Internal communications - it's not rocket science

Not a decision I’ve taken lightly – telling staff about bad news

Last night we had a seminar in the office for selected friends and contacts about handling bad news and uncertainty.  Somewhat ironically the tube network went into crisis preventing a few people from joining us.

A couple of themes developed in the conversation about how do you handle bad news internally.

Firstly (which is hardly surprising given that I was in the room) we talked about the importance of getting good quality intelligence.

When things get tough an organisation needs to understand how messages are landing and most functional heads are compromised in one way or another when it comes to knowing the truth about what is being said on the ground. Further more, any sort of systematic intelligence-gathering damps down the worst sort of speculation among senior managers about ‘what people are saying’.

Secondly, we talked about the pub test – what’s the 30 second summary that you’d tell a friend in the pub.  Rather than getting drawn into opaque consultant-speak, the job of the communicator is to make it simple – a lesson that many of us forget, perhaps for fear of being seen as trivialising or misunderstanding the issues

And thirdly we talked about the need to show compassion.

My colleague Alex Woolfall who runs our Issues and Crisis practice joined us and talked about the power of getting a senior leader to say “this is not a decision I have taken lightly”.  Try Googling it and you see what he means.

Liam

 

A rather lumpy experience

Apparently no one ever noticed it but I have a lump on my forehead.  Or , rather I did have until Wednesday night when losing it turned into a rather odd experience.

First I have to tell you about the lump – it was a lipoma, a sort of fatty deposit under the skin which causes no harm except, like a spot on your nose you feel it’s shouting ‘Hey look at me’ every time you step out of the house.

My wife says it’s tiny and I shouldn’t worry.  But when you’re a professional and vain hypochondriac you stop trusting your nearest and dearest.  After all she has the duty of telling me most days that I’ve not really put on weight, that my biceps aren’t looking at all flabby and that my moobs are looking particularly pert at the moment.

So when she says the lump on my brow is barely noticeable what am I going to think?

Luckily my GP understand how I feel and he fixed me up with a minor surgery appointment to have the fleshy replica of Ayers Rock removed.  And all on the NHS.

Unluckily, it went a bit wrong – it bled after it had been stitched up leaving me with a bulge on my temple about the size of a golf ball caused by some bleeding beneath the skin and a banging headache.

My wife had the decency not to smirk that I’d ended up in a worse state!

So off to hospital, where despite the large number of sick people loitering around they found time to see me, sort out the new minor planet that had attached itself to my bonce and stop the bleeding.  They even glued it up and sent me off home with a bandage that looked rather smart and ensured that no one could possibly doubt the fact that I was properly poorly.

And why am I posting this on my blog about internal communication?

Because I went to Watford Hospital – supposedly the worst and dirtiest hospital in the solar system.  And at the hospital I met an endless stream of helpful people who I’m sure weren’t being nice to me because they’d read the memo about being nice to over-anxious 40 something white men.

And judging from the tatty and grubby notices all over the place, I doubt if they would have bothered to read such a memo if it had been sent around.

I think the place worked because it was run by smart people who seemed to care about what they were doing.  My nurse, Chloe (nice bandaging skills) told me that it was normally chaos and that the coming winter was going to be a challenge…but somehow I expect she would cope.

The staff had to run around finding stocks of things (they had to scrounge the glue for my head from another department) and put up with the breathtaking rudeness of a senior house officer, but they made it all work somehow.

I imagine it works because the people on the front line make the extra effort.  What happens when management stop these people caring?  If the people who fill in the cracks lose faith, all the management speak about targets and pursuing excellence really means nothing.

 

Now everyone is noticing my cut on the forehead and commenting on it.  I tell them I got at my cagefighting class.

Liam

Measurement and crisis

Found this article deep in the internet about work I did years ago.  I'd forgotten what a good writer Kieron Shaw is...

Liam