Posts tagged ‘Communication’
The Key to Engagement
“Engagement” has become an overused and misunderstood term. Engagement is not just about marketing, and the secret to real engagement lies deep within yourself.
As a communication coach, I often work with people to improve their messages and the way they deliver them (whatever the medium – written, verbal or visual) so they can be more effective in their jobs. However, if you really want to influence people (and make no mistake, that is the goal of a good deal of our communication, in both our work and our private lives), there are three underlying realities that you must take to heart.
The first is that you will never get your message across – and you certainly won’t be able to influence anyone – if you don’t have their attention. Period. And guess what: A person’s attention is not something that is yours by right; it is something you earn – by being genuine, relevant and focused.
Second: It’s much easier to influence someone when you understand their point of view. How else can you be sure your message is relevant to that individual or group? Doing this requires that you pay attention – in the same way you hope that the other person will pay attention to you – and that you put in the leg work to understand their interests, perspective and concerns.
Third – and this is based on a lot of solid research – people learn best, and the learning persists longest, when they are engaged with the material, whatever it might be. And the more senses they use in the process, the better.
The world of social computing has done a lot to focus our attention on this issue of engagement. This is a good thing. But successful engagement starts long before you go online. All of the things we’ve learned about online engagement apply to the rest of our interactions as well. Consider the following, from a 2009 blog post, and think about it in the context not just of your company’s customers but your fellow employees, your family – whatever communities or individuals are meaningful to you.
When we are engaging others, we are not pushing content (products, services, advertisements), but rather we are conversing, asking for opinions, involving others in problem solving, idea and content development.
Engagement should be embraced by all leaders and all contributors in an organization – not just the marketing department. But real engagement requires humility and the willingness to be vulnerable, and too many of today’s leaders have been trained in authority and certitude first. (If you’ve any doubt how powerful – and how difficult – it is to be vulnerable, watch this excellent TED talk on The Power of Vulnerability by researcher, story teller and social scientist Brene Brown.)
It’s a very good thing that online marketing as put such a focus on engagement – it’s changed forever the way consumers interact with companies, greatly improving the relationship in the process. Now let’s take it into the rest of the organization and into our offline interactions. Our communications and our effectiveness will be better for it.
Persuasive Communication
This is an excerpt from my Persuasive Communication workshop. The previous post and the next one flesh out some of this content, but I thought you might like to see the slides – they’re pretty nice. The images are from either istockphoto.com or Flickr.com Creative Commons license. Enjoy!
Effective Communication: How to Get to the Point
To be a successful communicator, think of your listener first, and focus on attention.
Communication is hard. To successfully convey information requires taking what’s in my head and getting it into yours in some reasonable facsimile of the original thought or idea. If you think this is easy, just remember the last time you tried to inform a group of individuals about an upcoming change – and then remember the many (sometimes baffling) concerns and rumors that arose as a result!
As George Bernard Shaw once said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that is has taken place.” That’s because most of us focus only on the front end of the communication process – the part that’s all about us: the information we want to convey (the message) and how we plan to convey it (the medium).
To be an effective communicator, work all parts of the communication process
We ignore the back end – the part that’s all about the person we’re trying to communicate with. We rarely take into account, for example, the knowledge, experience and beliefs that might influence how they interpret our information. We don’t consider what might have happened to them that morning, or if we even have their attention at all! If you want to be a successful communicator, you have to work the entire communication process (see diagram) – including having a feedback loop to ensure that the message you sent is the one that got through.
Hey You, Over Here!
Attention is the single most important resource in successful communication. Without it, you can’t explain, sell, or influence anything. That’s because people only absorb information when they pay attention, and attention is scarce. It was scarce even before the advent of instant messages and texts, Facebook and YouTube, Twitter and RSS feeds. Today, getting someone’s attention is like trying to attract a hummingbird to a specific flower in a field of tulips.
Does your message stand out?
So what do we do? We push more information at people to get their attention, fighting the information glut with our own arsenal in an ever escalating arms race. Wrong! Herbert Simon, a social psychologist who pioneered the field of attention economics back in the early ‘70s, observed that since information consumes attention, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” These days we’ve gone beyond a wealth of attention to a state of full-on information pollution.
The first thing, then, is that we need to reduce “noise.” Noise is anything that distorts, distracts or interferes with the communication process. We do that by making sure our message is focused, relevant and clear, that we pursue engagement as much as understanding, and that we repeat the message until we know it’s been received and absorbed.
In my next post, I’ll delve into each of these areas and explain how persuasive communication is as much about change management as it is about messaging.
Effective Communication: How to Get to the Point
To be a successful communicator, think of others first, and focus on attention.
Communication is hard. To successfully convey information requires taking what’s in my head and getting it into yours in some reasonable facsimile of the original thought or idea. If you think this is easy, just remember the last time you tried to inform a group of individuals about an upcoming change – and then remember the many (sometimes baffling) concerns and rumors that arose as a result!
As George Bernard Shaw once said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that is has taken place.” That’s because most of us focus only on the front end of the communication process – the part that’s all about us: the information we want to convey (the message) and how we plan to convey it (the medium).
We ignore the back end – the part that’s all about the person we’re trying to communicate with. We rarely take into account, for example, the knowledge, experience and beliefs that might influence how they interpret our information. We don’t consider what might have happened to them that morning, or if we even have their attention at all! If you want to be a successful communicator, you have to work the entire communication process (see diagram) – including having a feedback loop to ensure that the message you sent is the one that got through.
[DIAGRAM]
Hey You, Over Here!
Attention is the single most important resource in successful communication. Without it, you can’t explain, sell, or influence anything. That’s because people only absorb information when they pay attention, and attention is scarce. It was scarce even before the advent of instant messages and texts, Facebook and YouTube, Twitter and RSS feeds. Today, getting someone’s attention is like trying to attract a hummingbird to a lone flower in the midst of a Dutch tulip field.
[TULIPS]
So what do we do? We push more information at people to get their attention, fighting the information glut with our own arsenal in an ever escalating arms race. Wrong! Herbert Simon, a social psychologist who pioneered the field of attention economics back in the early ‘70s, observed that since information consumes attention, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” These days we’ve gone beyond a wealth of attention to a state of full-on information pollution.
[ILLUSTRATION]
The first thing, then, is that we need to reduce “noise.” Noise is anything that distorts, distracts or interferes with the communication process. We do that by making sure our message is focused, relevant and clear, that we pursue engagement as much as understanding, and that we repeat the message until we know it’s been received and absorbed.
In my next post, I’ll delve into each of these areas and explain how persuasive communication is as much about change management as it is about messaging.
Four Keys to Successful Change
Ever try to get someone to change the way they do something that they’ve been doing the same way for years? Ever try to break one of your own habits? It’s not easy. Not because people are intentionally contrary or obstinate, but because big parts of our brains operate on autopilot, in deep grooves of habit, and establishing new pathways is hard.
This can be a serious problem for individuals or managers who find themselves in the midst of major change efforts.
There are four things you can do to help make change happen:
Sell the problem, not the solution.
People aren’t in the market for solutions to problems they don’t see or understand, writes William Bridges, author of Managing Transitions. For example, prehistoric humans were probably more inclined to give up their hunter-gatherer ways to grow crops once they really understood that the wooly mammoths were dying out.
Prehistoric man only began raising crops in earnest once the wooly mammoths started dying out
To really sell change, you have to touch people’s emotions. “Motivation is not a thinking word; it’s a feeling word,” says John Kotter, Harvard professor and best-selling leadership author. People have to feel a sense of threat, crisis or dissatisfaction before they have enough motivation to start the process of unlearning and relearning, according to Edgar Schein, an MIT Sloan professor and expert in organizational culture.
However, you have to be careful with how you use burning platforms, warns Kotter. If that’s all you do, you can create a panic that stops new action. Fear makes people focus on self-preservation instead of organizational transformation. The way around this, says Schein, is to make sure that while people feel a sense of threat in the old, they also feel a sense of psychological safety about learning the new.
Focus attention.
Once you create the impetus for people to move away from the old, you have to provide them with a clear vision of the new alternative. Imagine the panic among the cavemen and women once they understood that their prey was disappearing from the land and before they realized they could domestic certain plants and animals to generate their own source of food.
Focus is essential because the working memory part of our brains can only hold a few concepts in mind at one time. The worst thing you can do in a change effort is overwhelm people with lots of extraneous information and detail. (For a great talk on this topic, check out David Rock speaking at Google on YouTube.)
It’s important to distinguish between the overall mission of the group and its specific objectives. As long as you can show people that the new objectives still support the mission or core purpose of the group, it will be easier for them to switch. Early man’s mission was to eat to survive, not to hunt and kill mammoths.
Engage everyone in the change.
Everyone should have a role to play in the change – otherwise it will be something that’s being done to them. People have to be able to see themselves in the new future, and that will be easier if they play a part in shaping it.
The prospect of change causes uncertainty and anxiety in people. That anxiety is overcome when people have a personal insight. People have an insight by paying attention and reaching their own conclusions. And such insight is solidified when people voice their ideas. In fact, brain research shows that paying attention, having an insight and voicing ideas create a lot more activity and connections in the brain than reading about or hearing someone else voice a new idea.
What’s more, insight makes people feel better. Just as uncertainty causes anxiety, reaching a personal insight causes real pleasure. This reinforces the learning in ways few other things can.
Craft a message that’s simple and strong.
There are three keys to communicating change.
- When formulating your message, choose your words carefully. Words matter, and many a change effort has been derailed by a careless remark by a company leader.
- Images are better than words to create an emotional connection, so show, don’t tell, by telling stories that paint a picture or using actual physical evidence or demonstrations to emphasize your point.
- Effective communication requires repetition. There is so much that can get in the way of human communication. It’s rarely sufficient to tell something once and expect the message to get through. Don’t stop at the memo; use blogs, posters, town hall meetings, one on ones…. and then ask questions and listen to make sure your message is getting through in the way you intend.
Most people don’t resist change intentionally; resistance to change is part of our DNA. So if you want to change people’s behavior, remember these four things:
Sell the problem, not the solution – you’ve got to help people get unstuck from where they are.
Focus people’s attention – be very clear about the new priorities.
Engage everyone in the process of solving the problem – this is much more important than any particular solution.
Finally, keep your message simple, strengthen it by painting a picture that captures people’s imaginations, and broadcast it far and wide.
See my recent presentation, “Leading in a Turbulent World,” on Slideshare. You can view the slides on my previous post, but to read the substance of the talk, go to the Slideshare version.
Great Communicators: Steve Bandrowczak on What CIOs Can Learn from Sales
Steve Bandrowczak, former CIO at DHL, Lenovo and, most recently, Nortel, knows what IT leaders can learn from sales and vice versa because he has recently made the transition into a sales leadership role himself. As vice president of global sales at Avaya after that company’s acquisition of Nortel, Steve leads sales, marketing, channel strategy, services and service strategy for Avaya’s data business. I spoke with him recently. This is the third in a series.
Steve Bandrowczak
Abbie Lundberg: You’ve made the shift from CIO to leading a global sales and marketing organization. What are the differences and similarities of those two roles?
Steve Bandrowczak: Sales & IT have a lot in common. The thing that you learn from sales and can take back into the IT world is that every customer is different. Every customer has a unique set of challenges in terms of how you communicate, how you work with that individual company or customer.
To be an effective CIO leader, you must understand the different parts of the various groups you serve. The way you speak to the head of sales is different from the way you speak to the head of operations, the CFO or the head of R&D. In order to be effective leading IT, business transformation and change, you have to understand what various leaders are trying to do within their own business area, align with that, and then communicate the value that IT brings.
If you start talking to the head of sales about IT or operational metrics, they’ll glaze over very quickly. If you go in talking to them about how am I going to help you drive sales, how am I going to help you drive sales productivity or lead management, you’ll have a much better reception than if you go in there and simply say we’re going to implement Salesforce.com and give them a project plan. You need to show them you understand their challenges as well as the value proposition of what IT can bring.
Where a lot of IT guys get hung up is they talk about “the data center is up 7/24” and “I’ve got five nines reliability” or “I can role out projects…” But you know what? That’s a commodity these days. The real value that you have is where you understand a business unit and its key metrics. I’ll just take a real simple example: If you’re going to roll out a CRM project, the sales team, in general, is looking for… well, they’d say it’s really about lead management, it’s about getting my contacts in a single database, it’s about making my day easier. No it’s not! It’s about sales productivity and driving revenue.
And oh, by the way, if I don’t understand where my baseline is today and where my competition is – meaning the best in the industry – then I don’t know what gap I’m trying to close and how I’m going to improve it. One of the things the CIO brings is understanding the baseline of what that business is doing. So very simply, in sale, if you know that the average revenue per head in your company is, say, $1 million per head, and you know the best in the industry is $4 million, then your CRM goal should be, how do I triple my productivity, not how do I implement CRM. Big difference.
The more that IT executives understand those business goals and metrics and then can bring successful programs to close that gap – that’s where they’re hitting home runs. What we’ve seen through the years is that, from an IT perspective, people focus on: I hit every single milestone – SAP was in on time, on budget. Then five months later, the company’s going out of business.
A lot of IT professionals are uncomfortable with the idea of “selling” or “marketing” IT to their colleagues in other parts of the business. Is this really necessary?
What you’re talking about is communicating the value that IT brings to the business, and that’s absolutely essential. If the only thing the IT organization is doing is the same thing that an EDS or IBM Consulting Services or Accenture is doing, the reality is they can be outsourced. And because external companies are variable in cost, they become more attractive. The difference between the two options becomes variable versus fixed cost, and am I lowest cost versus an external provider.
Where I bring value and why we need to communicate about the value that we bring, lies in understanding the business and being able to communicate about the value IT brings to the business and how IT helps to drive that business transformation. That’s where the uniqueness and the challenges come in. CIOs today – and it’s not just CIOs, it’s the whole IT community – need to communicate the value in a business-centric set of communications. That’s where you become much more effective and much more valuable.
Communicating that value is necessary, and it needs to be frequent. We used to do an annual newsletter. We used to do a monthly achievements memo. Whether it’s in staff meetings, one-on-one, big presentations to groups, newsletters, an annual report… there’s never, ever enough communication.
The key there is it’s not just IT communication – it’s we rolled out with the sales force and achieved these things, we rolled out with finance and achieved these things, as opposed to we did an SAP system, and we did it on time, on budget. No, we worked with the finance community, we redesigned the receivables, the payables, collections, and here are the end business targets that we’re going to achieve and the timeframe in which we’re going to achieve it, and by the way, we’ll give you updates on a monthly basis. Much different than you’re tooting your own horn.
What separates a good communication program from a bad one?
If somebody doesn’t understand what I am saying, it’s my fault, not theirs. I have to take ownership that if somebody doesn’t understand something, it’s because I have not communicated effectively.
Bad communication is when you have sent out a monthly communication or whatever it is, and the business is still shaking their head or they don’t understand it or they just haven’t paid attention. If that happens, you haven’t done your job. And you see that from a lot of IT organizations. All too often, IT says, “I’ve communicate that 100 times. Why doesn’t the stupid business understand it?” You know, “we tell them what we’re doing; what’s wrong with them?”
The reality is, everybody is different. Every CEO is different. Some CEOs have a sales background, some have an operations background, some have a finance background. Each CEO likes to be communicated to differently, and you’ve got to be able to communicate the way the business units want to be communicated to.
Each level is different too. The way you communicate to a senior VP is different from the way you communicate with someone inside a call center or warehouse, but equally important. Everyone is important.
So what makes effective communication? When you talk to the business and they understand the last 10 projects you rolled out and how you did it and what the value was. And you’ve got to keep checking that communication vehicle that you’re sending.
Does it mean you do one-on-ones and staff meetings? Yup. Does it mean you do town halls with business units? Yup. We used to have something we called breakfast with Steve and meet your customer where I’d talk to the IT community about a particular function – this is what’s going on with sales, this is what’s going on with supply chain, this is what’s going on with the finance community. Meet your customer. Someone from that function would come in, explain from their perspective what their top 10 challenges were and why they needed IT and how important IT was. That’s the way you close the gap and eliminate this Chinese firewall where they do the requirements and throw it over the wall, you do something, you implement it and hopefully it works for them.
How do you check the fidelity of your message? How do you make sure that the message you intended to communicate actually got through?
There are a number of things. We used to do quarterly surveys – that’s one mechanism. Also, spending one-on-one time with the senior management team and just getting a feel for, OK, what can we do better? Do you know where we are with this rollout?
I used to have one person on my staff sit in with each business unit/function. My head of operations would sit in with their head of sales, and sit in on their staff meetings and global communications meetings. So we had someone inside the function, understanding what the function was doing, who would bring that back to the IT executive leadership team.
What’s the role of effective communication in change management?
It’s huge. It’s huge in establishing the right set of goals, showing how you’re doing along the path, and when you finish a project, seeing the benefits post implementation. It has to be a running track alongside any transformation initiative.
Describe a change effort and how you used communication to make things go more smoothly.
When DHL acquired Airborne, we had a significant external set of eyes on the integration. FedEx and UPS were just sitting there waiting for the integration to fail, and it would have cost us significant market share. When you do large integrations like that, you tend to do some unnatural things in terms of timelines and the way you put things together. So the communication aspect of that is very important, in terms of why you’re doing it this quickly, with this kind of 7/24, 15-week effort. In that particular one, we were going to lose something like $10 million per day for every day we couldn’t integrate.
When you communicate in that perspective and set that kind of burning bridge, teams understand why the pressure, why you’re making the decisions you are, why you’re taking some risk. If you don’t communicate the reasons, that sense of urgency is just not there, and that’s important when you do large-scale transformation programs like that.
I always pick what I call the top-five burning bridge things. What are the top five things that, when any other question comes up, you raise them against those five goals. So a simple example: Many people do SAP implementations and say, “I need this report before I go live.” So we would say, what is the value of going live? Whatever it is, let’s just make up a fictitious number and say I’m going to gain $5 million per week operational savings. Which means that for every day I don’t go live, I basically waste a million dollars. When someone says, “I need this report before we go live,” you simple say, “OK, where’s the million dollars?” “Well, I don’t have a million dollars.” “Then you’re not getting the report.” It puts the conversation in perspective and gives it a definitive metric and focus so for every single question that comes up, you can target against a broader set of objectives.
Why do IT professionals often have trouble communicating with business colleagues?
We teach IT as a science, not an art. That touchy-feely soft stuff we’ve learned through the years around program management, change management, training – that’s not taught in the schools today. Everything is black and white, ones and zeros, on and off – they don’t really get that communication set of skills. And by the way, many of them don’t have the business set of skills either. What you’re starting to see now is people from the business who have worked on a project coming over and having some of those skills get into the DNA of IT.
When I got to Nortel, they had just completed an evaluation of the entire staff, and they ranked them for me, one through seven, with one being the best. After my own two-week evaluation, the order was completely flip-flopped. The quote/unquote “best” IT person was my worst. Why? Because the best IT person, the way it was ranked, was the best technical person – no business skills, no transformation skills, no leadership skills. Tremendous technically – but I can go buy that. The person who was ranked the lowest was the one who was touchy feely – focused on training, worried about employee sat, retention, customer sat, communications, business value. She didn’t know anything about IT operations, networks, the technical side of it, and that’s what I loved about her. She turned out to be one of my top leaders.
What are some classic communication mistakes IT professionals make, and what can a CIO do about them?
The first thing is putting out a status report that doesn’t have any business impact in it. Focusing on the top 10 IT accomplishments – we implemented a local area network, we had five nines reliability, the data center had zero down time – being too IT centric and not realizing the business doesn’t give a hoot about those things.
The second thing is one size doesn’t fit all. Whatever the format, each function needs to be communicated to in a different way.
Most IT organizations tend to have one or two people who can do that, but it tends not to be widely shared across the organization. The also don’t focus on it, don’t measure it. One thing IT people are good at: when they have a clear set of metrics and goals, they tend to get things done. But go survey the top 100 IT organizations and ask them how they measure the effectiveness of communications. You’ll get blank stares – what do you mean?
What’s the most important thing you’ve learned about communication in the course of your career?
There tends to be a certain arrogance around the CIO role. That’s partly because they got where they are because they’ve been successful, and they think they understand. But when you start with, “I don’t know anything, I’m humble, and each business day is something I can learn from customers, employees,” that’s when you really understand the art of communication and can be most effective. When you have arrogance around, “I’ve said it, therefore everyone must understand it,” you’ve got nothing but a lose/lose.
Seven Secrets to Better Communication
As part of our interview, I asked Genentech CIO Todd Pierce to describe the most important thing he’d learned about effective communication in the course of his career. He gave me not one but seven critical facets of great communication.
Know your audience: Really know who you’re communicating with and what you’re communicating.
Ask questions: [The best communication] doesn’t advocate; it inquires and helps people get to an insight or an inspiration or an action. And it gives you the information you need as well.
Be responsive: Ask, “Is this a good use of our time?” If the answer is no, you have to be able to stop the meeting or reengage in a different way or drop your content and move to where you need to be. People build presentations or communications for their own logical path, and 99 percent of the time, that’s not somebody else’s path. Sensing that early on and being able to move is key.
Be concise: I work on my own communication skills every time I speak to my leadership team. That’s 130 people once a month. I set a goal for myself to not speak more than 10 minutes, and to not use any visual aids. I was used to speaking for an hour with as many visual aids as I want. Ten minutes is about all people can retain.
Get rid of jargon: … and not just IT jargon. Words like inflection point and strategy – things that sound like they mean a lot but have lost their meaning. You need to really strip all that away. I’ve learned that at Genentech, because they’re talking about cancer – how cancer grows or how antibodies work. You can’t teach people 20 years of biology, so they figure out how to strip all the complexity away and still leave you with the relevant points.
Simplify: Too often people relish the complexity – I did – you know, this is so complicated, let me show you how complicated it is. It’s a given it’s complicated. What people really want you to do is find the simplicity on the other side of complexity – and don’t communicate until you do. Say, “we haven’t figured that out yet but we’re working on it.” We’ve spent a lot of time on that.
Do more showing, less telling: Interactivity with IT is so much bigger now. People no longer wonder if technology can do something; they accept that it can do just about anything. But would you want to use it, will you use it, and how useful would it be? That’s a much bigger part of the dialogue. I tell my team: assume [the person’s project] is two hours past due, they’re working from a hotel room after two drinks at 10:00 over a VPN. Is it going to feel good? How do we make it so easy that they can’t resist it? We do more demo’ing and less justifying and explaining.
Great Communicators: Genentech CIO Todd Pierce
This is the second in a series.
Todd Pierce
Great communicators focus on the perspectives, priorities and frames of reference of the people they seek to communicate with. At Genentech, that means science. Todd Pierce, SVP and CIO at Genentech, views effective communication as the “circulatory system” of business. Everything he does takes that into account.
Being in the drug discovery/drug development business, Genentech runs on quickly gathering large volumes of information and analyzing it effectively. With 30-40 clinical trials going on at any given time, that’s a lot of information.
In addition to supporting Genentech’s ongoing clinical trials, Pierce is focused on executing the organizational design and 18-month roadmap that are part of Genentech’s recent merger with Swiss biotech giant Roche. The combined organization will move to one set of global systems – which will require 140 integration projects, among other things.
Pierce is also an early adopter of innovative new technologies. In part one of our interview, we discuss how he conveys the benefits of emerging technologies – such as iPhones, Google Apps and social networking – and how he engenders trust in business colleagues and passion in his staff. In part two, we’ll discuss in more detail the decisions around the company’s early adoption of the iPhone and Google Apps.
Abbie Lundberg: When you think about business/technology alignment, where does effective communication fit in?
Todd Pierce: I think of communication as the circulatory system – everything flows around and is dependent upon it. You can’t be aligned if you’re not listening and don’t have a deep understanding of what the business needs and wants, and where it’s going, and what role technology can play in that. You have to be in dialogue. It’s not just one side telling the other side; it’s both sides collaborating to figure out where do we want to be, and how to get there most effectively.
A lot of companies have trouble with that because they often don’t have a common language to communicate around complex technology issues.
That’s right. You have to have a common language, and people are incredibly busy, so you can’t get them up on the IT language; you have to speak in the language that’s relevant to them. That’s where a lot of communication breaks down.
It’s been very important for me in my career to learn as much as possible about the business: what’s important; how the different pieces work. At Genentech, we help employees understand that by having patients come and talk about products, or having scientists come talk about how we discover them, or researchers and clinicians on how we develop them. Every meeting that we have [in IT], we have some communication from the business about the business in the language of the business to keep us immersed in that.
Patients come in several times a year. They speak very personally about what our product has meant to them, but they also speak very honestly about what missing or what’s left to be done. That’s something you don’t get in the typical corporate communication.
Much of IT is complex and specialized. A lot of things must be taken on faith. How have you built trust with your business colleagues so they’ll trust you to do the right thing and look out for their interests?
The thing that builds the most trust is transparency and accountability. Even when we’re talking about something they may not understand, or they’re thinking, “wow, that sure is a lot of money; are you sure we need to do that?” we need to be very clear about what it is we’re doing and what we’re going to be accountable for – how we’re going measure our effectiveness.
Second, as an internal service, we have to put pressure on ourselves just like a market would, to continually up our game. It builds credibility and confidence from the business when they see us doing that.
As part of this merger, we’ll be supporting an additional 4,000 people in Genentech with 20 percent fewer resources. So we’ve come up with a series of things to improve our core processes. For example, we said, let’s eliminate 30 percent of all the calls to our service desk. We had no idea how we were going to do it, but we set up a contest and formed teams [to tackle the problem]. We may not actually achieve the goal, but by setting the goal and challenging ourselves, the business sees that we’re always trying to improve our performance. Seeing us do that and seeing our performance improve builds confidence and trust.
What can individual team members do to build that trust all the way through the organization?
Trust is created through every contact and every experience people have with IT. It’s things like, “Does my laptop work?” “Is it easy to connect to the network?” “Are all of my expectations being met without me having to actively engage with the IT department?” It’s constantly staying in touch with users’ expectations and how we’re doing, and really being honest with ourselves about our performance — being self-aware both individually and collectively about where we’re not meeting people’s expectations and what can we do about that.
Where do communications most often break down within the business ecosystem?
You want the distance between the creators of information and the consumers of information to be as short as possible, because then you can make sure that people really are using the information and getting value out of it. Things break down when there are a lot of intermediaries, for example, when corporate functions in complex organizations decide to implement something that imposes on other people, and IT gets in the middle of that. I try to make sure we are always thinking about the ultimate end user rather than the entities that are ordering [a new process] or dictating it. That end user often gets lost, so you build systems that people hate to use or find hard to use, and ultimately the business doesn’t get the value out of it.
Genentech has been an early adopter of some consumer technologies that other enterprises have been reluctant to adopt, such as iPhones and Google Apps. How did you get to yes so quickly?
Getting to yes involves having good controlled experiments. I told my staff, “Let’s identify risk and manage it; don’t hide behind it.” When the iPhone came out, the concern was that it was a consumer product, not an enterprise product, and that it could compromise our information, or it would be hard to manage.… All the arguments about why it wouldn’t work or why it might be a bad idea came up. So I challenged my team to take all of our fears and concerns and test them – to actually go out and get the information.
Within a week of iPhones being available, we had 100 of them in a test. We had the IT people list out all the risks and concerns and then start solving them and working with the vendors to address them. I’ve found that to be very helpful, because it brings along all the stakeholders (legal, IT infrastructure, support, suppliers), getting them around the table, figuring out what the issues are, then running the trial and having some exit criteria that say if we achieve these end points, then we’ll go to the next level – much like we do with our core business of drug development.
You’ve developed an internal social network called Gene Pool. Why did you invest in this – what’s the business value?
The key value is how to continue to have that small company feel inside of a big company. Genentech has grown 3x since I’ve been here. In small companies, you feel like you know everyone, you can talk to anyone and get the information you need.… We all go to the same cafeteria and have a sense of connection and ownership. These informal networks are how creativity and energy and vitality exist in organizations.
When you scale up and you have 50 buildings, and we’re hiring 100 new people every week, you’re not going to have those relationships, nor do you have the capacity to find them and build them fast enough. Social networking blows all those limitations out. It’s all about how can you effectively scale these informal networks.
What barriers did you have to overcome?
The key barrier for that kind of technology is the management hierarchy. Management doesn’t see the need for it. They have their chain of command and their processes to get the information they need or do the work that they need to do. My barrier in that case was just how not to get senior management involved in the decision. Because it’s not for them. So I said, you don’t get this, and you don’t need to get this, and I’m not building it for you. This is for the front-line employee, who doesn’t have the hierarchy and everyone sending them status reports and aligning their information sharing around whatever your questions or needs are.
So you were very explicit about that upfront.
Oh yeah – absolutely. It was kind of an epiphany. The company was spending a lot of time and emotional energy thinking about how do we preserve the culture and scale the company. And I thought, this is perfect! You know, “voila!” But then, whenever I presented [the idea of social networking] to the executive committee, they all had this puzzled look on their faces, like, why do we need this? The epiphany was, “You don’t need this, you’re absolutely right, and I’m not here to convince you that you need it, because you have all the information you need, and if you don’t, you have a hierarchy that will help you go get it. But most employees who are just joining the company or haven’t been here very long don’t have those networks, so how can we build those effectively?”
Why the name Gene Pool?
We were trying to figure out how to explain what this was. If you’re not familiar with it, how do you explain it? We were brainstorming a whole number of things. We didn’t want a cutesy name that didn’t mean anything, you know, some kind of typical corporate branding thing, and a long-term employee said, “oh, it’s like a gene pool: we all put our genes into the pool, and the best things come out. That’s how we grow and evolve and create.” And the minute they said it, the whole room said, “That’s it!” That totally explains why you want to play – you want to get your genes in the gene pool. It’s that bringing together of different ideas, diversity of genes, that will build the best organism.
We also wanted to have this be not another corporate system. There’s application fatigue. We wanted people to think of it not as another beast you’re going to have to feed, but this is actually going to work for you.
What are people doing with it that’s valuable?
It runs the gamut, which just shows you how creative people are and how many communication needs there are within corporations. One of our most effective executive leaders who has 3,500 people in his organization publishes a blog every two weeks. People can write back, respond and interact with him. That just wouldn’t be possible in any other way. Most top executives are in a room with the same 10 people 80 percent of the time. This gives great access and a way to have dialogue that people are comfortable using. He gets more interactivity there than he would in a town hall meeting or if he just sent out an e-mail.
Then there are work groups – dynamic work groups being able to come together, share information, work on problems, publish that and make it searchable and accessible. Think about how much valuable work is redone and lost in organizations.
It’s incredibly low cost – low cost to implement, low cost to operate. It doesn’t have all the overhead that running a big intranet site does with the same amount of content. Every part of the business is using it for communication and collaboration needs that aren’t met by the core applications.
The precursor to this was our intranet, which had 30,000 pages and you couldn’t find anything. It wasn’t clear who owned what, and what was authoritative versus brainstorming. Where it would break down was in the bureaucracy. You know what it takes to sustain a publication – you need a lot of reporters and editors and reviewers; it requires a lot to keep the quality up. What’s nice about Gene Pool is it’s clear who owns information, where it’s coming from, and whether it’s authoritative. You can subscribe to it. It’s faster and easier than what you can do with most of your intranet site beyond the homepage and about two links off the homepage.
You’ve talked about how important it is for people to have a sense of passion for their work. How do you engender that in your staff?
This is a constant thing. I tell everyone in my organization I want there to be three things true about everyone here:
First is to love what you do – I don’t think anything great or meaningful ever comes from people who don’t have passion or love what they do.
Second, be good at it – and that requires practice and constant learning.
And the third is be easy to work with – have a good user interface.
Our employee development accentuates all three of those. We have three centers of development: head, heart and body, and how do things get integrated and move from your head to your heart to your body. Someone has an idea, and it ties into their motivation, and then they have a practice to constantly improve; that’s how people grow and change.
We have a year-long development program that’s open to all staff. They meet eight times a year in small learning communities of four or so people. In each of those meetings, they do a head-heart-body check in…. This gives people the language, cultivates their sense of self-awareness, and gives them not only permission but the impetus to do something about it.
I do a three-day offsite with all of my managers, and part of that is finding out, what do they really care about? What do they really love doing? And giving them the assignment to get more of that into their jobs.
There are multiple things we do to tap into that emotional energy. The great thing about emotional energy is it’s one of most renewable resources we have, so you need to constantly renew, reward, recognize, cultivate it.
Sidebar: Seven Secrets to Better Communication
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Todd Pierce is senior vice president and CIO of Genentech, the $13,418 million San Francisco biotech company that this year became a wholly owned subsidiary of Roche. He joined Genentech in May 2002. Pierce’s IT leadership experience spans a broad range of industries, including commercial software products, health insurance, clinical care and government. Prior to joining Genentech, he served as CIO and Director of Information Systems for the Santa Clara County Social Services Agency. Pierce holds a B.A. in Economics and Finance from Austin College and a M.A. in Health Policy and Administration from the University of California, Berkeley.
Great Communicators: Kimberly-Clark CIO Ramon Baez
The first in a series
Effective CIOs all have their own style and approach to leadership. One thing they have in common is the ability to communicate well at all levels of their organizations. They understand that communication is a collaborative process, as much about asking questions as answering them; as much about listening as talking. It’s a conversation.
Ramón Baez, CIO, Kimberly-Clark
For IT professionals who began their careers as technologists, this is not always a natural act. In this series, we’ll talk with business technology leaders about their own experiences with communication and leadership — what they’ve learned over the course of their careers, what their most effective practices are, and how they’re helping their teams become great communicators too.
I recently caught up with CIO Ramon Baez to talk about how communication drives strategy and change at Kimberly-Clark.
Lundberg: Where does effective communication fit in to business/technology alignment?
Baez: First, company leaders have to put their heads together and develop a shared mindset and vision for the company. That includes what our values and key priorities are. You need to lay out that framework before moving forward.
The next piece is you have to communicate the framework not only at the top layer of management – that’s the beginning – but get feedback from them to determine if the approach will work in their part of the business or globe.
Kimberly-Clark is very focused on being a stronger company on the other side of this global economic recession, and we are very focused on how to execute this with our whole team. It’s essential to lay out the plan and the vision for all team members to understand.
Over the past year, we’ve been focused on better managing our supply chain; doing a better job of sourcing from a global perspective; and optimizing our processes throughout the organization. Looking ahead, we are cautiously optimistic about business conditions. We need to continue our focus and momentum and re-engage everyone in the organization around innovation, customers and brands, and developing our people.
If you think of effective communication as a series of links in a chain, where within the business ecosystem are the most common breaks?
There are two places where things get disconnected: at the top layer of management and at the supervisor/team leader level.
In my past, I have observed that if the senior leaders don’t believe the organization is moving in the right direction, then the rest of the organization is not going to get it. If that’s the case, you need to find out why, quickly. Talk to them, survey them anonymously. They all may have a different view, but see where you have some overlap; these are the areas you need to attack first. Just remember, if you go out and ask the question, you have to be able to handle the answer.
The same applies to the manager/supervisor level. If they don’t believe in what you’re doing, or they don’t trust your leadership, you’ll have a significant disconnect.
This happened at one organization I worked at. When we did the engagement survey with first-line managers, we found out they didn’t trust leadership and didn’t believe we were moving in the right direction. At the same time, their teams loved them. Employee surveys showed a high percentage of satisfaction with team leadership. We had to find out what we were doing wrong.
In that case, it turned out that because we were moving so fast, we were not doing leadership development with that level of managers, and we weren’t listening to them. We’d been doing too much one-way communication instead of listening to their ideas about what we needed to do differently. When they started seeing senior leaders listening to them and taking action, they then began to tell their teams how much they believed in what we were doing. This created the necessary momentum to move forward.
You spent most of your career in aerospace and defense. Did you have to learn a new language coming into a consumer products company?
No matter what the industry is, the IT part is very similar: It’s your job to get accurate information to the business leaders quickly and in the most effective and efficient way.
However, there are differences. When you move into a new industry, you have to understand three things:
- You have to understand the jargon – every industry has it, and even the same acronyms can mean different things in different parts of the same industry.
- You have to understand how that business makes money; if you don’t understand that, you won’t be able to communicate with business leaders.
- You have to understand their pain points.
So the first thing you need to do as part of successful communication is to listen well. At Kimberly-Clark, I spent the first 45 days travelling around the world to meet with the business folks first, then the IT team. The business leaders all had different things to say about IT.
Why do IT professionals often have trouble communicating with business colleagues?
Throughout my career, what I have seen is that many IT professionals may have started their careers very focused on the technology and not having to interact with their colleagues in the business. As they progress in their careers, relationship management and communication skills become just as important. At Kimberly-Clark, we provide relationship and conflict management training to help develop our IT professionals. We had 150 people go through this process last year, and we plan to do more in the future to make sure we continue to drive value for Kimberly-Clark from an IT perspective.
What are some classic mistakes IT professionals make, and what can a CIO do about that?
Speaking in general, we don’t develop our people to be prepared to have those conversations. One of the things we do is role play with members of our team before important meetings or engagements. I may ask, if the CEO or the CFO asks these questions, how would you respond to them? Many times the first answer is way off – too focused on the technology or speaking in a language the business people don’t understand. We coach them to put their focus on the business problem – “this is how we’re going to fix this process” or “this is what the customer is going to experience” rather than “this is the technology we’re rolling out.” If there’s one thing for IT professionals to remember, it’s to lead the conversation with what business capability they’re enabling, not with the project or solution.
It’s the CIO’s job to create an organization that is able to communicate in a way that fits with the company culture. You also must have a strong leadership team to be successful in executing communication well across a large enterprise.
What other issues do IS staff wrestle with?
Oftentimes, IT people simply don’t speak up because they don’t have the confidence to communicate effectively with their counterparts in the business. It’s our job to coach them to think about their audience and what that group of people is trying to do before they send out an e-mail or make a presentation. We brought our communications team in to help develop templates for messages coming out of IS, to make sure we’re addressing the things that matter to businesspeople trying to do their jobs.
What’s the most important thing you’ve learned about communication in the course of your career?
If you come across as arrogant or self-serving, you’re going to fail. A CIO needs to understand and speak to the hearts and minds of others. And to do that, you have to listen and understand. Communication is a process, not an event.
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Ramon F. Baez has been chief information officer and vice president for information technology services of Kimberly-Clark Corp. since February 2007. He is responsible for leading Kimberly-Clark’s enterprise-wide information systems initiatives to support its future growth and to maximize the return on its information technology investments.
Ramon started his career at Northrop Grumman. Over the course of 25 years at the defense and aerospace leader, he assumed increasing responsibility for information services and data management, leading to his being named chief information officer for its electronic systems sensors sector. He served as CIO and VP for IT of Honeywell International Automation and Control Solutions group and, prior to joining Kimberly-Clark, as CIO of Thermo Fisher Scientific, where he was responsible for coordinating and directing worldwide information systems.
Mr. Baez holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Business Administration from University of La Verne in California.
Storytelling and the Art of Change
Storytelling is a powerful tool when you want to drive organizational change, sell an idea, or just make a point.
There’s nothing new about storytelling. As a species, it’s in our DNA. Long before we had books and newspapers, telephones and telegraphs, the Internet and Kindles, our ancestor’s sat around the fire and told stories. More than storytellers, we’re story consumers. Even people who think they’re no good at telling stories generally love to hear them. We just respond better to information when it’s delivered with a memorable anecdote or example (i.e., story).
I’m reading The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, by Stephen Denning. It describes how to use storytelling to move people to action, build trust (in you as a leader or in your company or brand), convey your values and vision, and drive change in your organization – outcomes that all managers need to deliver today. While “analysis might excite the mind, it hardly offers a route to the heart,” Denning writes. “And that‘s where you must go if you are to motivate people not only to take action but to do so with energy and enthusiasm. At a time when corporate survival often requires transformational change, leadership involves inspiring people to act in unfamiliar and often unwelcome ways.”
Stories are not a natural part of the business dialogue in most companies. There’s an executive bias toward data-based analysis and objectivity to the exclusion of “softer” means of persuasion. How often have you heard someone apologize for a point of evidence being “just anecdotal”? But the two are not mutually exclusive. “Although good business cases are developed through the use of numbers, they are typically approved on the basis of a story,” Denning writes.
Then there’s the issue of language itself. People who are perfectly fluent in human terms outside the office start babbling away in corporate mumbo-jumbo as soon as they cross the company lobby. Put them in a conference room or onto a stage and it gets worse. It doesn’t have to be that way.
One of the things I like right away about Denning’s book is his message that anyone can learn to tell a good story. And that’s a good thing. In “The Irrational Side of Change Management,” published in the McKinsey Quarterly and excerpted on Forbes.com, Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller point out that even managers who buy in to the power of stories fail to achieve the change they want by telling the wrong stories. They don’t realize that what motivates them as company leaders and stewards won’t likely motivate the mass of people they’re trying to influence. Leaders tend to focus on the impact on the company, but this is only one of five areas that matter to employees. The others are impact on society (is there a “green” angle to your data center consolidation?), the customer, the team they’re a part of, and their own interests (personal development, compensation, etc.).
A second excellent point Aiken and Keller make is that it’s much more powerful to let people “write their own story.” In other words, before you tell your story, ask a lot of questions, really listen to the answers, and incorporate what you hear into your change program. This is about buy-in. “When we choose for ourselves, we are far more committed to the outcome (almost by a factor of five to one). Conventional approaches to change management underestimate this impact. The rational thinker sees it as a waste of time to let others discover for themselves what he or she already knows—why not just tell them and be done with it? Unfortunately this approach steals from others the energy needed to drive change that comes through a sense of ownership of the answer.”
Stories are useful in all parts of the change process, starting with selling the idea to the CEO, board of directors or investors. There are different types of stories for different situations: comparative examples with positive outcomes; parables that convey a set of values; narratives with an identifiable protagonist; and problem/resolution stories.
You don’t have to have been born with the gift of gab to be an effective storyteller. Managers can increase their effectiveness by learning which stories to tell and how to tell them. The right story well told will engage your audience in ways all the data in the world on its own never will.
Leadership Communication: From Ideas to Action
Communicating effectively with business colleagues has ranked as one of CIOs’ top three critical success factors for as long as I’ve been tracking these things — and I’ve been tracking them for a long time. I’ve wondered over the years why this issue hasn’t gone away. Why is it so damn hard for IT leaders to get their message across?
First of all, this is not just a CIO problem. People in general are terrible at conveying a concept or message intact from their brain to that of their “listener” (a misused term if ever there was one). As Celtics coach Red Auerbach used to say, “it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.” Influencing what people hear involves a lot more than just forming the right words.
To communicate successfully requires navigating a virtual land of ogres and sirens, often without a map. The territory between two brains is populated with two lifetimes of context, experience and expectation, and if you don’t understand any of that, your message will have a tough time reaching its destination in anything like its intended form.
What makes this more difficult for people who choose careers in IT is that they are typically strong analytical thinkers. This reinforces the idea that a well-reasoned proposal that “makes sense” must naturally be accepted. Wrong! Much of business and, indeed, human interaction, has nothing to do with reason at all. It has to do with intuition and “gut feel” and is influenced by examples and stories. Don’t get me wrong, you have to have good data to back up your position, but don’t for a minute think that’s all — or even the most important part — of your message.
Your message will have a much better chance of penetrating the thicket of your audience’s biases and defenses if you leave yours behind. Whatever the form (dialogue in a meeting; a written document; an e-mail; a speech), a message that is spare, direct and other-focused is less likely to get hung up along the way.
Effective communication both requires and creates engagement. Good communicators show people where they fit into the picture, how a new initiative will affect them and how their own actions will contribute to it, and thus to the organization’s success. It takes them beyond buy in to action, building essential momentum behind the effort.
Getting from ideas to action is what leadership communication is all about.
Five Steps to Successful Communication
- Put in the work to map the territory (understand your audience’s context) before you begin.
- Leave your own biases and defenses behind.
- Choose your time and place. If you can limit the distractions competing for your audience’s attention, your message will have a better chance of getting through.
- Make sure your audience is really listening. If not, why not, and what can you do about it?
- Show people where they fit into the story — how the change will affect them and how they will help create the change.
