Stirred, not shaken:
Constructing an Executable Targeted Communication Strategy
(JENKINTOWN,
Pa.)--The transcript below is from the presentation "Stirred, not Shaken: Constructing an Executable Targeted Communication Strategy" presented at the IABC Southern Region Conference of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC).
Presenter:
Roland
L. Draughon
Management Consultant-Trainer
Kansas City, Missouri
Part 1 of 2
A couple of announcements:
First, you do not need to take
copious notes in this session. This presentation will be posted on the
Gavin-Hodges Associates’ website, nearly verbatim, before you return home from
this conference. The Handout provides an outline of what I sat down at the computer keyboard and intend to say to you. I’ll try very hard not to get off onto too many tangents.
Second, many of you—maybe all of
you—were given printed information that the title of this session was something
about ‘how to Mix a communication strategy.’ Well fortunately for me, and fortunately for the person who did it, Como se dice: what is the word for such a person? (My friend from El Salvador is teaching me to speak good Spanish.) What could possibly be the word for a person who would decide--without consulting me--change the title of my presentation?
Fortunately, for both me
and that person, I do not have that person’s name. I do not know who rewrote and distorted
the words that I provided to describe this presentation. Maybe that person wanted a Emeril Lagasse recipe. I do know, that person clearly needs to be in this session today. That person clearly has no idea what a communication strategy is or how to construct one!
Friends, Romans, Southern Region IABCers, the absolute last thing you want to
do on your job and in your career as a communicator, the absolute last thing
you want to do, is “mix” up a batch of communication strategies.
We have enough problems
with how operating managers see us as it is. Please don’t represent
yourself in your organization as any more “mixed up” than your operating
managers already think that we are.
Ladies and gentlemen, you
will never, never, never, never ever hear me tell you to ‘mix’ a communication
strategy!
So, with apologies to Ian
Fleming for reversing a standard James Bond line of dialogue, the title of this
session is, “Stirred, not shaken: Constructing an Executable Targeted
Communication Strategy.”
We want to develop communications and communication strategies that ‘stir’ our
employees to action, not communications that 'mix' them up. We want to develop
communications and communication strategies that do not leave us shaken because
they fell apart, or flat-out bombed!
Let’s get rid of strategic plans!
Now… while I’m on this rant…
Last spring, I was copied
on an email that was distributed to Kansas City IABC members about the KC/IABC Bronze
Quill competition.
The subject of the email was
how to increase the number of participants in the KC/IABC Bronze Quill competition.
I’m sure that I was copied
on the email because the person who forwarded it to me knew that as I read the email the EMTs would
need to be called for me with oxygen and a portable defibrillator!<
Anyway, the email said
this, and I quote:
“Many of us are involved
in very tactical communication activities. But as you know, the competitions
are heavily weighted toward strategic communications.”
Wait. There was more.
“The problem for those who
practice at the tactical level (Don’t even get me started on what the
definition of a ‘tactical communicator’ might be!) is that we often come into a
project way downstream of any strategic discussions.
“This makes it awkward at best to write the ‘work plan’ portion of an entry. And to any of you who have
judged IABC competitions, you know that the work plan portion is the judge’s
first stop.”
'Hello!' I said out loud to myself as I continued to read. There was still more of this.
“In order to enter the
KC/IABC Bronze Quill competition, we must start backtracking upstream (The person meant back-pedaling, I assume?)
to reconstruct a conversation we never had about the strategic value of our
tactical efforts.”
The e-mail message goes on
with some other violin-surround-sound palabra about why developing
communication strategies is a good thing but…
Now, here’s the coup de
grace of the e-mail message, and I quote:
“… If we dropped the work
plan requirements (for skills sections) would more members who practice at the
tactical level enter their work in Quill competitions? Do you think this would
dilute IABC’s core commitment to strategic organizational communications?”
'Hello!,' I said out loud to myself again.
Wonder what the competition
criteria would be for so-called ‘tactical communicators’ if no work plan/strategy were
required? Beauty? Prettiness? What?
What is being proposed is
that these so-called ‘tactical communicators’ be given a pass on having a
reason, or expected outcome, for their work.
Wouldn’t it have been a
more reasonable thing to do to encourage the ‘tactical communicators’ to stop
doing tactics without knowing why they were doing them?
Fortunately for me, I
didn’t find out what was decided on the proposal. Very much like Papa, my
‘delicate condition’ makes me way too fragile to hear an absurd outcome!
Professional treasure chest questions
How many of you already have a documented communication strategy in place?
Have you always had one?
Do you always develop a strategy? Both for short-term projects and for
long-term organizational communications?
What was the hard part of
doing your first communication strategy?
What is still the hard
part of doing communication strategies?
Colleagues, here are some
more questions (no responses required) for you to keep in your professional
treasure chest:
• If we do not develop
strategies for the communications that we produce, what is their value? How do
we know?
• If, at the outset, we can
identify no reason to do it, why communicate at all?
• Without a communication
strategy, how will we know what behaviors were influenced?
And, thereby hangs the
tale of why communication strategies are always required.
The bottom-line of the
communication process is influenced behavior(s) of a target audience(s).
That means that not only must we know valid information about our target
audiences, but we also must know what behaviors our leaders have identified
that need influencing.
What does it look like?
I received a telephone
call at my office recently. A man said that he and his colleague needed some
help with communicating better messages to employees. (The ‘to’ is his word, not
mine. Clearly, he meant to say 'with.')
The man explained that his
organization is in the process of re-creating the organization’s persona.
He said their organization’s
CEO wants their organization to be the first name that pops into clients’ and
potential clients’ minds when services like his company’s are needed.
After asking a lot of other
questions, I asked the caller: ‘When your organization is exactly the way your CEO wants it to be, and your organization
has the businessworld persona that your CEO wants it to have, what does it
look like?”
I gave the caller an
example of what I meant by ‘What does it look like.”
I told the caller that I once had a CEO client who brought me in to train his managers and supervisors in how to manage their work
unit employee communications.
My job was to train these
managers and supervisors in a communication management process that would
provide them with the skills to create work unit employee communications that influence
employee behaviors, instead of their then current practice of creating messages to
‘send’ to their employees. Early on in the assignment for that CEO, I discovered that the CEO (a very nice
person, I might add) had a habit of making speeches to his workforce in which
his theme song always was, ‘We must be world-class in the year…”
One day, after one of
those speeches, I continued my tale to the caller, I flagged down this CEO and asked, “What does ‘world-class’ look
like?” To my surprise, he knew!
This CEO told me that for his organization to be world-class by the year …,it would need to have
production that reached x-level; the organization would need to have revenues that exceeded x-level; the organization’s safety record would need to be at x-level, etc., etc., etc. This CEO knew what ‘world-class’ for his organization 'looked like, I told the caller. But there was a problem, I continued.
The problem?
This CEO had never told anybody
else in his organization what ‘world-class’ for his organization 'looked like.' Somehow, everybody in his organization was
supposed to just know what ‘world-class’ (in the CEO’s head) looked like. That was not possible!
‘What it looks like’ means: an organization’s leaders have defined and communicated who the organization is, where it is going and how it is going to get there.
If an organization’s
senior management team has not identified, in concrete terms, and communicated
what the organization’s short-term and long-term success ‘looks like,’ it makes
no sense to even try to ask employees to help make real an organizational success that has no identity.
In a few minutes, we’re going to talk about our role as communicators in the
‘what it looks like’ scenario of our organization.
But first, let's go back to the man on the telephone. After hearing the example that I gave him, he said that he and his colleague would work on ‘what it looks like’ and get back to me.
I suggested that they
revisit the subject with his CEO. That didn’t appeal to him very much. He told
me that the CEO already had said to the groups working on this new persona that
if he (the CEO) knew how to shift the organization’s persona, he would do it
himself. But since he didn’t they should make it happen.
Do you understand?
Managers can be trained to
develop behavior-influencing communications. I can do that.
But to do that would be a
waste of my time and an organization’s resources, if those same managers and
supervisors have no idea what their organization’s success ‘looks like.’
Managers and supervisors
who are trained and highly skilled in communication management still have
nothing concrete to communicate to try to influence employees unless the
organization knows what it is supposed to look like when it grows up. Such
highly-skilled managers would be all dressed up in skills with nowhere to wear
them.
Go to stirrednotshaken Part 2.
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