No more wafting about strategy without delivery!

Today’s communicator has to be business savvy – know more about the business and the market in which it operates than the CEO. I was on my soapbox at a recent Sequel run ASPIC seminar on internal communication where the fabulous wallpaper at The Soho Hotel threatened to overshadow my bright orange dress. With just one PowerPoint slide, the dress, and my 'resilience' music to boost me up for tricky days in comms - Start Me Up by the Rolling Stones - I was able to share what today's communicators need to focus on if they want to be taken seriously by their CEO and the business. You can read more about it here:http://tinyurl.com/qdpboz3

Why 'cascade' is a corporate comms myth-take

There is one dreadful word still bandied about in internal communication. There are several but one I'd particularly love to see buried in the corporate comms nonsense graveyard of terms and practices is 'cascade'.

I know it still exists because a well-meaning FTSE big boss recently mentioned to me he had 'cascaded our annual results so every one of our 20,000 employees now knows and understands where the business is going'. Fingers crossed with that one.

I have also spotted 'cascade' lurking in Linked In forums, in IC articles and as a key achievement in communicators' CVs.

And we are not in 1990 anymore, Toto!

Anyone reading this post (apart from my mum) will have a few such archaic words they loathe too. Would love to share those. But surely in internal communication, and in a world where people are connected more than ever before, 'cascade' should have died out dinosaur-like a decade or two ago?

'Cascade' is no way to do business, folks. It is a corporate myth to imagine information cascade's like a waterfall through a business from the top to the bottom just because the CEO speaks about strategy and a thousand managers' not-very-brief briefing packs are produced. Even if the approach does start with lots of good intentions, as one comms grandee suggested brilliantly, the process 'leaks meaning at every level' and mostly grinds to a halt somewhere  in the middle because people have more important things to do - like work.

Conversation and helping facilitate that is what matters and that is sometimes a whole lot harder to achieve yet ultimately more effective and a tad more grown-up.

Cascade can always reinvent itself -  as a name for a bathroom company.

Ban the 'fluff' in your function

As a pragmatist I am not overly impressed with too much theory or hypothetical nonsense about the business of improving internal communication.

In that spirit, and in no particular order, here are some thoughts:

• A comms plan is not a business strategy but sometimes in lieu of the latter (and yes it does happen!) you can pull together a framework for communicating what the business should be sharing and start the dialogue.
• Strategy schmategy. I don’t believe people who say they are only strategic and don’t roll their sleeves up and get tactical. It’s a balance of both depending on business need.
• Don't feel you are only half a comms practitioner if you don’t have every single latest way to communicate in your comms approach. I once overheard someone say they needed to ‘engage’ their staff because everyone else is doing ‘staff engagement’.
• Remember your CEO will come to you wanting to know what people are thinking and feeling in the organisation. Keep a finger on the pulse – that’s your job.
• Talk the language of business and ban the fluff in your function. How can you and your team show real value in the work you do? Perhaps link your activities with your own scorecards and measures or add it to others’ key performance indicators?
• Who, what, why, when, where and how are good to have top of mind most days.
• Stalking could get you in trouble, networking is a great alternative so find those people in the business you need to help you get things done. Organisations never look nice, neat and hierarchical like those organagrams on the intranet. They are structured more like a mad ‘splitting the atom’ diagram from a science book. It’s not what you know but who.
• You don’t need to spend the GDP of a small Caribbean island to support a business with great comms activity.
• Communication is more than one, two or three ways.
• Employees are the public and usually – particularly in the UK – have their own opinions. They don’t do being spoon fed information and spookily often want to have their say or get involved in change.
• Don’t be afraid to say what you are thinking and challenge the status quo. Big organisations have a tendency to say they tried your suggestion in August 1985 and it didn’t work. 
• Get back to basics – don’t overlook simple ways of communicating for something fancy with bells on it. Conversation is best so do what you can with that in mind.
• Listening is good and should feature in your approach to stakeholders and with employees. 
• What do you want people to think, feel or do as a result of communication? If you or the business person who has come to you for help can’t answer that it probably doesn’t need to happen.
• Leadership visibility – be very afraid of encouraging or increasing this if the leader in question hasn’t learned any social skills. It’s fine to be more visible and build a better relationship with your employees but not if your leader is a psycho standing three inches from said employee and asking them if they enjoy their job.
• Benchmark – people are people with a few variations whatever the business they work for. You can learn a lot from your peers’ experiences of supporting similar challenges in other organisations.
• Prioritise your priorities or you will soon find there are not enough hours in the day. If you match your comms strategy to business priorities that’s a good start.
• And lastly…banned from the Board meeting? Your unofficial network gone on holiday? Don’t discount the treasures you can find or pick up at the photocopier, fax machine, water cooler, paper shredder and on all those social communication sites.