Internal communications - it's not rocket science

Better line manager comms - essential reading

Researching a chapter for a PR Book is proving to be a real treat.  I’m being forced to update my reading in a few areas that I’m ashamed to say I’ve neglected a little in the last couple of years.

One great discovery is Phillip Clampitt’s Communicating for Managerial Effectiveness.

Consistently every IC manager sooner or later gets drawn into the discussion of how to improve the communications skills of line managers.  Even if you have no interest in training or HR, no practitioner can afford to let supervisors stumble over communications.

If the first line manager gets the message wrong, whole campaigns unravel quickly.

Clampitt’s book provides a thought-provoking framework for planning and developing communications standards for line managers.  It includes hard practical advice as well as understandable explanations for some quite detailed theory.

For example, he explain Shannon &Weaver’s classic comms model in the context of getting managers to think about their basic approaches.

A discussion of the causes for ambiguity in communications generates a set of general principles:

• Explore the employees’ context
• Manage expectations
• Sculpt the proper context
• Anticipate possible interpretations (and misinterpretations) of messages, events and symbols
• Don’t let the probability that one person could get the wrong end of the stick shape your whole message
• Pay attention to secondary messages
• Remember that the credibility of sources shape everything

Definitely a book for most communications offices.

Liam

 

Management writing - all a load of guff?

Thanks to David Ferrabee for a recent twitter I found myself reading a cracking book for the last few weeks.

It’s The Management Myth by Matthew Stewart – part review of some of the major thinkers on management science in the last 100 or so years and part personal story about his experiences as a strategy consultant.  If you want to hear an attack on management consultants you'll find some good material here.

Stewart suggests that many of the most lauded writers in the field of management – people like Mayo (of Hawthorne effect fame) and Taylor – were little more than charlatans who falsified their data.  I imagine that the laws of defamation prevent him being quite so robust in his condemnation of contemporary gurus like Gary Hamel or Waterman – you get the impression he doesn’t hold them in high regard.

I can’t judge whether I believe him or whether his allegations are the product of a wild and embittered mind.

However, he does make a powerful central point.  If you are claiming to be scientific, your hypotheses need some sort of predictive value and your evidence need to be open to challenge by your peers.

Otherwise, he suggests, you are little better than a snake oil salesman promising fantastic results. 

Which is why I sometimes struggle with some of the amazing data that gets chucked around our field.  In recent years I’ve seen facts claiming multi-billion losses caused by poor employee retention or the vast profits that can accrue to companies that communicate well.

There's food for thought in here - especially when you dragged into yet another conversation about the amazing wizardry that comms people can perform...

Liam

 

An engaging read

I'm really enjoying a great read at the moment.

It's Julie Gebauer and Don Lowman's 'Closing the engagement gap - how great companies unlock employee potential for superior results'.  

Drawing on years of consulting experience and research, the book explores the impact that employee engagement can have on business performance.  It looks at the drivers for engagement and the strategies that different organisations employ to win over employees.

The list of drivers includes (my paraphrasing):

• A chance to develop my career
• Making a difference to customers' lives
• Interesting work
• A chance to input on work issues
• Good relationships with my supervisor
• Social responsibility
• A culture that encourages innovation
• A chance to develop my skills
• Employee authority to do a great job
• Sincere interest in employee well-being

And although many of these things are firmly in the domain of HR, it is clearly the role of communications to ensure that employees understand the intent of their organisations. There's not much use having a fantastic training programme if no one knows about it!

However, it is communications that owns some crucial components.  For example it is our role to ensure that senior leaders get to demonstrate their interest in employees or celebrate the impact that the organisation makes on the lives of customers or service users.

And the thing I am finding particularly interesting is how organisations involve or ignore their staff when it comes to sustainability or CSR programmes.  Clearly community or environmental action are things that motivate and bind (or indeed repulse) employees.  It therefore makes considerable sense that CSR programmes are intimately tied into an engagement strategy.

But how many CSR teams sit in HR or Comms?  Very few I suspect.

Liam

Clampitt and line managers

I have just come across a text from Philip Clampitt when he looks at the default positions of many managers when thinking about communications.  It predates more recent works on the engagement approach of leaders and I think is a bit more insightful in some ways.

Clampitt and his collaborators talk about mangers who:

• Spray and pray
• Tell and sell
• Underscore and explore
• Identify and reply
• Withhold and uphold

I have to thank one of my current students for showing it to me – it’s making me rethink a  course I currently run for line managers.

 

Liam

Liam FitzPatrick Bell Pottinger Change and Internal Communications Line Managers 

Always worth visiting

As part of my big post-christmas email clear-out I came over a bunch of mails from the guys who publish a daily summary of communications news.  I can strongly recommend it as a useful summary - they take feeds from a bunch of places and consistently spot things that you'd have to spend hours trawling the web for...

Liam

Fame at last!!!!

At yesterday's CIPR conference we were all given a copy of the latest edition of Lyn Smith's book on internal communications.

Sadly I flicked through the index and....there I was!!!  Some things that I wrote with Sue Dewhurst on line managers were quoted.  I have to say that I was disgustingly pleased - it's one thing to write a blog, it's a completely different matter altogether to be in a book.  I reckon that makes me an expert and I shall be buying loads of copies for my extended family!

The item that was quoted was about the questions (Download line_managers.pdf ) you should ask when thinking about your line manager communications.  Seeing it in a book is much more exciting than powerpoint!!!!

Liam