The Handbook of Internal Communications wiki / Line Manager Communication

By Patrick Williams

Patrick Williams is a Senior Consultant with Ragan Communications. The author of several books on employee communication, Williams has designed and taught face-to-face communication programs for Allstate, Comcast, Motorola, Quaker-Tropicana-Gatorade, Eli Lilly and hundreds of others.

Communication take many forms: electronic, print, face-to-face. But in my 27 years of consulting in the profession of Employee Communication, I have never once—not once—seen survey results that did not conclude that the employees' preferred vehicle of communications, on most performance-related topics, is face-to-face with their managers. Not on every topic, of course, but on most performance-related topics. Employees want to know:

The company's plans and financial accountability from the CEO and executive team, for reasons of security and purpose
Concrete tailoring of plans through the management structure to the department, the team and the daily work of individual employees by the immediate supervisor, in anticipation of performance reviews, self-interest, and the simple joy and benefits of teamwork and meaningful productivity
That their ideas for systems and process improvement are actively solicited and taken into account in decision-making, for reasons of pride in ownership

The research results that show face-to-face communications as the preferred medium are predictable, and appeal to common sense based on the evidence of experience. Like you and me, employees simply need to know four things:

Where is the company headed?
Why?
What's in it for me?
How can I help?

To develop a successful face-to-face process within your organization, you'll first have to face and overcome some imposing barriers. Let's identify and try to understand them, and then overcome them.

Barriers

Cultural barriers: CEOs and everyone below them down to the immediate supervisor are under tremendous pressures to hit their numbers: ROI, productivity, cost/benefit, etc. They spend all day in meetings, and simply don't have time to communicate, except, often, through quarterly informational meetings, blast e-mails and intranet messages or announcements. Frankly, many see "communications" as "the soft stuff," though that is changing quickly, thanks to the communication leadership of Welch, Gates and other business icons.

Some others still nod in the direction of "communications" with occasional meaningless perks like a pizza party. But they patronize such events, if they attend ("Gotta go")—and put on a hard mask—sometimes (am I right?)—a "macho" mask—of formality, superficial engagement and financial rigor, which, unfortunately, often leads to career advancement within a statistical hierarchy. They plead lack of time for communications, which is a self-congratulatory way of reminding everyone how hard they work—an argument the more compelling for its being true.
Communication incompetence: Managers at every level become managers because of expertise in a technical competence: They were great engineers, accountants or marketers; perhaps they led their teammates by example. Now they're being asked to manage people with the same competencies. The two—technical competence and managerial competence—don't always go hand-in-hand.

Doing something well doesn't mean that you can manage others who do that same thing well. Look at sports. Great players—Frank Robinson, Ted Williams—were not as successful as managers as they were as players. Average or unknown players—Phil Jackson, Sparky Anderson—become great managers of world championship teams.

In fact, isn't it the case that, by education, personality, experience and rewarded success, technicians have chosen their craft or profession over managerial, or people, skills? Technicians operate systems and processes; managers lead a team of people. There's no necessary correlation.

Solutions: Expert technicians sense that they must move into management to increase their financial self-interest. But why? Why take someone out of a job he or she is expert at, and force them to do something they have no interest or competence in, i.e.: management, which is, in large measure, a matter of communication? Now we know why so many cubicles are lined with Dilbert.

One solution: The best immediate solution to the problem (as seen at Motorola, Deere & Co. and others), is to provide parallel career tracks, equally compensated, for technicians and managers. There are at least two generations of incompetent managers, who are also expert technicians, in the workplace. This is an endemic or structural problem.

The ultimate solution: Hire, train, reward and promote managers who are expert in management skills, which means, simply, managing people. Reward technicians based on their technical expertise.
The barrier of perceived class prejudice in the workplace

Employee responsibility for communications
I am depressed to hear, in focus groups, that many employees take absolutely no responsibility for consuming company literature, communicating openly with teammates and contributing their best ideas for systems and process improvement to management. They say, too often: "I just want to keep my head down and do my job. I'm living for the weekend. I'm hoping to limp into retirement."
Class
Further, employees see their managers' valuable and useful college degrees as "just a piece of paper"—so why should they listen to a less competent person? They view company-sponsored communications as "propaganda," though they don't read it, as evidenced by their inability to recall a single issue or story. They view lack of access to online communications—though it may be read in printouts posted on bulletin boards or on computers available in common areas—as an intentional withholding of information. (Knowledge as power.)

They actually feel that their supervisors should be able to do their jobs as well as they do. They feel that they—and they alone—have created and produced the profits of the company, from which management takes a disproportionate share of wealth. When challenged to seek better employment elsewhere, they plead lack of opportunity. They revert to child-like behaviors: “No one asked me.” “Authority says one thing and does another.” “Just tell me what I must do.” “Can we have a party?”
When asked to articulate their responsibility for communications, they respond with puzzled stares.

I don't blame them. That's the culture we were raised in. They have few models of communication excellence and lack both effective training and human resources processes for reward as they relate to communication performance. Many tell me they haven't had a performance review of any kind in months, much less daily, ongoing communications: "Management is always in meetings. We never hear what goes on in there." (Meeting attendance as a corporate status symbol?)

The basic point is this: Employee responsibility for communication must be an integral part of any effective face-to-face process. It's a partnership. And you'll meet entrenched resistance.

Perception of the value of communication
Many managers and employees within organizations think that "employee communication" resides in a department by that name. The "good folks in PR" produce events and things: meetings and publications, Web sites. (Some managers might even remember the old days of house organs, service anniversaries and turkeys at the holidays. It's all a momentary cultural salve, until all this patronizing "recognition" adds up to a "career." Don't be fooled.)

Audiences and consumers send communication professionals patronizing congratulatory notes on a nice photo or colorful PowerPoint or incidental executive joke in a speech or a well-run meeting. They nod in the hall: ("Thanks for removing the burden of recognition and courtesy from my schedule.") Some people in employee communication think—to judge by their allocation of time—the same way. They like pumping out copy, shelling out those meaningless gifts, smiling at the pancake breakfast and getting those notes.

They're wrong. And unprofessional, in the sense that they haven't kept pace with the evolution of the profession.

The value-added role of employee communication professionals is providing information, training, coaching, counseling and heightened understanding of the vital importance of communications throughout the organization. And strategic, measurable processes for doing so.

How to overcome resistance?

Resistance to communication as an agent of change is to be expected. It's the first barrier you'll have to overcome if you're going to implement a successful face-to-face process in your organization.

The relationship among the three key elements is determined by resistance:

The speaker whose persuasive force directs meaningful change
The audience that resists change but can be moved
The professional communicator/researcher/strategic planner who supports the speaker through audience awareness, expertly devised communications initiatives, and alignment with clear objectives

Just as change cannot occur without persuasive force and directed motion, neither can organizations realize their plans for profitable growth without effective communications, the efficient cause of work, the energy behind leadership.

Modern research on change management and employee engagement reveals that employees move through a "continuum" of communication, which we might simplify like this:

Information: Words and data that reduce resistance to change
Understanding: Initial agreement with the research and thinking—including employee input—of management's decisions
Agreement: The alignment of audience self-interest with perceived company objectives
Commitment to behavior change: I know what I must to do differently or better to support the organization's plans and realize my hopes of self-interest

Within that "continuum," we can see the strengths of various media, and the need to integrate them:

Electronic, mainly for speed of timely information
Print, for both information and depth of understanding, based on portability, in-depth coverage, and the perceived "gravitas" of print
Face-to-face, for all four: information, understanding, agreement and, especially, behavior change, based on personal relationships with managers and perceived connectedness to senior executives.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide communication professionals with the tools, techniques, processes and systems to achieve one goal: To create a comprehensive process of two-way managerial face-to-face communications with employees to engage them for the organization's profitable growth.

Our approach: The four-part structure of an effective face-to-face communications system. Here, it is essential to note that no one of these structural elements can stand alone. They are interlocking, mutually related and co-dependent. Without excellence in each one, the entire structure will crumble.

1. Leadership: Within organizations, people come to see what's rewarded by those actions that are most highly rewarded, and model their behavior accordingly. Your face-to-face efforts will succeed only with top leadership's support through their actions, especially candor, accessibility and availability. You must get their commitment up front for:

Transparency of decision-making
Cascading/tailoring/public accountability and follow-up
Building trust: the foundation of successful communications
Accessibility, approachability and availability

2. For managers: Understanding your role/accountability—and executing it successfully

Subscribing to measurements and rewards, or incorporating employee communications effectiveness into performance reviews. What gets measured gets done. Communication competence is not a matter of "likeability," it’s not soft. It’s a necessary process for accurate, aligned decision-making. (Here, you need to partner with HR for quantitative, measurable results, 360°, with teeth in it.)
Holding successful meetings
Modeling

3. Tools, resources, and techniques

Using the information tools at your disposal
Listening skills
Speaking skills
Overcoming barriers: time restraints, difficult personalities, team formation/delegating, legal barriers

4. The role of the professional communicator:

Among these, we’ll look at:

Building the team to implement a face-to-face process: Project manager
Trainer
Coach
Counselor
Information/vehicles producer
Professional advocate
Researcher/planner

So let’s look at each of these four key steps.

Step 1: The role of the leader in face-to-face initiatives

Many factors are necessary to successfully integrate effective face-to-face communications into the way you do business, or into your culture. Among these factors, the first and most important step is securing leadership's support—not just approvals, but commitment to modeling. Everyone in an organization learns what behaviors get rewarded by observing the behaviors that are most highly rewarded; that is, the behavior of the CEO and executive leadership team.

That support can be difficult to secure. Some CEOs instinctively grasp the business case for face-to-face. If so, half your battle is won. But many do not.

One school of thought is that executives either get it or they don't, and nothing will change their minds. Another line of thinking has it that, privately, executives don't really believe in the business necessity of face-to-face and think of it as a "soft" skill. But they do understand, in a vague sort of way, that other companies have such a process, that employees want it, and that they'll go along with it—as long as others, mainly in communication, human resources and organizational development, take it off their plates.

But perhaps the largest group of executives with "yes/no" decision-making authority on giving you the go-ahead with your face-to-face program comprises those who will listen to reason, look at research and be open to persuasion based on the evidence.

The evidence

The relation between effective face-to-face communication and profitable growth is so firmly established that only a business leader who doesn't read or cannot be persuaded can ignore it.

But the CEOs I've known can also be persuaded by the example of their peers and high-performing companies.

I recall, for instance, that when Jack Welch retired from his career at GE—one whose success is without parallel—he gave a series of TV interviews and wrote a book on his career. When asked his views on communications, he said that CEOs and their companies' leaders "have to be transparent": that is, everyone must know—or have access to—any relevant information about the company, including the decisions and plans of senior executives, and the reasons for those decisions.

But perhaps the most compelling case for the business need of executive commitment to face-to-face communication is provided by the famous study Corporate Culture and Performance, by Harvard's John Kotter and James Heskett (The Free Press, 1992).

Among their findings from research in hundreds of companies on the link between financial performance and cultural health:

"The single most important factor that distinguishes major cultural changes that succeed from those that fail is competent leadership at the top."
And: " ... although executives need to foster pride among employees, they must also be as intolerant as possible of arrogance in others and in themselves. They need to confront, and make others confront, as many of their failings as is practical. They need to create events where everyone in management is forced to listen to dissatisfied customers, angry stockholders and alienated employees—not to embarrass or punish their managers, but to keep them informed and to help them realistically assess their strengths and weaknesses. And this must be done on an ongoing basis."

In short, every form of evidence to suggest the link between executive commitment to face-to-face communication and business prosperity exists—for those willing to listen. For those whose instincts tell them otherwise—best of luck to you.

Trust: Selling the 7 Cs

The reason you must gain senior management's commitment to modeling effective face-to-face communications is simple: Trust is the foundation of all successful communications. Without that, everything else will fail. And the CEO and his or her executive team have the responsibility of establishing and maintaining trust.

In your role as counsel or coach to executives, you must encourage their efforts to build and maintain trust, specifically the following seven elements of leadership communications.

Confidence. "Confidence" comes from the Latin "fides," or faith—as in "Semper Fidelis" the motto of the Marines. Faith is simply the unwavering commitment to an organization's values or goals without demanding continuous proof or demonstration. Faith is the belief in things unseen, and leaders must demonstrate an unwavering faith in an organization's plans, people, products and customers.

Confidence, of course, is partly a matter of how one carries oneself, but as a product of communication, it's chiefly the result of conciseness—saying everything you intend to, and no more, in the fewest words possible. It's Lee Iacocca: "If you can find a better car, buy it." In other words, tighten the message for confidence.
Competence. Competence is the ability to do one's job to achieve or surpass predetermined goals. Unfairly, as we noted in the introduction, some employees will criticize leaders for not having the same competencies that they, the employees, have. Some employees will regard executives as college-educated ivory-tower types who've never done—and couldn't do—an honest day's work.

But nothing succeeds like success, and leaders at every level of the organization who display competence—managing a team to hit or surpass pre-determined service and profitability targets—will soon discover that their foundation of trust has been strengthened.

People will overlook a lot to tolerate competence. When the press badgered Lincoln about Grant's drinking, his reply was simple: Find out what's he's drinking and send a case of it to all my other generals.
Consistency. Consistency of words over time, and from place to place. This can be a tough one, since messages will change in response to all sorts of changes inside and outside the organization, and must be tailored to the needs of audiences with sometimes conflicting interests. When people perceive that a leader has changed his or her mind, they'll claim to lose trust on the grounds that "You said this last week, now you're saying this other thing"; or: "You told me this, but you told this other person that."

Consistency doesn't mean that you don't get to change your mind or tailor your message. It does mean that you explain the reasons you've changed your mind in light of the research and changing conditions that caused you to. "I know that when you were hired, we promised a job as long as you did the work and didn't break any laws. That's changed. The recession and increased competition mean we can now guarantee you only employability."
Credibility. Credibility, or "believability," simply means that a leader's spoken comments match the audience's experience with objective perceptions of external reality. Credibility complements confidence. Just as confidence means "I don't need endless research to maintain my faith in employees," credibility means "I do, however, know what's going on."

Credibility is the result of research—systematic listening—and shows itself in concrete evidence. "If I say the market is going in a certain direction, you can look it up." "If I say our competitors are about to launch a competitive niche product—you'll be reading about that in the newspapers."
Candor. Candor has three levels:
1. At a basic level, candor is the ability to tell another person bad news clearly and directly.
2. At a more advanced level, candor is the ability to hear bad news without punishing the often courageous deliverer of the message.
3. At the highest level, candor is the ability to take—and act on—criticism of one's own performance.

We earn the right to criticize by being open to it. Both—the ability to give and to take constructive criticism —are essential to trust. Simply examining your own experience will reveal the high esteem in which we hold people who trusted us enough to tell us difficult news honestly and directly. Far from lessening our respect for that person, it actually builds trust by increasing the efficiency of honesty.

Compassion. The goal of communication, as we've said, is "motion": moving employees in the direction of a desired goal. The capacity for motion is "e-motion," or feeling or passion. "Compassion" means the ability to feel what your audience is feeling: joy, fear, sadness, doubt, friendship, humor.

Nothing builds trust as much as the perception that a leader is one of us.
Character. There may not be one universally accepted code of conduct, but there is universal agreement that one's actions and the words that describe those actions must align, for reasons of character, or integrity.

Lies about one's behavior violate trust, usually beyond repair.

So, simply put, if you say that employees' ideas are vital to the company, your actions must align with those words: You must listen to and implement the ideas of employees.

Cascading, tailoring, accountability, follow up

Of course, the CEO cannot actually do all the face-to-face communications alone. The best thing he or she can provide is an infectious model of speaking transparently and listening candidly.

But the CEO should also require that his or her direct reports pass all relevant information down to their reports, who should pass it down to theirs, and so forth. Communication at the very top of an organization tends to be good, and at the supervisory level, also, pretty good. Where things get stuck is in the great bottleneck or, to alter the metaphor, clay layer of middle management.

So another communication responsibility of the CEO and his or her direct reports is to help ensure that decisions and plans at the highest levels reach those at the farthest level, without filtering but with tailoring, in ways that are meaningful to everyone in the organization.

The cascade model

Actually, the directional terms we're using here—"top," "highest, "bottom"—aren't really accurate, since they imply a hierarchy in what is more usefully viewed as a flat or lateral process. Information should not be viewed as flowing only "down," but also "outward"—from the decision-makers to the people who produce the products and provide the services—and "inward"—from the front lines in to managers for accuracy of decision-making. Just as a river can flow only within the structure determined by its banks, so also with information.

None of this happens without structure, modeling, systems and accountability. And perhaps the most effective example of the cascade model in my experience is the one of Saturn, in Spring Hill, Tennessee. It goes something like this:

Every Monday, the senior executive team has a one-hour meeting to review performance updates, progress against plans, significant issues and the like. The meeting is "scribed," and the notes published electronically and posted.
On Tuesday, the individual members of the executive team meet with their direct reports—avps—and tailor the high-level messages to their individual functions: law, marketing, operations, finance, etc. Again, the meetings are scribed and the notes published.
Wednesday: Tailoring to the managers charged with putting those decisions into operation. Notes posted.
Thursday: The front-line supervisors—the most important link in the chain—get the messages, tailored to their work units. Notes published.
And on Friday—Friday morning! (No Friday afternoon meetings)—the front-line employees discuss that week's news and ideas with their supervisors, with the notes of the meeting transcribed and posted.

Why it works:

Transcribing and posting the notes from every meeting ensures agreement in a common public document, can be used for clarity in future meetings, commits to follow up, and informs those people who, for whatever reason, couldn't attend the meetings. It is also the evidence of accountability: that the meeting took place, and that everyone is "reading off the same page."
Tailoring the information to the precise level of detail—that is, the practical level of application and decision-making—makes the information most useful to the subject-matter experts in their functional areas where responsibility resides.
Each level of management holds its direct reports responsible for the next level of meetings—both explicitly in directives, and implicitly, through informal follow-up.
Scheduling regular meetings at the same time every week ensures that busy managers make time for communications.
But perhaps the greatest strength of the process is that it defies gravity—it actually allows information to flow "up" to executives. At each meeting, information is not only given out; the questions and best ideas of employees at every level are gathered, and "passed in" at the next week's meeting.
In other words, the reason the best ideas in an organization—those from the people who make the products or provide the services—seldom reach the right level of decision-making is that there's no structure for "listening in." The cascade model provides that structure.
Finally, the cascade model provides a forum for CEO modeling and peer emulation. In other words, if people at the highest level of the organization participate in the model, people at every level will also be inclined towards responsibility for participating in the model—especially with the pressure from their management peers.
And when everyone begins doing something—in this case, communicating—the same way, it becomes part of culture: the way we do business.

Meeting skills: A review

Because:

Most executive face-to-face communications take the form of a meeting, and
Most managers spend most of their time in meetings, and
To judge by the feedback I get—most meetings are a wasteful exercise in boredom ...

The following review of best meeting practices.

12 steps to more effective, more efficient meetings

Decide whether the meeting is necessary. The main purpose of a meeting is discussion, leading to participation in decisions and clarity through interactive Q&A. No data dumps, so . . .
Prepare the attendees with pre-reading; again, use the meeting for discussion and decision-making, not information-sharing.
Tighten the attendee list: one person can report to the rest of his or her team after the meeting.
Provide an agenda in advance, so people come prepared.
Assign roles to participants before the meeting: scribing, reporting to team members, preparing to discuss the pre-reading, gathering questions of team members, actively participating in the discussion, and the like. No one should ever arrive at a meeting wondering what it's about or why he or she is there.
Start on time; end early. There's no reason meetings have to be any specific length—just long enough to get the job done. But they should never run past a certain pre-determined time.
Keep individual presentations to five or fewer slides. And five or fewer minutes.
Speak less; listen more.
Field questions as you go, topic-by-topic, not all at the end.
Scribe and post the meeting notes.
Schedule and post follow-up items.
No Friday afternoon meetings.

As with any key system or process in an organization—legal standards, software, methods of financial reporting—meeting processes should be standardized throughout the organization.

To ensure conformity to best practices in strategic face-to-face communication, some leaders find the following "Meeting Planning Template" useful. It ensures that, for every topic on the agenda, we link the topic to a business issue, gather ideas topic-by-topic, and commit to follow-up.

Accessibility, availability, approachability

Let's say, then, that the CEO and the executives who will lead by example your face-to-face communications initiative are on board:

They understand the business case for face-to-face
They understand their role
They're equipped with basic tools and techniques
They're supported by well-managed communications processes and systems

But that's not enough. What is sometimes overlooked in discussions of executive responsibility for face-to-face communication—often in the rush to "media coaching"—is the importance of simply being present. Everyone knows that executive time is at a premium, and that executives are often minor celebrities within an organization. Just seeing them can be impressive.

Because most of what we communicate comes through our actions, it is essential that executives underscore their commitment to communication by being ... well, sort of just by being ... there. Of course the CEO's time is the organization's rarest resource, and his or her calendar is tightly managed. That's the point: The executive willing to make time, for anyone, for any valid reason, at any time, will do more to build trust and advance the cause of face-to-face communication than the charismatic superstar CEO.

So a concerned executive must be:

Available: There—not always in meetings or always on the road, but there where people can get at you.
Accessible: Not just visible, but someplace where people can come to you easily without barriers, whether spatial or cultural—tell the security guard and administrators. And please be sure no one in the organization has the outmoded idea that all communications have to go up through a well-structured chain of command and only up one level at a time. That is, the idea that I have to pass everything through my boss. That's the old "knowledge is power, command and control" hierarchy. It's not only ineffective, it's so dated it's becoming quaint.
Approachable: This is a hard one: Executives must be not only there, but also accessible—the kind of person who puts others at ease: humorous, unpretentious, friendly, helpful, informal, genuinely interested in others.

These are skills of personality that can be taught only to a limited extent, but opportunities for interaction can be structured into any executive's schedule, and they're familiar:

Breakfast and lunch meetings with representative employees at regular intervals
More spontaneous informal meetings—simply joining others at random in the cafeteria, chatting on the elevator
Management by walking around to create opportunities for listening. A certain amount of time—in addition to set times—should be scheduled into every executive's calendar.
Attending celebrations—service anniversaries, promotions, retirements, even social events and community relations efforts

In short, an executive who is not only seen—but known to be approachable—will have gained a reputation for trustworthiness. And it's that executive who will discover that he or she suddenly becomes the repository of the company's best ideas for systems and process improvement as passed in by employees—in other words, its most important asset: its intellectual capital

Defining the communication role of the manager or supervisor through research and planning

If you feel, then, that you can make the case for face-to-face communication to decision-makers, and can make the case forcefully enough to secure senior leadership's commitment to modeling best practices in face-to-face, then you're ready for your toughest audience, and your most important: front-line supervisors.

We've noted the reasons for resistance: Supervisors are busy, paid to hit their numbers, often more comfortable exercising their technical skills than managing people. They think communication is a soft skill; they don't get the business case.

But we've also noted the importance of supervisory face-to-face communications: It's the first, last and most important step in the process of employee engagement, leading to customer retention for profitable growth.

So it's really not a question of whether or why to enlist front-line supervisors as the most important link in the employee communication process, but how.

First step: Get their attention—and their buy-in: The role of research

All successful communication begins with one act, the same act: listening. Building your face-to-face process and garnering the support of employees and front-line supervisors for that process is no exception. In this case, the listening must be structured carefully, through focus groups with employees, and focus groups with supervisors.

Most professional communicators will be experienced in conducting focus groups using established best practices.

The reasons you want to use focus group research—rather than quantitative research—for this effort, should be obvious:

The face-to-face, qualitative (or verbal) medium of the focus group gives a more accurate picture of the state of face-to-face communication in the organization than a written, quantitative (or statistical) survey. The medium is the message.
The focus group itself is a forum for speaking and listening, central skills in the face-to-face initiative; and focus groups place the communication process within the culture.
Participating in the focus group research that will inform the basis for structuring your face-to-face process will heighten support through ownership. That is, people's support for a decision or plan is directly proportional to their perceived role in helping to inform the decision or plan.
And, above all, of course, well-conducted focus group research, like all research, provides accurate information on which to base your plan for a face-to-face program.

Who should conduct the focus groups, and who should participate?

The standard approach to well-conducted focus groups is this:

Create separate focus groups for supervisors and employees
Make no focus group more than 8-12 participants
Select participants at random from a pool stratified by function and job level

How many—who should facilitate?

Hold enough focus groups to get results that are representative of significant audience groups and that will provide results that are useful enough for purposes of planning.
There's rarely any point in holding more than four, one-hour focus groups with supervisors and eight with employees. Two days should do it. After all, everyone will participate in the subsequent training, see the results of the research and, of course, everyone—or, at least, every supervisor and employee—will participate in the actual face-to-face communications that come out of the training. Here, you just want accurate information, support through representative participation and modeling best practices. Again, always begin by listening.
The focus groups should be conducted by an outside professional, for reasons of objectivity and expertise.

Questions to ask in focus groups

Remember that the purpose of focus groups is not to satisfy an insatiable curiosity, but to gather accurate information on a specific or focused topic for a defined purpose.

Here's a list of questions to ask employees:

For the most important information you want at work, where do you want to get that information?
And what is the information you want?
Are you getting it?
Do you get the information you need to do your job the best you can?
Do you know what your job is?
Does anyone care about your performance?
Do you know what others are doing so that you can work with them—in your own area, or in other departments?
Do you know the goals of the company?
Do you know what you can do to help the company meet its goals?
What do you see as your role in the communication process?
If you were to get the sorts of information you've been telling me about, and to have the voice you're seeking, how would that change your performance?
What would you be willing to do differently to improve communications with your supervisor?
How would that help the company?
How would you evaluate your supervisor's communications skills?
How would you evaluate your own?
What one thing would most improve communications between you and your supervisor?

Here's a list of complementary questions to ask supervisors:

For the most important information you want to communicate to your direct reports at work, where do you want to get that information?
And what is the information you want?
Are you getting it?
Do you get the information you need to help your reports do their job the best they can?
Do they know what their job is?
Do you care about your reports—not just their performance, but their needs as people?
Do you know what other supervisors are doing so you can work with them?
Do you know the goals of the company? Do your reports?
Do your reports know what they can do to help the company meet its goals? In other words, do you tailor the goals of the company to the specific work of the people in your area?
What do you see as your role in the communications process?
If you were to get the sorts of information you've been telling me about, how would that change the performance of your group?
What would you be willing to do differently to improve communications as a supervisor?
How would that help the company?
How would you evaluate your reports' communication skills?
How would you evaluate your own?
What one thing would most improve communications between you and your reports?

Note: For both groups, the two most important follow-up questions to ask are always these:

Could you please give me a specific example?
Why? Or: Why do you think that?

Reporting the results, structuring the plan

Just as no act of listening is complete without follow-up, no research effort is complete without reporting the results—and the plan for action—to the participants, and to those they represent. Focus groups should always end—and probably always begin—with a commitment to participants that they will see the results of the research, along with a plan for improvement, and where they will see it.

Typically, full reports of research are presented first to the sponsors of the research, then a summary of results and plans to participants, then a summary of results with a plan outline to the entire affected population in a mass media vehicle, usually an electronic or print publication.

Highlights of research can also be used to kick off training sessions. That demonstrates the credibility of your case to senior management, and structures your plan to improve face-to-face communication.

How to organize a report on your findings about face-to-face communication at your organization

It's important to have a well-structured, accurately written report on your focus groups for many reasons:

Different audiences will be interested in different parts of the report, and at different levels of detail
The report can be used as reference in related communications efforts
Above all, the research report provides the context to participants in planning

The external focus group facilitator should write the complete report, with the internal communication sponsor tailoring the report and its parts to various audiences for various purposes.

The parts of the report

Title of report: the 5 W's:

" Key Findings from Employee and Supervisor Focus Groups on Improving Face-to-Face Communications at X Corporation, February 9-10, 2006"

Date of Report

Table of Contents, including a one-sentence summary of each of the next four sections (3-6)
Executive Summary:
- One paragraph each summarizing the next three sections (4-6).
- Or you may want to structure the "Executive Summary" using a four-paragraph SWOT analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.
Introduction:
- Purpose of the report
- Purpose of the focus groups
- Methodology in selecting participants, number of participants, number of groups, facilitator of focus groups and credentials, author of the report
Key findings:
- Organize these by focus group question, with summary analysis, representative quotes and minority viewpoints
Recommendations:
- Include all recommendations—from focus group participants, not from the facilitator, sponsor or any other outside interest
- Group the recommendations by topic, noting their recurrence or frequency
- Include these two "pro forma recommendations":
  - Publish the results of the research with a plan to address the issues uncovered
  - Schedule a planning session to structure your process for improving face-to-face communication
Transcripts:
- These can be verbatim or summary, with the appropriate focus group date, location and number and job category of participants
- Never identify a focus group participant by name in a transcript

Planning the face-to-face initiative

You may be asking yourself: "Why am I doing all this research and planning? I know what to do. Why not just do it?" Or: "Programs for improving supervisory communications skills already exist. Why not just buy one and adapt it? Why reinvent the wheel?"

The last question first: The whole purpose of face-to-face communications between supervisors and their reports is two-fold:

To engage employees in helping the organization meets its goals, by tailoring those goals to the employees' self-interest
To listen to the best ideas for systems and process improvement from the people closest to the product or customer—the employee—for accuracy of decision-making

If you yourself violate those two principles—tailoring and listening—in purchasing an "off-the-shelf" program, your chances of success are diminished. I believe you'll find that the sellers of these off-the-shelf programs always claim that they are tailored to your needs. But you'll find that all they're doing is changing the name of the organization, in their canned presentation, to the name of your organization.

The answer to the first question is harder: Of course, you know what to do. You're a professional communicator. The reason we bring others into the process of research and planning is to secure their support and engagement through ownership. The final plan for your face-to-face process would probably look the same whether you put it together by yourself or in a group planning process. But it will have a lot more support behind it if you use the latter approach.

How to conduct a planning session on building a program in face-to-face communications skills for supervisors

Again, many useful templates exist.

But, in a nutshell, you want to:

Bring a group of representative members of the organization together, maybe eight to 10 people—for a one-day planning session. These will obviously include people from Communication, HR, Training or O.D., and Operations, as well as representatives from the focus groups: two supervisors and two to four employees.
Use the Research Report as the basis for the day's discussions. Be sure everyone has read it in advance of the planning session.
Lead the group through a step-by-step planning session, with interactive discussion. This follows.

The 12-step agenda for a planning meeting

Review the research findings using a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis. Strengths might include such things as leadership's support. Opportunities might include training for supervisors.
Identify the key issues, those consistent topics most in need of action. These might include, for instance, the need for supervisors to find time to communicate, measuring communication performance, the need to listen, and so forth.
Identify three to four initiatives that will address these issues. They might include an HR re-structuring of performance reviews to reward communications skills, or hiring and promoting better communicators as supervisors. One initiative, certainly, will be instituting a comprehensive session to improve supervisory communications.
Brainstorm and select various tactics to support the face-to-face initiative. These should come right out of your research and might include such tactics as these:
- Training in speaking and listening skills
- Launching information sources to help supervisors tailor corporate-wide messages
- Redefining the role of the supervisor to reflect the need for better communications
Identify key allies in the organization. These will be the leaders you go to for support.
Identify any barriers you might face, and how to overcome them
Set a goal for the initiative ("To improve supervisory communications,” e.g.)
Identify your means of measurement (“as indicated by improvements in quality and productivity related to improvements in communications.")
Set a schedule and budget for the initiative.
Assign responsibilities and accountabilities.

That's it. The last step is to publish your plan to everyone affected by it. Since that's everyone in the organization, you may want to publish several versions of your plan:

One for the team that will help you implement it: the whole thing
One for senior management, who must support you and budget the initiative: Executive summary
One for other managers and all supervisors
One for all employees: feature story in employee publication or on the intranet.

The two principal values of the plan are these:

It unites a disparate organization in support of a common goal based on shared information.
It coordinates the efforts of the professionals most immediately responsible for implementing the initiative.

A typical structure for a face-to-face communications session for front-line supervisors

We call the meeting at which we introduce our initiative a "communication session," rather than a "training session," for practical reasons. Although skills training will typically be a part of the session, it will be only a small part.

An important decision is who will go through the first sessions. Only supervisors? Supervisors and their managers? Just managers? Executives? In their own group or as part of other groups? Employees? Yes—employees. After all, communication is a two-way—or everyway—process. Will it work if only one half of the participants in the dialogue—the supervisors—attend?

All arguments have their virtues. Sure, if resources like time, money, and trainers are unlimited, put everyone through the training. If not, identify a few trainers to administer the program, and put only the front-line supervisors through the session. Make it part of the follow-up to have supervisors cascade the learnings and information from the session out to their reports, and in to their own managers.

But the program will gain enormous credibility if the executive team goes through it and endorses it first.

The session is typically four hours, given people's busy schedules and shortening attention spans. It includes most or all of these elements, often in this order, depending on your research findings and planning.

A brief introduction by an executive, endorsing the initiative.
The agenda.
A review of the research, stressing the business case for face-to-face and the central role of the supervisor. Some form of the research—either the entire report or a summary—should be available as pre-reading to attendees before the session.
A review of information tools and communications coaching support at the supervisor's disposal.
A review of speaking and listening skills, including meeting skills.
A review of the cascade model.
Tips in time management: making time to communicate.
Standards of performance expectations, systems of measurement, rewards.
Next steps and follow-up.
Commitment to cascading the session both ways (out and in).

But first, a note of caution. A successful face-to-face initiative for supervisors is more than training in speaking and listening skills. The simple fact is that everyone seeks out their own self-interest, their economic interest. And what gets measured and rewarded gets done.

As important as leadership modeling is to the success of your face-to-face program, so is your partnership with HR in incorporating measurement of supervisor communication success as it relates to their performance reviews and, thereby, establishes standards of performance expectation and corresponding rewards.

Often—too often—I have seen performance review modules for supervisors that include two or three questions related to communication performance, as evaluated by their manager. These usually include such areas as "Holds regular meetings" or "Is open to ideas from reports."

That won't work.

Supervisors must be evaluated—not only by their managers but also by their employees—on such key areas of performance as these:

My supervisor helps me understand the company's goals
My supervisor helps me see what I can do better to help us meet those goals
My supervisor helps me understand how I can work more productively with others in my area and other departments
My supervisor helps me define my job responsibilities
My supervisor listens to my ideas for improvement and follows up with me
My supervisor genuinely cares about my work experience

Like that—and with some teeth in it. In other words, supervisors must be directed to excellence in communications performance as described by and structured into their performance reviews. And their direct reports must have a voice in that process. Performance reviews, in other words, are simply one more expression of effective face-to-face communication.

These standards and processes, of course, vary from organization to organization. The sponsors of the program must work closely with Human Resources in establishing standards of performance expectation and accompanying rewards. But this is an essential part of any successful program in improving supervisory face-to-face communication performance, and must be presented at the first meeting to introduce the initiative.

Tools and techniques for supervisors

If you've made the case—the business case—for face-to-face
If you've secured leadership's support for the initiative and commitment through their actions
If you've done your research and put your plan together
If you've partnered with HR to establish standards of expectation through valid measurements of communications performance ...

Then you've laid a solid foundation for a face-to-face communications process for managers and supervisors.

But only the foundation. The next step begins to implement the plan, and is, arguably, the most important step in the process: its introduction to front-line supervisors. First impressions are lasting, so the (typically) four-hour informational, training session for supervisors must be put together with great care. Planning the session will also ensure that you've put the support processes in place to heighten your chances of success.

Reviewing the best-practice template for meeting planning from Step 1, you'll notice that a meeting's success is often determined by what goes on before the meeting.

In this case, you'll want to prepare the supervisor participants in a number of ways:

Send them an agenda for the meeting in advance, using the nine-step outline provided here
Send them, also, a letter of invitation to the session from the CEO, and copy their immediate manager
As pre-reading, send a summary of the research
Clarify the purpose of the session: to help supervisors in executing one of their most important responsibilities: communicating with their reports to heighten company performance
Clarify their role in the session: to participate fully, to review their own communications support needs to present at the meeting, to ask their direct reports for any useful input, for example: What would most improve communications between them and the session participants?
You may also want to heighten awareness for the importance of the entire initiative before the session by running a series of stories in your print or electronic publication, reviewing the focus group research and explaining the plan for improving face-to-face communications

Who should conduct the session?

A professional communicator could lead the session, or a professional trainer. The ideal trainers—or facilitators, really—would be front-line supervisors, since they would have high credibility as peers of the participants. Each of these has obvious strengths and weaknesses.

Decide what's best for your organization, what resources are available, and so forth. Two facilitators work better than one, so perhaps some combination of supervisor, communicator and trainer would be ideal.

Of course, your own sense of what will make for a successful session will determine room arrangement, handouts, refreshments and so forth.

This is where all your preparation and planning pay off. If you've put all the pieces in place, the session should virtually teach itself.

Here's a typical 9-point template:

1. An introduction by the CEO, or a member of the executive team.

This person's job is to endorse the session and the face-to-face processes that come out of it, and to represent executive leadership's full, unqualified support for the process. Sample contents of this address:

A personal anecdote from the executive's own career, on the importance of face-to-face communication to business success
Endorsement of the business case for face-to-face. The business case (to review) is that employee engagement is the key to customer retention, and that spells profitable growth. In other words, the executive must make the business case for face-to-face as a necessity, not a "soft" skill
Explaining that communication is everyone's responsibility
Commitment to support the front-line supervisors: tools, rewards, modeling
To conclude the introduction, the executive should say: "But all successful communication begins with listening. So tell me: What would most help you be better communicators? What barriers do you face? What can we do to support you?"

Here, one of the facilitators will want to capture the suggestions and questions of the participants on flip charts or white boards, organizing them by topic, as structured by the agenda. The executive can address whichever issues he or she is comfortable with, or simply capture them.

Commitment to follow-up: The executive should conclude the introduction with a personalized statement of what he or she intends to do after the session to improve face-to-face communications, and get back to participants with action on their suggestions.
Although you want to be flexible with time, this section of the session should take about a half hour.

2. Introduce the facilitators, who present the agenda.

3. Exercise: Traits of a great communicator

In this early stage of the session, it's important to keep listening and to keep everybody active. An excellent question is to ask participants:

Who is the best communicator you've ever known personally at work?
What skills or traits did that person possess?
What benefits did the person get from being a good communicator?
What benefits did this person's direct reports get?

The point of the exercise, obviously, is to have the participants themselves endorse the class: To have them illustrate, in their own words and examples, that communication effectiveness directly correlates to business success.

Some optional questions—or additional ones, if you have the time, are:

What is the biggest success you were ever involved with in your business career?
What role did communication play?
Was communication necessary to the success of the project?
What did the communications look like?
Would the project have succeeded without effective communication?
How can you apply those lessons to your own career?

Again, the point is to have participants make the case for the session:

That face-to-face communication is an essential strategic business practice and everyone's responsibility
That any supervisor can improve his or her communication skills
That you are here to help

This activity should conclude the first hour of the session.

Establishing standards of performance excellence,

clarifying roles, supporting winning behavior, measuring for success

The vital point to reinforce at this most sensitive stage in the session is that you are there to do everything in your power to heighten their chances of success as supervisors. They've demonstrated in their own words and examples that communication is necessary to success.

4. Present your research

Now, you must demonstrate that, in their own words and the words of their reports, there is a considerable opportunity for improvement. In other words, here you review the focus group research described in Step 2. That should gain you credibility for the session, and the initiative that comes out of it, in three ways:

The session is based on the input of the participants and their reports
The session is tailored or customized to address the specific opportunities uncovered by the research
The session content is also determined by the needs of participants

In other words, presenting a summary of the focus group research is in no sense an opportunity to beat up supervisors for having done a bad job. That's the approach to avoid at all costs. The purpose of presenting the research—and engaging the participants in discussion—is to gain credibility for the business case for face-to-face, and to assure participants that you are there to support their real interests in success.

But the focus group research can be negative, and participants can be defensive. This would be a good time to ensure front-line supervisors of your awareness that they are the most important audience in the organization: that everything depends on their ability to engage front-line employees, the ones who touch the product or the customer.

Presenting the research and discussing it should take no more than 15 minutes, since they will have already read it.

5. How they'll be measured

We stressed the vital role of measurement in the previous step. A Human Resources professional now presents the new way communication competence will be weighted and evaluated in supervisors' performance reviews.

To repeat for emphasis, the purpose of measuring supervisory communication performance is to clarify their role, establish objective standards of performance, and to support them in that role through rewards.

The specifics of measurement must, of course, be determined by Human Resources professionals, in partnership with Operations and Communication and others, within existing management guidelines and in alignment with the culture and goals of the organization.

Those measurement programs that seem to work best have several characteristics in common. They are:

Based on observable behavior: "My supervisor holds regular meetings"; "My supervisor explains how my work contributes to the organization's goals."
Include the input of the supervisor's manager, peers and reports, to drive the supervisor's communications efforts in every direction: 360 degrees.
Link the supervisor's communications skills to business metrics: improvements in safety, or defect-free products, for example.
Are part of an ongoing process of review, rather than a yearly event with sometimes surprising results

Exercise and questions for discussion: Here, the HR representative will want to share a sample performance evaluation with participants and ask them to evaluate where they are today. Questions:

How can you change the way you currently communicate to improve your performance measures?
How can we help—today, and in the future?

This should bring the session to an hour and forty-five minutes, leaving 15 minutes before the break, and inviting a brief discussion of time.

6. Make time for time

The primary barrier to communications, a barrier that supervisors will identify in the focus group research and in this introductory session, will be lack of time. We've noted the reasons. The discussion will go on too long unless you control it. Just give it 15 minutes for two activities:

Gather their best practices in time management, to demonstrate to participants that their peers can do it.
Underscore the importance of:
- Scheduling frequent, brief meetings
- Incorporating communication into other activities
- Focusing on only a few key messages

That should conclude the first half of the session.

Tools at your disposal

People sometimes believe, mistakenly, that "communications" is something done by people called "communicators" in the "communications department." Actually communication is everyone's job and goes on all the time and every place, including, in an important way, between supervisors and their reports.

So what is the role of professional communicators? Many things, as we'll see in the last step. But in this introductory session to supervisors, you'll want to review existing tools and processes—and maybe launch some—that you create to support front-line supervisors in their communication efforts.

7. A list of possibilities:

Of course, you'll want to have samples of these to show and pass out to participants during the session.

Review the cascade process described in the previous step, and offer brief practice in using it:
- First, provide participants with a sample issue of importance facing your organization. Show them how it would be communicated at the executive level, cascaded through your structure to their level, and how they might tailor the message to their direct reports. Do two to three of these as practice.
- Also, give supervisors practice at gathering ideas and questions from their direct reports and cascading them "in" to the right level of decision-making, based on your organization's structure.
Review the meeting planning template in the previous step. Again, give participants a relevant topic, and ask them to present the topic using the stages in the template. Try two or three of these as exercises.
Review your daily electronic newsletter, and ask representative participants to practice presenting its contents in a regularly scheduled daily five-minute meeting. If you don't have a daily electronic news vehicle, this would be a good time to launch and introduce it.
Review your Web site and intranet page, the informa

The Handbook of Internal Communications

Line Manager Communication

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Useful Models

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Advanced Communication Skills

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