Friday, August 27, 2010

What's Your Story?

Organizations going through significant change risk the imminent danger of people losing focus on the central mission, lacking a full appreciation for and understanding of the change, its impact on the company and, most important, their role in the transformational process.


That kind of result is understandable since organizational change often encompasses new ways of doing things, and the discarding of outmoded practices. People can easily become disoriented.

A clearly delineated story about your company, its purpose and where it’s going will help you focus your organization’s best talents on the things that matter most to drive meaningful results.

Organizational change typically results from a merger or acquisition, external shifts in the markets in which the company operates, or response to a new competitive threat. Similarly, it can come about when there is change in the top leadership, when a new CEO brings with him/her a new strategic direction.

Whenever internal or external forces impose abrupt transformation on an organization, it is critical that employees quickly gain a clear understanding of the change and get their bearings so that their talents, energies and thinking are focused on the right things. The alternative is a lot of wasted energy focused on mundane matters of little or no consequence to the company’s new mandate. Worse, companies’ most talented and valuable people can often become disillusioned and disconnected, focusing their energies instead on finding new employment elsewhere.

The best and quickest route to keep people on board, moving proactively toward the new challenges, is through the development and deployment of a narrative that tells the new story clearly and succinctly, and then making sure it’s used consistently across the organization.

The narrative is a distillation of the appropriate words and descriptors of the change: the rationale behind it; the external and/or internal forces that mandate the change; how the organization must adapt; where the change will likely take the company; and the facts that support the change in direction.

Narratives, executed effectively, enable managers at all levels to gain quick employee understanding of what exactly has to change in the company and their jobs. The narrative helps managers interpret the change for their own particular unit in terms of what people need to do differently, appropriate to where the company as a whole needs to go. To borrow a tired cliché, it gets everyone rowing in the same direction.

The narrative is reached through consensus of the company’s leadership and communications professionals. It provides them and all managers with consistent language to help them talk about the change and its impact on and importance to the entire organization, as well as the individual operational and functional units, and employees.

Individual employees, then, more readily connect their role and responsibility to the larger picture, able to draw a direct line of sight between what they do and where the organization now needs to go, and then how they need to change what they do to support that.

An apt metaphor for an organization going through such change is an aircraft carrier. There are hundreds of unique jobs on a typical carrier, all toward the common mission of delivering a navy’s forward strike capabilities.

The carrier’s mission changes often. There may be a new attack target, or the carrier might be directed to a new port. If an attack is called for, the carrier must get itself as near to the action as possible, as quickly as possible, then position itself into the wind to assure that the fighter jets achieve maximum lift for take-off. Just to do that demands precise execution by countless officers and sailors assigned to a range of jobs.

So when the carrier’s mission changes, everyone must take the new mission into account in how and what he or she must do, and when it must be done. The commander’s job is to delegate to his officers the task of making the mission’s story relevant to their respective crews so that each crew performs its tasks appropriately, precisely and in a coordinated manner.

As often as an aircraft carrier’s mission may change, it is not hyperbolic to compare its rate of change to that of a business organization. In this age, amidst the current economic turmoil and uncertainties, companies must remain nimble, able to tack and change course constantly.

So what’s your story? As your company’s mission changes to accommodate market fluctuations, a new acquisition, or a new strategic direction, that change will similarly impact what people do, how they do it, and when.

Your ability to tell a clear, coherent story will prove to be an invaluable tool, assuring that managers across operations and functions are well informed and plugged into the organization’s new direction. And well-informed managers, with a clear narrative at hand can make that new mission relevant and meaningful to their teams, helping them stay on course.

Monday, August 9, 2010

We, The Jury

Years ago, while impaneled as a jury member on a medical malpractice case against a practicing obstetrician, I learned an important lesson about people, a lesson applicable to employee relations and communications.


This very complicated medical malpractice case involved a lot of unfamiliar medical jargon from expert witnesses, as well as the physician defendant. I toiled to comprehend and link the various aspects of the case, to sift out the deeper significance of the testimony and separate the truth from the exaggerated. But I was troubled by something else.


Frankly, because I was struggling to make sense of it, I was concerned about the ability of my fellow jurors to comprehend the complex details of the case and pass judgment appropriately. As we retired to the jury’s chamber, it was clear to me that the doctor was innocent and I fully intended to vote that way. But I wondered about the other members of the jury.


In my cynical, college-educated view, I cast a skeptical eye at my fellow jurors. Ironically, while sitting with a panel of my peers in judgment of a doctor, I was instead passing judgment on those very peers.


All but two jurors (myself and a young woman) were blue-collar workers. I assumed they had not been able to follow the details of the case and would likely cast a vote based on the emotions of the case – i.e., that they would find in favor of the plaintiffs because they would identify more with the poor working class woman and her husband (who was newly unemployed) than the (presumably) wealthy doctor, awarding them (and their lawyer) several million insurance company dollars.


Boy, was I ever wrong. It was a quick decision. On our first vote, we, the jury, unanimously found the doctor defendant not guilty.


One jury member suggested it would be inappropriate for us to return to the courtroom immediately, that it would give the appearance that we had been frivolous in our deliberations. So we snacked on donuts and drank coffee while we talked animatedly about the case.


In the subsequent discussion, the proverbial scales fell from my eyes. Not only had these “rubes” followed the details of the case but some of them picked up angles that I, the sophisticate, had missed.


I chastised myself and felt ashamed for being such a judgmental elitist, for assuming that my professional career choice, coat and tie, and college education endowed me with greater common sense, insight, intelligence, and reasoning ability than these others. And, so I learned an important lesson that has stayed with me ever since, giving me valuable insights into front-line employees.


That was a long time ago. But what I know today is that if there is a central guiding tenet of employee communications, then it is the basic dignity and respect that people in a working environment deserve from their employer, recognition for their innate intelligence and common sense.


Providing employees with relevant and helpful information in a timely manner demonstrates that respect for them as individual contributors. It says that everyone here has a role to play; it says how and what one person contributes to the greater good is just as critical as anyone else in the organization.


In many business circumstances, however, people are not treated that way. Some managers are attuned more to their own rank, experience and educational background in relation to those they regard as their subordinates, and ignore the basic intelligence others have and their desire and ability to contribute. And so they talk down to them, treat them as inferior, and communicate with them accordingly.


Regardless of your rank in the organization – CEO, vice president, or supervisor – you should always operate as though the average employee is eager and fully capable of making important contributions to the organization. He/she is intelligent and possesses common sense built over years of experience both on and off the job. Let them prove otherwise. But until then, you’d be mistaken to assume the opposite.


Communicate to employees as your peers, not as your inferiors. Give them more information than you think they need. Recognize that people aspire to grow within organizations and learn, and that information gives them more insights into the business so they can do that on their own terms.


Don’t make the same mistake I made and misjudge your employees. Don't assume you know what information they want or need, or what they’ll do with what you give them. Don’t assume they won’t understand it or can’t master its complexity. They will see it through their own lens – different than yours – process it, and draw conclusions that may not coincide with your own.


And maybe, just maybe, you might gain a new insight into how better to run the business because you trusted the unique worldview of someone you assumed was your lesser.