How do you make your organization smarter, and you smarter, and the organization smarter, and…. in a non-ending get-smarter cycle. The first key element is one not often practiced. Tell your employees--all of them, your suppliers, your direct staff, your investors, your board, and even (with some judgment) your customers the same exact story; here are our problems, here’s how critical they are, here’s what we plan to do about them. Your credibility grows when you tell everyone the same story (presuming it’s truthful and candid). Most everyone better understands what they can do to help. Possible solutions sprout from the woodwork. Work rule changes are volunteered. It’s amazing; except that it’s not. Human nature is such that individuals and organizations feel they’re on the team and want to contribute when they are treated like they’re on the team. Bad news doesn’t scare people away, whereas continuous doses of spin turn them off. There’s an extra benefit for the CEO; you don’t have to remember which version you previously delivered to your current audience.
Why do CEO’s and managers feel more comfortable communicating “the real stuff” only to their direct staff rather than broadly to all their employees and constituencies? Then when there’s no choice, deciding on the current spin version can be tortuous. They want to stay in a nice comfort zone, talk only to direct reports, talk more broadly only in terms of happy platitudes, do the “dirty work” behind locked doors.
Staying in the comfort zone means relying on management staff and lower layers to relay important information. This approach doesn’t work. It offers the opportunity for so much error through honest mistakes, misinterpretation and deliberate sabotage, it’s a wonder anything of importance makes it to the most important people in any organization, those on the front line.
Back in the dark ages of the ‘50s and ‘60s, the telephone game was a popular party game. A circle of people passed a story or comment to the rest of the group by whispering to the person next to them. Once it went entirely around the circle, the version the last person heard was compared to the original. The final tale was always significantly different.
Of course, everybody laughed to hear how much the message had changed. But in a modern business environment when the purpose is to communicate critical new information or to galvanize the organization in a new direction, message changes are no laughing matter.
In the game, several miscommunication phenomena are at work. First is the lack of listening skills. Comprehension of what one person is hearing may be incomplete, or the person may simply not be listening at all. Second is the faulty memory and transmission skills that accompany even the best listener. Third is the purposeful altering by individuals bent on mischief or with a hidden agenda. The number of transmittal events further compounds each miscommunication.
In an organizational environment, the telephone game perfectly describes the communication process as information passes through an organization’s different layers. The CEO calls a policy or strategy meeting. Managers listen well or not well, filter the message through their own experiences, and hear what they want to hear. Each manager then selects what they want to remember and translates it into their own words.
Of course, the managers also have a history of what they’ve previously told subordinates. If they are now tasked with delivering a different message, their level of authority or respect may drop. Then there are those whose agendas purposefully change the message. When we’re all done, what do we have? Confusion! An organization with no confidence in the company’s direction and no knowledge of which behavior patterns will be rewarded.
For exactly that reason, deliver your initial and continuing communications directly to all employees. In addition to achieving fuller understanding, the entire organization will have interacted with you. You will create a connection that enables people from all levels to return the favor. As information flows out of these levels, you’ll have another way to gain insight into how your business actually functions.
Once you’ve chosen to make communication direct, you still need to figure out what to say. Determining the message shouldn’t be torturous. You’ve already decided on the company’s direction, determined its priorities and problems, and you obviously know the state of its performance.
That’s it. Use those three components as your broadcast message and don’t change them. Don’t worry about sensitivities. Deliver the message to all employees the same as you would to directors. The approach is easy, it saves time, it builds your credibility and is highly beneficial to the organization’s growing intellect. It’s also a lot easier to remember one message rather than attempting to remember what version you most recently gave to constituency A, B, etc. Following is a real story that is so much fun to recall, a real positive emotional experience crafted out of a rather bleak situation.
