Both my parents were communicators—my mother a novelist, my dad an ad man-turned-essayist. I’m a journalist and I’ve covered (and consulted on) corporate communication my entire career.
So you don’t have to sell me on the importance of writing and communication. But you do have to sell management. And so do I.
Yet I’m somewhat ashamed to say that after all these years of advocating for communicators (they’re my species!), the following scenario is still a bad dream: I’m at a cocktail party and and I meet a CEO and he says his corporate communication director is demanding access to senior management meetings and a raise and he asks: "Now really: What the hell does she know that I and the rest of my senior leadership doesn’t?"
I’m not sure what I’d say. I can’t very well say, "You and your senior leaders are probably out of touch with all your key constituencies." I can’t say, "All you boys care about are the numbers. You need a liberal arts major on the team!" And I’ll be damned if I’ll say with a straight face, "Haven’t you read the Watson-Wyatt study that shows employee communication excellence leads to a higher share price?"
I’m afraid I’d hem and haw (just as the CEO expected) thereby killing our communication director’s chances at that management access and raise we all know in our hearts—but do we truly believe it in our heads?—she richly deserves.
Readers, do you have an elevator speech for communicators? Let’s hear it.
Me: “You want the employees working on delivery of the strategic objectives you and rest of the senior management team have set, right?”
CEO: “Naturally”
Me: “Well, employees don’t look at business from the same perspective as executives. In order to get everyone working towards the same goals, someone has to explain those goals in ways that make sense to everyone from the mid-level managers, right down to the guys on the loading docks. Your time is, and should be spent working on leading at the top, but your Comms Director can explain the business messages in the variety of ways that will get everybody working to meet them. The alternative is that employees either don’t know, or don’t care about what you are trying to accomplish, neither of which is helpful to getting things done on a daily basis. So, for the minimal investment of allowing your Communicator to hear the objectives first hand you get better buy in from all the people who need to deliver on your vision to make it happen. Sounds like pretty good ROI don’t you think?”
What Kristen said. It is unfortunate though that leadership still claims to “get” communications but in reality, they don’t.
Okay, Ridley. That was good.
Now I’m going to be nasty and ask the CEO’s next question.
“My communication director works at corporate, gets to our various corporate sites less than I do, drives a Volvo and participates in a book club with some of the folks in HR and marketing. Why should I believe she looks at the business from such a vastly different perspective than I do? Why should I trust her to be able to translate my grand vision to the guys at the loading dock?”
So who IS translating the grand vision to the guys at the loading dock?
And what is the CEO’s vision of what the comms director SHOULD be doing?
Jane, this is what I’m trying to get to. It’s so easy for us to say, “CEOs just don’t get it.” What exactly don’t they get, and how can we help them get it. We are communicators, after all, and the first step in communicating an idea is knowing exactly what the idea is.
I think CEOs think of their communication director as a necessary expense–aw, I suppose ya gotta have a person in charge of getting all the stuff out to everybody; we can’t rely on our execs and managers to filter everything down–but I don’t think they think of it terribly much beyond that.
Not without the help of a resourceful, ambitious and PERSUASIVE communication director.
(Of which I am not one–I’m far too easily intimidated by management goons, far too open to their claims of being too busy to communicate, their beliefs that the bricklayers will never consider themselves cathedral builders, etc. This is why I’m begging YOU for this knowledge.)
I was expecting that question David, and here’s the answer with you playing the CEO (for demonstration purposes only, you understand):
“David, you’ve hired the best people available to do the jobs needed across the organization. Doesn’t it make good business sense to give all of them a reasonable opportunity to deliver on the mandates you’ve assigned them before you decide they aren’t capable to do so? What your Comms Director is asking for is basically the information she needs to do her job. You wouldn’t object to your Finance Director asking to see the books, would you? This is exactly the same request, only the type of information is different.”
P.S. I’m not just making this up. I actually used this argument with my SVP at a previous job, and it actually did work!
Caveat: SVP in this case was a woman, and she was the best, most in-touch, smartest, and most human executive I’ve ever come across. Results of this approach may vary dependent on the executive in question. The author makes no guarantees, and accepts no liability for the efficacy of this argument in other situations.
Ms. Ridley, do you think the communication director is the only person who wants to get into senior staff meetings? The HR director wants in, the marketing director wants a say, the IT goons–every one of these assholes wants to sit in on senior management meetings. You know what they want? They want access to information and power. I understand that, and I appreciate it. And we’ve got nothing to hide from them. But I can’t very well build a bleacher section in the boardroom. So unless you can show me why this communication director needs more than an explanation of the decisions that came out of the senior staff meetings–(how much detail does she need on the strategy to translate it to the dock workers anyway?)–I’m afraid I’m going to have to tell her no like everybody else. And if she’s going to storm off and tell everybody I just don’t get it, well, I’m she’ll have a lot of sympathetic company. This company has a lot of problems, but I just don’t believe The Communication Director Not Having Enough Access to Senior Management is one of them.
And to your second point, Kristen: There ARE executives who agree intrinsically with your–our–point of view, and communicators should be looking for companies like that to work for (and sympathetic execs to sidle up to in the companies they’re working in now).
I’m trying to crack the tough nut.
I’m writing this as someone who has failed at it as often as I’ve succeeded.
I love Covey’s Fifth Habit — “Seek first to understand, then to be understood” — and whenever I failed in my corporate communication quest, I failed because I didn’t seek to understand the top brass. It’s easy to see them as the holders of power and wealth who want only to hold on to that power and wealth, and thus to feel morally superior to them. I’ve been guilty of those feelings. At those times, of course, the CEO has been RIGHT not to trust me–and I’ve trashed 50 percent of the necessary ingredients for successful coporate communication.
I’m tired of thinking of business in this way. I’m tired of seeing CEOs as Simon Legree and the employees as slaves under his whip. Neither is generally true. And what may save us all is…GEN Y! These people say what they think, respect knowledge rather than position, ask what they need to know, and don’t quake and over-think when they enter the carpeted corner office with an issue they’d like to straighten out. In other words, they aren’t afraid of the boss. We could all use a little more of that attitude. Losing the fear is the first step in understanding.
Can I get an amen? Beautifully said, Jane, and right on.
We really need to ask ourselves: What ARE we so afraid of with these execs, who not only pull their pants and pantsuits on one leg at a time, but who often suffer from great deficits in perspective from their often one-track, workaholic lives?
But whatever their reality, we should seek to understand it, yes.
I hear this fear thing a lot. Personally, I don’t get it. I have never had an issue telling executives what they need to know, or asking them the questions I need to ask to do my job. You have to be polite and respectful, but you do have to say what needs to be said, that’s what you’re there for!
Maybe I’m unusual, but I’ve never been intimidated by “titles” and even the jerk executives (and I’ve worked with a few) realize that people need information to do their jobs. They may make you deal with their admins to ensure you know how important they are, but I could care less where the info I need comes from, as long as it comes.
If “fear of approachin/challenging authority” is the topic, that’s a whole different ball o wax than the scenario David started this discussion with. And, frankly, I think that issue is one that a communicator would need to address on a personal level. You can’t even BEGIN to have the conversation David started with, if you are intimidated by someone because he has a fancy title or a cushy office.
On the topic of confidence to engage executives on a parity level, Jane’s reference to Carnegie and his approach is a great start.
Once again caveat: I have been “down-sized” and “re-structured” once each, so there is somtimes a cost to behaving in the manner that best serves my mandate as a communicator. For me that price is worth paying to maintain my credibility and integrity as a communicator, but I don’t have kids or a mortgage!
Sorry – that should have said “Covey” not “Carnegie”
Kristen, with no mortgage or kids, you’re like a Gen Y in an Gen Xer’s body (and with a Gen Xer’s experience).
You’re potentially some kind of communication super hero. Leaps over management layers in a single bound ….
Oh yeah! I’m so amazing, I can’t keep Covey and Carnegie straight!
Seriously though, I’m not for a moment suggesting that any of this is easy and it sure as hell isn’t painless, or we wouldn’t have to keep talking about how to get the c-suite’s attention and support, but like Jane and Amy and I advocated in our recent panel discussion at the Ragan conference, it IS important enough that we need to keep trying.
Conversations like this are great because we can pool our various experience on navigating this thorny topic.