Strategic Internal Communication

How to Build Employee Engagement and Performance

David Cowan

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780749478667
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sviluppo organizzativo
• Index: Business

Previously restricted to cascading information and managing day-to-day conversations, internal communication is now essential to empowering employees to deliver business strategy. Strategic Internal Communication shows how to design and implement a strategy which will lead to engaged and motivated staff, increased productivity and consequently improved business performance. The book uses the author's own Dialogue Box tool designed to help companies explore more thoroughly what kinds of conversations they need to have with employees to address internal and cultural challenges. It helps transform organizations into open and transparent communities to ensure that entire workforces are committed to the overall business vision.This fully updated 2nd edition of Strategic Internal Communication includes new information on how to use Dialogue Box during times of transition and organizational change. It also gives advice on how to manage difficult conversations and avoid damaging miscommunication and misinterpretation. Supported by examples and case studies from the author's own experience, Strategic Internal Communication is an indispensable guide to creating an integrated and collaborative culture which will take your organization to the next level of success.

05

Zone 1: Intelligence – how organizations and people think

The great German writer Goethe said that to act is easy; to think is hard. Organizations do a lot of thinking, from product design through to creating their strategy. In communications, it is the thinking component that communications work mostly focuses on: getting the strategy right, writing the media release, crafting the presentation, and other intelligent tasks. This is why it is Zone 1 of the Dialogue Box (see Figure 5.1 on page 116). However, I want to extend this thinking process in the Dialogue Box, to connect thinking to connect employees emotionally. The idea, the words to explain the idea, the strategy to connect – all of these actions involve crafting the right message and understanding the audience. This is important work, but all too often the thinking stops when this work is done, when in fact this is only the beginning. This chapter will address how to understand and build the intelligence in the Dialogue Box for a more thoughtful and connecting way of communicating.

So, what is intelligence?

At its simplest, intelligence is our capacity to be rational and pursue a path of reasoning to reach a decision or conclusion about something. It allows us to discern what we can know and understand why something might be unknown. Having intelligence means we have a capacity for knowledge, and that we are able to take what we know and use our reasoning to systematize it in order to make sense of the data we have before us. It is also our capacity to be objective, to step outside of ourselves and see situations and events from a bird’s-eye view and make decisions that affect us and others; we are able self-consciously to think of ourselves as part of this whole process. Another crucial element of intelligence is our capacity to act ethically, and to make decisions on the basis of what is good, which may not necessarily be what we want to do but what we believe is the right thing to do; which is not to say we will do what we should, however intelligent we are! We do not do this in isolation – there is both individual and group intelligence. This means that as individuals we can have intelligence and do all these things I have defined as intelligence, but it also means that as a group of people we can create intelligence and do all these things on a group basis, interdependently or in a supportive manner. All of these aspects can be the focus of our attention, and one aspect may sometimes take precedence over another in vying for our attention. However, there are some significant drawbacks to the intelligent process of rationality and reasoning, not least of all the fact that emotions and our subconscious influence the process, which is precisely what the Dialogue Box identifies as necessary to achieve overall success in our communication.

There are many barriers to reaching intelligent conclusions, and one problem for intelligence is that the discernment of what is or can be known can be eclipsed by the unknowns, the things we don’t know, cannot know or are only revealed to us by later information or events. In our reasoning process we may suffer, or struggle, with insufficient knowledge. We also have certain biases and make certain assumptions. We try to fill in the gaps, and in so doing our attention can be steered in the wrong direction, or our eyes fall on the wrong element and our decision or viewpoint is thus faulty. There are occasions when we are unable to systematize to make sense, and hence we need to fill in the gaps based upon assumptions or by seeking out new information. In such moments we may well hold tentative or temporary notions of the complete picture and revise accordingly. There are occasions when we have a diminished capacity to be objective, and our intelligence is usurped by emotions or biases leading to a triumph of a subjective over an objective view. In such circumstances we ignore the facts that do not fit and over-value the facts that do fit to bolster our subjective case. There are occasions when we are challenged by the understood ethical norms, and intelligence allows us to still make use of these norms or rules of thumb to achieve an equitable result. There are occasions when our intelligence is unable to appraise events fully for a number of reasons, which may be because there are key events not occurring that we would expect or had been told would be a precursor to the troubling event. It may be that key information we would expect is not established. Another reason may be that we are struggling with our approach to an event or information because the way is not adequately prepared or because we have been kept in the dark. Hence in a meeting it is good when people are fully introduced, rather than being left to try to figure who an individual is, thereby being distracted from the task of engaging with them. So many occasions where we may fail to have accurate intelligence!

Ordinarily, when a company or organization makes a decision there is much intelligence at work involving many intelligent individuals in the process. There may be many hours, weeks, months and more put into reaching the decision. The decision will have been well researched, discussed in many committees, focus groups and with multiple internal and external parties. Many presentations will have been made, and feedback built into making the decision more robust. So far, so good. Why then is all this intelligent work undermined in the blink of an eye? The answer is emotion, which we will explore in the next chapter. If you recall my example of the company closing down a facility in Chapter 2, this will be used as our example here. Like many major decisions, let’s assume this move is announced to the outside media, perhaps at a media conference or in a media release with various specific interviews. In this context, we can only admire the intelligence of the decision or plan, assuming the media portrays the decision in a sympathetic way. The media will ask questions, probe and discuss the decision or plan in a remote sense. Their objective is to see what the story is for them, asking if this is a valid approach, does it have great impact on the local community, will it send the share price up, will it lead to job losses, save the company or draw the wrath of politicians? In other words, is it newsworthy? Any number of news stories or narratives may emerge, depending on the size of the organization, the nature of the decision and its interest to the outside world. The deciding question is simple: does the media narrative match the desired narrative?

The narrative battle you fight is that the decision or plan has its own narrative, the one the company or organization has based its own thinking on in order to reach the decision and the trajectory that is foreseen by the decision-makers. The media conference seeks to get that narrative reflected in what appears in the newspapers, on television and online, but the media will have their own ways of testing the decision and as a result form a different narrative. Media specialists internally and external consultants help to craft the message and materials in order to sell the organization’s narrative, or at least to get the reported narrative as close as possible to the organization’s narrative. Whatever the outcome, the media reporters are approaching the decision or plan intellectually. They don’t really have any emotion vested, except in getting a story or being motivated by a big story or smelling a rat. The question is, are they convinced by the message and narrative they’ve been presented with and will they more or less report the desired narrative? Hold this thought – we will return to it in the next chapter. The point to take on board here is that the work done on the decision or plan has been based on intelligence and it has been announced with this intelligence to an objective audience. We can admit that there has been some emotion that has gone into the planning, but again we’ll hold that thought until the next chapter.

Let us stick with understanding intelligence in the organization and the way decisions are made. When I speak of intelligence I mean it in many ways, not merely as something intellectual or deep thinking. Intelligence is a much bigger word than this, which may explain why people get scared by the word. We should not be scared, because we all have intelligence. As human beings we have this amazing thing called the brain that makes us more self-conscious than other species on our planet, and also makes us more concerned about our future and how we plan for it, aside from the purely instinctive. Animals act with instinct and will make their moves accordingly, but this is all in a short timeframe. An animal being chased will run for cover, but plans little beyond that. Each day an animal plans its movements according to light and dark, the need for food, and such like. Human beings look beyond short timeframes and basic needs. We plan our individual lives up to retirement and death, and we organize our societies for this generation and the generations yet to come.

We are also creative, spiritual and thoughtful. As human beings, we are not hardwired but our brains are wired in a particular way. Our brains are governed by the ability of neurons to forge new connections, to blaze new paths through the cortex, even to assume new roles. We can rewire our brain, and consciously develop our intelligence to learn new things. Our brains do a lot more than those of other species, and we have the capacity to rationalize about ourselves and our situation. We are also conscious of our end, and seek spiritual paths to address our current existence and ideas of what lies beyond this life. We are, in other words, complex intelligent beings. While we often refer to what a rational and reasonable person would do in a situation, thinking through all the angles of a problem, we cannot get the full picture if we exclude the elements in the other zones we will discuss. But even in this zone, intelligence is not simply what is rational. In intelligence we use a lot of educated guesswork and rules of thumb. The brain also has the subconscious, which contains a lot that we, as the name obviously suggests, are not always aware of. When we calculate distance, for instance, we are subconsciously using a range of mathematical data and equations to make a judgement about when to apply the brake on a car or position ourselves to catch a ball in flight. Our brain has this built into it, and we barely pay attention to the fact we can do this and do undertake a lot of work in the brain that goes without us slavishly rationalizing step by step.

However, we also have to recognize that our minds are limited. Each of us, to varying degrees, has limited knowledge, intelligence and attention spans. These are tested when faced with choice and change. Despite the widely held belief that more is better, in other words lots of choice reflects our independence and individuality, in fact the human mind can only cope with so many choices at one particular time. Often for the brain it is less that is more. Offering employees more choice does not necessarily make them feel more empowered or better rewarded. Likewise, we are creatures of habit, some more than others. Offering ‘exciting change’ is not necessarily enticing or even acceptable to employees. Among the most controversial decisions a CEO or leader can make is to change the work schedule or workspace of an employee. We think we always have to think ‘outside of the box’ but the brain often wants to live inside the box, and assesses situations and data to fit within a box. It is easier to analyse three choices than thirty. Faced with an overwhelming choice, we in fact tend to resort to familiar choices, things we heard of, or just plain make a lazy decision. We then fall into habitual practices. Even choosing the familiar is often an extension of lazy thinking. I say this not to insult or lay blame, after all we all do this at some level. Some of us may love to analyse and offer a fantasy league World Soccer XI line-up involving a lot of choices and analysis of choices, but prefer to choose one soap powder over another because of habit or familiarity.

In making choices our brains exclude data, trying to strip away the extraneous to get at the essential. However, in this process our level of knowledge, assumptions and other factors come into play in excluding things, sometimes to the detriment of a good decision, which might explain why so many bad decisions are taken! Making choices is about making sense of a variety of data points and what we see before us. We have documents and reports, we meet people and influencers, and we have a range of assumptions and a sense of the trajectory for these assumptions, all of which combine to make a decision and all of the time involve us in seeking to make sense. It is not simply that we have all the data and just need to make sense of it; quite the reverse is often the case, because data is missing. The eye is a camera, with a lens that makes sense of data. This extends to how we approach situations that at first don’t seem to make sense. We fill in the missing pieces and try to complete the incomplete picture we are presented with. Again, we do not do this entirely rationally; we are influenced by a variety of factors. In an organization we are surrounded by influencers – people who can have a say on what we think. The right, or wrong, thing said at the wrong, right, time can have enormous impact, because it may cause us to fill in a gap we see and forms the basis of what we decide we know about a person or situation. It may not, however, be the missing piece. In the politics of an organization, this is where vulnerability creeps in, as rationality yields to perception. In understanding perception, we see that knowledge becomes negotiable.

The power of knowledge

Knowledge is power, we’ve all heard that. It leads managers to hold on to information as a power play. It can be used at critical points to influence a decision. Organizational gatekeepers will guard knowledge or information to maintain their authority or control over a person or situation. Their possession of knowledge makes them attractive, and it seduces people into a particular power relationship with them. Here’s the thing. Francis Bacon wrote that money should be like manure, effective only when spread about. Information and knowledge are the same. If knowledge is shared then it can produce teamwork and results, spread like manure to grow a nice crop of success. If it is hoarded like manure in a barn, it will soon begin to stink. How smelly is your organization? This is a seemingly silly question to ask, but I’ve asked it and you should be able to answer it.

Another thing about knowledge is that it is frequently observed we live in a knowledge economy. The role and importance of knowledge are frequently talked about, as if it were purely something objective to be captured, stored and used. I contend knowledge is much more dynamic than this, because it is much more nebulous than this common picture implies. It is perhaps not surprising then that most organizations struggle with knowledge management. This is not a book on knowledge management, but there are some important aspects of knowledge that are relevant to discuss here. Knowledge is part of intelligence, since it impacts how we think. In situations of low knowledge we are in learning phases, and more reliant upon external resources and consultants to create knowledge within the organization. The more we know then the more we can create and innovate new products, services and, of course, knowledge. This all contributes to the organization’s knowledge capital, and the ability of your organization to be a learning organization.

A key reason for knowledge being difficult to grapple with is the speed of change. What we know is changing all the time, and we are constantly creating new knowledge and making old knowledge redundant. We can start a major project and quickly find ourselves in a race against redundancy. On one level we love technology, and all the possibilities of finding knowledge that it opens up to us. I have to confess that doing my PhD was so much easier with modern technology, to the extent I find it hard to imagine how people used to do PhDs with pen or typewriter. I could edit and rewrite more quickly. I could access research all over the world, and consult texts, journals, reports and other research sources from my own computer, rather than having to travel to the source. In this respect, the role of technology is welcomed as an enabler.

However, it i...