Change in the context of… communication

Most young and way too many old-guard leaders confuse leadership communications with giving orders in wartime: clear, hard edged, confident, and delivered with the voice of absolute authority. This bunch, confronted with a high uncertainty, shuts down communication because they don't think they have much to say. After all, they aren't certain, and, leaders should be certain. Or at least they need to appear certain. In fact, as uncertainty grows, leaders must not attempt to 'appear certain' and they must 'certainly appear'.

Human beings caught up in more uncertainty than is comfortable for them need to participate in a healthy, evolving dialog which confirms what is changing and what is not and keeps up a natural momentum of the group through the change. People need to know they are not alone. They need to have a sense of where the whole community is located. They need to get a whole story, which will include the dimensions of the new uncertainty. They need to be engaged in a conversation which, by its very nature, assists them to evolve through the change. They need to be continually invited, in subtle and non-subtle ways, to express their feelings, thoughts and urges to action. They need access to their fears by sanity checking them with their peers. They need to make enquiries and participate in learning experiments with others.

The formal communications activity in the organisation has a most profound access to the cast of characters. This access is wasted if the communications program is simply designed to pass top-down spin to the troops. Communications needs to be creating generative, useful engagements between stakeholders which, in uncertain times, keep the evolutionary dialog going.
In uncertain times, the really good stuff almost never comes top-down. It bubbles up. The best leaders show up as collaborators, listeners and role models of empathy and coaching, rather than answer givers and experts.

Communications need to be as real-time as possible, backed up by thought pieces that put the immediate into a realistic context from past into future. This is a bit like watching CNN for an hour to get the latest bits, reading the Economist for an hour to get a fortnightly view, and spending an hour with a non-fiction book exploring an in-depth history and an over-the-horizon futurist view of some aspect of the present.

Communications need to be learning-centred. We need to be prompted to explore from wherever we sit in the organisation. We need to be stimulated to ask questions of other learners. We need to write up and contribute whatever we think we discover and place it in a mix of what everyone else is discovering.

If I had to implement a change-worthy communications scheme using contemporary corporate technology I'd try something along the following lines:

Every manager of people would be writing a personal weblog. The deal would be to make at least three entries a week on whatever subject he or she is curious about or stimulated by.

All managers would subscribe to and read the other managers weblogs and add comments.

All the direct reports of every manager would read and would contribute to their manager's weblog.

Each manager would provide links to those weblogs from anywhere in the stakeholder community which seemed to have the most compelling, effective insights, ideas, and links.

The weblog system would be searchable. I could put in some key words that mattered to me and see in an instant what people from across the system are thinking and talking about.

All this stuff remains private to the company, of course, but it is not moderated. It is the real stuff. It might appear chaotic. But there will be rich patterns occurring over time. Thought leaders will appear. The formal communications entity will find all manner of material to use in their own work of building and reflecting coherent themes.

In times of high uncertainty, every manager would be required to spend an hour every fortnight with each of his or her direct reports doing a bit of coaching which includes a collaborative retelling of the current organisational story and the employee's specific place in the story. Adjustments are made. The deeper story evolves. Employees remember where they are in the big picture. Leaders have a living sense of where all their people are. Managers find recurring themes, insights and questions which they add to their weblog. Employees get into doing searches and making exchanges with others in the organisation which further evolves the place. In times of low uncertainty, the hourly sessions might slide out to every six weeks. But no less than that. It will vary from employee to employee. This, of course, requires leaders to see their employees as their clients rather than as their slaves. And this requires a view that management and leadership are at least as much about coaching as they are about planning, organising, staffing, directing and controlling.

The communications department peruses the logs, finding overall themes to explore in depth, explorations which will move off the electronic system, into hard copy, bill boards and baseball caps. Managers engage other managers on hot topics. A round table discussion with ten employees from all levels with the most senior manager is transcribed into a print article worthy of the Sunday Times magazine. A movie of the proceedings is posted on the web. MP3 audio of the event is available to be downloaded to one's iPod for listening on the train going home.

The communications department and HR and the Change Management team will be making sure that everyone learns about the realities of change and how to make something of it. Articles on the subject are presented. Workshops, master classes, and facilitation of change-critical meetings by visiting gurus all contribute to the change-worthiness of the organisation.

Change-worthiness organisational measures are invented and become part of each manager's performance contract.

The communications department keeps a weekly process going where thought leaders in the organisation tell their story of where we are and where we are going. Four or five of these pieces are combined with similar pieces from senior management and appear in print, web-video and web-audio. The idea is not to make anyone wrong, but to build the story from a wide variety of voices from a wide variety of corporate, customer and supplier perspectives. This is as much for the leaders as for the employees.

Alignment builds, uncertainty can be stated without bringing down the house, leaders begin to borrow material from the workgroup level and vice versa. Trust ensues. Sweetness and light emerge. All becomes better, even though the changes go on. The whole place gets the feeling they are engaged in a collective, creative process where uncertainty and chaos are experienced as opportunities rather than impediment.

The above is hardly exhaustive. But if we could actually deliver on half of it, our lives in enduring uncertainty might go far better.