by David Keel

David Keel is Head of Group Marketing and Communications at Allianz Insurance plc where the challenge is delivering messages to 4,500 employees in 20+ locations
 

 
No matter what industry you operate in, whether your organisation is large or small your CEO has a vital role to play in the communication of key messages to employees – whether he or she likes it or not. They are the figurehead of the company, they can offer views and opinions and issue statements on strategy “From the Top” and most importantly “From the Horse’s Mouth”. When they speak, the company listens. They inspire confidence, motivate your team to perform to their potential and leave you with the feeling that your office really is a “Great Place to Work”.
 
At least, that’s how it should be.
 
And if it isn’t already, that’s how it could be.
 
But the CEO cannot achieve the level of trust and credibility required to reach these goals without a little help and the communicators within the organisation should play a key role in providing this support.
 
The raw material with which we are asked to work will vary considerably. Everyone in business will be able to quote examples of the good and bad. Those CEOs who lead from the front, who are viewed with reverence by the people who work with them, who provide the sort of leadership that people want to follow and most importantly – stay on message. And those CEOs who are loose cannons, perhaps always prepared to give a quote or an interview but not prepared to be advised on what to say, those who talk tough but inspire fear in their people or those who live in their own bubble, protected from their employees so that they can get on with their job of running the company.
 
Your new best friend
 
You won’t know what kind of CEO you have until you build a relationship with them. This will be one of the keys to maximising the opportunities in using them to spearhead an internal communications plan. You need to get to know them on as many levels as possible, this may be difficult, uncomfortable and slow but it will be time well spent. 
 
The first part of this process – and the one that your CEO may be most comfortable in discussing – is to establish their own internal communications objectives. This will most likely involve identifying the key messages which they are looking to convey to your employees. Great attention should be paid to this dialogue as it will give you a lot of valuable information when it comes to framing a communication programme for your CEO. It will be much easier to convince them to participate in any form of communication activity if you can show them how you are seeking to support them in putting across their own key messages.
 
Of course these messages will need to be consistent with the others that are being put out to your other audiences such as customers, shareholders and the media. Indeed this provides an opportunity for you to propose specific internal positioning statements that are consistent with existing external messages. Where these can be tied back to real commercial objectives you are likely to gain your CEO's ear. Whether they are a natural communicator or not, they will enjoy talking about the business and your job is to translate this into a language that is relevant, engaging and, where possible, inspiring to your employees.
 
At this point it is worth remembering that you are representing both the voice and the ear of the employee. Firstly, as the voice, you should be feeding back to the CEO what it is that your employees want to hear and how. This will cover the general topics that interest them (and those that don’t), the media through which they wish to be communicated and the tone of voice and level of detail that they feel is appropriate.
 
Numbers Talk
 
It’s not a nailed-on racing certainty but it’s a fairly good bet that your CEO didn’t get where he is today without understanding the numbers that drive your business. Whether it be market share, revenue, expense ratios or retention rates they are likely to be more confident talking numbers than painting pictures with words.
 
So you have to learn this language too. It’s unlikely that you will be able to match their vocabulary – or you’d be the boss yourself, or worse still an accountant – but you should be able to interpret the facts and figures that are their stock in trade into messages that will have meaning to your employees.
 
The challenge is in this interpretation, taking the language of the Boardroom and turning it into the language of the shop floor. This is a delicate balancing act
 
Numbers also talk when you are measuring the success of your internal communications programme. You will stand a far better chance of persuading your CEO to dedicate more time and energy to your cause if you are able to show that there is a positive return on their time investment. This will involve the use of quantitative surveys which can be undertaken online for ease of administration and focus groups to explore in depth how the messages are received and interpreted.
 
For this research to have validity, you must ensure that you are measuring those aspects of the programme that are important to the CEO and which can be adjusted and improved in response to the research findings. You must be prepared to accept and act upon the results of these research, even if they do not correspond with your own viewpoint. You should also be prepared to show a full commitment to these measures by having the research findings hard-wired into your own performance measuremet objectives.
 
Don’t waste my time
 
“Time is money” - it’s a cliché but in this case it’s true. The time your CEO dedicates to the programme is a precious commodity that needs to be handled with care. This means meticulous planning and preparation in advance of meetings and prompt and accurate feedback afterwards.
 
Make sure you are making the best use of the time that your CEO allows for communicating with his people. This time allocation is a resource that needs to be targeted towards those areas where you are going to achieve the maximum return. In this respect, budgeting your CEO's time is much like planning any other marketing activity where you are looking to maximise your return
 
Keep reports short and to the point but with contingency plans to provide more information if required. This “layered” approach can also be applied to the messages that your CEO is delivering to your employees. The time that they dedicate to the programme should be used to deliver top line messages with the greater depth provided by the communications team.
 
Within this you must not lose sight that the CEOs time must be equally balanced between time spent delivering the message and time spent receiving feedback, answering questions and entering into a true dialogue. Not all employees will want or need access to feed their thoughts and ideas back to the person at the top but it is critically important that this access is seen to be granted.
 
Make sure you are only using the CEO for delivering those messages that have to come from him. There are specific areas of your business that must be owned at the highest level. These should be agreed with the CEO early in the process and will typically include the headline delivery of corporate strategy and performance, the launch of major new initiatives or the announcement of acquisitions.
 
Most importantly the CEO must be the person to deliver “bad news” that have a direct impact on the individuals within the organisation. This will include the announcement of redundancies and restructuring. In order for the CEO to establish credibility throughout the organisation he should be seen to be addressing all of the key issues providing strong leadership, taking responsibility for bad news as well as good.
 
Other messages can be allocated across your top management team on a case by case basis. Directors can be positioned as sponsors of ongoing initiatives but your CEO must be seen to be supporting them all, particularly at key milestones as these programmes develop.
 
Making best use of the CEOs time will involve explaining clearly any process and their role in it and ensuring that they are not involved in those parts of the process that do not need them.
 
 
Keep flexible
 
It is entirely likely that whilst you will be using all of your finely tuned skills to ensure that your CEO is committed to the cause of talking to your people, he will still be placing this aspect of his job some way down his personal priority list.
 
Accept this as a way of life! Again contingency planning is a key here. Expect the worst and plan for it. If you are announcing an event or activity to your employees in advance, think through the scenario of a last minute cancellation or delay.
 
 
Cascade
 
Make sure that your CEO’s good example of internal communication is promoted as best practice to the rest of your top management. Whilst they should not be seen to be stealing his thunder, as already mentioned there will be messages that can be delivered equally well by another senior manager.
 
As your CEO is seen to be embracing internal communications as part of his management style, this will rub off on his colleagues around the management board. Whilst your own resources should be focused primarily on the person at the top, consideration should also be given to the support which can be given to the rest of your top management team.
 
Don’t Cry Wolf
 
If there is nothing important to be said, don’t waste your CEO's time by asking them to attend meetings, make addresses or send out messages. Keep your powder dry for the important issues.
 
In the same way that you would not expect your CEO to undertake interviews with all of the journalists from the niche publications that may be on the fringes of your target audience, you should not point them at every small subset of your employee base. Accepting that their time is limited, addressing the largest, most influential groups of your internal stakeholders should be the priority, supported by feedback mechanisms that give everybody access to put forward ideas or questions.
 
Be a ghost writer
 
I’ll let you into a secret. In most organisations where the CEO has fully engaged with the internal communications programme they are still unlikely to be writing their own material. The more involved your CEO becomes in your internal communications programme, the more work you will be creating for yourself.
 
We’ve already established that your CEO is likely to have an affinity with numbers, it is less certain that they will be equally confident as a wordsmith. This being said, they will no doubt have views on specific positioning and words which they do and do not like used in specific contexts. Keep a note of these and try to build up a vocabulary that can be used when drafting statements to inject their personality into your words.
  
Make sure it’s a two way street
 
As with all good internal communications, your CEO’s own programme should be a dialogue, not a monologue. Whatever the message or medium used there should always be a channel for feedback.
 
Blogging, whilst providing an excellent opportunity to enter into such a dialogue may be a little outside your CEO’s comfort zone but the opportunity for your people to challenge, probe or seek clarification whether face to face through an open forum or online via an Intranet “ask me a question” facility is key to a successful programme. If the forum is not face to face the communicator will have the opportunity to help control the messaging and most importantly reduce the CEO’s workload. The more responsibility that can be devolved from the CEO, the more likely they are to maintain their support for the programme. 
 
As already mentioned, whatever the solution you choose to establish this dialogue, if you want it to succeed, be prepared to do the work yourself. Draft answers to questions for approval and prepare key message documents and answers to difficult questions for approval in advance of any live event. Your CEO will not always stay on message but you have a better chance of getting consistent responses if you have done your preparation.
 
The balance here is to ensure that you are not seen to be hiding your CEO behind your communication team’s spin, with all messages and responses sanitised before release. There must be mechanisms for a direct face-to-face contact with unseen questions being answered openly and honestly without any interference from the communication professionals.
 
Free to roam
 
It must always be remembered that the briefing material you prepare for your CEO and the answers and statements that you draft are there to assist them rather than to put words in their mouth. Dependent on the personality you are dealing with they will seek to roam
 
Pick your battles very carefully. Whilst it is likely that your CEO will expect you to advise and challenge, there will also be a line that should not be crossed where you might be seen to be challenging their authority. Exactly where this line is drawn will vary dependent on their personality and the relationship that you are able to build with them. Once you have crossed this line and pushed too hard, it will ttake a long time and a lot of hard work to rebuild.
 
Make it fun
 
If your CEO considers that your employees are enjoying the dialogue then he is more likely to engage further with your programme. Again it is a fine balance between maintaining a business-focused approach and allowing for some more light-hearted exchanges.
 
The objective should always be to show that the person at the top has a human side that they are prepared to share with the business
 
Be in it for the long haul
 
Before commencing on a programme of internal communications with your CEO you must make your own commitment to see the job through to the end. Be prepared to expand the programme should their appetite grow and their demands grow, you must be prepared to grow with them. You must retain your personal enthusiasm at all times. Whilst it is correct to challenge any new initiatives that you do not feel will add value, these must be based on objective reasoning and not a reflection of your own workload or appetite. If your enthusiasm wavers, theirs will follow and you will find your self in a spiral
 
Be creative
 
You are the expert when it comes to communicating with your employees. While your CEO will be relying on you not only to develop the messages, choose the delivery mechanisms and prepare background material, they will also be looking for that flash of inspiration.

 
 
Roll with the punches
 
As you try and build your relationship with the CEO, resilience will become an important part of your armoury. It isn’t going to be plain sailing even once you have been taken into their confidence and feel that you have established a true partnership in your shared goal of keeping your employees, informed, engaged and motivated. There will still be occasions where other demands on their time and pressing business issues take precedence. 
 
When this happens, you may be involved in the decision to cancel or postpone an event they were due to participate in. More commonly the decision will be taken by the CEO themselves and your job is to pick up the pieces.
 
The best way of managing this situation is by staying one step ahead of the game. Whilst the change of plan will come as a disappointment, this feeling can be offset by the satisfaction of being able to deploy a well thought through contingency plan. When drawing this up there are a number of obvious options that could be considered.
 
Place – if the CEO has to be elsewhere, is there an alternative location that could be considered?
 
Time – can the event take place at a later or earlier time on the same date? It should be possible to ascertain the flexibility of all parties in advance. This may often be the most appropriate solution and it shows great commitment if the CEO is seen to be giving of their own time.
 
Date – the most obvious solution is to delay. With this in mind, access to the CEO's diary before the event is essential, if not to have a secondary date agreed in advance then at least to have an idea of the timescales you are looking at. For example it would be foolish to suggest to your audience that an alternative date might be found “in the next couple of weeks” if the CEOs diary shows them to be booked up solid for the next month.
 
Medium – could a face to face meeting become a telephone call or a webcast or an online Q&A?
 
Substitution – not an ideal solution but could someone else step in? This solution should be considered as a near to last resort where any other rearrangement would prove too costly or untimely.
 
In the same way that you are building trust with your CEO you will also be building the trust that your employees have in them. If an event is postponed that trust and credibility will take a slight knock. What is important is how you recover from that knock and make sure that the damage is not compounded by a further postponement or unclear messaging around the replacement activity.
 
One practical example
 
I am putting the final touches to this chapter in a hotel room somewhere in the north of England. Later on today I will be facilitating a CEO Roadshow at a newly acquired subsidiary company. I will give you some details of the event, not necessarily claiming an example of best practice but just to give one practical example of what can be achieved.
 
Today’s event is one of a series of 20 visits that our CEO makes to our various locations around the UK. This represents an investment of 10% of his time in visiting the operations and people around our business.
 
After a meeting with the MD of the local business, our CEO will hold two open forum sessions with employees based at the site. Today there will be 80 people in each session, probably more than we would ideally recommend but on this occasion we feel it advantageous to address as many employees as possible from a new acquisition.
 
Each of these two sessions will comprise a 25 minute presentation, trimmed down to cover only the most important aspects of our business. 80% of this presentation will be standard to all locations, addressing the key strategic issues facing the company as a whole. The remaining 20% will be speaking specifically about the challenges facing the local business unit.
 
Following each presentation there will be a question and answer session of approximately one hour. Questions can be submitted in advance, including anonymous questions posed by the faciliator, or asked spontaneously from the floor. No subjects are taboo but part of the facilitators job is to orchestrate the session so that the questions flow smoothly and the controversial topics are evenly sprinkled.
 
After the open forums there will be a lunch attended by 10 members of the local management team and then a walkabout of the offices for around two and a half hours, giving as many people as possible the opportunity for some one-to-one time with the top man.
 
At the end of the day’s events, each member of staff will be emailed a questionnaire to complete and return.
 
As this is the first Roadshow at this particular venue, we will follow up with a feature in the staff newsletter. The Q&A sessions will also be transcribed and circulated to all employees at the site as well as the management board at head office.
 
The preparation for this event has involved close liaison with the local management to prepare a briefing document to cover the logistical aspects of the visit but also to identify any hot topics that may arise on the day. Whilst one of the ground rules for the Q&A session is that the CEO does not see the questions beforehand, this background information just helps to focus his mind on some of the local issues that are considered to be front of mind for the employees.
 
A two page briefing document was prepared and presented in a face-to-face meeting of around 20 minutes with the CEO which also covered the feedback from the previous Roadshow.
 
The feedback forms show that our people value these visits and they remain the cornerstone of our internal communications programme. For this to continue we must demonstrate value to the CEO and ensure that the organisation is so slick that it becomes automatic.
 
And Finally...
 
Don't lose heart.  Building the reationship between your CEO and your employees with you sitting in the middle will be a long and challenging journey but when you get there you'll know it was worth the effort.

 

 

 


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