It's tough at the top

OK, I've just nipped out of the Melcrum summit in the coffee break to write this, so it's going to be a quick one! (See, I got Liam trained for precisely ONE day to do my bidding. How did I know it wouldn't last ...)

Session of the day for me so far has been Darren Briggs from the Company Agency talking about CEO communication.  He talked about the pressures of life in the CEO hotseat and sent us all off to read this report by Booz-Allen & Hamilton about CEO turnover. It turns out life as a CEO is a bit of a shaky existence, and you're not likely to keep your job too long if your performance doesn't stack up (mind you, I have to say I wouldn't mind the payoffs they seem to get!).

He also got us thinking about just how much influence the CEO has over an organisation's culture.  We weren't convinced at first, but by the end of the presentation we'd been persuaded of just how influential this one person is, and how important it is to be help them use their words and actions to build a healthy corporate culture.  In fact one person I sat next to at lunch said it had been her eureka moment of the conference, and she was off to persuade her boss that she really has to spend less time 'doing the doing' and more time working with senior execs.

More on this theme from Charlie Nordbloom at Volvo, who had done some impressive number-crunching about the relative influence of managers at different levels.  Turns out the greatest blockers to effective front line communication are not the poor old middle managers at all, but the people they report to.  If they don't put the effort in, that's when the middle managers reporting to them don't get the support to do their bit.  It sounds obvious when you say it, but the stats showing the impact of good/poor communicators at senior management level were striking.

Some interesting anecdotes from the audience about long-gone Chief Execs. who still have strong legacies.  Apparently Ray Kroc, founder of McDonalds, is still quoted throughout the organisation AND the headquarters has an interactive 'Talk to Ray' machine where you can ask questions and hear him talk back!  Excellent!!

Sue

Comments

[Alex Manchester]

Hi Sue,

I heard of a similar thing to Virtual Ray recently but from a KM perspective. In a BP engineering firm they created a "Virtual Pat", Pat being a very knowledgeable guy who was retiring having given nearly three decades of service. It was deemed of critical importance that Pat's knowledge, experience and ideas remained accessible as much as possible, even if "Real Pat" didn't frequent the office anymore.

I guess Virtual Pat and Virtual Ray have much in common. Both were highly influential, knowledgeable and above all, damn good at what they did. It seems logical to me to try and keep any remenants of those sort of people wherever possible.

[Mark Darby]

The main thing I learnt from Darren Briggs (and Karen Kerr) in their Vodafone days was the importance of influencing senior people. And this didn't mean tweaking one or two sentences in their all employee announcements, but talking them through what they could do to communicate their vision to employees. Even getting that vision and the key messages out of their head.
Since leaving Vodafone, I've always asked the same question first up with the CEO or VP - what are the 5 things you want employees to understand in 6 months time? I'll then help you to have that dialogue with employees.

I know this is part of the Black Belt Course too - but gave me many more tools to use.

On Virtual Pat and Ray, I wonder how long it will be before the likes of AQA (63336 - who charge £1 for a text answer to any question you ask) have a company version. There's money in them thur mountains.

Mark

[Sue Dewhurst]

Hi Alex and Mark,

Thanks for the comments. Mark, to build on yours about the 'what are the five things', Monika Stafford, Head of IC at Lloyds, talked at the summit about working with the Exec. to identify the 'one killer thing' that would most help company performance, and then 'getting everyone's shoulders behind the boulder' (she had a big pic of one!)to deliver it.