"What if you're not trying
to get anything done?"

The Situation:
The staff communication manager at the corporate headquarters of a national insurance company was assigned to work with all operating divisions to help division managers learn to target employee communications to their operating goals. The communicator's first meeting with managers from the seven operating divisions was scheduled as a 'briefing.' 

Twenty minutes into the communication manager's half-hour briefing on the need, value and payoffs of communication targeting, he was interrupted by a questioner. 

"What if you're not trying to get anything done?," the very pensive questioner said. 

"I can understand what you're saying about communication targeting to help achieve specific operating goals," she said to the communication manager, "but I don't think that applies to everything that we do. 

"For example," she explained, "I'm the associate general counsel. Corporate training reports to me. One of the things that we do each quarter is distribute the corporate training course schedule to all employees. 

"When we're doing that, we really aren't trying to get anything done. We're just distributing the training schedule. What does communication targeting have to do with distributing our training schedule?" 

Question:
What would you have said?
Look at What Happened?

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