when this principle was thrown into the discussion.

The great thing about the KISS principle is – of course- that everybody immediately knows what you are talking about. In the corporate environment we often tend to make things far too complicated. Managers often feel that their messages need to show that they really know what they are doing.

So often does this tendency lead to phenomena like what I like to call ‘PowerPoint Body Building’. “Hey, look how complicated this chart is. I manage this, and I know all the details”. So, OK, you got muscle, but what was it that you were trying to say to us, because we are totally lost here…

Another issue with many managers or project leaders is that they just want to communicate too much. You don’t need to cover all your areas, just focus on what is important to your audience. Communication is very much about what you don’t say!

When I make a communications plan, I usually try to get the KISS principle (spelled this way, and just explained once) in the communication strategy part of the plan. It is a great phrase to refer to whenever people make things too complicated. Everyone knows immediately what you mean when you give feedback.

Anyone any other examples of principles that they use? I’d be curious to hear about them.

Sorry, we don’t speak English here

English is the business language in the corporate environment, no question about it. I hope my German and French readers don’t feel offended, but this is reality in the global village that we call world.

If we were to look at the communications profession as a toolkit, language (so, in the corporate world, the English language) is our most important tool.

O.K, this is a given, but I’d like to point out two things that we sometimes tend to forget in our daily practice.

1 Native English speakers have a huge advantage over non-native speakers. I am Dutch, so I spend most of my days communicating in a foreign language. My English is in reasonable shape, but clearly, I miss many nuances as a result of the fact that I am not communication in my native tongue. If you are a native English speaker, please take into consideration how difficult it can be for a foreigner to communicate in a foreign language.

2 I think we, as communications professionals, should stress more and more that we need to train people to master the corporate language. It never fails to amaze me that we keep hiring people in a corporate environment that don’t master our preferred language at least at a basic level.

Well, I hope I did not make too many mistakes in this blog post. Native speakers, please forgive me, and if you want to see a real funny example of what I just wrote, just watch this hilarious video.

If your meetings are compelling, useful and effective, don’t read this blog post

In years and years of practice in internal communications I have met so many people who hate meetings. Just look at the faces of most people in a larger meeting. Or listen to people complaining about the fact that their day is fully planned with meetings, keeping them from ‘work’.

Meetings often don’t start on time and don’t end on time. Very often it is unclear what is decided. Action points are not followed up. The meeting is dominated by just a few people (the loudest, not the smartest). We often tend to start discussions without a clue of what the goal of the agenda point is, and there are quite a few meetings that don’t have an agenda at all.

I have asked this question time and time again, to employees in a wide variety of businesses: “How much time do you spend in meetings?” The average number, for office workers, is 30%. Then, when I ask them if they received any training in meeting skills, the usual answer is: none at all; in college, nor at work.

So, we spend 30% of our time doing something that we were never trained to do. This fact never fails to amaze me, and I think it is a hidden problem in many organizations. In my opinion, we internal communicators should tackle this problem. For years now I have been conducting meeting workshops, and people love them. I teach them how to prepare a meeting, how to ensure that everybody can contribute, techniques to keep time and  techniques to ensure that the meeting members stick to the goal of the agendapoint. I add some background about group dynamics and I stress the importance of following up on what was decided. Basic stuff, but everybody loves it.

For me, in my role as manager internal communications, this is probably one of the best contributions I can make to improve efficiency in our organization. People often tell me that they saved hours and hours of time as a result of the workshop.

This could be a Dutch problem, though, as we are consensus seekers by nature. I am curious about that: is it? Please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts and experiences with me.

Did you ever learn to be a knowledge worker – part 2

In my last blog post I raised this question: Did you ever learn to be a knowledge worker? In part two I would like to give you a little background on how this question came to my mind.

In the last few years I initiated the introduction of various free digital tools for internal communications in our company, but I did not do that on my own, on the contrary. In 2006 I joined forces with Samuel Driessen, our Information Architect. It was very interesting to collaborate, as Samuel and I both worked from a different background. We found each other in the middle, in our interest for social media. His cutting edge knowledge about enterprise 2.0 tools, and my knowledge about communication and human behavior was the perfect mix for a very creative approach that led to the introduction of various new tools in our communications mix on a budget of 0 Euros. This approach was well documented in various articles and presentations, so I will no elaborate in this blog post. When it came to executing our plans we could rely on my great colleagues at the Corporate Communications Department who made it happen and an IT team that was willing to take some risks.

We found out along the way that the adoption of enterprise 2.0 in a company is very difficult, as this area is located in what I would call an organizational vacuum between Information Management, IT, HR and Communications. Who owns publications, collaboration, knowledge sharing, document management and archiving in a company? The answer in many organizations is: nobody, really. Different departments own different parts. The Enterprise 2.0 developments force us to seek each others help. To illustrate that: I wrote an internal blog post once, titled ‘help, I’m in IT land now’, kindly commented on by our IT counterpart who said not to worry, as he was here to help (and he delivered). And, yes, my work as internal communicator has changed dramatically over the last few years.

Now, back to the question raised: did you ever learn to be a knowledge worker? After the introduction of the tools, we felt we needed to educate people, Samuel and I created a workshop about social media, and we found out along the way that our audience had actually never learned to be knowledge workers. They loved our explanation about what tool can be used for what purpose. We learned that people struggle to keep up with the information overload and that they are not aware of the great tools out there that can help them. We came to the conclusion that two things are needed. I already mentioned the tools, but a really underestimated second prerequisite is human skills.

That is why we raised this question: do we teach people to be knowledge workers? No, we don’t, and I would call upon all HR-managers, Internal Communications Manager, IT-managers and Information- and Knowledge management experts to join forces. Our employees need help! I hope you are lucky enough to find the same great colleagues from other departments that I encountered. And Samuel, thanks for everything, it was magic!

The power of asking questions

Corporate communications is a trade with many branches. We are experts on media use, on advertising, on brand and reputation management. We invent concepts, write stories, deal with the press, provide project communication and change communication and the list goes on and on. But, today, I want to focus on a subject that is often forgotten. A subject that we own or don’t own as a department, depending on the organization: personal communications skills.

In past jobs, I often helped employees develop their own communication skills. During the years, it became very clear to me that many communication problems are caused by the simple fact that we talk in statements. Very often we assume that someone else said something. So, in a conversation,
I make a statement to my fellow communicator. She assumes to know what I said and makes a statement back. This goes on and on, very often with frustrating results. The situation becomes worse if this conversation is an email conversation instead of a personal meeting, as we then also loose the power of non-verbal communication.

To my own amazement I found out that the answer to these communication problems is very simple: learn to ask questions. A question connects straight away. A question opens up the possibility for dialogue. A questions shows that you are interested, but most of all, a question gives you the opportunity to check if your own statement is indeed in line with what the other said. The best question of them all is: what do you need? This question is open. It opens up the opportunity to say what he or she really wanted to say: the real need behind the statement. This is very often the real problem and often has to do with emotions like concern, fear, rejection, insecurity, anger.

By asking this question, the other has to formulate what their real need is. That, in return, gives you the opportunity to do something about it. Sounds simple? Yes it is, but we very, very often forget to do this. Listening is probably the most underestimated communication skill of them all. So, next time you come across a communication problem: ask a question! Or, to stay in character, and ask a question: do you believe in the power of questions too?