Blogging and Tweeting in Search of a Purpose

The previous blog entry here stimulated a number of private emails to me. It felt like a lot of people were nodding in agreement. Clearly, it struck a nerve. An editor friend shared with me a parallel experience she's having at work.

Her company publishes a series of specialized ink-on-paper trade magazines for niche subscriber bases – old-time media, in other words. The powers-that-be in her company are trying to stay ahead of the curve, as well they should. For some time now, they have been alert to the impact of the Internet on their products and audiences.

To that end, they were early in launching web versions of their half-dozen magazines, available to subscribers for no additional cost, where readers can find supplemental and updated information about topics covered in the magazines. That’s a smart model and one that a number of other print publications have been following – to their benefit.

But now, her managers are latching onto the buzz of social media as the next new thing. Her boss said that if they don’t get into social media, they’ll be left behind.

Perhaps. But, as she wisely noted, the meeting at which this idea was launched was devoid of any discussion of readers’ media preferences or habits. There was also no dialogue about the appropriateness of tools like Twitter and blogs to carry their messages and information to their target audiences, or what specific type of information would be offered in these new media.

Instead, the discussion centered largely on how social media works, who should do what, and when the effort will be launched. In the end, as my friend sighed, it will mean more work for the editors and writers.

This kind of discussion should really be about the interaction between a content provider and its audience. On the one hand, the audience’s preferences must guide the choice of media. But on the other hand, the disseminator of information has the opportunity – some might say the responsibility – to move its audience along the curve of technological innovation. It’s a delicate balancing act between what the audience will accept versus the content provider’s desire to advance its business model.

Innovation is like that. After all, where would we be today if Steve Jobs had dismissed the idea of the iPod 10 years ago because people didn’t listen to music and manage their music collections that way? What if Steve Jobs saw the music business through the narrow lens of the Tower Records model? (Remember Tower Records?) After all, it could have turned into a major flop. Fortunately for Jobs and Apple, it didn’t. His target customers “got it.” And they got on board pretty quickly.

To cite a metaphor, suppose I had approached last weekend with the good intention of doing some long-postponed household chores. What if the first thing I did was to open my toolbox and grab three random tools: a hammer, a screwdriver, and a socket wrench. Then I went to do my household tasks. What’s wrong with that picture? Obviously, I selected tools before assessing the nature of the chore. So I had a wrench, a screwdriver and a hammer in search of the appropriate job where they might be useful.

Sounds silly. No one would operate that way. But isn’t that, in fact, what a lot of people do when they seek to communicate to a discrete audience by pre-selecting a given medium without thinking through the needs and desires of the audience? It’s exactly what my friend’s company is doing.

Without so much as a simple poll of readers, this organization is going to force its editors and writers to start tweeting and blogging. Why? “Because everyone else is doing it and if we don’t start now, we’ll be left behind.”

I’ve seen similar thinking inside other business organizations, where communications professionals (who should know better) think that it would be nifty if their CEO started tweeting to employees, or began writing an internal blog. Perhaps it was the boss’ idea to start with and the communications pro felt powerless to resist. Consider Dilbert’s “pointy-haired” boss, who torments Tina, the tech writer:

Certainly there are cases where a CEO has plenty to say to his/her employee audience, where blogging or tweeting makes perfect sense because they are the quickest, easiest and cheapest ways to have on-going dialogues with that internal audience. But beware of the initial excitement that often peters out after a few weeks, as the CEO loses interest and/or enthusiasm.

As noted in my previous blog, I’ve seen these kinds of ventures start out great guns, only to fade away because the CEO runs out of things to write about, or finds he/she doesn’t have the time. At that point, as often happens, someone in the communications department starts writing it for the CEO, thereby defeating the whole purpose of the exercise.

No matter the technology, no matter how sexy and exciting it may feel to be tweeting or blogging in 2010, if your audience is not in a position or desirous of following your tweets and blogs, you’re wasting your time and money, while risking losing the trust and interest of your audience.

Instead, do your homework. Find out more about your target audience: who they are; how they like to get the kind of information you’re providing; whether they are comfortable with social media; why they come to you in the first place for that information; and the specific type of information they want and expect to find on blogs or tweets, to what level of detail. Until you probe for the answers to those kinds of questions, save your time and money and put the blog and Twitter on the back burner.

Employee Communications vs. the Employee Newsletter

At one time or another, you’ve undoubtedly found yourself having to explain what you do for a living to someone completely unfamiliar with your discipline. If your field is employee communications, as mine is, and someone at, say, a neighborhood party asks, you’re eager to slip into your rote 30-second elevator speech (if you have one) before he can say, “Oh, employee communications. I know, you write newsletters.”

Sometimes, I’m tempted instead just to say that “I work for the federal government, but I can’t talk about it,” give a conspiratorial wink, and leave it at that – better that than the alternative of explaining why “employee communications does not equal employee newsletters” to someone who won’t care to understand the difference and will quickly lose interest in your refutation.

Amazingly, I ran into a variation of this absurdity earlier this year when invited to pursue an assignment to help improve the internal communications of a local company. The business employs nearly 10,000 people at several sites around the U.S. and Canada. The head of Human Resources had sought outside support for the employee communications team that reported to him.

His “team” consisted of three hard-working, dedicated and intelligent (though very junior-level) people. I quickly sensed they were overwhelmed and poorly directed, and that they were looking for shortcuts to get things done – “things” being that which they sensed their boss wanted done or what he told them to do.

With respect to communications, their types of shortcuts aren’t always good things. I’ve seen companies grow too comfortable with their established modes of communicating. These tools become part of the fabric of the organization, even after they’ve lost any meaning or value to their audience. Unfortunately, I got the impression this was the case here.

I soon concluded that their desire to “improve internal communications” really came down to wanting an outsider’s fresh approach in order to improve the quality of the monthly employee newsletter: i.e., better-written and more interesting stories, and more appealing layouts and graphics. Roughly half of the employees did not have access to computers, so the tried-and-true printed newsletter was how they learned about their company – if they were interested enough to read it.

But had anyone gone to the trouble to determine whether in fact this tool was the most effective way of reaching the employee audience? Was it bringing them the information they wanted and needed? Were people actually reading the newsletter? Was it relevant to them? Was it opening employees’ minds to new ideas and new ways of doing their jobs? Were they connecting its messages to where the company needed to go? What were they doing or expected to do with the information gleaned from its pages? Or were copies of the newsletter just filling mailroom trashcans?

As I began to ask those questions, I sensed they were not being well received – nor would I likely get cogent or informed answers.

When I asked for examples of other internal communications, I was shown a series of sporadic emails from the CEO and his management team on a range of minor and major topics. There was also an “inter-active” on-line “CEO’s Forum,” its most recent entry more than two months old. The inter-active component was not apparent. It was all one-way. An occasional “Letter from the CEO” appeared in the newsletter.

One person said that the CEO and/or his team held infrequent “town hall meetings” to make important announcements, though she couldn’t remember the last one or its core message. For that matter, she couldn't tell me the last time she had spoken to any of the senior people or seen them on site.

The problem at this company and, no doubt, others today really boils down to this: It has become too easy for leaders and managers to let technology do their communicating. In fact, executives are not communicating effectively when their communications are simply emails, newsletters, and on-line postings, where the medium becomes more important than the message. Media, no matter how sophisticated, do not engage employees in the business and its vision.

When a company’s definition and understanding of “employee communications” is a newsletter or email, or when information is expected to “cascade” (I hate that term) down into the organization as if by magic, it’s likely indicative of a deeper, more harmful problem. It means that little consideration is being given to the real communications that should be occurring within and across the organization – the daily face-to-face exchange of ideas, insights and information between and among leaders, managers and employees; communications in which leadership engages the organization in the company’s mission and vision.

And when that’s the case, when leadership is trying to take the company one way while the employees are going in the opposite direction because they’re misinformed or uninformed, the problems multiply and fester, resulting in poor financial results and weak long-term growth prospects.

Because the decision-maker in this case, the head of HR, seemed so set on fixing and improving the newsletter as the solution – without fully appreciating or even being interested in delving into the company’s deeper issues and challenges – I took a pass on the opportunity. This company’s problems were far more than a boring newsletter. They were, in fact, far worse than its HR director knew or could have imagined. No sense beating my head against that wall.

What's Your Story?

Organizations going through significant change risk the imminent danger of people losing focus on the central mission, lacking a full appreciation for and understanding of the change, its impact on the company and, most important, their role in the transformational process.

That kind of result is understandable since organizational change often encompasses new ways of doing things, and the discarding of outmoded practices. People can easily become disoriented.

A clearly delineated story about your company, its purpose and where it’s going will help you focus your organization’s best talents on the things that matter most to drive meaningful results.

Organizational change typically results from a merger or acquisition, external shifts in the markets in which the company operates, or response to a new competitive threat. Similarly, it can come about when there is change in the top leadership, when a new CEO brings with him/her a new strategic direction.

Whenever internal or external forces impose abrupt transformation on an organization, it is critical that employees quickly gain a clear understanding of the change and get their bearings so that their talents, energies and thinking are focused on the right things. The alternative is a lot of wasted energy focused on mundane matters of little or no consequence to the company’s new mandate. Worse, companies’ most talented and valuable people can often become disillusioned and disconnected, focusing their energies instead on finding new employment elsewhere.

The best and quickest route to keep people on board, moving proactively toward the new challenges, is through the development and deployment of a narrative that tells the new story clearly and succinctly, and then making sure it’s used consistently across the organization.

The narrative is a distillation of the appropriate words and descriptors of the change: the rationale behind it; the external and/or internal forces that mandate the change; how the organization must adapt; where the change will likely take the company; and the facts that support the change in direction.

Narratives, executed effectively, enable managers at all levels to gain quick employee understanding of what exactly has to change in the company and their jobs. The narrative helps managers interpret the change for their own particular unit in terms of what people need to do differently, appropriate to where the company as a whole needs to go. To borrow a tired cliché, it gets everyone rowing in the same direction.

The narrative is reached through consensus of the company’s leadership and communications professionals. It provides them and all managers with consistent language to help them talk about the change and its impact on and importance to the entire organization, as well as the individual operational and functional units, and employees.

Individual employees, then, more readily connect their role and responsibility to the larger picture, able to draw a direct line of sight between what they do and where the organization now needs to go, and then how they need to change what they do to support that.

An apt metaphor for an organization going through such change is an aircraft carrier. There are hundreds of unique jobs on a typical carrier, all toward the common mission of delivering a navy’s forward strike capabilities.

The carrier’s mission changes often. There may be a new attack target, or the carrier might be directed to a new port. If an attack is called for, the carrier must get itself as near to the action as possible, as quickly as possible, then position itself into the wind to assure that the fighter jets achieve maximum lift for take-off. Just to do that demands precise execution by countless officers and sailors assigned to a range of jobs.

So when the carrier’s mission changes, everyone must take the new mission into account in how and what he or she must do, and when it must be done. The commander’s job is to delegate to his officers the task of making the mission’s story relevant to their respective crews so that each crew performs its tasks appropriately, precisely and in a coordinated manner.

As often as an aircraft carrier’s mission may change, it is not hyperbolic to compare its rate of change to that of a business organization. In this age, amidst the current economic turmoil and uncertainties, companies must remain nimble, able to tack and change course constantly.

So what’s your story? As your company’s mission changes to accommodate market fluctuations, a new acquisition, or a new strategic direction, that change will similarly impact what people do, how they do it, and when.

Your ability to tell a clear, coherent story will prove to be an invaluable tool, assuring that managers across operations and functions are well informed and plugged into the organization’s new direction. And well-informed managers, with a clear narrative at hand can make that new mission relevant and meaningful to their teams, helping them stay on course.

We, The Jury

Years ago, while impaneled as a jury member on a medical malpractice case against a practicing obstetrician, I learned an important lesson about people, a lesson applicable to employee relations and communications.

This very complicated medical malpractice case involved a lot of unfamiliar medical jargon from expert witnesses, as well as the physician defendant. I toiled to comprehend and link the various aspects of the case, to sift out the deeper significance of the testimony and separate the truth from the exaggerated. But I was troubled by something else.

Frankly, because I was struggling to make sense of it, I was concerned about the ability of my fellow jurors to comprehend the complex details of the case and pass judgment appropriately. As we retired to the jury’s chamber, it was clear to me that the doctor was innocent and I fully intended to vote that way. But I wondered about the other members of the jury.

In my cynical, college-educated view, I cast a skeptical eye at my fellow jurors. Ironically, while sitting with a panel of my peers in judgment of a doctor, I was instead passing judgment on those very peers.

All but two jurors (myself and a young woman) were blue-collar workers. I assumed they had not been able to follow the details of the case and would likely cast a vote based on the emotions of the case – i.e., that they would find in favor of the plaintiffs because they would identify more with the poor working class woman and her husband (who was newly unemployed) than the (presumably) wealthy doctor, awarding them (and their lawyer) several million insurance company dollars.

Boy, was I ever wrong. It was a quick decision. On our first vote, we, the jury, unanimously found the doctor defendant not guilty.

One jury member suggested it would be inappropriate for us to return to the courtroom immediately, that it would give the appearance that we had been frivolous in our deliberations. So we snacked on donuts and drank coffee while we talked animatedly about the case.

In the subsequent discussion, the proverbial scales fell from my eyes. Not only had these “rubes” followed the details of the case but some of them picked up angles that I, the sophisticate, had missed.

I chastised myself and felt ashamed for being such a judgmental elitist, for assuming that my professional career choice, coat and tie, and college education endowed me with greater common sense, insight, intelligence, and reasoning ability than these others. And, so I learned an important lesson that has stayed with me ever since, giving me valuable insights into front-line employees.

That was a long time ago. But what I know today is that if there is a central guiding tenet of employee communications, then it is the basic dignity and respect that people in a working environment deserve from their employer, recognition for their innate intelligence and common sense.

Providing employees with relevant and helpful information in a timely manner demonstrates that respect for them as individual contributors. It says that everyone here has a role to play; it says how and what one person contributes to the greater good is just as critical as anyone else in the organization.

In many business circumstances, however, people are not treated that way. Some managers are attuned more to their own rank, experience and educational background in relation to those they regard as their subordinates, and ignore the basic intelligence others have and their desire and ability to contribute. And so they talk down to them, treat them as inferior, and communicate with them accordingly.

Regardless of your rank in the organization – CEO, vice president, or supervisor – you should always operate as though the average employee is eager and fully capable of making important contributions to the organization. He/she is intelligent and possesses common sense built over years of experience both on and off the job. Let them prove otherwise. But until then, you’d be mistaken to assume the opposite.

Communicate to employees as your peers, not as your inferiors. Give them more information than you think they need. Recognize that people aspire to grow within organizations and learn, and that information gives them more insights into the business so they can do that on their own terms.

Don’t make the same mistake I made and misjudge your employees. Don't assume you know what information they want or need, or what they’ll do with what you give them. Don’t assume they won’t understand it or can’t master its complexity. They will see it through their own lens – different than yours – process it, and draw conclusions that may not coincide with your own.

And maybe, just maybe, you might gain a new insight into how better to run the business because you trusted the unique worldview of someone you assumed was your lesser.

One Leader's Approach to Communications

In January 2001, as President-elect George W. Bush began forming his cabinet, he selected Paul H. O’Neill, then CEO of Alcoa, to become Treasury Secretary. As is its habit, The New York Times featured a lengthy profile in its January 16, 2001 edition that, as it turned out, intrigued me not so much for its political theater but rather for the lesson it held in leadership communications.

It was a compelling story that I’ve kept all these years. On occasion, I share it with clients and colleagues as an example of effective executive communications that broke the mold of what people usually think of as “communications.”

As the article noted, O’Neill was known for his business acumen. He came to Alcoa from International Paper where he had been president. Alcoa then was on the ropes, losing money, closing plants and laying off workers. What struck me was the way O’Neill turned around Alcoa and the role that his unique approach to communications played in that reversal – communications that consisted of conscious actions and a sincere concern for employees.

In 1987, at the time of O’Neill’s assumption of the role of CEO, the global aluminum business was struggling in the midst of a commodity glut and price war. O’Neill directed Alcoa to reduce production rather than the route his predecessor had taken, which was to cut prices.

But he had a longer-term vision that he began to execute in the context of the downturn. O’Neill articulated shared corporate values and the importance of building internal consensus. And he leveraged the issue of worker safety to do it.

As the Times article noted, “O’Neill engineered a financial turnaround… [by] promoting worker safety as a way of improving productivity…” An Alcoa director observed that the approach served to inspire employees, “build coherence, and enlist the passions of his staff.”

When he took over, his predecessor had been initiating a plan to diversify the company. O’Neill deep-sixed the plan, and instead broke up the company’s command and control structure, substituting 20 autonomous units to better respond to customers, each reporting directly to him.

He also dialed down the corporate excesses that had long before taken root in the company’s culture, selling corporate limousines and jets, and cancelling executives’ country club memberships. He also moved his office out of the executive suite and into a cubicle among staff. But his major focus was on improving productivity, and that’s where his focus on worker safety came into play.

Certainly worker safety is a critical issue in any industry, particularly one like aluminum production. But O’Neill saw the benefits of safety beyond its obvious altruism: its potential impact on the company’s bottom line. As he explained it, a production process that resulted in worker injuries was a flawed process, incapable of making high quality products efficiently and cost-effectively.

So he instilled safety into the company culture and made it the recurring theme of all of his communications. Most important, because he was the CEO and because he made worker safety important, it also became important to all his managers, and therefore important across the entire organization – a central feature of truly effective employee communications.

Regardless of the audience, including meetings with non-Alcoa people, he opened his speeches with a discussion of safety, not only about how he was improving it at Alcoa’s plants, but also personalizing it to the audience members. Before launching into his speech, he would point out the emergency exits from the meeting rooms and why it was important to be aware of that.

He would also talk at length about the importance of safety in the workplace, even if the audience were Wall Street analysts whose primary interest lay in revenue and profit forecasts. His larger goal was creating a cultural change. “If I can unify employees on the obvious issue of safety,” he told one audience, “then I can unify them behind return on investment and assets.”

He certainly got the attention of the unions. He was focusing on an issue – workplace safety – that’s always important to any union’s leadership. Once he had their attention, he promised job security if the workers worked smarter and more efficiently. That led to revisions in rigid union contract language to enable greater on-the-job empowerment for the workers and, ultimately, increased productivity.

The effort paid off. When he started in 1987, Alcoa’s work force numbered 59,000 while the company’s annual revenues were $1.5 billion. By 2000, it employed 140,000 and posted revenues of $23 billion.

The then-head of the United Steelworkers of America, George Becker, said that O’Neill’s emphasis on worker safety was “very sincere” and “one of his strong points.” Becker’s observation underlines the effectiveness of O’Neill’s communications. It was the sincerity and the single-minded focus that got people’s attention. Through that avenue, he was able to achieve the cultural shift necessary to remake Alcoa into a world power aluminum producer.

As this tale illustrates, there is no limit to the means of communications available to senior executives, only one’s imagination. The key is not so much the means or the subject matter as it is its relevance to the audience – in this case, personalizing the value of a safe working environment to the people most affected by it.

Fill in the blank. Pick a different audience. What issue will get their attention, especially if your communications on the subject are sincere and passionate like O’Neill’s were about worker safety? I guarantee that you will connect with your audience and fully engage them in the business’ vision. And, you will likely see positive results on your bottom line.

Carpe Diem

Recently, my wife and I were driving down a two-lane Maine backcountry highway on a sunny Sunday morning. It was a good, safe road, recently repaved, with broad shoulders and plenty of room for passing slower vehicles.

I was doing the speed limit of 55 miles per hour in a straight stretch when I saw a big tractor-trailer rig in the distance, coming towards us at about the same speed. As the truck neared, I could see it was a fully loaded flatbed trailer of assorted items. But I also noticed the load at the rear was not well secured and appeared to be coming loose.

As it got closer, as though in slow motion, I could see it was a vertically stacked pile of scaffolding parts and, to my horror, it seemed about to fall off the truck into our path. Our combined speed was probably over 100 mph so there was little I could do in that split second. We passed one another in a flash, just as the metal tumbled sideways off the truck into our lane. I saw it fall in my rear view mirror, close enough that we also heard the loud clattering of metal pipes on pavement.

And then the immensity of the moment hit me. A millisecond made the difference between what had actually happened and might have happened. The “might have” could well have meant our instantaneous deaths – or at least severe, life-threatening injuries – if the heavy metal scaffolding had landed on the hood of our car and crashed through the windshield, if I had braked instead of maintaining my speed.

That “might have been” stayed with me for days and still haunts me.

As a teenager and into my young adult years, I was often a bit reckless and took a lot of unnecessary risks, mostly involving outdoor sports like downhill skiing and mountain climbing, sustaining my share of broken bones and other assorted scrapes and bruises. But never did I have such a harrowing near-death experience as I did in that brief instant on the country highway.

In reality, it’s the knowledge of what might have been that haunts because, had I glanced away at that moment, I might never have known how close we came to utter disaster.

Still, it gives me pause and a new insight into the notion of fully appreciating the present, of being in the moment and making the most of it. Every day is a new day, with new opportunities, and every moment is fresh. Yet, we get lulled into our daily routines and time can pass without our notice, or it passes too slowly in our eagerness for the next event.

We focus too much on the short term – the planned weekend activities, the coming vacation – and we forsake the moment we are in. Catch phrases like “Monday blues,” “hump Wednesday” and “thank God it’s Friday” become part of our weekly lexicon, as though time can’t move fast enough for us and there’s always something better soon to come.

Rain may spoil our day’s outdoor plans, but that doesn’t mean it’s an ugly day or that it’s a lost day. We need to take them one at a time. I hate summer days that are hot and humid because they limit my options and make me want to stay in air-conditioned comfort. But it’s still a distinctly separate day with its own identity, and I need to learn anew how to seize it and make the most of it.

The Latin phrase, “Carpe diem,” which means "seize the day," has become a cliché of sorts. I’m no Latin scholar, so I went looking for its origin, and learned that it was from a poem by the Roman poet, Horace.

The poem translates into English as follows:

Don't ask (it's forbidden to know) what end the gods will grant to me or you, Leuconoe.

Don't play with Babylonian fortune-telling either.

It is better to endure whatever will be.

Whether Jupiter has allotted to you many more winters or this final one which even now wears out the Tyrrhenian sea on the rocks placed opposite — be wise, strain the wine, and scale back your long hopes to a short period.

While we speak, envious time will have {already} fled.

Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next.

As I’ve written here before, we need to learn to be here now, to approach our everyday surroundings as though we’re discovering them anew, as though we’re tourists in our own hometowns.

We should greet each day as though it’s our last, approach our own backyards as a frontier, and be with our friends as though we may never see them again. Let’s vow to fully appreciate the moment, regardless of what we’re doing: working or playing, laughing or crying.

Employee Recognition: Keep It Simple

Recognition is among the purest, most effective ways of communicating with employees. Recognizing people is also one of the best ways to reinforce the behaviors that support a business’ purpose, vision and strategy.

Why, then, do so many companies and managers do such a poor job of it? A lot of bosses don’t even say “thank you” when an employee puts in an extra effort. Some act as if to say: “So what? It’s their job, isn’t it?”

The subject of employee recognition is top of mind lately because I’ve been following an intriguing on-line discussion the past few weeks on Linked In, at its Employee Communication and Engagement section. There have been a lot of predictable answers to the question about how best to recognize and reward employees, involving both narrowly focused and complicated methods, as well as tired, conventional actions.

I’m pleased to note, however, that the recurring theme of the discussion is that the simple “thank you” and acknowledgment go far – especially when received from the CEO and other senior executives. Recognition needn’t involve rewards or money, nor must it be overly complicated.

Here’s an entry in the discussion I liked. “[Saying] ‘thank you’ for a job well done goes a long way… I hear stories in focus groups about how good people felt when a boss, manager, [or the] CEO popped by and said thanks; how [it made their day when] the senior manager took a few minutes to say ‘hello’ (and perhaps ‘thank you’); [or, conversely] how bad and deflated others [felt] when they poured their energies into something, only to feel ignored and inconsequential; how senior managers visiting a site/department whisked in and out without a word to employees, [making] them feel like they didn't count.”

Toward improving the internal climate, one person cut to the core meaning of thanking people, noting, “Simple courtesy and respect. Two simple things that most of us were taught at an early age, and if we were not fortunate enough to have received this in our youth, at least most know how good it makes you feel to be treated with courtesy and respect.”

At base, it is the CEO and his/her senior staff that determine the strategy and direction of the organization. So when individual contributors and/or teams are doing the good work that drives the organization towards those ends, the top people would be wise to set the standard and acknowledge it by saying “thanks.”

A number of discussion participants wrote about using internal communications vehicles to spotlight people’s good work. One typical comment was, “If you have a corporate newsletter or an Intranet site filled with articles about what's happening in your organization, well-written, compelling stories that highlight individual achievement can be your cheapest and most effective way to recognize deserving employees and teams.”

That’s fine, provided the primary (and first) acknowledgment comes directly from the person’s manager or a more senior person in the organization.

The following story, posted in the on-line discussion, was so poignant that I include it here in its entirety. The contributor had excerpted it from a longer article on the subject from Entrepreneur.com. It speaks for itself…


”Some years back, a custodial employee working for one of my clients came up with an ingenious way to eliminate a slip hazard for customers on wet or snowy days. A story about it, with a photo of the employee, was featured in the company newsletter. This company routinely mailed copies of its newsletter to the children of any employees highlighted within its pages, with a personalized note that read, ‘Your daddy's picture appears on page 2.’

“Several weeks later, management held a staff meeting and invited questions about their quality improvement program. The custodian rose to his feet and reported that the day his two children received the newsletter, he'd been greeted with a hero's welcome when he got home. His youngsters wanted to hear how his picture came to be in ‘the paper.’ The kids had subsequently brought the newsletter to school for show-and-tell, and the teacher posted it on the school bulletin board for a week. His kids felt like celebrities at school, he said, as if their dad had been on the cover of Time magazine. He went on to acknowledge that he'd always assumed they were somewhat ashamed of the janitorial work their father did for a living. This expression of pride from his own children, he said, was the most personally rewarding experience in his entire 30-year career with the company – and if this was the kind of thing management meant by ‘quality improvement,’ he wanted them to know he was ready to do anything he could to help. With that, he sat back down. Things were strangely quiet in the meeting room for a few moments after his remarks.”

Recognition, even when it seems simple, can be powerful stuff.

The Value of Empathy

Empathy, “the capacity to recognize or understand another's state of mind or emotion,” is a powerful competitive advantage within a business organization.

Truly empathetic managers are often the best, most effective managers because they have a better, clearer understanding of how their employees operate and what motivates them, and so are better able to lead a cohesive team focused on a common purpose.

The surest path to empathy is the personal, first-hand experience. Many of the best managers, those with profound empathy, are those who worked their way up in their organization – which is why the wisest company founders/owners don’t merely pass on the mantle of leadership to their children but make them earn it.

I witnessed this first hand a number of years ago at a client company. Founded in the early-1960s, the specialty-manufacturing firm grew and thrived on the genius and drive of its founder, who had left a promising career at a global industrial company with nothing more than his ideas for a better company around a core product line and how best to produce it and deliver it to a target customer base.

As a youngster, his son Ollie often hung out with him on weekends, walking the factory floor, listening in as his dad talked shop with his employees.

In high school, Ollie swept floors and did general janitorial work as his summer job. Over the years, through college and post-graduate business school, he always worked part-time during the summer months in the plant doing the dirtiest jobs. It was what his father wanted. Upon graduation, his dad put him through the paces and by the time he reached his late-30s, Ollie had worked in every department, including billing, field sales, manufacturing and customer service.

By the time I got to know him, Ollie was head of marketing, a capable marketer with a keen understanding of his company’s product lines, its markets and, especially, its customers and their world.

Ollie eventually became president while his father moved into an advisory role as chairman. The company continues to thrive, and I know one of the biggest reasons for its success is the fact that its president knows his company intimately, from every perspective.

Most important, though, he knows the people who make it work. He knows from hands-on experience and first-hand observation what it takes to do each job. He knows the dedication, intelligence and perseverance of the many employees that are the foundation of the company’s success.

So it would stand to reason that a company that hires an outside manager or CEO with little or no first-hand knowledge of the company’s inner workings and its people is asking for trouble. And the truth is, statistics show that outside CEOs and senior managers have a less than positive track record. So consider how one company approaches that dilemma when they have no choice but to hire an outsider.

A friend and colleague told me the personal story told to him by the general manager of one of the premiere hotels at Walt Disney World in Orlando.

This eminently qualified gentleman had been hired by Disney to run its newest, plushest hotel. He had come from a major hotel chain where he had gained a number of years’ experience running several of its properties around the world.

He reported for his first day on the job impeccably dressed in suit and tie, but soon learned he had over-dressed. Handed a workman’s jumpsuit, he was told that his next six months would be spent learning how the hotel really operates – from the ground-up, starting with maintenance.

It was an eye-opening experience as he rotated between behind-the-scenes jobs. He unclogged toilets and fixed balky air conditioning systems. He cleaned guest rooms and changed bed linen, bussed tables in the restaurants, toted room service trays, served drinks at the bar, hauled garbage, cleaned the swimming pools, and worked the front desk and the reservations line.

In all his years in the hospitality business, he said, he had never fully appreciated how hard so many people worked to make the guests’ stays pleasant and enjoyable experiences. Imagine what he learned about his employees’ workaday lives and how he carried that empathy back with him when he returned to his suit-and-tie uniform in his role as hotel general manager. Imagine the unique insights he gained into the inner workings of the marvelously complicated machine that such a hotel really is.

The Walt Disney Company is a unique organization, focused on innovative engagement at all levels. Every employee, no matter the operation, no matter the job, is referred to as a “cast member.” A concerted effort is made to maintain a positive work environment, which in turn leads to engaged employees who feel motivated, inspired and committed. Workers at all levels have the ability and control to deliver on the Disney mission statement: “To make people happy.”

The company’s namesake and founder, Walter E. Disney, said it best: “Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards – the things we live by and teach our children – are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.”

That’s a pretty good definition of empathy, too. Don’t you think?

Postscript: In response to this blog post, a good friend sent me the following link, a story from the May 21 (Portland) Oregonian about a CEO who, upon being hired to lead family-owned Platt Electric, spent six months in the field learning first-hand how the company operated. Employees thought he was a temporary worker. He never said anything to the contrary. Upon taking charge, he managed it through a tough housing and real estate market without any lay-offs or pay cuts. And now, he's growing the company in the face of a weak economy, stealing market share from larger competitors.

I considered excerpting it for another blog entry, but realized I couldn't improve on it. Besides, I'd have to truncate it and necessarily lose the heart and soul of the story. It's pretty inspiring stuff. Enjoy...

Exec helps re-energize Platt Electric

Getting Out in the Field

One of the surest paths to management excellence is not through MBAs, books and seminars but through personal, first-hand experience – getting out in the field and seeing with one’s own eyes how things really happen.

An earlier blog entry here concerned the CBS television show “Undercover Boss,” which, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is a “reality TV” show where the CEO of a company goes out in disguise and works on the front lines to learn more about his/her company.

In that blog, I wrote: “I’d like to think that this show will encourage other bosses to do the same. It's always going to be a great learning experience – for both sides of the equation. The benefits that senior executives derive from getting out on the front lines with their employees are immeasurable.”

Apparently my wish has been granted. In at least one instance, the show has inspired a company’s senior management to get out their offices and see for themselves what goes on out there. In a May 20, 2010 article, the Boston Globe spotlights DHL, the international package delivery firm, and how its senior executives borrowed CBS’ idea. They came to Boston for a week to work alongside their local employees, though not incognito like the TV show.

Ian Clough, CEO for U.S. operations, was joined by several of his senior managers for the first-hand look. Clough and the others each rode shotgun in a delivery van all day one day, going on the daily rounds with their drivers. It was a terrific learning experience, the CEO reported.

As the Globe notes, “Clough developed the program as a way to better assess how policies enacted at upper levels of the company affect the firm’s front-line workers.”

Bravo!

As Clough explained, “The idea is if the CIO or the CFO is evaluating an investment proposal for new equipment for our couriers, and he’s sitting in his nice warm office, he’ll have firsthand experience of knowing what it’s like to be out on a truck in a wet and windy place like Boston.

(If they were looking for "a wet and windy" experience, I'm not sure Boston in mid-May is the best choice. But if they were out and about on the trucks yesterday, they got lucky. It was, indeed, wet and windy.)

Christine Nashick, marketing vice president, characterized the exercise as a “back-to-basics approach.”

Clough introduced himself to customers at each stop and asked probing questions about their preferences in delivery services and their attitude toward DHL. People were honest and Clough was grateful. He learned a lot, he said, and not all of it was good news.

He and his team were there to observe, not to get their hands dirty like the CEOs in “Undercover Boss.” Drivers were selected at random, and paired with the executives.

The van on which Clough rode was one of the company’s new hybrid trucks. Clough was interested to learn from the driver how well it performed. He was pleased to get a first-hand report from the driver, though not entirely happy to learn that the hybrids’ performance left a lot to be desired.

The story mentioned that the senior executives were scheduled to go out on sales calls as well, for better insights into the customers’ world, their needs, and how DHL can better support them.

I’m always heartened to learn of such out-reach activities on the part of senior executives. This kind of experience never fails to open one’s eyes. It’s one thing to sit in the executive suite and make decisions. It’s still another to do so after having been exposed to the field where those decisions most affect people and operations.

What the Globe story doesn’t mention is the importance of the personal connections the executives make with their front-line workers. It will undoubtedly leave a deep, valuable impression.

It will give them otherwise unattainable insights into the working environment of their employees: their daily challenges, pleasures, frustrations and opportunities. Decisions and discussions around capital expenditures are one thing – whether to buy new hybrid deliver vans, for instance. But now they have a better feel for the impact those decisions will have on people, perhaps the most critical aspect of any decision.

And they will have a newfound and profound perspective on how their company operates, from the bottom-up rather than from the top-down. They will have a better sense of the impact, not only of their decisions but also of their messages and their communications.

No doubt Clough was surprised at least a few times to learn that initiatives or executive communiqués failed to reach or failed to impress the people on the ground. Let us hope, if he did get that insight, that he will rethink his messages and how he communicates them in the future.

If that were all he got out of the exercise, then it was worth the week’s investment of the executives’ time. Everything else was a bonus.