The Handbook of Internal Communications wiki / Leadership Communication

by Bill Quirke

Bill Quirke is the founder and MD of Synopsis Communication Consulting a specialist internal communication consultancy whose clients include British Airways, Vodafone, Intel, Shell, BBC, Diageo, UBS Group, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Rolls-Royce, Unilever and Whitbread.

In a world of turbulence and uncertainty, the job of leaders in setting direction and taking people with them is all the harder. With tough markets, uncertain demand and increasing competition, leaders need to build stronger relationships with their people and establish firm foundations of trust. Organizations need their leaders to lead, and good communication is vital to doing that job well.

Change for most organizations now means being in a state of almost constant flux. The stakes are high, both for the business and for its leaders. CEO departures doubled in 2005. The winners will be those organizations which are most fluid, anticipate change and adapt quickly.

Organizations now need more from their employees than simple compliance. They need to engage their creativity, energy and commitment. A business can only achieve its best when everyone's energies are pointed in the same direction and are not at cross purposes.

This chapter focuses on the importance of engaging employees and the key role of leaders’ communication in doing so.

Understanding is not enough

If companies want to engage their people, they must ensure everyone understands the key business issues - the ‘whys’ as well as the ‘whats’. They must also ‘make the connection’ to show how individual success contributes to company success. But understanding on its own is not enough. Commitment comes from a sense of engagement – the winning of hearts as well as minds. Engagement involves employees feeling a strong emotional bond to their employer, recommending it to others and committing time and effort to help the organization succeed.

The importance of employee engagement was the centerpiece of James Heskett’s, and his colleagues’ at the Harvard Business School, 1994 paper, ‘Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work’. Engaged employees create loyal customers who in turn create greater profit. Four years later in 1998 the Harvard Business Review carried a case study on the retail chain Sears’ which had made employee engagement a fundamental plank of their strategy. Sears’ leaders estimated that a five-point unit increase in employee attitude led to a 0.5 per cent increase in revenue growth.

Sirota Consulting studied 28 multinational companies during 2004 and found that the share prices of organizations with highly engaged employees rose by an average of 16 per cent compared with an industry average of 6 per cent.

In 1999, The Gallup Organization published research that showed that engaged employees are more productive, more profitable, more customer-focused, safer and less likely to leave their employer. Watson Wyatt found that high-commitment organizations outperformed those with low commitment by 47 per cent. They also found that organizations where employees understand organizational goals deliver 24 per cent higher shareholder returns. (Source: Watson Wyatt 2003)

In a study of professional service firms, the Hay Group found that offices with engaged employees were up to 43 per cent more productive in terms of generating revenue.

‘Driving Performance and Retention Through Employee Engagement’, a 2004 Corporate Leadership Council survey of 50 000 employees in 59 global organizations, found that highly committed employees were 87 per cent less likely to leave their organizations and performed 20 per cent better than fellow disengaged employees.

The key to creating engagement lies with a company’s leaders. It is their job to make the connection for their people and to communicate in ways that win commitment. This chapter describes how to do just that, and outlines critical lessons for success that every leader – at all levels of the business – needs to apply.

It is no longer enough simply to communicate and hope for compliance. Now the job has changed to one where leaders at all levels need to understand how to engage and motivate their people and lead their people through change, both good and bad.

A 3-year study of 40 major global companies (Source: ISR, People Management, 29 May 2003) confirmed that a key driver of business profitability was the level of commitment shown by a firm’s employees. The key factors behind this were the leadership skills of managers, the opportunities given to staff for personal development and the extent to which employees were empowered to discharge their responsibilities effectively.

Organizations are typically keen to engage their people for a variety of reasons. They want to unleash the talent and energy of their people, to give them strong personal ownership for delivering their goals, give them the sense that we’re all working for the same business and to harness their drive to achieve extraordinary things. They also want to create a buzz around the workplace so that people enjoy coming to work, feel it’s a great place to be and create a virtuous upward spiral of engagement and energy.

With all that to play for, it’s no surprise that leaders are trying to raise the standard of leadership throughout their organizations.

They know that channelling their people’s energy in the same direction will get the best from their people both for themselves and for the organization as a whole.

The leaders’ role in achieving this can at times seem fairly daunting. The list of qualities expected of leaders is seemingly endless. They have to be brave themselves and motivate and energize others, drive performance, support the organization’s vision and create positive working relationships across different parts of their organization.

Organizations with these kinds of aspirations for their leaders tend to benchmark themselves against high performing organizations, and therefore the standards they set for their leaders are continually rising. Whereas employee surveys in the past would typically ask an employee to rate their manager on giving them the information they need to do their job, now employees are more likely to be asked to rate their manager on their ability to inspire them to do their best.

Research shows that executives often suffer from an ‘inspiration gap’, the difference between how they rate themselves and how their staff rate them. A DTI report, ‘Inspirational Leadership’ found that the chief executives they surveyed expected workers to show trust and respect for the people they work with and their customers. But, when 700 white collar staff were questioned, only 40 per cent thought their MD or chief executive had the same characteristics. 60 per cent said they were out of touch, and only 10 per cent said they inspired them. Four in ten executives ‘talk more than they listen’, staff felt, and just 50 per cent of staff felt there was a ‘good buzz’ at work.

So, at a time when leaders want more engagement from their employees, leaders are inadvertently disengaging their people through poor communication.

What is it that people want from a job?

Employees have a range of needs from their jobs. They want clear direction on where the organization is going and how it is doing. They want to know how they fit in, what they are supposed to do, how they contribute and how they will be judged. Once they are clear what their job is, they want to know where they can get the information they need to do it.

They also want meaning, excitement and a sense of purpose – what are we about, what are we interested in, are we playing a bigger game than making and selling widgets?

They want feedback on their progress and performance, and the opportunity to develop. They also want to know how they should behave, what is important to the organization, and who should they emulate. Finally, they want to feel part of a community, to enjoy working with colleagues who they can talk to for information, trust and rely on.

The Corporate Leadership Council emphasizes the importance of gaining employees’ commitment because it has an impact on two things:

· Their discretionary effort, which is the extra work they put in which therefore has an impact on improved performance.

· Their intention to stay or to leave, which has an impact on retention.

They identified two aspects of commitment:

· Rational commitment – the extent to which employees believe that following managers, teams or organizations are in their self interest – whether that’s financially, professionally or in terms of their development.

· Emotional commitment – the extent to which employees value, enjoy and believe in their jobs, their managers, the teams they’re part of and their organizations.

(Source: ‘Driving Employee Performance and Retention Through Engagement’ Washington DC, Corporate Executive Board, 2004)

These two sides of the coin of engagement – rational and emotional – are reflected in global survey company, ISR’s, useful description of three components of employee engagement:

· How employees feel – employees’ sense of belonging to, and pride in the company.

· What employees understand – the evaluation of the company’s goals and values.

· How employees act – the willingness to go the extra mile for the company and preparedness to commit to the future.

These three components add to the rational and emotional the vital component of action. However, poor internal communication often undermines employee engagement, by failing to help employees feel, think and do:

· Employees may not feel that they truly belong to the organization, are valued by it, or feel pride in the company they work for.

· Employees may not understand what the company is trying to do, or why it is trying to do it. Kaplan and Norton (creators of the ‘Balanced Scorecard’) discovered from their research that on average, 95 per cent of employees are unaware of, or do not understand, the organization’s strategy. (Source: Harvard Business Review, October 2005)

· Employees may not know how the overall strategy relates to their daily job, what precisely they’re supposed to do to contribute, and how, concretely, they can help.

There is a clear link between poor leadership communication and low employee engagement. Engagement is damaged by a leader’s shortcomings in communicating, when:

· they lack clarity about strategy, and a clear focus about direction

· they do not translate corporate rhetoric into concrete specifics, so their communication sounds like ‘motherhood and apple pie’

· inconsistent messages from different leaders signal a lack of alignment, and a lack of certainty which only encourages employees to wait a little longer for a clearer picture to emerge

· leaders tend to communicate in a way that is rational rather than emotional, and fail to paint the bigger picture. They use management speak and an impersonal style, and cannot bring a vision to life or generate enthusiasm in themselves or others

· leaders are reluctant to give employees the freedom to ask tough questions or to answer those questions without dodging the issues. This signals a lack of respect for employees and undermines the credibility of leaders. Employees take from this that they are not valued or listened to, which undermines their identification with, and pride in, the organization

· leaders do not walk the talk – there is an obvious disconnect between the espoused values of the organization and the behaviour of its leaders. Employees then listen less to what leaders say, and instead watch to how they behave.

Why leadership communication is important

Leadership guru Warren Bennis identifies the central role of communication for leaders:

‘Communication creates meaning for people. Or should. It’s the only way any group, small or large, can become aligned behind the overarching goals of an organization’.

Survey after survey reports that employees feel the most important and preferred channel for communication is their line manager. This shifts depending on the kind of information which is being communicated. For example, where significant structural changes that have an impact on people’s jobs are concerned, employees often want to hear it from the most senior manager available, on the principle of getting it straight from the horse’s mouth.

Line managers and leaders have a clear influence on employee attitudes and behaviours.

Towers Perrin’s and Tom Lee’s useful piece of research highlights the primary sources of communication which have the greatest impact on employees. They report that while formal media such as newsletters, intranets, and publications have a 7 per cent impact on employee behaviour, the impact of leaders on their employees is far greater at 61 per cent.

Ironically, many of leaders’ communication shortcomings described above are inadvertent. The disengagement of employees can be the result of leaders playing to what they see as their own communication strengths, and using the winning ways which have helped them succeed so far. Unfortunately, many of these ways were developed in organizations that did not require high levels of employee engagement, and in times which were less complex and demanding. What has helped the leaders succeed so far may not be what will help them succeed in the future.

Part of the problem is that there is no one ideal model of a leader. There are different types of leaders who are good in different situations. They each have different communication styles, communication strengths and, inevitably, communication weaknesses.

Different people react differently to different leaders. The charismatic chief executive, who passionately paints the company vision that inspires the sales and marketing teams, can seem a little short on substance and specifics to the engineers in the manufacturing division.

A good first step for leaders is to understand what kind of leader they are, and what kind of leader they need to be in future.

In any leader’s role there are two aspects: the task dimension of the role – setting a clear direction and helping employees understand their role and what their efforts mean to the organization; and the relationship side of the role – communicating with people in the way that builds constructive relationships and makes them feel valued and respected.

Authors of ‘Primal Leadership’, Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee, identify six styles of leadership based on research data from 3871 executives. These six distinct styles are very helpful in identifying leaders’ communication preferences and styles.

· Visionary – describes leadership that inspires people by focusing on long-term goals. An effective visionary leader understands the values held by the individuals within the organization, and can explain their overall goals for the organization in a way that wins support.

· Coaching – describes leadership that delegates responsibility for elements of the organization’s strategy. An effective coaching leader listens one-on-one to employees, establishes rapport and trust, and helps employees identify how their performance contributes and where to find the resources they need.

· Affiliative – describes leadership that creates a warm, people-focused working atmosphere. An affiliative leader listens to discover employees' emotional needs, and how to accommodate those needs in the workplace.

· Democratic – describes leadership that involves everyone in the group, listening to everyone's opinions before proceeding.

· Pacesetting – describes leaders that lead from the front, set ambitious goals and continually drive progress.

· Commanding – describes leadership that issues instructions without asking for input, and says ‘do it because I say so’.

Each of these leadership styles lends itself to one element of the leadership communication job. Some lean more toward the task side, and the rational; others were toward the relationship side, and the emotional.

The problem is that leaders tend towards one dominant style, and either find it hard to adopt other communication styles, or do not realize that they are supposed to do so.

Visionary, Pacesetting and Commanding leadership styles tend to be used by leaders who are task focused, high energy and ‘make it happen’. Their tendency can be to shoot from the hip, and get messages out rather than think them through. The temptation among such leaders is to communicate at, rather than with, their people. Such leaders have usually succeeded in the past by being directive and task focused. The communication skills they have developed are usually more suited to telling than to asking and engaging.

The skills needed to engage and create conversation are different from those required to make a strong PowerPoint presentation. Leaders who believe they can simply apply their existing communication skills to a different communication job usually do not get the results they hope for. A typical pitfall is to focus only on what messages they want to tell employees, rather than an understanding of how employees may interpret and decode their communication. Without a good understanding of their different audiences, and without a good feedback channel, such leaders are not communicating, just broadcasting.

If you are trying to engage your people, adopting a campaigning approach will seem like a superficial ‘flavour of the month’, which will hurt rather than help your credibility as a leader. People need to feel that their views are understood, and they are reflected back in any communication. It is important for the leadership team to understand their people’s concerns and likely reactions, before they start communicating.

More people-focused leadership styles such as Coaching and Affiliative, create a warm, people-focused working atmosphere. An affiliative leader listens to employees closely, with the danger of focusing more on the emotional climate and ignoring the work itself.

Democratic leaders listen to everyone's opinions and gather information. The danger for them is being seen as ‘dithering’, such as when meetings drag on for weeks without making progress.

There is no one best style of leadership. The directive approach, for instance, is useful in crises or when a leader must manage a poor performer, but overuse stifles initiative and innovation. The affiliative approach is appropriate in certain high-stress situations or when employees are beset by personal crises. Pacesetting can get results in the short term, but it’s demoralizing to employees and exhausting for everyone over the long haul.

The most effective leaders are adept at all six leadership styles and use each when appropriate. Typically, however, leaders default to the styles they are most comfortable using. Leaders who are motivated mainly by achievement, for example, tend to favour pacesetting in low-pressure situations but to become directive when the pressure mounts.

In ‘Leadership Run Amok, The Destructive Potential of Achievers’, authors Scott W Spreier, Mary H Fontaine and Ruth L Malby warn of the impact of overachievers, who, they say:

‘Tend to command and coerce, rather than coach and collaborate… take frequent shortcuts and forget to communicate crucial information, and may be oblivious to the concerns of others. Too intense a focus on achievement can demolish trust and undermine morale, measurably reducing workplace productivity and eroding confidence in management both inside and outside the corporation.’

Leadership teams usually comprise different functional specialists who have developed different leadership styles. So it is no surprise that they focus on different elements of communication with different priorities.

These differences in style can reinforce the danger of leaders not being seen to sing from the same song sheet.

Pacesetting leaders, for example, may not spend enough time agreeing precisely what they are saying and how they are going to say it, or thinking through the possible negative perceptions of what’s proposed, and agreeing their responses. Lack of preparation and discussion drives inconsistency, and inconsistency drives conspiracy theorists who look for differences in tone, interpretation and emphasis between the leaders that they then take to be signals of discord. A communication about change, for example, is then undermined when the top team is not seen to be united behind the proposals.

Building trust in leadership

At a time when trust is declining in leadership, leaders are casting around to find out why. Trust is declining in a number of institutions – religion, government, the media – and sceptical employees are equally sceptical about their leadership.

Only 51 per cent of employees have trust and confidence in the senior management of their companies (Source: Watson Wyatt, 2003) and only 44 per cent of employees believe senior leaders are trying to ‘do their best’ for their employees. (Source: Effective Communication from the Top, Melcrum Research 2007)

There may be a number of different reasons why employees do not trust their leadership:

· they don’t see them, and so don’t have a sense of what they’re like;

· they suspect their competence – they seem like good people but not capable people;

· they’re not approachable or human;

· they’re not credible – they’ve got a strategy which doesn’t seem to hold water, and no clear rationale for having arrived at it.

Employees seem to look for five things if they are to trust their leaders. To be trusted, leaders must be seen to be:

· Competent – judged to know what needs to be done for the company to succeed, and felt to be capable of leading the organization effectively in the right direction.

· Open and honest – telling the truth and feeding back the ‘whole story’ not just good news.

· Concerned for employees – showing they understand why staff feel as they do, and demonstrating empathy.

· Reliable – making sure that commitments they make are followed through and that ‘words and figures’ match.

· ‘In the same boat’ – perceived to share a common identity, experience and commitment with staff.

However, there are a number of things leaders do unwittingly which do not help them build trust:

· Leaders leak – what they are like inside leaks out of them, usually at unguarded moments. Any difference between what they espouse and what they actually believe quickly becomes apparent.

· Leaders emerge from meetings at which they’ve agreed a collective line and then communicate a different version, often more favourable to themselves.

· Leaders react under stress and say something which is completely uncharacteristic – which is then taken to reveal their personality. Employees have an ‘aha’ moment – they see the mask of their leaders slip, and feel they have detected the true person beneath.

There are other brakes which leaders unwittingly put on their own efforts. While one foot is pumping the accelerator of engagement, the other is firmly planted on the brake of poor communication.

Where employees perceive there is a lack of urgency, and where they cannot quickly perceive how they can help, they tend to disregard increasingly strident urgings from the boardroom to change and change quickly. Where they do not understand how the strategy was arrived at, where the strategy would take them and how they can contribute to it, employees are slow to put their hand to the plough. Where the strategy is simply not credible, where it is an apparent repeat of something already tried some years ago and where the leaders themselves are not seen as credible enough to achieve it, employees slow down again.

Finally, where the destination is unclear, it is unlikely to be motivating, and so employees feel neither willing nor able to head in the recommended direction.

What makes a leader a good communicator?

It is useful to be able to give leaders an understanding of the different components of the job they have to do as communicators. Each leader usually has in their head a leadership role model – a leader they admire, who is effective and is a great communicator. However, each of these leadership role models can be quite different.

While leaders talk to each other around the boardroom table about the need to communicate, they usually mean quite different things depending on their personality, their character and their values.

A useful exercise is to ask leaders to identify another leader who they feel is an effective communicator. The leader they choose can be from any walk of life – political, sports, military, religious – living or dead, known by all or simply someone they’ve worked with during their career.

People will pick leaders such as Winston Churchill, Bill Clinton, Jesus Christ, Nelson Mandela, Colin Powell, Akio Morita, Lee Kwan Yew or even Mother Teresa.

When asked why their chosen leader is effective as a communicator they come up with another wide range of answers. Winston Churchill, because of his ability to articulate the feelings and determination of a nation and express them compellingly. Nelson Mandela, because of his strong sense of values, being a model of compassion and understanding, and embodying reconciliation within South Africa. Bill Clinton because of his charm and his ability to make people feel like they’re the only one in the room he’s talking to.

What’s useful about this exercise is it shows that leaders incline towards a favourite way of communicating, and tend to neglect or downplay other styles.

Each of the leaders they choose tends to reflect the chooser’s own priorities and values. Someone with a strong task focus and a desire to set strong direction may choose Margaret Thatcher. Someone believing in the importance of articulating the mission of the organization in an emotional and compelling way may pick Martin Luther King. A person who believes in the importance of ‘walking the talk’ and the importance of demonstrating their values may pick Nelson Mandela. Someone who believes it is important to get on the same wavelength as people, to relate to them empathetically, and to ‘feel their pain’ may choose Bill Clinton.

These are four very different types of leaders, with different characteristic strengths.

Research done by Synopsis showed that effective leaders – in business or otherwise – excel in four key areas of communication. This enables them to engage their people in both good times and bad, throughout stable times and turbulent times.

These four areas are Focus, Articulate, Model and Engage – summarized as FAME.

For successful communication, leaders need to understand that all four aspects of communication are important, at different stages and times. They also need to be able to build on their existing strengths and to adopt new styles so they can adapt their communication to different audiences at different times.

A senior manager’s selection of a leader who they believe is an effective communicator is usually a clue to whether their own leadership style leans towards the task side or the relationship side. Task and relationship in leadership are like the two pedals of a bicycle, you need to be able to push on both. However, senior managers tend to lean more heavily on one or the other.

Task focused leaders tend to be good at providing focus, setting direction, giving a clear sense of mission and direction and setting a challenge for the organization to fulfil.

They may be less good at articulating their vision in emotional and compelling ways that bring their people with them. They may not be able to see things from their employees’ point of view, nor be able to engage with them.

Conversely, some senior managers have a strong sense of values and are deeply empathetic with their employees – but they don’t put enough time and effort into clarifying what the direction is, what the specific and concrete examples of what employees could do are, and they do not feedback on progress and how well targets are being achieved.

Effective leadership means balancing the ‘hard task’ and ‘soft relationship’ aspects of communication. The task side includes helping employees understand their role and what their efforts mean to the organization and its stakeholders. The relationship side involves communicating with people in ways that build constructive relationships, make them feel valued and respected.

Making leaders more effective communicators means acknowledging that they have been successful by using the skills they have developed to date – it requires building on those skills, and understanding those areas where they are not yet as strong as they need to be.

Senior managers in organizations have often been promoted for their ‘task’ side – they have high drive, clear vision of where they want to go and can deliver results. However, in the past they may not have had to exercise their ‘relationship’ side – the ability to empathize, engage and articulate.

This is reflected in the drive with which organizations pursue employee engagement. Task-focused organizations often find themselves aspiring to relationship based engagement – but pursuing it in a task focused way, adopting detailed step by step processes optimistically intended to create engagement with their people. A clear case of stamping on the brake and wondering why we’re not going any faster.

However, research by management consultancy Marakon in 2005 suggested that most company strategies deliver only 60 per cent of their promised value. Under half the executives surveyed by consultancy McKinsey in 2007 said they were satisfied with their company’s approach to making strategic decisions.

Part of the problem may be taking a purely rational approach to developing strategy. Research by strategy consultants Cognosis suggests that managers are crying out for strategies that engage both heart and head.

Only a quarter of the 1600 managers surveyed said that they found their organization’s strategy exciting. Half didn’t feel sufficiently involved, and did not believe that their opinions were listened to.

According to the research, there is a strong correlation between emotional and rational ‘buy-in’ – and both are needed to succeed. Stronger engagement and commitment can only be achieved where employees are persuaded emotionally as well as rationally, that a planned strategy makes sense, is credible and doable. The Cognosis survey also revealed that 10 per cent of managers were ‘super-engaged’. Intellectually they liked the rational rigour of their company’s thinking, and were committed to achieving clearly understandable goals, but emotionally, they also felt their organization had a common purpose and that leaders were united round it.

The Corporate Leadership Council survey mentioned above found that emotional engagement was four times more valuable than rational factors in driving employees’ effort.

The vital combination of rational and emotional is reflected in the words of Professor Henry Mintzberg of McGill University in his co-authored work ‘Strategy Bites Back’:

‘Strategy doesn’t only have to position, it has to inspire. So an uninspiring strategy is really no strategy at all’.

Thus, many high performing organizations are impatient to drive up engagement by having leaders who are inspiring. However, few are helping their leaders connect with their people in any way which is inspirational.

The section below expands on each of the four areas of leadership communication:

1. Focus

The chief aim of the leaders’ communications is to ensure that everyone understands both the external and internal issues facing the organization and what each must do to contribute to the organization’s success. Mercer Human Resource Consulting discovered in a study in 2000 that when senior managers do not communicate a clear vision for the future, employees are more likely to consider leaving the organization. (Source: Communicating Business Strategy to Employees, Melcrum 2005)

Employees often complain about the lack of connection between initiatives and the inconsistency of leaders’ messages. Leaders therefore have to communicate a clear focus on business issues, set a few clear priorities, which they repeat and reinforce consistently, and identify clearly what they want employees to do.

The 2004 Corporate Leadership Council survey identified the top levers for driving employee effort as the employee’s understanding of the connection between their work and the organization’s strategy and the importance of the employee’s job to the organization’s success.

Employee research consistently shows that less than 50 per cent of employees know where their companies are going or what they are trying to achieve. This indicates that organizations are not telling their people the thing that would most increase employees’ efforts. The same research also shows that employees are convinced that they themselves are doing a great job. They do not know where the business is going but they are all too confident that they are helping it get there.

This break in the ‘line of sight’ between a company’s strategy and what individuals at the sharp end are expected to do is a common failure of leadership focus. Giving people clarity about what is expected of them, and how their efforts relate to organizational goals, has been shown to have the strongest link to productivity. (Source: Spreier, Mary H Fontaine and Ruth L Malby HBR, June 2006)

2. Articulate

Great leaders can turn a vision into words succinctly. They paint a picture of what they want to achieve, turning ‘management-speak’ into plain language. They make messages memorable and ensure that everything they say fits together into an overall picture.

Leaders may want to engage employees’ emotional commitment but they tend to appeal for it in dry, intellectual language. Leaders have to be able to turn the vision into an elevator speech, and paint a picture in a more emotional language. Effective leaders invest time in planning how they will convey their message. Leaders such as Martin Luther King and Winston Churchill painted their ‘bigger picture’ messages in emotional, engaging language, which they took the time to prepare and craft.

3. Model

In a Melcrum survey of over 1000 communications and HR professionals, ‘actions of senior leadership’ was rated as the most important driver of employee engagement.

Effective leaders are champions of the values they stand for. They lead by example, and model the right behaviour for others.

If leaders want to inspire and motivate their people then how they behave and what they signal are often the most powerful parts of their communication. Commitment goes beyond simply agreeing and repeating messages, or going out on the road to meet people. Senior management need to walk the talk, and be committed, because lack of commitment is transparent and readily detected.

Nelson Mandela is not famous for his words, but for his actions. When South Africa hosted the Rugby World Cup in 1995, he walked out on the field wearing the South African rugby shirt. This was a symbolic action, signalling reconciliation across racial divides, in what Mandela saw as the creation of ‘the rainbow nation’.

Modeling also involves understanding your own communication style, and adapting it to meet the preferences of a particular audience. Leaders such as Bill Clinton and Richard Branson use this skill to great effect.

Since 70 per cent of communication in organizations is informal, and employees consistently report that they get 70 per cent of their information via the grapevine, it’s important to understand the impact of leaders’ informal communication.

Leaders are influential, and have greater impact on their people when they are communicating informally – whether around the water cooler, in the bar or in a car on the way to a meeting.

Employees pay far more attention to leaders when they are apparently ‘off duty’ than when they are standing on stage in a formal setting.

It is important for leaders to understand that ‘leaders leak’. What leaders truly believe, and how they really think ‘leaks out’ of them, unbeknownst to them, as they talk informally in off duty moments.

So it is that employees become experienced ‘Kremlin watchers’, looking at the behaviour of their leaders rather than just what they say. Informal communication is the most powerful, but it is also the most likely to lead to misunderstanding.

Even where leaders believe that it is formal communication events that have the greatest impact, they typically do not prepare for them. Leaders fly to vital management conferences only finalizing their slides on the plane. They do not allow rehearsal time with each other, and do not ensure that each individual leader is singing from the same song sheet, and harmonizing with their colleagues.

Such a lack of alignment and consistency may be survivable in a formal setting, but is deeply damaging when it comes to informal communication.

Inconsistencies in messages between leaders are almost inevitable. Leaders tend to agree on generalities, but disagree on specifics, since they do not take the time to dig further down into the issues on which they disagree. So their informal chats inevitably signal differing views. Employees perceive there is a gap between different leaders and then watch more carefully to see how these disagreements will be resolved.

This costs an organization time. Where strategy has to be translated into actions as quickly as possible, and there’s urgent need for action, unprepared communication and lack of alignment between leaders act as brakes. Employees slow down rather than speeding up, because they get mixed signals, and so await a clearer signal of direction before proceeding.

4. Engage

Bill Clinton described leadership as, ‘The art of getting others to do something you want done because they want to do it.’ Effective leaders engage people by providing context and making the connections between their agenda and the individual’s agenda. They are good at listening, facilitation, asking effective questions and handling difficulty.

Increasing employee engagement means understanding what engages people.

Employees want to work for an organization that is succeeding and is going somewhere. They feel it is fun to work with interesting people in an organization fulfilling a bigger purpose. However, how leaders engage with them is a vital part of whether they feel valued, involved and heard.

Employees report that what engages them is the chance to talk and the feeling they are listened to. They want to feel safe to speak, to have their say and to be able to exchange ideas with their leaders.

Leaders who are thought to be engaging are described as being approachable, enthusiastic and interested. They ask questions and listen carefully to the answers. They can get on the same wavelength as the people they’re talking to, they can ask thoughtful questions to explore issues and they understand the concerns that their people express.

Areas for leaders to focus on

Work with leaders to improve how they engage their people has provided some useful lessons. One key lesson is where leaders focus. Typically, task focused leaders have a very clear idea of what they want to achieve but they tend to be less good at understanding what their various stakeholders want.

In one organization, for example, leaders had the clear aim of improving the margins of their business. Their intended message to their employees was clear – we have to compete more effectively, reduce our cost base and get our margins up to provide greater shareholder return.

Asked to identify what was the focus of their communication, leaders looked at a few simple questions:

· What’s the outcome I want in this situation?

· Where are my people now and how do they regard the current situation?

These are deceptively simple questions, and it is surprising how often leaders find them difficult.

Take the first one. Leaders tend to be very clear about what they want to say to their people, for example ‘reduce cost, improve margins and increase shareholder value’. They tend to be less good at identifying what communication is supposed to achieve. What should be the change in attitudes and behaviour as a result of successful communication, and how would they recognize success if they saw it? What this often reveals is that leaders focus on the message they want to give, rather than the change they’re trying to make.

Leaders should focus on the outcome by asking themselves the question, ‘What do I want my people to do differently, how do I want them to behave and what is my picture of success?’

Grappling with these questions, leaders often come up with abstract terms with few specifics, such as, ‘I want people to buy-in to the change’, or, ‘I want people to feel energized and empowered.’ The point is not that these answers are wrong, but they’re not specific. How would you know whether your people bought in? Would it be enough for them to nod and smile pleasantly in agreement or do you want them to behave differently with customers?

Where are your people now?

It is extraordinary how often the leaders of initiatives are convinced that employees are waiting with baited breath to hear more about their programme. Because something is so important to its owner, it’s easy for them to overestimate the enthusiasm of employees elsewhere.

Enthusiastic project owners tend to project their enthusiasm onto others. A typical response to the question, ‘How do your employees regard this initiative?’ is ‘fantastic, very positive, very keen, very enthusiastic’ and so on.

In one organization, the global IT function was about to launch a major change programme across the organization. Asked about how employees might regard this new initiative, they were initially positive and enthusiastic. Questioned a little further, they began to become less certain and less enthusiastic.

Why were employees so positive? How did they regard the last IT initiative, what was their perception of the global IT function as a whole and how did they regard the level of service that the function provided? Rapidly, the assessment of employees’ views shifted. The last IT programme was widely perceived as being a disaster. Why was that? – ‘Because it was a disaster,’ said the IT team.

Senior managers need to take a slightly more sceptical view of their own initiatives, and to identify employee attitudes as they are rather than as they wish them to be. This is because if you’re trying to get on the same wavelength as people, and trying to connect your agenda to theirs, it helps if you have a realistic picture of their views.

However, leaders can often view this as ‘being negative’ and can be unwilling to acknowledge and confront employee attitudes that they regard as negative, ill-informed and uncooperative.

This may explain why so much communication adopts a relentlessly cheerleading tone, and focuses on the positive – an approach that is reflected in employee attitude surveys which say that management too often tell employees the good news, but don’t tell them the bad. This in turn undermines the credibility of the leadership, the trust of employees in them and the levels of engagement in the organization.

Articulating

Senior managers or project owners can find it difficult to articulate their message. This is often because:

· they do not put themselves in the audiences’ shoes and see things from their viewpoint;

· they express things in ‘management-speak’, using jargon which is meaningful only to management;

· they favour complexity over simplicity and make things complicated not simple;

· they create communication to be read not said.

Articulating is about the leader’s ability to put things into clear pictures, memorable phrases, compelling words. Articulate means being able to drive home your point by using language expressively. Leaders who are seen as great communicators such as Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King are often praised for the masterly way in which they use language. People remember Churchill’s rousing call to action, ‘We shall fight on the beaches’, and they remember Martin Luther King sharing, ‘I have a dream.’

Both of these leaders were trained in oratory, and had studied how to write their speeches and how to use their powers of speech to create a powerful impact upon their audience. That they could connect so closely with their audience testifies to their ability to express so precisely the thoughts, feelings and aspirations of their people.

Their expressiveness, their spontaneity and their impact was helped, not hindered, by the preparation and forethought they put into their words.

Margaret Thatcher, facing a rebellion among her own political followers who wanted to perform a u-turn on policy, memorably said, ‘You turn if you want to, the lady’s not for turning.’

Ronald Reagan was famously called ‘the great communicator’ because of his ability to reflect the thoughts and feelings of his constituents, through his simple and sometimes folksy use of language. Often criticized by the press for his short working hours, for example, he turned this to advantage in one press conference. Referring to a policy he had been working on, he said that he had ‘really been burning the midday oil on this one’.

These are all phrases that live on, and are remembered and repeated when people think of those leaders. It is noticeable that the quotes of political and religious leaders can be recalled and repeated. It is much harder to recall the sayings of business leaders.

Politicians are trained in the skills of oratory. They understand the impact of the right words on their audience. They understand the impact of the cadences of their words, the construction of their sentences and the style of their delivery.

They take advantage of the fact that, for most of us, the rules of communication are based on an oral tradition – on words said rather than read. Literacy in the west is a relatively new phenomenon whereas the oral tradition of story telling is thousands of years old. Formal communication depends on the rules of written language, whereas informal communication is based on conversations using the rules of an oral tradition – the rules of storytelling, joke telling and anecdote swapping.

This may explain why so few employees can remember and repeat their business’s strategy, but they can repeat a joke they have heard. This may also explain why the grapevine is such as powerful means of communication; because it relies on rules of communication we’re all so familiar and comfortable with – the rules for telling and repeating stories. Seventy per cent of the communication within organizations is informal, whether that is networking or gossiping. Formal management-speak communicated occasionally via formal communication channels cannot match the power and influence of day-to-day informal storytelling.

What is remembered gets repeated. For example, the story of Goldilocks and the three bears is familiar and repeatable for a number of reasons. There are three bears, which is easy to remember. Each time Goldilocks tries something – a chair, a bed, food – the first is too this, the second is too that and the third is always just right. Imagine the confusion had there been six bears, and not just three bowls of porridge, but a buffet of food, each kind of which had to be remembered and repeated.

In the stories I told our three daughters, there were ‘Three Billy Goats Gruff’. In fairy stories, magic rings provided three wishes, there were three sons who competed for the hand of the fair princess, and three wise men.

Three is a magic number. It features strongly in oral tradition, perhaps because people can remember three to five things before they start losing detail. This may be the reason why although Snow White met seven dwarfs it is so hard to remember all their names.

Three is the magic number in speaking. There are often three words – ‘liberté, égalité and fraternité’. There’s Tony Blair saying the most important issue is ‘education, education, education’. The most important issue in buying property is ‘location, location, location’.

There’s the good, the bad and the ugly; lock, stock and barrel; hook, line and sinker. Politicians always seem to answer questions in three ways. Listen to any bulletin and you’ll hear spokespeople giving their lists of three, ‘We will protect American lives, restore law and order and prevent chaos.’

There’s an important lesson here for leaders. Use rules of communication which are already established, rather than trying to overlay less successful rules. Your employees will not remember your PowerPoint slides, but they will remember your jokes. They will remember your strategy if it is structured in a way that helps it to be more memorable.

Seventy per cent of internal communication is informal conversation in the corridor or around the water cooler, using the rules of oral communication. If you can craft your communication to follow the same rules, your messages will be remembered. What gets remembered gets repeated, and what gets repeated gets reinforced.

The more formal the communication, the less likely it is to be repeated. Managers often feel uncomfortable ‘communicating’ with their people because the language they’re asked to use is so unnatural and artificial. Leadership communication that is written in ‘management-speak’, as bullet points on a PowerPoint slide, stands less chance of being translated into day-to-day action.

The secret to effective leadership communication is to make it simple, memorable and repeatable.

As a first step this means avoiding complex words, and exploiting words that already work.

Before the advent of widespread literacy, techniques were used by people passing information to each other to ensure its memorability and repeatability. One of these techniques, for example, was the use of alliteration – using words that begin with the same letter, or the same sound. We have phrases in our language such as short and sweet, heaven and hell, chalk and cheese, cheap and cheerful, which owe their use to their alliteration.

News media are often very good at simplifying a story, and expressing it with alliteration so that it is remembered and repeated.

Affluent ladies who were opting to pay for caesarean delivery of their babies, rather than waiting for natural labour, were labelled as ‘too posh to push’.

Alliteration is an aid to memory developed by oral tradition. Another is adopting phrases that already exist. For example, in one news story recently, controversy had arisen about four-wheel drive vehicles being used by affluent drivers who claim they are for off-road use, but only use it to go to the supermarket. The press started referring to these as ‘toff roaders’.

Another aid is metaphor. People think in pictures, and a picture is worth a thousand words. If a chief executive exhorts his people to, ‘Increase operational efficiency, raise the quality of product development, and focus on higher quality products and services,’ his message is more likely to be remembered and repeated if he summarizes it by saying we want to be a ‘Ferrari, not a Ford’.

We use metaphors in everyday conversation. We say things like ‘we won’t even get to first base’, we will ‘leave no stone unturned’, we complain ‘the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater’. One director talking about the future of his industry said, ‘The traditional business model is sinking like the Titanic, and it’s the small boats that will survive in the future’. Such pictures have high impact and are memorable.

A manager of a risk management department was frustrated at trying to engage other departments in the vital but apparently boring process of risk identification and logging. Each time they contacted colleagues for meetings to discuss the ‘risk evaluation process’ (REP) they couldn’t get the time of day, as colleagues remembered they had to be elsewhere to do something much more important.

In a burst of frustration, the risk manager said that the way they were currently operating was, ‘Like a fleet sailing into troubled waters without a minesweeper – at some point they were going to hit the mine field’. Most of his colleagues didn’t understand what the REP process was, but they did understand what a minefield was. Communicating in this more vivid way got them greater engagement and greater cooperation.

Unions’ very effective communication is often due to their very good use of metaphors. Whereas management talk about ‘optimizing processes and rightsizing resources’ in an apparently abstract and bloodless language that may conceal more suspect motives, unions fight back with vivid metaphors in protest. Plans are, they say, ‘the thin end of the wedge’, this is simply ‘death by a thousand cuts’. One union recommended its members reject management’s proposals by saying that ‘this deal has more strings than the London Philharmonic’. Few of their members understood the details of the deal, but they repeated the sound bite knowingly. In the race for employees’ hearts and minds, the metaphor beat the management-speak.

Metaphors are, of course, a two-edged sword. They can work for you or against you. One chief executive described to his senior managers the journey they had embarked upon. He was keen to get them engaged, and reluctant to be side-tracked by long debates about detailed issues of implementation, which could only become clearer once they got started, and at a later date.

Unfortunately, he described the journey in terms of being on a boat sailing troubled waters. What he wanted to say was that some details would only become clear as we got closer to them. He could have said that we were sailing towards the horizon and details would emerge as we got closer. Instead he described the uncertainty as ‘sailing in fog’, which, his senior managers muttered was like him – thick and wet. When he declared ‘We’re all in the same boat,’ the rejoinder came, ‘Yes, and it’s the Titanic’.

A number of these oral techniques come together in having leaders summarize their strategy in an ‘elevator speech’.

The elevator speech is a brief encapsulation of an idea, concept or argument. It is named after the challenge of stepping into the elevator, and being asked by a colleague about something you are working on and being able to give them the short version in the 30 seconds it takes for the elevator to travel between floors.

The more conversational you can make the summary, the more likely it is to be remembered and repeated. However, to encapsulate everything in 30 seconds, requires some clear structure.

Stories and jokes have a clear structure. They have to, if the storyteller is to remember them, and the listener is to be able to repeat them.

For example, many jokes begin, ‘An Englishman, Irishman and a Scotsman walk into a bar.’ The Englishman goes first and does something, the Scotsman follows with his version, and then the Irishman does something different and brilliantly clever. In telling the joke, the teller knows that there are 3 cycles he has to remember. He knows there is a set up, three cycles and a punch-line. That gives the teller a clear structure and a roadmap of the story. It helps organize the ideas, not omit anything and put the emphasis on the punch-line.

Similarly, for the listener there are clear signals about what to expect. There’s a clear structure, there’s a simple sequence and there’s a clear takeaway – the punch-line.

Importantly, structure helps both the teller remember what to tell and the listener what to expect and what to repeat in turn.

So, when leaders are asked to write an elevator speech, and then follow a clear structure, it must be written to be said, not read. It must be short, clear and simple. It must use conversational language, not management – speak and jargon.

The structure for the elevator speech is taken from storytelling and joke telling, and follows the ‘rule of three’.

· A one sentence summary of what the strategy is trying to do – for example, ‘We are changing the way we serve our customers, so that we focus on what’s most important to them and more profitable for us’.

· Three reasons why we’re doing this – for example, because customers are demanding higher levels of service, need greater levels of resources and are becoming more demanding about price.

· Three things we’re going to be doing – for example, we’re going to focus on those customers who spend most with us, we’re going to retrain our sales people to act more as account managers and we’re going to provide a smaller number of customers with higher level of service.

· Three benefits of this approach – for example, this way we will make happier customers, have more demanding but more interesting jobs, and securer and more interesting careers.

Typically, leaders are bought together in groups to translate their strategies into elevator speeches. They’re then challenged to stand up and deliver these in 30 seconds against the clock. What’s interesting about this exercise is that leaders often protest that their strategi