Facilitating Leadership Communication

At Intertech, we start setting guidelines for communication on a new employee’s first day.  We hand out an Intertech Communications Guidelines document.  At about a dozen pages in length, this document has a series of practical bullet points on communication.  Below are just a few:

  • “I don’t know” is okay, especially when teamed with “I’ll find out.”  This is much safer than bluffing.  It shows you are honest and you are not panicking in the face of a challenge.  If you follow up with an answer quickly, it shows you are responsive.
  • Listen.  Seek first to understand then to be understood.  When you sense someone’s upset or miscommunication has taken place, listen without going through what you plan on saying in your mind.  If appropriate, to make sure you’ve understood the issue(s) restate what the person said.
  • Act with character, be committed and divide and conquer.  Adversity tests character and shows others how we are “wired” at our core.  Our leadership and the customer will reward and remember behaving with character and being committed to solving problems.  If you lose heart when adversity comes, your only strength will be weakness.

We’ve institutionalized communication through:

  • A yearly “Town Hall.” At our Town Hall, employees discuss, in the absence of the leadership team, how we’re doing as a firm.  After the Town Hall, an employee who facilitated the event anonymously shares the feedback.
  • Huddles.  Throughout the firm, we use huddles – stand up meeting where we’re talking about what’s happening – big updates, stuck items or problems, and track metrics.  Huddle frequency is based on a person’s role in the firm.  For example, at a leadership team level, we do daily huddles.  For our software teams, we call out to them once a week to check in on project status (many of our teams use Agile and Scrum approaches to application development so they’re doing daily huddles).
  • A weekly newsletter.  This newsletter shares what’s happened over the past week and important upcoming events.
  • A monthly all company meeting.  In this meeting, we cover updates on strategic goals, sales, R&D, and our P&L.
  • A social network.  We use a product called Yammer for internal dialog throughout the day—employees post ideas, questions, and updates.

Along with the institutionalized communication, nothing beats just talking with people as you run into them in the hallway.  A simple, “What’s the best thing that’s happened today?” can get a good conversation going.

Next: Leadership communication elements

 

 

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The Reasons Behind Changes in Leadership Communication

This is the third post in a series on leadership communication.  This series is based on an article in the June 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review by Groysberg and Slind.  In it, they cite five core reasons behind the dramatic shift in leadership communication over the past decade.  The reasons are economic, organizational, global, generational, and technological:

  • Economically, the increase in service and knowledge-based industries has increased the need for faster, frictionless communication
  • Organizationally, companies are flatter and faster with more decisions being made by front-line employees
  • Globally, employees can be around the world.  This demands infrastructure for conversations
  • Generationally, younger workers don’t hope for two-way conversation from their leaders, they expect it
  • Technologically, the internet and social media platforms make communication instant and around the clock

In the next post, I’ll share specific ways that we support leadership as a conversation at Intertech.

 

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Leadership as a Conversation and Communication

As shared in the first post in this series, Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind in June’s Harvard Business Review wrote about leadership as a conversation.

They state in today’s connected and flatter organizations a communicate-and-collaborate style not commmmand-and-control works best.

“The command-and-control approach to management has … become less viable. Globalization, new technologies, and changes in how companies create value and interact with customers.”

Communication today is more dynamic and connected.  Further, even if the person in charge doesn’t want those under them to have a voice.  They do.  For great proof of this, look at the Arab Spring.

In Building a Winning Business, I dedicate a section of the book to communication.  To be successful, communication needs to be institutionalized and backed up with systems and processes.  At Intertech, we’ve done this–from an enterprise “Intertech-only” social network to leadership team daily huddles at day’s end to a yearly Town Hall where employees, minus management, share their thoughts on the business.

Next post:  The leadership communication new realities

standardJuly 26Tom SalonekLeadershipcommunication

Leadership Is a Conversation

“Leadership” is a lot like a U.S. Supreme Court Justice once described pornography: “Hard to define, but easy to recognize when you see it!” All joking aside, defining leadership is important for those of us who are interested in being effective leaders.

A recent Harvard Business Review (June 2012) article, “Leadership is a Conversation” by Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind, does a great job of defining positive leadership through the art of conversation. (The two also teamed up to write the book, Talk, Inc.: How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power their Organizations, Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). In my book, Building a Winning Business, I dedicate five chapters in the leadership section to the topic of communication. There also are five other chapters sprinkled throughout the rest of the book on the importance of communication, including chapter 18 (Involve the Team when Defining Values), chapter 28 (Let Everyone Weigh In), chapter 41 (Communicate at the Beginning to Avoid Problems at the end) and chapter 46 (Communicate Early and Often).

So, please believe me when I tell you that I’m excited about this new work by Groysberg and Slind, which goes way beyond the One Minute Manager concept and includes observations based on interviews with nearly 150 people at more than 100 companies: large and small, blue chip and start up, for profit and non-profit, U.S. and international. Building upon insights and examples gleaned from this research, they developed a model of leadership called “Organizational Conversation,” which they define as having the following attributes: (1) intimacy, (2) interactivity, (3) inclusion and (4) intentionality.

“Talking with employees, rather than to them, can promote operational flexibility, employee engagement and tight strategic alignment,” notes Groysberg, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and Slind, a professional writer and editor.

I’m going to take some time to explore “Organizational Conversation” as a leadership model in my upcoming posts. I’ll also share some of the lessons learned along these lines at Intertech. Please share your thoughts and observations too. After all, a conversation can only happen when there is an open exchange of ideas and information!

Next post: Just what, exactly, is Leadership Communication?

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