Did you know that most of what you "say" in person is communicated by your body language and tone rather than by the words you speak? This can be a little disheartening when rolling out an announcement or big news to a staff audience. In this month’s e-newsletter I provide four steps to success to help get around this challenge. Given the wealth of statistics that show employees are looking for leadership and direction from their employers, and notably, their senior management, there is no time like the present to brush up communications within your organization. Here’s the first step from the article. If you’d like to receive the e-newsletter you can sign up here.

Step 1. Fail to plan, plan to fail

Planning is a journey, not a destination. The simple act of planning will bring forward issues and ideas you hadn’t thought of.

· Start with your objective in mind – although obvious, it’s easy to forget. The first step to any strategic communication is defining your objective. Each message you deliver should have a specific audience and purpose.

· Make a list of all of your audiences

· Identify the role each group plays in your initiative – will they be go-to people for inquiries once the project starts? Are they a link in the chain? Do they just need to know, but won’t be directly involved? Are they responsible for training other staff and volunteers? This helps identify what information each group will need. This might even cause you to rethink timing or order of information to each group, for example, brief department leaders or go-to people first.

· Identify the issues or concerns for each group – anticipate any positive or negative reactions, and make sure you have answers for each. Remember the first question each person will have is, how will this affect me?

· Identify the action you’d like to inspire in each group – everyone needs to know his or her responsibility in the process and what you are asking each of them to do.

If your organization is sitting on the fence and investing less in developing your internal team and communicating with your staff and volunteers than externally focused endeavours, a recent study again demonstrates that the lowest hanging fruit can yield the best results. The study found that despite emphasizing the importance of people assets, a staggering amount of employees don’t feel their organizations or their senior management are doing enough to help them become fully engaged and contribute to their organizations’ success. Towers Perrin’s Global Workforce Study not only provides some international benchmarks and comparisons but also concludes the importance of senior leaders demonstrating ‘inspiration, vision and commitment’ and that employees want to work for a company that is seen as a leader. The bottom line of the survey? That the organization itself, and specifically, senior leadership, is the most powerful influencer of employee engagement beyond employees’ personal values and traits. Another recent post, released prior to the survey, on Duct Tape Marketing puts it in another perspective: that if you are not “marketing” to attract and keep staff, and balancing this with an earned reputation for vision and leadership, you’ll be forced to compete by price, or salary, alone. Well said!

This week I came across a quote on the Fundit blog. It sums up perfectly my philosophy toward inspiring organizations. I’ll be covering four steps to success in communicating with internal audiences in my next e-newsletter. You can sign up here.

If you want to build a ship,
don’t herd people together to collect wood
And don’t assign them tasks and work
but rather, teach them to long for the
endless immensity of the sea.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I have had people ask me how big does an organization have to be to require a formal internal communications program? The flip side of this is "that won’t work for us, we are too small". My answer is always the same: size doesn’t matter.  Internal communications is just as important in an organization of five people in one location, as in an international organization with multiple offices and hundreds of employees. A formal program doesn’t have to be as formidable as it sounds: it can consist of devoting time at each staff meeting to touch base on the organization’s strategic plan or progress on an important goal, inviting two-way dialogue and feedback on pending changes or new ways of doing something, and making sure staff know where to find information and who to go to with questions. The key is ensuring they are plugged in to the strategic direction of the organization and understand how they each fit and contribute. If you’re a small organization, steps toward a formal plan can be as simple as writing down the different opportunities you have to communicate with your staff, and pencilling topics and time frames. It’s also useful to think of best practices as scalable, meaning you can increase or decrease all those big ideas you hear about to get the right-sized solution for your organization.

When faced with a major change or project in your organization, it’s easy to overlook a well-thought out approach to internal communications. Yet most would agree building internal support is a critical success factor for any large initiative. In the September Make It Count e-newsletter I discussed common communication traps that can inadvertently trip up well-intended organizations. In the October issue I’ll offer four steps to avoid these obstacles and to help ensure your initiative is a success. If you’d like to receive the e-newsletter directly in your inbox, submit the sign up form.

Here’s an excerpt:

Too busy –when planning for a major initiative, much of the emphasis is placed on the external announcement or event and spending much time on the internal announcement can become an afterthought. However, the last feeling you want to inspire in the troops is disregard.

Using the same message for all audiences – whatever your message is, it needs to be meaningful and inspire a specific reaction from your audience. Staff will have different interests than media would, for example.

Leaving more questions than answers – there are times when you won’t have all the answers, granted. But anticipating the questions and having reasonable answers will at least take care of the immediate reaction and show that you have taken the time to consider their needs.

Giving the wrong message – what could be great news to one group can be cause for concern for another.

Failing to segment your internal audiences – staff is not a single entity. Divide your internal audiences up as much as appropriate to the project. This can be done by function, by role, by department or whatever works for your situation.

Not giving enough time for your internal audiences to digest the information – you’ve spent weeks or months being immersed in your project. When you announce your news, don’t be surprised if there are no immediate questions. Most people like to reserve comment or questions until they’ve taken the time to think it over.

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard this statement, I’d be independently wealthy: We need better communications. Everyone says it, everyone knows it, but hardly anyone does it. I think there are many reasons why this is so: different understandings of the term, mismanaged expectations, or unclear goals and objectives, to name a few. When you get right down to it, communications is a broad concept. There is the act of communicating, and there is the profession of communicating. Everyone communicates but not all are communicators, professional or otherwise. As a profession, communications is a broad field with many areas of specialized skills.

What communications isn’t, is a band aid for organizational issues, lack of strategic direction or focus. When I am told by management or staff that better communications is the missing piece they feel is needed in order to be successful at X, Y, or Z, I know from experience that this is usually the sign of a larger issue or challenge that needs to be addressed, and then communicated. Here are a few common scenarios I hear often:

• Staff aren’t excited or supportive of a new, positive initiative
• Board members seem disconnected from the workings of the organization
• Long-term volunteers or staff are becoming disinterested, and are leaving
• Despite an open door policy, no one comes forward to discuss concerns
• Media never cover happenings or news about the organization
• The organization isn’t recognized in the community
• They (insert group here) don’t understand our issues
• Donations are down and we think it’s because we don’t have a high enough profile
• Members aren’t renewing and we don’t know why

There are many valid reasons why any of the above situations occur. But most often, it is not a single cause that is the issue. So trying to solve one generally leads to another. Good communications, if done well, is integrated into the core of the organization and is consistent throughout all functions and activities. But the need never ends or is completed. Think of it as a series of decisions and interactions. Multiply it by the power of the individual and the perceptions, motivations and interests of each person and you can imagine why achieving communications nirvana is a continually moving target.

I fundamentally believe that all organizations need these pieces for each corner of the puzzle: a clearly articulated vision and strategic plan, realistic and meaningful goals that can be interpreted at the individual level by each person in the organization, a comprehensive and two-way internal communications program, and an annual communications plan that specifies both internal and external communications objectives and activities that directly support the organization’s broader strategy. Only then can you begin to fill in the pieces.

A lot of time, energy and money is spent each year by organizations striving to strengthen their internal teams and therefore improve their performance. But is there such a thing as too much love?

Sadly, yes! Although it’s been a few decades since Irving Janis first coined the groupthink concept,and it is one of many communication theories, there is still much to be learned from the essence of his original concept. It goes something like this: groupthink occurs when highly cohesive groups are pressured to make important or quality decisions; they desire unanimity above all and therefore do not consider alternatives, leading to faulty decision making.

Now, this is not to say you should be worried if you have a highly functioning group of team players who understand and are committed to your vision. Celebrate it! But you might want to watch for signs of groupthink and adjust your planning approaches accordingly.

Why does this matter? Because failing to examine alternatives or offering constructive criticisms, or not thoroughly gathering information means you are not getting the whole picture. And you might be missing out on the great ideas which often happen when obstacles become opportunities. Classic signs of groupthink are a feeling of invulnerability or superiority and the ability to rationalize poor decisions. Members hold back their thoughts in fear of upsetting the group. It’s like peer pressure in reverse!

Here are some updated suggestions for combating groupthink in your organization:

• Ask each team member to critique suggestions and provide objections and doubts.
• Avoid expressing your opinion when assigning a task to a group.
• Assign several independent groups the task of working on the same problem.
• Use an independent peer review, a panel of objective experts to review your proposed plan.
• Appoint a devil’s advocate whose job is to deconstruct and shoot holes in your plan.
• Divide into groups and discuss differences; report back to the larger group.
• Use the services of a professional facilitator.
• Hire outside help to guide your planning.
• And my personal favourite, have a "last chance" meeting to offer one final opportunity to choose another course of action.