I’m going to talk to you today about my third principle for effective change leadership and I anticipate that when you have read this article you will be aware of the need for timely, consistent and clear communication throughout your period of change.

In my last two pieces talked about the need to Work with the Current Reality and to Do what you can, where you can, when you can. This one might best be entitled

“Communicate, communicate, communicate…”

I remember a conversation with a managing director with whom I was working on communicating a new corporate strategy and the high-level implications of that strategy for the people in the company. We had just finished a week long initial communications exercise and he had been talking to various employees about what they now understood about the new strategy. He expressed his disappointment at how little of the message was repeated back to him, and how different people had retained different things. I think my response hit home – “Bill, you and the executive team have just spent three months developing the strategy, it is unrealistic to expect your employees to understand this after hearing the message in a single one hour event”. Sometimes those of us immersed in a change project forget that it is just one small blip on other people’s radar. Our job in communicating is to make sure that everyone has seen the blip, recognises its significance and starts to think about how they as individuals are going to respond.

The communication events we had a run in the company I mentioned previously had been very well crafted (though I say so myself) and follow-up surveys of staff produced a strongly positive response to the manner and content of the communication. But a one off can never be enough. You need to pace your communications, not dropping everything on participants all at once. You need to repeat your communications and use different media (we offered everybody in that company a copy of the slides that the MD used in his presentation and the written brief that directors and senior managers had worked to; we also produced a frequently asked questions sheet that had been developed by trialling the initial presentation on a small group of trusted staff). Consistency is key “Some jobs will be lost” is not the same as “4% of all our employees are likely to be made redundant with the majority of those falling in the finance department”, yet both might describe the reality.

Communications needs to be a line on your project plan and someone must have responsibility for making sure that it happens. Bearing in mind the aphorism that “The meaning of a communication is the response you get”, following up any communication with a check for understanding is crucial

We developed a set of principles for communication that I offer to you below:

Finally, the big challenge. Even when you have nothing to communicate, you must communicate. There are times in any change programme when not very much seems to be happening – perhaps the participants are analysing where they have got to, or perhaps they are planning where to go next rather than acting in the organisation. Unless you let people know what is going on, they will make stuff up to fill the void and in all probability they will make up a load of rubbish. It is your responsibility to ensure that this does not happen because once that rubbish starts to gain currency it will be much more destructive than if you had spent a little time to say “Well, not very much has happened this week. We’re figuring out what to do next” or something similar.

So, there is principle number three

Communicate, communicate, communicate…

What stories would you like to share about how to communicate effectively in times of change?