Some Online Store

Figure 6-4. Getting to know the territory: topics to address.
? Customer Profiles and Customer Requirements. Who are they, what do they want, what do they value, what disappoints them, and how might things change in the future?

? The Playing Field. What market, regulatory, and technological factors significantly affect the way the game is played? (For publicly traded companies, what’s the role of the stock market and our relationship to it?)

? Competition. Who are they, and what do they offer that’s different, now and in the future (also, how do we fare against them)?

? How Work Gets Done. Who does what in the organization, and how are various operations organized and coordinated? How does the business work, and what are the costs of doing business?

? Information Sources. Where do I go to find out more, and whom do I talk to?

The worksheet was produced inexpensively, black and white on egular- grade paper. Armed with colored markers, participants could scribble, underline, and otherwise “customize” the worksheet as they talked. Worksheet discussions were prompted by a series of questions, contained in a booklet given to each participant. The booklets referred table groups to different data fields, asking them to consider possible implications for the company. Participants could also highlight key points, record notes, connect data fieldsthey felt held implications for one another, and so on.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

Like many energy companies, MidAmerican Energy Corporation (MEC) was worried about the future.6 A regional company serving customers in several states and overseas, MEC was concerned about the trend toward deregulation and the entrance into the marketplace of real competition. MEC knew that future prosperity, even survival, depended on its ability to win and keep customers who would soon have energy options to choose from. The organization would need to become, from top to bottom, a more competitive enterprise with a different outlook on its clientele.

The initial challenge to leadership was how to rally a workforce that had known only the environment of a regulated industry, where MEC, dealing in both gas and electric power, was practically a monopoly. MEC leadership felt one thing was obvious: Everyone would need to become more aware of a different competitive landscape already beginning to take shape. To set the stage, company leadership held an unusual kickoff at its annual management meeting, featuring groups of leaders discussing questions raised by a “planning worksheet” process.

Worksheets were big, measuring 3 feet by 4 feet. At the management meeting, cross-functional groups of corporate leaders, including the senior leadership team, had their own sheets spread across a table. The worksheet had the look of a game board, with different graphically displayed data fields arrayed around the sheet and cartoon drawings to “punch up” messages contained in the data fields. One field presented snapshots of other industries that had undergone deregulation; another, comparative statistics from other energy providers showing customers per employee and profit per employee; a third, maps displaying the new configurations involving power generation, marketing, and transmission made possible by new laws.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

In chapter 3, on meaning-making, we mentioned that many organizations have made significant attempts to enhance the “business literacy” of their workforce, the fundamental understanding people have about the nature of the organization’s business and how the organization actually functions. The assumption behind improving business literacy is simple: Employees will make more sense of organizational goals and objectives when they have a better understanding of the environment in which the organization works.

Leaders function as direction setters by helping employees understand better the territory in which the organization moves and operates. This territory can have several distinctive features, environmental markers that leaders can include in their discussions about organizational challenges and the journey toward organizationalgoals (see Figure 6-4).

If your workforce isn’t reasonably knowledgeable about these topics, the directions you set to guide future performance will notbe as clearly understood as they could be. It’s that simple.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

The agricultural division of a major chemical company used a balanced scorecard to set the stage for a conversation about priority goals between its leadership and the rest of the company. A group of chemists and formulators first became interested in a balanced scorecard because they felt it might create a more comprehensive way to set and communicate direction across a diverse population of professional employees. The group proposed to senior management that a balanced scorecard approach to goal setting and strategy building be considered.

Senior leadership expressed a willingness to try it and developed its own set of balanced goals for the organization (in a session facilitated by the CEO!). In a series of workshops, company managers then plowed through their own goal and indicator development exercise. The outcome was a platform that leaders could talk from when they met with their own teams to set direction for team priorities.

The company also chose to tie its performance appraisal process to the balanced scorecard platform, so that a truly unified communication could be made to all employees about what was important and how performance would be measured.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

? Use data only if your audience will understand it. Consider your audience before you consider the data—its needs, backgrounds, perspectives. If data is there mainly because you like it, consider dumping it and make your points in other ways.

? Use data to help tell a story; don’t make it the story. Incorporate data into story plots that tell of organizational quests, journeys, victories, anddefeats. This is the best way to help your audience make sense of data.

? Use graphs and charts to present a lot of information and make it quickly and more completely understood. They can help an audience read data and make numbers come alive in ways that columns and rows of figures will not. They can also fit data into basic plotlines.

? Avoid the “scoreboard syndrome.” If people haven’t seen the numbers yet and could use the feedback to guide further action, then telling them the score is important. Otherwise, leaders fool themselves in thinking that numbers by themselves can inspire, motivate, or otherwise communicatereasons for action. The numbers need to tell a story.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

One potential “plot” structure for integrating different data to good advantage with employees is the balanced scorecard. In recent years, the concept of a balanced scorecard using a “family of measures” to define goals and provide performance feedback has gained a considerable following.5

To our mind, this approach provides a way to effectively bring measurement data into a conversation about organizational goal setting, strategy building, and performance evaluation. In storytelling terms, it’s about defining the quest, mapping the journey, and recounting the adventures along the way.

Balanced scorecards help make direction setting more disci-plined, while inviting several different “story lines” to play out simultaneously, much as they do in the real life of organizations. They also allow leaders to tell a story serially, based on regularly measured performance against goals. Perhaps most important, they bring greater clarity and specificity to the way in which leaders define goals and strategy. When leaders use a balanced scorecard, they can rely on more concrete indicators to communicate progresstoward a goal.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

? Expose your reasoning. If you tell people what’s behind your directions, what your assumptions are, even what alternatives you might have rejected, you can count on two things happening. People will understand your directions better, and they’ll see that you have confidence in them (we address this tactic on a larger scale in the next section when wedeal with enhancing “business literacy”).

? Invite questions—and wait for them. All too often the tag line “Are there any questions?” is spoken automatically, with no expectation that there will be any (we’ve actually witnessed speakers ask the question with their eyes still focused on their notes, making it impossible to see if any hands might be raised). The best tactic here is to make a point of waiting for at least five seconds, while you deliberately scan the room, so that you show your audience your invitation is sincerely made. (In large staff meetings at our former company, the CEO would ask for questions after his remarks; if none came, he started questioning himself,and he didn’t just ask the softball questions.)

? Summarize. Hit the key points one last time. They become the “takeaways” that people will retain.

Yet data presented well can improve the clarity and impact of leadership communication. Data can be used to raise questions, make a point, draw a conclusion, or substantiate a decision, just to mention a few applications. Feeding data into a presentation can bring concreteness to an otherwise abstract message and specificity to an otherwise vague or unclear one. Figure 6-3 contains ideas forusing data to enhance a presentation.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

? Focus on a single objective whenever possible but make sure you show clearly how it fits in with everything else. Discussing multiple objectives can be distracting and cause one objective to compete for attention with another.

? Limit your discussion to two to three key points. More than that, and people simply will not remember what you said. Multiple message points dilute the impact of the really important things you want to get across.

? Prioritize your key points. If you make it sound as if everything is of equal importance, you could well leave employees wondering which direction they should run in first. And since there doubtless is some sense of priority, don’t assume your audience will be reading them in the same order you do; tell them.

? Translate strategy to operating terminology. The closer you can get to language that describes what people will need to do, the better they’ll understand what the action implications are. If you don’t talk about the actions you want, people will tend to do the same things in the same ways as before.

? Repeat yourself. The old adage “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them” is still a useful
organizing principle that contributes to better understanding and remembering.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

Former CEO of SAS Jan Carlzon once said that “the leader’s most important role is to instill confidence in people.”4 One way in which leaders instill confidence is by being clear and understandable when they talk about what’s important to the organization. If people can’t understand their leaders’ directions and why those directions are worth following, they’ll lack confidence in their leaders and in their own ability to carry the directions out. The strategies we discuss are all about delivering messages that are understood, both directly on their own terms and more broadly as part of the organization’s mission and work.

To begin with, the “tactics for keeping it simple,” outlined in chapter 5, work not only to enhance trust levels, but also to make communications more actionable. Figure 6-2 contains a set of tactics for leadership communication, spoken or written, to nurture clearer understanding regarding actions to be taken.

Using Data to Clarify Direction All too often in presentations, leaders resort to using data in ways that shut down communication. Rolled up, interim performance results expressed as various financial ratios (and for extra points, with the formulas that generated this stuff ) can make audiences’ eyes glaze over. When shown to an audience that has no real control over the numbers, your data simply doesn’t communicate. Other times, data becomes a stick used to threaten or punish.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

But let’s be honest. Making sense in organizations can be a complicated task, where problems aren’t always well defined, where issues are many sided, and where directives and directions are likely to come from several different sources at once. Employees look to their leaders to bring order to complexity, but the order is not always apparent. We would argue that coping with complexity is a challenge for everyone in an organization, and that imposing order over that complexity is what effective leadership communicationaims to achieve.

Communication Filters
Here’s what leadership communication is up against. In any organization, people are likely to filter the communications they receive according to:
? What they’ve heard before on the subject, and what they think they already know ? What they’re hearing from other sources, including the grapevine (typically thought to be more credible and reliable than you!)
? What they think you want them to hear (versus the “real, hidden” agenda)

Leaders tend to think in the same terms and filter their messages through their own assumptions as to how people think, what they want to hear, how informed they already are, and how much understanding they have on the subject. People if asked would say they want communication to be simple and straightforward. But no matter how straightforward the outgoing communication, they will want to interpret it in complex and roundabout ways, using those ever-present filters. In fact, we can’t help ourselves: We’re programmed through evolution to have doubts and to screen for hidden meaning, and often, especially in organizations, such filtering helps us to cope and survive, and succeed.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator