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THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY OR ROUTE 66?

Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility.

Robin Morgan, American Poet, Author

Seeds for Growth

When you consider the complexity created by the rapidly evolving needs of today’s customers and employees, it’s no wonder that organizations struggle with achieving significant and sustained growth. As one CEO put it during a meeting in which we were discussing some these challenges, “Shawn, if I’m not dealing with a customer issue, then I’m dealing with an employee issue. There seems to be little opportunity to actually focus on anything else with all these people issues we’re dealing with.” People issues indeed. But when you stop to consider for a moment what is at the heart of these challenges, it doesn’t take too long to realize that information, or access to information, is a significant driver behind many of the changes organizations are experiencing. Of course, it’s technology that is influencing much of our ability to access information, the speed at which we can access it, and ultimately providing a means to make more personalized decisions around the information and our interpretation of it. As a frequent flyer, for example, I use an app called Flight Tracker.¹ The app provides me with real-time information and status of flights, most of which is often more accurate than the information I can obtain from employees working in customer service at the airports. With this information in hand, I no longer need to spend hours waiting in a long line at the customer service counter when a flight is delayed, but rather, I can make alternate travel plans that minimize the impact on my schedule. This access to information maximizes the use of my time and gives me the “inside information” once possessed only by the customer service agents at the airport. When an announcement is made that a flight is delayed, I often know more than those who don’t have the app in hand, and I’m in a position to know exactly what a “slight delay” means, rather than guessing as to what the service agent considers as “slight.”

As Claude Shannon says, “Information is the resolution of uncertainty.”² Although most organizations are placing a tremendous focus on providing more information to their customers, consideration also has to be made for what and how information is shared with employees. After all, as we first discussed in Chapter 4, it’s employees who are interacting with customers both directly and indirectly on a daily, if not hourly, basis. When I mention this during my talks on how to build an unstoppable organization, invariably I’m told that with all of the e-mail, texting, instant messaging, company intranets, and the like, employees today have access to far more information than ever before. This, of course is true. However, the problem is that much of this information rarely provides the employees with exactly what they need to make more informed decisions on the job and specific to serving customers. Don’t get me wrong, communicating information to employees is always a good thing, but the power comes when you are clear about what information you’re sharing, why it’s important, and specifically what employees can do with the information that will better satisfy your customers. Telling employees about changes in the organization’s share price or updates to the benefits program is fine, but what we have to ask ourselves is exactly how does this information help the employee make better decisions on the job? The short answer is it doesn’t.

In my work with some of the fastest growing organizations in North America, it has become readily apparent to me that unstoppable organizations and the executives and leaders who run them have made this connection in providing information strategically to their employees. Such leaders often see their organization not as employees and customers in isolation of one another, but rather as a collaboration of sorts in the form of a melting pot for growth. The more executives invest in their people, the greater the results they achieve from a business perspective.

I briefly mentioned Aviva Leebow Wolmer, CEO of Pacesetter Steel (or Team Pacesetter as she refers to her organization), in a previous chapter. Aviva and her team embrace the concept of growth through collaboration between employees and customers as a key focus and strength of their organization. “Our people are our conduit to growth,” she said during our conversation about the continued growth of her organization in what is a highly competitive and commoditized market. Aviva and her leadership team have set out to ensure that every employee feels like they are part of Team Pacesetter; moreover, she understands the influence they have on both the organization and its customers. For example, Aviva ensures that all employees are exposed to “the organization’s numbers,” including revenue, expenses, and profits (amongst other key metrics). These are reviewed in detail, with discussions centered on how the entire team can influence these numbers, while continuing to be more innovative and supportive with customers. When I asked Aviva why she shared the numbers with all employees, rather than just with the senior leadership team, she said, “The more our team members know about how the organization is doing, the better positioned they are to influence the organization and the more ownership they will take in their role. And we don’t hide anything either, we share everything—the good and the bad.”

Aviva’s ideas about sharing the numbers are a consistent approach taken by CEOs and executives of unstoppable organizations. I mentioned earlier as well the history of Jeff Sziklai, the CEO of Bellwyck Packaging Solutions. Jeff, since taking over the business from his father-in-law, still ensures that either he or a member of his executive team stop at each of the eight facilities they own every quarter to share the company’s numbers: from profits to revenue to losses. In fact, every CEO that I met with or interviewed for this book shares a similar philosophy and approach when it comes to strategically sharing information with their employees and its value in supporting continued growth and profitability.

In a recent interview, Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit, said: “The pace of change today is unprecedented. Technology is evolving faster than ever and our employees need to keep pace with trends and strategy. To do that, we’ve increased our transparency so we can move faster—sharing information that was once only shared with the CEO. Trust and reputation are also more important than ever in today’s connected world. We strive to build our reputation based on trust and respect, to attract and retain top talent.”³

How Much Information is Too Much?

The question that I hear most frequently in response from CEOs and executives when I discuss the importance of sharing information with employees is, “Shawn, how much communication is too much?” This is a good question considering that for the most part we are all, including our employees, bombarded with information constantly, from e-mails to calls to meetings. In fact, one might think that all of this communication and information sharing only serves to only reduce employee productivity. But this perception is wrong because in essence it’s not the volume of communication that matters; it’s the quality that counts.

Our employees may be bombarded with e-mails, messages, and meetings, but we have to ask ourselves: What value does this information bring to them? Does it help them to be more effective in their job? Does it contribute to building their decision-making abilities so as to empower them in their role? Do the meetings they attend provide additional information that they can actually put to use?

In my experience, they often don’t.

When I was working for a large power generation company about 15 years ago, I was leading a team that ranged in size from 12 to 32 people, depending on the types of projects and time of year. As I was also the lead for our group within one of the generating stations, I was expected to attend all of the meetings as a “representative” of my department, acting as a conduit in communication. As more people became aware of my presence, and the contributions I brought, my schedule became fraught with meetings. I was literally in meetings every day from 7:30 a.m. until 2 or 3 p.m., with some days extending until 5 p.m. I’m all for collaboration, but the schedule (and the pace I had to sustain to make it from one meeting to another on time) was ridiculous. The more time I spent in meetings, the less time I was available for my team, which also meant that they weren’t as productive as they could be, often holding back on or delaying projects to await my feedback, ideas, or support. Something had to change and quickly, if I was going to succeed in leading my team. I decided to triage my meeting schedule, focusing on my priorities and ensuring that the development of my team in the process took precedence. This is an approach I’ve used in coaching executives and leaders many times in the years since. It’s a tool that helps leaders at all levels of an organization identify how to prioritize their communication interactions to avoid burnout and being overwhelmed.

The approach is as follows.

1. Identify priorities in order of importance.
2. Identify key stakeholders who influenced my role and that of my team.
3. Identify critical projects/assignments that required my focus and involvement.
4. Identify delegates who could also represent our department or team in different areas of specialty.
5. Communicate the new system to everyone involved and deal with any fall-out.

Here is an example of what my plan entailed.

My priorities:

• Provide mentorship and support to my team.
• Act as a liaison for the department.
• Ensure critical projects for the department continue to move forward.

Key stakeholders:

• Senior management.
• Maintenance and operations.
• Engineering.

Critical projects/assignments (priorities at the time my plan was created):

• Full ERP implementation.
• Inventory optimization.
• Warehouse layout optimization.

Delegates within the team:

• John Taylor – Union Team Lead
• Bob Albright – Senior Employee
• Katie Bright – New Employee
• Stacey Smith – Tooling Specialist

Communication plan:

• Discuss plan with team members for input and buy-in.
• Review plan with vice president for feedback and buy-in.
• Communicate plans to key stakeholders, including the impacts on meetings.

To obtain a blank copy of this plan, visit www.unstoppableorganization.com and download one for your own use or that of your team.

The pushback I received from others who were on the receiving end of my plan, following a reduction in my personal attendance and participation in meetings, interestingly, didn’t come from executives or my team itself, but instead from various other employees and leaders from across the business who wanted me to personally attend all of their meetings. When I pushed back, first determining if attending would provide value to our department, then assessing if it did, and who would be the most appropriate to attend (a development opportunity for future leaders of the team and department), those setting up meetings or calls would invariably become irritated at my seeming lack of willingness to participate.

What I found through this experience is that there are three different default approaches people tend to apply when needing to communicate within an organization, namely:

1. Hold a meeting.
2. Hold a remote meeting (for example, a conference call or through Skype).
3. Send an e-mail.

There are variations of these three methods that were often used, but I found that most people tended to prefer one approach for virtually all of their outward bound communications, rather than identify the best approach based on what was to be communicated and who required the information. More specifically, people who preferred sending e-mails rarely booked meetings, and in turn, people who preferred meetings rarely used e-mails. The individual preferences of employees tended to guide their mode of communicating, rather than assessing each communication individually and then determining how best to respond. What I found was that when I pushed back on an approach identified by the communicator (for example, not able to attend their meeting, participate on their call, or respond or acknowledge their e-mail), many of these people would become frustrated or even angry with me for not conforming to their needs or expectations based on the perception that how they preferred to communicate was the best option (further validating our earlier discussions around how each person assesses value individually).

I share this story because there are some key lessons to be learned from this situation that most organizations are plagued with today; by overcoming or resolving these issues, we can better understand how much communication is too much. To begin, I often outline the following in many of the talks that I deliver to senior leaders. I call these the Five Rules to Effective Communications for Leaders:

1. Communication is a dialogue, not a monologue. Any communication that is of value must include participation and feedback from those involved, otherwise it adds no value.
2. People absorb information in predominantly one of three ways: kinesthetic, audio, and visual, often having a primary and secondary preference that they are not aware of. Any communication that does not support the absorption of information on all three levels is ineffective.
3. To ensure communication has value and relevance, it must be prioritized. There is such a thing as too much communication when it doesn’t serve to add value. If you’ve ever sat on a conference call and pushed mute in order to get work done, you’ve tuned out. This is most often a result of a combination of numbers 1, 2, and 3.
4. Meetings and calls should be built around objectives, not time constraints. Just because Outlook suggests meeting times in 30-minute blocks does not mean a meeting can’t take 16 or 42 minutes. In fact, building a meeting around time rather than objectives often creates a habit of filling time, rather than focusing on objectives.
5. If the objectives of the larger group (in this case the plant) do not align, then departmental objectives and those of individuals within the department will conflict. Creating broad objectives that stretch from the top of the organization down, and align from the bottom up, are key to ensuring everyone is focused and that communications have and add value.

When it comes to ensuring every communication adds value to its intended audience, we return to the practice we mentioned earlier in this chapter in which top performing CEOs understand and practice a habit of sharing business performance information with their people. Why do they do this? Because the information:

• Has relevance and value for everyone if positioned correctly.
• Helps to connect individual performance with organizational performance.
• Influences behaviors and employee buy-in to projects and assignments that are critical.
• Provides a platform to communicate frontline employee issues and concerns with senior management.
• Creates consistency in messaging—everyone gets the same information at the same time.
• Quashes opportunities for rumors or hearsay as it pertains to the performance of the organization.
• Builds a foundation for measuring employee performance against business objectives.

In my experience, what CEOs eventually realize is that communication is a tool that drives attention, awareness, and focus, which is what I realized many years ago. If you were to sit in on the presentations that Aviva holds with her team, for example, you would find that the information is geared toward the audience, what they understand and see as valuable, and that the discussions she holds are very much a dialogue with her team, not a monologue. She could just send out an e-mail, or have department managers and leaders roll the information down to employees, but Aviva recognizes that for information to add value and be relevant, it needs to come from her and the senior leadership team directly in the form of a dialogue. She also recognizes that it needs to be done in a setting that facilitates discussion because it’s through discussion that understanding evolves.

Communication as a Conduit to People

As we discussed in an earlier chapter when meeting Aviva Leebow Wolmer, CEO of Pacesetter Steel, the sharing of business information in a face-to-face dialogue with employees is critically important as it’s through these dialogues she is able to empower her associates, enabling them to make the right decisions in a timely manner. Aviva recognizes what many CEOs and senior managers do—that your employees cannot be effective in their roles in offering value to customers if they lack the knowledge and information to do so. Interestingly, the commonality amongst these CEOs is not just that they share information frequently with their teams, but also in the other not-so-subtle approaches they consistently practice to ensure that communication that flows throughout the organization has value for employees:

• They communicate face-to-face, using e-mail only as a supportive tool to provide further context or support for their discussions.
• They involve their executive team in the presentation, ensuring that the communication is a team effort.
• They incorporate a question-and-answer period in every dialogue with their people, allowing employees to discuss their concerns and for senior leaders to hear them first-hand.
• They don’t avoid tough questions, but rather face them head-on recognizing if one person has a concern, it likely echoes the concerns of others.
• They walk the halls and floors of their organizations before and after the discussions, allowing for further one-on-one or group dialogue where it might make sense to have such.

More importantly, this approach to their communications doesn’t stop at the executive level, but rather rolls down throughout the organization. In private with their executive teams, these leaders hold open dialogues on a frequent basis, avoiding e-mail wherever possible. They also ensure that department managers, supervisors, and team leaders also hold frequent (often daily) face-to-face team meetings, through a dialogue focused on the day’s or week’s objectives.

In fact, the most common practice among the CEOs I interviewed was communicating through dialogue. At Pacesetter Steel, Aviva ensures that all leaders across the organization practice both group and individual coaching sessions, as she refers to them, to guarantee that face-to-face dialogues occur regularly.

At this point, you might be wondering how the advent and evolution of technology that we referenced earlier is influencing these seemingly old-school communication practices. After all, with all of the texting, online chats, and instant messaging options, as well as visual communication tools such as Skype and Zoom, why would we even need to hold face-to-face meetings? In addition, don’t most of the younger generations prefer communication via technology versus face-to-face dialogue? The answer, according to Aviva, is complicated. Yes, younger generations prefer to incorporate technology into their communications more than older generations, but technology simply can’t and won’t replace the value of having face-to-face communications. Aviva should know, after all, because she is a Millennial. Through her own development and experiences as a CEO, Aviva knows that the clichés around Millennials are often false, driven by perceptions that evolve from misunderstanding or misinterpretation. It’s true that the Millennial generation has grown up with more exposure to technology that supports communication. However, it’s also true that this generation, soon to be the largest working one in North America, has also grown up in and become accustomed to a more collaborative environment, in school, sports, and even home life, than any previous generation. Their often-insatiable appetite for information, and to communicate and contribute, is often driven by this learned collaborative behavior. So if you believe that face-to-face communication to discuss organizational challenges and opportunities is only relevant to some of the older generations, think again.

In my own experience, it’s this lack of clarity around when to communicate with technology versus other, more intimate forms such as face-to-face that tends to cause confusion and disengagement of employees in most organizations (consider my earlier example of how personal preferences guide our desires for how we communicate). Instant messaging or online chats were never meant to replace communications as we know them (although the companies selling the software might hope so!), but rather supplement them. This confusion seems to grow out of varying generations in the workplace having preferences in how to communicate; in turn, these preferences form biases from which CEOs and executives communicate.

I did some consulting with a mid-sized, privately held organization last year in which I interviewed nearly 30 employees of all ages and demographics and asked, “How can communications be further improved?” The number one response I received from the interviewees was a desire for more group meetings held by the CEO, by about 95 percent of respondents, with the remaining 5 percent having no comment or further ideas beyond what was already happening (which included the CEO’s quarterly meetings). Interestingly, when I asked what technology employees found to be unnecessary, more than 80 percent of the employees aged 35 to 58 felt there was too much technology already in place, versus the 60 percent of those under that age who believed more technology should be introduced and used in order to minimize face-to-face meetings. The survey demonstrated that, amongst other points we’ve discussed already, technology is more desirable by those younger and presumably more comfortable with it, whereas more senior employees who may have had less experience with some of the technology believed it had a diminishing impact on the value and relevance of communication. More specifically, the results clearly demonstrated the following:

1. Communications with the CEO and executive team had the greatest impact on employee morale and engagement.
2. Technology was a key component to communication, if properly defined for how it might supplement existing communications.
3. Effective training and introduction of technology to support communications was crucial to buy-in and proper application.
4. Generational demographics were directly proportional to the degree of buy-in and acceptance of technology use and application in the workplace.

The results demonstrate my earlier point. Too many organizations and the executives and leaders within them are looking toward new technology as a replacement for face-to-face communications, rather than treating it as a tool that can be used to supplement them. This is not to say that technology doesn’t have a place in workplace communications today—quite the contrary. However, if you truly want to engage your employees in understanding the business, its customers, and more importantly, the role they play in adding value to the customer’s experience, then face-to-face communication between executives and employees is the key.

What to Communicate and When

Structuring how to best communicate in order to be relevant and valuable to employees, then, is just as important as the information that is communicated. As discussed earlier in this chapter, having meetings and sending e-mails for the sake of satisfying personal preferences often diminishes employee interest and engagement in what is being communicated. Drawing on the earlier example with Aviva and her team, the key to success in communicating between senior leaders and frontline employees is frequency, consistency, and transparency. More specifically:

Frequency: A planned communication between senior leadership and frontline employees across the organization should happen quarterly at a minimum, or monthly to a maximum. Too few dialogues result in a loss for context in the conversations, whereas too frequent dialogues result in less than valuable information being shared just to fill time.

Consistency: Once you start holding dialogues with employees, sharing business and customer information, it’s important that you continue to do so consistently. Creating consistency leads to employees anticipating the discussions, and in turn preparing for them. Consistency also demonstrates a commitment to the value of the dialogue itself, setting aside the various other priorities for the CEO, executives, and the organization, creating in essence a culture of accountability.

Transparency: The key to having dialogues that are deemed both valuable and interesting is in being transparent. Aviva dives deeply with her management team into the numbers to discuss impacts on the business and its operations, and provides a similar but broader overview (with less detail) to associates. She ensures that she is transparent with both groups, and that the information fielded in conversations is valuable and meaningful. Her key ingredient is transparency, openly answering questions directly and sharing with all of the associates from across the business.

Based on this approach and my interviews with a dozen CEOs of unstoppable organizations, there are clear similarities in the types of information shared with employees, which includes:

• Financial performance, including profits, operating expenses, and revenue losses.
• Customer issues and feedback on products or services.
• Investments into the business, regardless of cost and complexity.
• Customer news that includes new customers coming on board and those who have decided to leave.
• Changes in the marketplace and the impact of market and political forces on the business.
• Updates on competitors and the changes in product or service offerings.

To ensure that all employees fully understand and absorb the information shared, all of the CEOs I have interviewed say that they include slides (for visual listeners), dialogue (for audible listeners), and question and answer periods (for kinesthetic listeners). They also often follow up on these discussions with smaller break-out sessions, typically held within one week of the broader discussion, in which frontline leaders have more intimate discussions with employees on what they heard, and what they as a team can do to further improve the circumstance. In Aviva’s case, recognizing that visual cues play an important role in communication, her team has created large vision boards in each department, providing an open area for employees to note their own ideas for improvement, ensuring that any ideas that evolve after the meetings or that may have been misunderstood during them are not lost. “It’s all about providing employees with various avenues upon which to communicate,” said Aviva while discussing the vision board concept.