IABC "Speedexperiencing" Event - Tues 9th Oct

Just a few words about my first IABC event. Everyone was very friendly and the setup was interesting, with the opportunity to take part in three of five discussion groups.

I wanted to be in all five, but ended up choosing the group on engagement run by Kevin Keohane first. It was nice to meet someone in person that I've only had "blog contact" with in the past. He had some pointed questions to ask about the alignment of the "employee brand" with the aspirations of current and potential employees, but I won't attempt to reproduce his nifty diagram here. I felt this discussion was just getting going as the hooter went to move us on to the next one. I hope we at least laid some groundwork for the next group.

Nick Grant asked us "Can internal and external communication ever be aligned?" Again, time caught up with us, but (being the IABC) there was of course some consensus that they two perspectives have to be aligned overall, otherwise the mixed messages can cause serious problems.

Alas, I cannot recall the name of the final discussion leader, but the topic of "Can change be managed?" and the notion that it rather had to be "led," than "managed" made me think today once again about our approach to internal communications.

In particular, one idea in the "change leadership" discussion was that most people are most likely to change for a direct manager who they know and trust. It's largely only someone who they work with regularly, who understands their working life who has the credibility/trust to ask someone to undertake radical working change.

For me, there was a strong parallel with how internal communications "should" work. Statements from the top, or even just far flung regions of the company are unlikely to have as much credibility or trust as those from direct supervisors and colleagues. We instinctively know this, I think, but often give up on it because it's very hard to make practical use of. Rather, many people view "middle management" as the "big sponge" that soaks up all the information, but never passes it along.

As a result, we've invested in circumventing the traditional channels of communication. That has some exciting possibilities, especially in connection with new "social media," but at the same time (hobby horse alert!) I feel it has pushed "internal communications" into a "mass communications" or "marketing/advertising" mould, where the purpose and expertise of internal communicators is to create communications strategies and implement them.

What I see is that there is an important role for "internal communications" in helping people communicate, helping "the sponge" of middle management actually pass more information along. In effect, doing less communication and spending more time on helping people communicate, both by innovating technology/processes and the hard work of teaching people extra skills. Why? Because in the end, they will tend to have credibility that a distant communicator will struggle to have. Social media allows a narrowing of that kind of distance, but even there I think that "social business communication" is going to need a lot of experience and even training to get the best out of it and existing trust relationships will continue to dominate.

 

Technorati Tags: change management , IABC , internal communications , lateral communications , marketing the strategy , top down , training , trust

In the words of Ezra Klein...

"My commenter(s) are smarter than me."

Sue from Black Belt Dojo replies to my post on strategy:

Just wanted to say that I do think we should think more like marketing in the way that they really know their audience - i.e. they do the research to build up a decent demographic and attitudinal profile so they know who they're talking to.

But I'm not advocating the sell/persuade approach. These people know what it's really like to work in the business, so hyperbolic fluff fools nobody. I'm talking about real, practical communication about subjects that actually affect them everyday.

I'll leave it there or my comment will be even longer than your post! But just to say that I agree with your thoughts later about involving people and not over-selling what we can do. In our role plays on the Black Belt programme we've managed to lure people into promising to work miracles with sales results, attrition, motivation ... you name it.

A number of important issues here:

1) As Sue notes, whatever it's faults may be, the discipline of Marketing is far more developed than that of internal communications. As a result, my banging on about their failures can seem a bit rich, because we still have lots to learn from them, especially in "identifying the audience."

2) I have my own problems "identifying the audience."

- My views come out of my experiences working in "other departments" in various organisations and are coloured by those experiences.

- In a lot of ways I'm writing to try and move the people who created those experiences of "internal communications" on to better ways of doing things.

- In reality however, the people most likely to actually read my blog are "enlightened practitioners" like Sue, who are already doing the right things, advocating good approaches.

- So to Sue and any others out there, I may be talking to you, but understand I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the still existing organisations where things just haven't progressed much in the last 10 years. We all know there are plenty out there.

- Finally, I'm still finding a blogging voice, but in my hubris I do hope to tie my ideas to the good things people are doing and contribute to a better developed philosophy of internal communications, as I think that's another area (along with tools like audience analysis) where we lag more established disciplines like marketing. We don't yet have a consistent, coherent and solidly plausible narrative for the things we can do.

Technorati Tags: audience , enlightened practitioners , internal communications , marketing , marketing the strategy , narrative

Why just repeating the strategy doesn't work...

Sue Dewhurst posting over at Black Belt Dojo has a pithy summary of some of the problems in internal communications today:

Then I asked people to imagine the sales assistant had joined in to persuade them to hand over the credit card. Here's what the sales assistant says: "We're operating in a very competitive environment right now and our revenues are under pressure, so we really need you to buy the jacket to help us increase sales." Not convinced yet? How about "We need to improve our cashflow, and we have to show quarter on quarter improvements to the markets. If you buy this jacket, you'll really help us improve our profits."

Ever heard a sales assistant try and persuade you to buy that way? Me neither. They go for the things they know you'll care about. But quite often inside organisations, we try to persuade people to buy in by talking about what's in it for the company - not what's in it for them. It's easy to throw together key messages. But if you really think about the people you're trying to connect with and try and look for an angle they'll actually care about, it gets a lot more tricky.

I agree with what Sue says, as far as it goes, but predictably I don't think it goes far enough. After all, she's really saying that internal communicators need to think more like marketers. There is the corporate strategy, but you need to sell it to the employees, you have to wow them a little, make a personal connection, show the link with their lives and aspirations.

The problem is, the audience is changing. Every new generation of workers has been bombarded with marketing from an ever earlier age. It's still possible to wow them on occasion and make things personal for them, especially in person, but in "mass communications" (which remain the staple of internal communications in many organisations) it's working less and less well.

Now Sue is on record with progressive views about employee involvement in strategy formulation and that's an important part of the story. It's a lot easier to talk to and inform someone if they have had a stake in creating what you are talking about. That's definitely progress.

However, in a lot of organisations, especially larger ones, this kind involvement remains limited. One answer is for internal communicators to campaign more aggressively for greater involvement for everyone in the co-creation of strategy.

There are organisations, unfortunately, where that just isn't going to happen soon and I think in those places in particular, internal communicators need to look long and hard at the business case they promote for themselves. I think the traditional approach of "we'll deliver employee engagement with your strategy" is a very dangerous way to sell the business case for internal communications, because it promises more than the tools can deliver.

Instead, I believe internal communicators need to look again at their role in communication, particularly communication from the bottom of the organisation to the top, and from side to side (lateral communication.) This is an approach that requires a greater engagement with the actual processes of the business. It's less about exercising individual creative communication on a daily basis and more about enabling others to communicate.

And now I'm largely caught up with my RSS feed of internal communicators, I hope to move from laying out the case for moving to a different approach to talking more about that approach itself in future posts.


Technorati Tags: internal communications, business case, marketing the strategy, lateral communications

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