A bigger conversation
Of all the institutions providing you with information about coronavirus, which is the most credible?
Of all the institutions providing you with information about coronavirus, which is the most credible?
In the workshops I run for managers and leaders, each participant works on an upcoming ‘high stakes’ conversation. You can probably guess the common focus areas: Meetings with under-performing team members, interactions with aggressive or micro-managing bosses, and peer conversations that have long been silently sabotaged by undeclared tensions. Deep down, we all know the … Continued
You can tell, when you read it, that Dale Carnegie’s book is not of this era – the language overly courteous, the case studies too quaint, and a suite of recommended actions that are surely too fawning for these sceptical times. And yet, every single year since it was published in 1936, How to Win … Continued
Last week I spoke with a CEO, the head of a big public sector organisation, who does something unusual. She says what she means.
If you knew that a quarter of middle managers in your organisation were not going to cascade important messages from your leadership team to their teams – to your frontline staff – would you be worried?
Leading change communication for big organisations has taught me a lot about how we listen and talk to each other.
I wonder if this statement will shock, or gel with what you grudgingly know to be true: Leadership teams are the best resourced group in the workplace, yet also the least collaborative.
The information flow inside organisations, from CEO and executives to directors, then to mid-level managers, and on to team leaders and ultimately employees, should work. It can work. It is the core purpose of the organisational structure and the lifeblood of the organisation. It is what converts hundreds, even thousands of autonomous individuals into a single organism, working for a shared goal, pulling in the same direction, all on the same page.
I help managers unleash their leadership and become an effective conduit for the flow of business information and knowledge by learning how to communicate for impact.
Workplaces are full of rumour and speculation about ‘what’s really going on’. If you want to disrupt cynicism in your workforce in 2018, and become a respected and effective leader, the single most powerful move you can make is to start breaking your own bad news.
For something so omnipresent, so talked about and so important, organisational change fails far too often – and most of the time, it’s the way we share information throughout our businesses that lets us down. Here are four golden rules of change communications to make your next transformation project a success.