Bloghound

Yesterday I talked with a CEO client, one of the smartest, most positive and respected executives I’ve ever worked with. He, like most CEOs today, are creating plans to slash expenses, people and programs. “I’ve been through a number of recessions, but nothing like this,” he explained, with not a trace of optimism.

The greatest challenge is treating people who are losing their jobs humanely and with dignity. The second challenge is keeping remaining employees engaged during such uncertain times. A Gallup poll shows that companies with engaged employees grow earnings 2.6 times faster than those that don’t. In this economy, that may mean that companies with engaged employees make it, and those without  will not.

Here are eight communications suggestions for these difficult times:

1. Create  online alumni communities ASAP – a place to help find new jobs,  provide encouragement and support, get financial advice on how to keep life together, etc. You can be up and running with  Ning community in less than 30 minutes for less than $30 a month.
2. Don’t paint a rosy picture on a bleak landscape: people know things are bad, don’t pretend they are not.  Be clear about your business situation and what you believe the company needs to do to survive and come out stronger.  For every action, help people understand the why behind it. You’ll earn more trust by being real vs. trying to put a “good spin” on a difficult situation, that will continue to be fraught with uncertainty for at least another four fiscal quarters, if you can trust the economists.
3. It’s not about transparency, it’s about fairness and caring: Employees must feel that you care about their personal well-being. A recent Harvard study found that “even well-meaning organizations can destroy trust if they are perceived as being fair but callous.”  Get out of the office and into the field with your employees so that you can both experience their worlds and show that you care and that all the HR  “employees first” mantras are more than just rah rah.
4. Tie every decision to your corporate values: take out those values and use them as the guide for making decisions and communicating.  If you really believe the values, they will guide executive decisions in a way that will resonate with all your stakeholders, particularly employees.  In making announcements, explain to people how the decision supports the organization’s values.  And if the values are not helping to guide decisions,  you know that the vision/value exercise was a failure.
5. Start with managerial incompetence: the largest driver of employee trust, according to the Harvard study, is managerial competence. In looking where to reduce staff, don’t simply cut by salary range or management level. Make sure you keep the A players, and excuse the mediocre. This will earn trust and motivate employees.
6. Put Enterprise 2.0 tools in place to make it easier to work: with fewer people needing to do more work, make it a priority to provide company-wide 2.0 tools (wikis, blogs, communities, forums) that make it easier for people to find help and resources within the company, collaborate, solve problems small and large, and connect as people with other people.  Most of these tools are inexpensive, easy to install and require little training.
7. Sit in the chair: last year a communications manager of a large retailer put two chairs in the company lobby and made herself available to employees who wanted to sit and talk. The response was overwhelming. (Read more here.) Sometimes small gestures go a long way, especially in such stressful times.
8. One point at a time: My tennis partner, a financial CEO,  and I were recently getting crushed in a match. He came over and gave me this advice: “Take it one point at a time.” We did, and we came back and won.  In such stressful, uncertain periods this same advice may be good for business as well.

The greatest impact of Web 2.0 on our culture is that people expect to have a voice and input into company and organizational decisions. Sure, this has always been true to some extent, but today people are taking action when they feel that management is ignoring them. (Note to executives: while you may feel like you are communicating, that’s different from making people feel heard. How they feel is often more important than all the usual rational communications strategies.)

One example: last week nurses at a local hospital — Kent Hospital in Rhode Island — voted 290 to 214 to join the United Nurses and Allied Professionals union. The reason? The nurses said that didn’t feel like they were being heard.

In a story in the Providence Journal psychiatric nurse  Debbie Almeida said, “Over the years the whole climate has changed here. We felt we no longer had a voice in things.”

Nurse Rose Desnoyers added, “The reason I wanted to see a union here was basically for respect. Money is not the issue.”

With the community and social networking tools available, it’s much easier to open up discussions and invite employees to engage in a genuine way and in a large scale. The only obstacle is management mindset.

We’re working on one project where the senior management initially poo-poo’d our recommendation to set up an online community for employees to talk about the issues. “They hardly use email.”  “They won’t participate.” ” What if someone starts trouble.” “This is more of a working class crowd, they’re not into that Web stuff.”

Instead of taking no, we created a private community using Ning, put up some discussion forums, showed it to management and suggested we invite employees in and try it. Worse case, we close it.  The response from employees has been quite good. People are offering insightful ideas in the community. Others are talking to their friends at work not in the community and telling them that management is really trying and the community shows it.

Our only obstacle: the company’s corporate parent blocked employees from being able to access the community at work. So people have to access the community from home and use their personal emails to register. And, due to hourly employee regulations, we have had to explain to folks that the community is optional. If they felt it was mandatory for their jobs and could only access it at home, the lawyers felt that we would be liable; employees might think, they warned, that looking at the community at home was part of work and demand to be paid overtime.

Fortunately, the CEO we’re working with is a risk-taker, squarely focused on his employees and his customers. The lawyers and corporate naysayers are secondary.

We’re working with another client who has yet to embrace social media but whose employees are also being courted by unions.  This company’s lawyers, too, block employees from being able to access the corporate intranet at home due to the same fears about hourly workers. And senior management and the lawyers worry about what might happen if they open up discussions and forums. What if someone starts trouble?

Seems to me that be trouble is already in the works. The risk of not opening up and really listening to employees — and acting on their often very good suggestions or helping them understand why their thoughtful ideas can’t be implemented — is unionization. And with unionization comes management issues of another magnitude.

In reading about the nurses at Kent Hospital it’s clear to me that they love their jobs and have a passion about the hospital.  Same with our clients’ employees. Most people want to work for successful organizations and most willing to share ideas have good ideas.

So why not learn how to really listen so that people are heard?

PS — If anyone has examples of how to get around legal issues, and open up employee communities and corporate Intranets so people can access from home, please share!

Thoughtfulness should be on the top 10 core business beliefs and values, suggests Tom Peters. I couldn’t agree more. It’s a biggie with a lot of power — and the ability to differentiate a company.

From Tom’s blog yesterday:

Thoughtfulness is even more encompassing than character. It is transactional—applies to literally every internal and external transaction—as well as something that resides deep within.

I like the idea of showing up for work in a place that cherishes thoughtfulness.
I like the idea of doing business with a service provider known for its thoughtfulness.
I like being a vendor to an outfit that’s thoughtful.
All this is X10 in troubled times.

Thoughtful is not “soft.”

We know that Web 2.0 is creating a new participatory culture of work, with people helping one another vs. going up the  traditional management hierarchy,  with an expectation of transparent,  two-way communications, with the view that everyone has a voice regardless of title or tenure.

What does this major culture shift mean for managers — not CEOs, but middle managers? A redefining of roles, new skills and qualities and new performance guidelines. Yet,  in my work lately I’ve noticed two things among diverse types of companies:

• Companies aren’t helping to redefine these middle manager roles and coach these managers on how to manage differently. These people are struggling, in some cases suffocating.
• Because these roles aren’t changing as fast as the adoption of new ways of working, companies aren’t realizing as many of the gains from social media — innovation, getting more value from resources, speeding problem solving — as they could be. At such a difficult economic time, we need to bust down the barriers to speed, innovation, efficiency and effectiveness.

Dusting off servant leadership qualities

What are the  most important management skills in this new collaborative world?  Some great insight can be found in “Servant As Leader,” the 37-page essay  written in 1970 by Robert Greenleaf, who had been director of management research for AT&T.

These ideas are 38 years old but seem pretty relevant. (Pardon the use of “he”; Greenleaf was from another generation.)

1. Initiative: He initiates…and takes the risk of failure along with the chance of success.
2. Focused on outcomes: By clearly stating and restating the goal the leader gives certainty and purpose to others who may have difficulty in achieving it themselves.
3. Listening and understanding: True listening  builds strength in other people.
4. Language: Nothing is meaningful until it is related to the hearer’s own experience.
5. Withdrawal: The ability to withdraw and reorient oneself, if only for a month, presumes that one has learned the art of systematic neglect, to sort out the more important from the less important, even though there may be penalties and censure for the neglect of something else.
6. Acceptance and empathy: The servant always empathizes, always accepts the person but sometimes refuses to accept some of the person’s effort or performance as good enough.
7. Intuition: Intuition is a feel for patterns, the ability to generalize based on what has happened previously. The wise leader knows when to bet on these intuitive leads, but he always knows that he is betting on percentages — his hunches are not seen as eternal truths.
8. Awareness and perception: When one is aware, there is more than the usual alertness, more intense contact with the immediate situation, and more is stored away in the unconscious computer to product intuitive insights in the future when needed.
9. Reject coercive power and authority: The trouble with coercive power is that it only strengthens resistance. And, if successful, its controlling effect lasts only as long as the force is strong. It is not organic. Only persuasion and the consequent voluntary acceptance are organic.

The two I find especially compelling and where there seems to be the greatest lag in training: #3 and #6.

Your thoughts on Management 2.0 qualities/skills?

Hillary’s Clinton’s speech last night was intended to unite the Democrats, persuading those who voted for her in the primaries to support Barrack Obama. As a communications analyst I can tell you that the speech did not succeed.

The intent of Clinton’s speech was not to garner support for Obama. Instead, Hillary talked about Hillary. The speech largely recanted her experiences on the campaign trail. It was Hillary’s swan song to Hillary and her almost-successful campaign.

While her style was articulate and strong, it failed to affect behavioral changes because it was too controlled and too clinical. Her gestures of support for Obama were clearly stated, but not deeply felt. Reason without genuine emotion rarely succeeds in changing people’s minds, never mind their actions.

Michelle Obama’s speech on Monday night, on the other hand, was effective. She was articulate, passionate, accessible, and aspirational. Unlike Clinton’s detachedness, Michelle Obama combined reason and genuineness. No wonder there are so many Tweets and posts flying around that say: “Michelle Obama: 2012.”

Why is it that many of us who are fairly smart do stupid things? While doing research on why CMOs fail, I came across a book that has some relevancy, Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, by Robert J. Sternberg, IBM professor of psychology and education at Yale. The most interesting chapter is by Harvard researcher David N. Perkins, who believes that you can be really smart but not know when to engage your smartness, and the extent to which this happens is “stupidity.”

Perkins highlights eight deadly sins of the stupid smart person:

1. impulsiveness (doing something rash)
2. neglect (ignoring something important)
3. procrastination (actively avoiding something important)
4. vacillation (dithering)
5. backsliding (capitulating to habit)
6. indulgence (allowing oneself to fall into excess)
7. overdoing (like indulgence, but with positive things)
8. walking the edge (tempting fate)

While I’m early into the research, my hypothesis is that CMOs fall into stupid territory most often by engaging in #s 1, 5 and 8.

Your thoughts?

Forget conventional wisdom when it comes to managing corporate reputation. In fact, transparency matters the least in building stakeholder trust (employees, customers, suppliers, investors) and can actually erode trust, according to a fascinating new study by Harvard University’s Michael Pirson and Deepak Malhotra, published in the summer issue of MIT Sloan Management Review. (”Unconventional Insights for Managing Stakeholder Trust.”)

The authors studied four different organizations to find out what matters and to whom. Highlights:

• Transparency is over-rated. In fact, transparency can diminish trust depending on what is disclosed. Also, it has little relevance in terms of building trust.
• Integrity is important, but. Stakeholders close to a company (employees and customers) need to feel that the company genuinely cares for their personal well-being. Integrity alone doesn’t cut it if people feel the company is being fair but “callous.”
• Trust is built on different types of competencies. Employees and investors look for management competency. Customers and suppliers more concerned about technical and quality competency.
• Shared values is hugely important to all stakeholders: All stakeholders want to associate with organizations with values they identify with.

“We have found that that although value congruence matters most to employees, it is also an important factor for every other stakeholder group we studies. In other words, stakeholders of all types are interested in associated with organizations with whom they can identify — and with whom they perceive a match in values.”

This study has interesting implications for marketers and corporate communications professionals.

• Trust means different things to different stakeholders.
• Marketing needs to focus more on two key trust-building factors: the company’s genuine interest in their customers’ success and well being, and the company’s technical ability to deliver quality products and services.
• What beliefs? It’s essential to clearly articulate the company’s values and beliefs. (Maybe even help uncover them. ) In my experience few organizations — especially marketers — focus on these beliefs, or even know what they are. But as this study shows they are critically important to building affinity and trust with customers.

Naming your organizations’ beliefs can guide decisions and inspire talent much more effectively than the traditional mission statement, which is usually pretty flat, descriptive and, well, boring.

Here are some examples of organizations’ beliefs.

Google

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.
3. Fast is better than slow.
4. Democracy on the web works.
5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.
6. You can make money without doing evil.
7. There’s always more information out there.
8. The need for information crosses all borders.
9. You can be serious without a suit.
10. Great just isn’t good enough.

Zappos

1. Deliver WOW Through Service
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8. Do More With Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be Humble

And my firm, Beeline Labs:

1. Deliver the wow and the whoa
2. Activate change
3. Go fast
4. Try new things; OK to fail
5. See new possibilities early
6. Don’t compromise; the work needs to be meaningful
7. It’s all about delivering business value
8. Bee vs. me
9. Integrity rules

What are your organization’s beliefs? Please share!

I was recently invited to share my views on the effect of social media on the 2008 Presidential Campaign for an upcoming feature article in the Public Relations Strategist.

Here are a few highlights:

Is the use of social media mainly tactical or strategic?

• If a goal of the candidates has been to convey a message of change, the use of social media represents a clear change from traditional ways of reaching out to and engaging voters.

• If a goal has been to engage with young voters, the use of digital has been a hugely successful strategy. According to Rock the Vote and CIRCLE (Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement), voter turnout among 18- to 29-year-olds has doubled and tripled in almost every state primary and caucus. These young voters’ preferred way of learning about candidates and participating in the campaigns is through social media and word of mouth marketing. According to a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press study that looked at voter behavior, two-thirds of Web users under 30 use social networking sites, and only 25 percent watch television news for campaign news.

• If a goal has been to manage positive and negative feelings about the candidate - and help people connect with candidates’ personal characteristics — social media has been strategic for Obama, but far less so for Clinton or McCain. Obama has shared more about himself- and social media is about people wanting to connect and share with people. He has also used a relaxed conversational communications style vs. speaking in “message points” during interviews and in videos. Clinton and McCain have used social media more as a channel, filling it with traditional “produced” videos and ads. Clinton and McCain haven’t adjusted their content or communications style for the new medium nearly as well as Obama, although Clinton has done a better job than McCain.

How has social media changed the game of the campaign so far?

The three biggest impacts of social media on the 2008 campaign:

1. Fund raising: Changed the game on how candidates raise money, putting more power with the everyday people than in any previous race. In March alone Obama raised $40 million, largely from the campaign’s 1.5 million Internet donors. According to Clinton’s campaign she raised $2.5 million after winning Pennsylvania primary and asking people to go to her site and donate. According to the most recent Federal Election data, 43% of contributions to Obama’s campaign have come from donors of $200 or less, compared to 27% for Clinton and 20% for McCain.

2. Traditional media: Changed the influence and role of traditional media, with more and more people going direct to hear and read about the candidates - viewing speeches on YouTube vs. TV, and going direct to sources vs. reading journalists’ coverage and analysis. For example, after Obama’s speech on race in March, the transcript of the speech “ranked consistently higher on the most emailed list than the articles written about the speech,” according to The New York Times (“Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass it On.” )

3. Advertising: Showed the diminishing effectiveness of “packaged” TV advertising. Leading up to the Florida primary Mitt Romney spent $29 million on 34,821 ads, more than three and a half times as much as John McCain who spent $8 million on 10,830 ads, according to analysis of data through Jan 27 by the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project. The effect of the big advertising spend? No lift for Romney who soon pulled out of the race.

In addition, millions of people are tuning into candidates via video vs. TV ads - on their campaign sites and on YouTube and other video sharing sites. Obama’s speech on race, “A More Perfect Union,” has been viewed by almost 4.5 million people on YouTube since March.

Pope Benedict plans to text thousands of young Catholics during World Youth Day in Sydney in July; the church plans to also set up a Catholic social networking site and use digital prayer walls. The goal: make the Catholic church more relevant to younger churchgoers.

Good for the rather conservative Catholics to use new ways to connect — especially in view of the declining number of members of the Catholic Church in many Western countries like the United States and Belgium. According to a recent Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life study:

Catholicism has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes. While nearly one-in-three Americans (31%) were raised in the Catholic faith, today fewer than one-in-four (24%) describe themselves as Catholic. These losses would have been even more pronounced were it not for the offsetting impact of immigration.

The question for the Pope, as it is for all marketers,  is whether using social media tools can help  attract and keep members without also changing the message and experience.