Black Belt Dojo

roll up, roll up

Just going through my notes from the summit (expect several postings as I keep thinking 'oooh, yes!  THAT was interesting!') and have come across the notes I wrote from Victoria Mellor's presentation about Melcrum's latest research about the IC profession. 

It's interesting stuff - I wrote the 'expert commentary' (blushes furiously) for the report and drove Liam mad at the time, by constantly calling/e-mailing and saying 'did you know ...'   Lots of stats about salary levels (if you want to earn the most, start your career in the UK, move to the US after two years and get a job in the Financial sector), budgets, structures (big trend towards IC functions sitting in Corporate Comms - mostly - and also HR), where people's time is focused and what we think we're good and bad at.

Anyway, the amusing point in the presentation yesterday was when Victoria asked how many people were planning to stay in their current job, how many were planning to move and how many were off to join the circus. 

The results? A fairly even split between leavers and stayers, and 21% are off to join the circus!  Unfortunately there was no option in the voting question for 'I already WORK in in a circus ...'

Sue

blog writing cats

An apology to anyone who has this blog set up as an RSS feed who might just have received a blank post - I'm afraid my cat managed to send it!  (yes, really)

I left a key with the neighbour to feed him whilst I was away at the summit for a couple of days. I couldn't get him to come back in when I left at 5.30am on Wednesday, and the neighbour didn't pick up my message that he was outside and went out for the day.  Apparently he caused quite a stir in the courtyard where I live by sitting on the doorstep and howling his head off for hours ... until one of the neighbours couldn't stand it any longer and opened a tin of tuna! 

Anyway, the upshot is, he now won't leave me alone and is walking all over me/the desk/the laptop, and managed to publish the entry I was about to write before I managed to write anything! So folks, it really is THAT easy to blog - even my cat can do it! (he just hasn't learned to type in the words yet). 

On that subject, last night at the drinks it emerged that some people were being put off writing replies to blog entries because they're not sure how to do it.  So here you go:

How to comment on a blog entry

1. Click on 'comments' at the bottom of the entry.  You'll then see a 'post a comment' section with various boxes.

2.  If you haven't got a TypePad account (TypePad is the company that makes the blog work, but you don't need an account with them to post a comment), put in your name and e-mail address.

3. Don't worry about the URL box - this is just if you've got your own blog or website and want to paste the address here

4. Type your comment

5. Preview it to make sure it looks pulitzer prize winningly brilliant

6. Hit publish ... and you're done!

Sue

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

Rumblings from SCM Summit

Sitting in the Strategic Communications Summit, listening to people going on about blogs and social media, Sue has forced me to nip out and do a blog myself in mid session. I’m not sure of the etiquette so I have sat myself down outside the conference and started tapping away.

But it wasn’t the blog stuff that got me going (although I can see what Sue is on about), it was a session from Monika Stafford of Lloyds TSB that made me think. Monika was talking about the challenges for the future and started by crediting me with single-handedly writing the Inter-Comm matrix.

Sorry Sue but I lost my nerve when the time came to stand up and correct Monika…. She showed some research from ISR and from Watson Wyatt about the communications characteristics of high performing organisations. In particular, she highlighted:

 The need to set an exciting vision

 The importance of leaders who are genuinely concerned and connected to employees

 The value of having structures that “speed the movement from ideas to implementation”.

And she talked about having competencies:

 To make connections

 To make it compelling

 To learn fast

 Knowing customers

 Knowing audience(s)

 Be authentic

 Make it interactive

 Deliver

In fact – all things that come up in discussion on the Black Belt courses. Two things struck me in particular.

Firstly when she asked the audience – around half said that they were looking to coaches or mentors to support their development. I wonder if that’s unusual because of the more senior audiences they get at these things or if its part of a wider trend. It would make sense to me if there was a trend here.

Secondly, she quoted me as saying that there is a lack of senior role models in IC. I have based this assertion on the fact that so many senior people see their future outside IC – good people get promoted into leadership positions in HR, Corporate Comms and even the line.

But she did a straw poll of the audience 35% said that there were in IC permanently. Although 50% of people said that they would move on within 5 years, it was still a pretty striking figure.

Does this mean that people are beginning to see a long-term career path in the discipline? And that led me to wonder if that’s a good thing. Do we need people with decades of experience or do we need people who move in and out of different functions?

More ramblings later….

Liam

From the top

I'm a real 'must be organised' person, so I can never stand to see the state of my office when I finally come back from a stint of travelling around. There are piles of papers everywhere, where I've put them down and picked the next lot up ready to get on the next train/plane. So the past couple of evenings have been spent laboriously sorting through my papers. (I know. I really should get out more.)

I've just come across some notes I made whilst at the Melcrum US summit headed 'advice from the top'.

Brad Casper, President and CEO of the Dial Corporation, gave an interesting presentation, but when people really sat up was when they were able to start asking him questions. Why are there so many CEOs that don't 'get' communication like he does? ("there's no magic formula - some people just won't get it")  When CEOs get together and talk about communication, what do they say? ("We don't really tend to talk about communication")

And the question where everyone sat with pens poised - What advice do you have for us as internal communicators about working effectively with CEOs?  These were Brad's three tips:

• CEOs like best practices. Coming back from a conference like this is a good time to talk to us about the best practices you've seen that we could learn from.
• Presenting a senior executive with a full-developed plan can be dangerous - we may not feel part of the solution. Leave some room for dialogue.
• Be ready to cite examples that are working and driving business results

I also noted down a piece of advice in a workshop run by Linda Dulye of L.M.Dulye&Co.  She was talking about the importance of data at the time, and took us back to a conversation with a senior manager that had influenced her approach to communications from early on in her career.  "Where's your data?" he had asked her.  "In God we trust - everyone else, bring data."   From that point on, she was determined to make sure her approach was built on evidence, data and measurement in just the same way as every other function, and she's built a very successful career on it.

What other advice have you been given by senior leaders or CEOs at various points that has given you insights or influenced your approach to internal comms? 

Sue

risks, issues and RAGs

Darren Crozier (Black Belter and esteemed Chairman of the CIB in Scotland) e-mailed us yesterday on the subject of IC managers acting as project managers and business planners. I'm afraid it prompted a mini rant (sorry Darren) back from me about the trials and tribulations of working with project teams. Taken aback by the steam coming out of my ears, Liam helpfully suggested it could be an interesting topic for the blog ...

My issue with projects is when the necessary process and discipline involved goes into overdrive. I turn from a mild-mannered smiley person into a stroppy and irritable hag when I'm asked to produce back-up templates for my templates (I was, on one occasion, asked to produce a contingency plan for the contingency plan), fill in RAG reports every 2 days and get quizzed about whether the red triangle on my gantt chart shouldn't ideally be a yellow circle.

There's also the scenario when you're constantly told you're on 'red' because you haven't produced a comms plan.  "I can't produce a comms plan," you helpfully explain (several times and increasingly through clenched teeth), " because you haven't worked out the project plan yet." Producing a neat matrix showing weekly updates for the next six months with a couple of conferences thrown in (just to make them leave you alone for 5 minutes) appears to get a tick in the box, even when you point out that actually it's not related to anything at all and will get re-written when the project plan finally turns up.

(Takes deep breath and climbs down from soap box.) So, given that we do want to be treated as workstream leaders, steering group members and valuable contributors to projects, how do we add value, and what are the secrets of success?  Here are three suggestions as a starter. Please add yours to the list ...

1. Provide constructive feedback and challenge about the project plan itself.  As someone who doesn't hasn't been totally immersed in the new system/product/whatever it may be, you're well-placed to challenge assumptions, give a realistic view about potential reactions, question timescales and spot holes in plans.

2.  Understand where project managers are coming from.  Speak their language and give them the milestones, progress updates and risks and issues logs that show you're in control of your brief.  And where you feel there really are risks or issues from a comms perspective, make sure they get heard. Sometimes they can feel tiny to a project team that's focused on the fact that they're 20% over budget or the new system's developed a major bug.

3. Be clear about roles, responsibilities and boundaries.  Set out what you will and won't do, and where you can and can't add value.  Some times templates and tracking charts are eminently necessary, but sometimes it can go OTT. On those occasions it's worth pointing out what's NOT going to get done that they really need your communication expertise for, because you have to fill in another round of templates. It may well turn out that there's someone else on the project team that can look after some of the process piece for you.

Seriously, I do enjoy getting involved in a good, meaty change project that you can get your teeth into, and I've worked with some great project managers, some of whom are now good friends.  But it's quite likely that we've had a few 'spirited' conversations in the course of our work together, and they would probably tell you with a wry smile that 'Sue doesn't do gantt charts'...!

Anyone else want to share any project working horrors or suggest some tips?

Sue

So what's a dojo?

We know that we're rather stretching the whole martial arts thing a bit far, but Black Belt Dojo seemed as good a name as any for this blog.

A Dojo is the name given in Karate and other Japanese martial arts to where people train  (if you do an art with a Korean origin it's probably called a dojang).

But it does seem to be a good label because a Dojo is more than a sports hall.  It's also a place where people discuss ideas and new techniques.  It's a place where you take your problems and work them until you have found the solution or mastered the individual skill or technique.  Most importantly its a place where even the master practitioner goes to learn and reflect.

And if you'd like to know more about what goes on in a dojo....I can seriously recommend Angry White Pyjamas, a book about training in Japan.

Liam

When is a blog not a blog?

Interesting story in the UK news this week about two Labour politicians that posted a spoof video of David Cameron (leader of the opposition party) on YouTube.  Various apologies have been made and the offending item has now been removed.

The video was having a satirical dig at David Cameron's own (video and written) blog.   

I heard an interview with one of the politicians involved in the spoof blog. His argument was that David Cameron's blog was not a 'proper' one - just a managed communication channel cleverly targeted at a particular age group, which went against the whole spirit of blogging.

It's an interesting point, and it raises a dilemma that I've seen posed in various articles of late. The whole point about blogs is that they are written by ordinary people with no ulterior motive, and that's why we trust them. (The spoof blog continually showed the 'spoof' Cameron saying "I'm just like you".)  So if new media - blogs, YouTube and the like - are the type of communication a certain demographic are starting to trust, can we use them as channels without somehow going against the spirit of blogging?   

Is the Chief Exec. really just writing his/her own random thoughts about life in general, or are there discussions going on behind the scenes about objectives, messages and tactics? Have a look on Cameron's blog, in fact, and one of the video diaries has been shot in his kitchen. Cue various postings suggesting this was staged.  No, says Cameron in his commentary, we were just busy, so we shot the video in the kitchen because it was quicker.  Should we believe him or not?

Can we use blogs in our organisations without by implication undermining what they're all about?  Do we end up using tactics to make them look home made and informal, even though they're actually corporately managed? Is that called connecting with your audience, or is it manipulation? Any tips from anyone that's using them successfully/unsuccessfully or seen good or bad examples elesewhere?

Sue

Am I getting old?

Listening to Sue's jet-setting lifestyle at the moment fills me with horror!  And listening to her on the phone from the baggage hall at Heathrow moaning about how long it takes to get out of the place (but at the same time spotting Pierce Brosnan - he has to wait like the rest of us) does little to sell the glamour of international business travel!

However, I was wondering if that's because I'm getting old?  In a couple of weeks I've got another birthday - and its a big one!  No I don't turn 30 or 40.  It's one of those ages where market reserachers start bracketing you with people ten years older than you.  Now when I look at people I'll be sharing a demographic with, I feel ancient.

I suppose that I should feel flattered that when I met someone in the flesh the other week, he commented that I looked much younger than my photos suggested.  Apart from making a mental note to sack my photographer I started wondering if it's becomming culturally unacceptable to comment on someone's age.

We know that you're not meant to comment on it in job interviews, but what's the role of internal communications in fostering a diverse workforce?  And it's taken decades to stamp out (mostly) derogatory thinking about race or gender in the workplace - where do we find the case studies form which anti-ageism communicators can learn? 

Any suggestions gratefully received.

Liam

Segmentation

So, last week was 105 degrees in Phoenix, Arizona.  Tonight, Matthew, I'm in Finland (colder, but not bad), comfortably settled in a hotel in the middle of nowhere. I should be preparing for my presentation tomorrow morning, but sadly I find myself drawn to this blog. Is there such a thing as blog addiction??

Yesterday I presented the results of Melcrum's research on segmentation to the strategic research forum members in the US.  We found that lots of companies are segmenting by division, grade, location etc., but hardly any have yet attempted to use the more sophisticated techniques used by people in marketing.

The segmentation session always seems to get the highest ratings of module one on Black Belt, so I guess it's a subject people are interested in.  We often see people coming out of the syndicate exercise saying 'great - we'd really like to split people into these different segments ... but then what do we do?  What happens if you don't have channels that can target the different segments?'

Well, one option is to target segments with specific channels where you can. Your other alternative is to use a form of self-segmentation - i.e. make different options available, let people know they are there, and then let them choose the option they find interesting. This could mean something as simple as sending out an e-mail communication that's very short, with bullet point key facts, and including an intranet link for those that want more detail.  At a more sophisticated level it could involve using RSS (really simple segmentation) technology.  That's still on the 'we don't quite know how to use this yet' list, but fast forward 5 years or so and I suspect we'll see much more of an element of audience choice in our communication offerings.

Are any of you doing anything interesting on the segmentation front?  Black Belter Jane Williams did a fantastic piece of work on segmentation around flexible benefits for Lloyds TSB. So fantastic, in fact, that it won an IABC award. She has some great tips about working with marketing and interestingly ended up reducing her print costs despite producing multiple versions of the communication for different segments . Anyway, I won't steal her thunder - let's hope we can entice her to tell you herself.  No pressure, Jane ...!

Sue