Some Online Store

C H A P T E R 2. Critical Issues for Leadership Communication
“Organizations have to market membership as much as they market products and services— and perhaps more. They have to attract people,
hold people, recognize and reward people, motivate people, and serve and satisfy people.” —Peter Drucker, “The New Society Of Organization”

We decided to write this book because leaders we’ve worked with continually express concern about three “people” issues that we, biased as we are, consider to be preeminently communication issues:
1. Commitment to the organization and its goals (calling for leaders to act as community builders)
2. Awareness and understanding of organizational goals and priorities (calling for leaders to act as navigators and direction setters), especially during change and transition
3. Willingness and ability to help the organization become better (calling for leaders to act as renewal champions)

A major section of the book is devoted to each of the three issues. Our approach in these sections is to explore the various communication roles leaders can play to manage the issues effectively. This chapter expands a bit on the issues, both as a source of concern to leaders everywhere and as an example of the critical nature of leadership communication in sustaining healthy, productive organizations.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

Leadership Communicates : So What ?

The problem with this subject is that it’s easy to ignore. Everyone communicates—it’s like breathing—and we all learn to do it as we grow up. So what’s the issue? To be sure, the last thing we want to do in this book is to complicate a simple subject, or clothe it in so much jargon and consultant talk.

Instead, we invite you to step back a bit and to look at leadership communication from an organizational perspective—three organizational
perspectives, to be exact. Stepping back is critical here, because our life in organizations is like being in the middle of a stream. We’re caught in its constant flow. We typically take the water and the flow for granted because we don’t have time to do much more than keep our boat headed in the right direction, and stay afloat. We don’t think much about the very medium that carries us along, even while it changes speeds, turns corners, throws some things in our path and obscures others. What we want to invite you as readers and leaders to do is to step out of the water and reflect on communication as a medium we can skillfully direct and thereby gain advantage.

Immersion in the stream of organizational life can indeed hinder our ability to see and hear clearly what’s going on around us. But leaders are potential victims of another source of disorientation, for as they move higher up the organizational ladder, they may be distancing themselves from two critical sources of organizational news: frontline employees and customers. The joke about the person at the top being the last to know is really an insight into the difficulty of leaders staying in touch. And a current strategy to counter this problem, reducing the distance from top to bottom by “delayering,” can lead to other communication problems. As Henry Mintzberg reminds us, “delayering can be defined as the process by which people who barely know what’s going on get rid of those who do.”3

The three perspectives we employ to explore leadership communication have always been important in organizations, but in recent times they’ve gained new dimension and significance. In chapter 2, we examine each one in turn to establish just why they’re important to the health of an organization and how they dictate communication strategy by leaders.

Notes
1. Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers (Boston: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1994), 180.
2. Anne B. Fisher, “Making Change Stick,” Fortune (April 17, 1995), 122.
3. Henry Mintzberg, “Musings on Management,” Harvard Business Review ( July–August 1996),

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

What We Mean Leadership Communication
Since we’re about to launch a baker’s dozen chapters’ worth of discussion on how leaders can effectively manage communications in their organizations (with particular focus on three key agendas), we think it wise to stake out the territory a bit. So here’s what we mean by the concept.

First of all, as we tried to imply in the fable, leadership communication is a much bigger affair than simply delivering information or making “effective presentations.” Our basic definition of leadership communication is that it involves the communication that leaders have with people, not simply words spoken, or information passed, to them. In this sense, thinking about leadership communication must address three topics:
1. What you say and how you say it
2. Whom you talk with
3. How you get people talking with you and with each other

Leadership cannot exist in the absence of dialogue with those who agree to be led. Command and authority are conferred, but leadership is created jointly, a product of the words shared and the conversations held that together establish and develop relationship. Lew Platt, former Hewlett Packard CEO, actually defined his job as “managing conversations.”2

Thus, leadership communication is about relationship building, in all of its many dimensions. When leaders manage communication effectively, work relationships are strong, well informed, and purposeful. Both leaders and their teams are more engaged and in sync. Trust levels are higher, and information is freely shared. And there’s a commitment to mutual education and feedback, such that things learned are spread and used within the organization.

Second, leadership communication is both an instrument of strategy and a strategy in itself. It is the means by which leaders build community and trust; create workforce alignment around mission and tasks; and engage employees in an ongoing, continuous improvement dynamic that shapes and reshapes the nature of the work, our three key organizational agendas. As a strategy, leadership communication can either accomplish successful realization of these three agendas or fail to do so.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

Despite this, the employees . . . well, some didn’t get it, some got it but didn’t like it, and some liked it but believed it would never ever work. Employees grew cynical and frustrated as they saw jobs being changed, moved, or eliminated altogether. Many of those employees close to the marketplace saw the on-the-ground customer concerns and challenges much more clearly and much earlier than “corporate” did. But their insights and intelligence gathering from the marketplace never really worked their way into the CEO’s thinking.

The CEO’s plan unfolded, and initially it was successful to a significant degree. But success was built as much on the serendipities of marketplace preferences as on strategy. Later, when the numbers went south, the CEO confronted growing problems of morale, cynicism, and mistrust among the workforce. As repeated downsizing took place, the company lost important parts of its institutional knowledge and culture, including a significant number of more senior and longer-tenured employees.

Our CEO became frustrated, skeptical about the workforce and its inability to get behind the new plan. He understood the change strategy so well, recognized the need for it so clearly. Why couldn’t the employees grasp it, buy into it, and go with it? After all, there were repeated announcements and explanations.

This fable represents a composite of real people we’ve seen coping with real challenges. For us it illustrates how many leaders come up short as communicators, not because they lack oratorical skills but because they see communication as little more than oratory. They grossly underestimate the importance of communication strategy and of communication as strategy.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

A FABLE Once upon a time, there was a brilliant Fortune 500 corporate CEO. In fact, he was not only brilliant but also gracious, down-toearth, affable. People inside the company who knew him generally liked him. Now the corporation was at a crossroads. Like many venerable Fortune 500 companies, this one needed to enter new and unfamiliar markets, continue to make big profits at its old businesses, and somehow engage its tens of thousands of employees
around the world in this uncharted and difficult process.

But our CEO had a plan for the strategic change. It was big, daring, yet ingenious. Somehow it even answered the age-old consultant’s dilemma about organizational transformation, namely, “How do you change a tire on a car going 90 mph?”

Picture the plan for success sketched out on a marker board, with a proud and satisfied CEO speaking to his troops on closed circuit video. He had worked hard, built the right equations, and now conveyed that deep sense that this was the right and best direction to go.

Without doubt, he had communicated and worked with his direct reports in choosing and planning the changes that would have to happen. In addition, once the concept was largely in place and ready to go, he informed his thousands of employees about the changes. He did this through all the typical, conventional, but highquality employee communication tools at his disposal. Moreover, he did not just tell them once, but numerous times in many different ways.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

C H A P T E R 1. Leaders as Communicators
“[M]anagers are leery about communicating. Although some are willing to communicate before they have all the answers, they are concerned about the consequences of making a mistake.” —P??????? M???????, “R???????? C?????????”

And therein lies the dilemma. Leaders today often feel caught between “telling it like it is”—for many, the instinctive thing to do—and holding back (or just not telling it quite the way it is). Speeches about organizational goals and values, while easy enough to deliver, these days provoke questions and,
in some cases, doubts that give leaders second thoughts about offering substantive information in the first place. After all, responsible leaders don’t want to be caught setting expectations they can’t stand behind, or making promises they can’t keep.

And there’s another concern—about the amount of open discussion and give-and-take that can be tolerated within the organization as it strives to move smartly together in the same direction. Employees seem to have more things to say and more questions to raise these days, but it’s still the leader’s responsibility to make the decisions and live by the consequences.

Can We Talk The problem is complicated by the traditional nature of leaderemployee relationships in many organizations, and the ease with which employees and leaders fall into dysfunctional communication. Ronald Heifetz has suggested that “authority constrains leadership because in times of distress people expect too much. They form inappropriate dependencies that isolate their authorities behind a mask of knowing. And then everyone rationalizes the dependency.”

Under such circumstances, leadership communication can be little more than ceremonial: repeating platitudes and avoiding real dialogue. The senior leadership rituals of making cameo appearances at company events, conducting parade reviews at remote plants, and talking to the workforce via canned video broadcasts are perhaps the most obvious manifestations of this tendency. But to some extent, talking over (or around) employees is a risk that all leaders run. Unfortunately, many organizational leaders aren’t even aware of such examples of their failure to communicate, of not connecting with their teams.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

P A R T I
The Agenda for Leadership Communication
“We are raising the bar on understanding one another. We demand much more mutual understanding than we ever did in the past.” —D????? Y??????????, T?? M???? ?? D???????

Two significant developments in the lives of present-day organizations have important implications for those who lead teams, business units, or the entire organization. First, new generations of employees, particularly knowledge industry and other professional employees, expect to be not only well informed about their organization, but a part of the dialogue about where it is going. They want to know what management is thinking, and they want to have their opinions heard.

Second, organizations are more and more prone to merge, restructure, and rebrand. Because of this, employees increasingly experience discontinuity and disruption in their work and in their relationships with their company and one another. Indeed, because the terms of the “new deal” in the workplace typically limit the company’s long-term commitments to employees, discontinuity is almost a given. We contend, especially in the work environment of the twentyfirst century, that communication takes on even more importance because organization effectiveness is now measured more by human factors like intellectual capital (intelligence creating value) and social capital (relationships creating value) than by older factors like efficiency, waste, and absenteeism. Each one of these new human factors
in turn is influenced by how employees feel about and contribute to their organization and its work. At stake here are relationship issues of trust and morale and, ultimately, of productivity and retention.

Employees today have higher expectations for work communication than ever before. What these expectations look like and why leaders need to adjust their own approach to communication in response are the subjects of the next two chapters.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

A book about leadership communication runs several risks. Its contents can seem too obvious, belaboring ideas that are so commonsensical that they bring more yawns than insight to readers. It can focus too narrowly on “things famous people said”—the great speeches approach to leadership communication that makes for entertaining reading but leaves you not with usable strategies but with quotable quips. Or it can get too mechanical—“follow these twelve steps to
successful presentations”—leaving the reader with a bunch of formulas that rarely translate into anything natural enough to feel right or have the effect you want.

Our interest in how leaders communicate with their people and how they enable people in their organizations to communicate with one another has led us to write a different kind of book. We’re
fascinated more with how leadership communication works as a strategy to serve the three critical organizational agendas discussed above. This book is therefore about what leadership communication looks and sounds like when these three agendas are being well addressed and well supported. It’s a book about things leaders do to make communication a force for accomplishing important organizational purpose.

In writing this book, we have set two goals for ourselves: first to make our case to leaders and potential leaders that communication carries a make-or-break importance; second, to provide comfortable, easy-to-remember, easy-to-use communication tactics and tools that support key leadership objectives. We hope as you read on that you’ll see yourself in many of the situations we describe, that you’ll feel reinforced in some of the things you’re doing, and that you’ll want to try some of the things you haven’t done yet.
Taken From : THE LEADER AS COMMUNICATOR

Our final chapter begins by offering some guidelines for determining how your present leadership communication profile matches the attributes of the model discussed above. We provide two audit templates, tools to use to take a snapshot of your own situation, and some general strategies for assessing strengths and weaknesses. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of thinking about communication as strategy, and about using assessment and observation to develop leadership communication competency.
Taken From : THE LEADER AS COMMUNICATOR

One of the real challenges to leaders of successful enterprises is how
to resist standing pat, thereby becoming too locked into yesterday’s
solutions. How do leaders best communicate that it’s okay to report
an inefficient operating practice, pass customer complaints upward
so they can be effectively dealt with, and in general challenge the
status quo? How do leaders let their people know that they can add
more value to the enterprise by sponsoring constant evaluation of
present practices, with an eye to improving them? And how do they
provoke the surfacing of mental models—the fundamental business
assumptions that underpin the way we do business now?

Chapter 9 addresses leadership communication strategies for
combating smugness and complacency and for championing watchfulness
and inquiry. It emphasizes in particular the leader’s role as
questioner, and the ways in which leaders can routinely raise questions
and invite others to do so as well.

Dynamic organizations that actively challenge the status quo as
a means of staying fresh and competitive require leaders who can
use conflict and tension for positive ends. Chapter 10 discusses the
critical role that leadership communications can play in fostering
healthy contention and sponsoring debates that bring alternative
ideas into play. We look at several techniques for making such debate
(especially in staff meetings) more productive and less painful.

In the past decade, we were tutored on the importance of being a learning organization, able to constantly adapt and renew our companies and so stay ahead of change. While few argued against such a model, we are still notably ill informed about how to make organizational learning happen in our companies. Chapter 11 looks at the roles leaders can play in supporting continuous improvement activity. We focus especially on ways that leaders can get their people to share what they know, making tacit understandings more explicit so that others can benefit from them.

Organizations that lead change, rather than merely react to it, are organizations that know how to sponsor knowledge creation and then implement the best new ideas. Chapter 12 examines how leaders effectively stimulate experimentation and innovation, and create a communication climate that supports free knowledge exchange and feedback. We highlight an unusual basketball coach whose team reinvented its style of play and dramatically changed its performance.

In the concluding chapter, we try to kill two birds with one stone.We introduce two families of assessment questions, one about self-assessment and the other about seeking audience feedback, and we use both to suggest how to organize a leadership communication assessment and to review the ten communication roles we’ve just discussed at length.
Taken From : THE LEADER AS COMMUNICATOR