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Building Exceptional Organizations
Observations from a roundtable discussion with:
- Thomas Buckmaster, vice president of corporate communications at Honeywell, Inc.
- Peter Debreceny, vice president of Allstate Insurance Co.
- Robert A. Ward III, senior vice president and director of communications & development at Synovus
- Mark Weiner, chief executive officer of Delahaye MediaLink.
On ensuring that your corporate vision and values are meaningful and credible
Thomas: Towers Perrin released a study in January that found that more than 50 percent of the communications that go to employees are bunk, according to those who receive them. So if the goal is to create dissonance in your environment, we're doing a fabulous job. You must do a really aggressive job to listen carefully to your employees and do a high-integrity job of addressing those issues first.
We developed an employee value proposition recently after doing a lot of research and crawling over broken glass with HR and other leaders. The worst thing we could do was announce what our employee value proposition was, so you won't find it anywhere. We talk about it privately in code for, "are we living our commitment." It's not that we're trying to keep it secret; we're trying to keep it credible.
Peter: A vision should really resonate in the heart and emotionally connect with people. It must be driven by the CEO's personal vision where he or she wants to take the organization over five to 10 years. It must be a stretch goal and one worth fighting and dying for. Your values are the DNA of your organization and you don't redo them every five years.
Robert: It's incredibly important to involve employees in the process of creating those visions and values so they ring true. The vision and values should be with us over the long haul and not be changed every couple of years. We must have communications about it constantly, and the CEO and other executive leaders must use the language day after day and reaffirm the language and get lots of feedback on it to see that it still holds true.
We developed a vision — to be the finest financial services company in the world, but we weren't sure what "finest" is. Over the last year or two, we got a group of employees and representatives of other constituencies together to paint the picture of what that would look like. We looked at three areas: people, sales and service, and performance. If we're not a high-performance company, we're not important to anyone. We developed four-to-five specific key attributes to each one and communicated that to every employee, shareholder and customer.
Mark: What we see in our research is that what's considered meaningful and credible in the C-Suite isn't always the way that employees or customers see it. Those audiences are very forthcoming, when asked.
On how communications can help grow exceptional organizations
Mark: The importance of communication can be very real by looking at what happens to visible organizations when there's poor communications. Look at the impact of Intel's refusal to respond to its Pentium computer chip problems? The impact was phenomenal to its market capitalization in just a matter of a few days.
Peter: I don't think we need to persuade the C-Suite that communications is an indispensable part of building an exceptional organization because if they're building it, they already know that and are challenging us to communicate it. What we can do, among other things, is manage the external reputation of the organization.
A great example is McDonald's, which currently might be a strong example of an exceptional organization. Its late CEO turned it upside down inside of 12 months. What's more, when he died, its directors had appointed a new CEO by 2 p.m. that same day. And a friend of mine stopped by a McDonald's franchise in California a half hour later and when he told the order taker he was sorry McDonald's chairman had died, she said, "Yes, it was very sad but I understand they appointed a new guy and he's terrific." Now that's exceptional communications.
When we hire people out of college, we hire business people who understand our business and the issues facing us as a company. We don't hire communicators because that comes in their tool kit. We need better business people.
Tom: When I left after serving for 20 years as president of Edelman New York, I thought I knew business. Yet at Honeywell, when the CFO asked if I knew how to read a balance sheet, I said, "I guess I don't if you are having to ask me." I understood earnings per share but I didn't know how to get there. I did a couple of days of two-hour segments with the finance people, and then I created a course for our communicators. It's important for communicators to learn how to read a balance sheet.
On the role of influencers in shaping perceptions of credibility and trust
Peter: I'm interested in what's happening externally, not only with the speed of communications that the Internet enables, but with the unquestioning acceptance of what people say. Bloggers now are responsible for more dissemination of information on the Internet than are Web sites.
Tom: The media is less important to us than a year ago and much less than five years ago. The environment is going to continue to get more sordid and tawdry as large organizations compete for eyeballs.
Rob: I'm interested in the Ketchum research that suggests your employees and next-door neighbors have more influence with consumers than do CEOs and other executives. It validated some things I've believed for awhile. We let about 200 people go over performance issues and, technically, it was a layoff. We had never laid off a single individual in more than 100 years. We thought the community would give us credit for not laying off anyone before. But it didn't. The reaction was violent. A restaurant owner advertised that he would give free meals to everyone laid off. If we had taken our community more seriously, we would have done some things differently — and we will do that next time. And we didn't do as an effective job as we should have in communicating with our employees.
On how you know you're really changing attitudes of stakeholders through communications
Tom: Within two hours of his arrival, our new CEO had set down five goals for the year, and we really banged on those five. But most employees if asked probably couldn't have told you what they were. In year two, he set the same five initiatives and said, "We're going to do those until we get them right." Two-and-a-half-years later, we're still talking about those five things but most people now can tell you what three or four of them are. I now know how hard it is to get 1,500 people saying the same thing so it's insane in my view to realign our goals each year. Let's be sure we undertake achievable goals and we have honest, truthful and direct communications about them.
Mark: A great source of free information about research and measurement is www.instituteforpr.com. A problem for PR is that more and more consumer product companies are linking controlled communications, like advertising promotions and coupons against sales. I see their measurement pie charts and PR isn't even in the mix for measuring. Without measurement, PR is never going to get a fair shake in the mix.
Peter: You can measure about anything, and you can go too far. One of the best skill sets you can bring to an organization is a set of really well-tuned antenna. In large part, what makes the difference between success and failure are good instincts, intuition and judgment.
On the Internet
Tom: I'm working on a new model for internal communicators and it's designed to be provocative. Increasingly, we're saying to employees, "Hey, we've got a new health-care plan and go to the Web site to read about it." That's not communications. It doesn't get opened or read. Generally, employees don't read them because they don't believe they're relevant. And of our 100,000 employees, only 60,000 have desktops. Our strategy leaves almost 40 percent behind. So beware the siren song of the IT solution.
Peter: We've made a bigger problem with the Internet because it enables us to push more stuff down a pipeline. The issue with the Internet is the same with internal communications. You must be consistent, credible, relevant and you must boil down the message to its essence.
On what keeps you up at night
Tom: Talent and talent management. And I worry always about whether we're doing the right work. We're busy and working flat out. But I worry often that my people too often are doing the wrong work.
Another thing: When you focus on corporate reputation, you're looking at the wrong end of your intellectual binoculars. Reputation is a manifestation of behavior, and behavior is a manifestation of culture, and culture is a manifestation of what you believe in. Forget reputation. Simply understand the fundamentals that your organization commits to being all about and what people in it want to be, and focus on that.
Robert: I want to stay vigilant about three things:
- Are our communication efforts keeping us at the table? Are we involved, valued and being included? And are we earning that opportunity every day?
- Do our employees know everything they need to know to do a good job?
- Are we prepared for whatever will come tomorrow? Are we going to be caught off guard?
Mark: As the CEO of a relatively small organization of 100 people, my concerns revolve around knowing what's important to clients, employees and other stakeholders; how do we distinguish ourselves as an organization and, then, what do we do about it.