CHANGE
YOUR ORGANIZATION ONE WORD AT A TIME David Firth & Mike Rix
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Molloy, Samuel Beckett
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saying is inventing
Change Your Organization One Word at a Time An invitation to engage Welcome to this booklet, which we have written to be useful but also to entertain, to stimulate and to provoke. One of the key assumptions we hold is the conception that communication is a one way process is flawed. In fact, communication is always multidimensional and dynamic; it is an ongoing conversation. To that end, as well as this booklet and the larger book that we are currently developing, we have created an online community for sharing experiences and developing ideas based on what comes out of your interaction with this booklet. Throughout these pages, you will find prompts to connect to the online community and share your thoughts and responses to our ideas. We would encourage you also tell us your stories of what has worked most of all for you when it comes to communication. Your engagement with us will be a key part of how we develop future ideas, applications and offerings from the world of Change Your Organization One Word at a Time. Change Your Organization One Word at a Time can be found online at: www.changeonewordatatime.com We look forward to being in conversation with you there.
David and Mike
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Table of Contents PREFACE .............................................................................................................................................. 6
PART 1: Some Key Ideas .......................................................................... 9 CHAPTER 1: This is communication, but not as we know it ............................................ 10 CHAPTER 2: The Three Laws of Communication ................................................................. 15 CHAPTER 3: Leader as Author ..................................................................................................... 22 CHAPTER: Engagement ................................................................................................................. 27 REFLECTIONS ON PART 1 .............................................................................................................. 31
PART 2: Implementing the Ideas ............................................................ 33 THE 5 STORIES ................................................................................................................................... 34 IS IT REALLY A STORY? ....................................................................................................................... 35 OUR INVITATION ................................................................................................................................ 42 ABOUT THE AUTHORS ..................................................................................................................... 43
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CHANGE YOUR ORGANIZATION ONE WORD AT A TIME
PREFACE Then, suddenly, I knew not how or where or when, my brain felt the impact of another mind, and I awoke to language, to knowledge, to love, to the usual concepts of nature, good and evil. I was actually lifted from nothingness to human life. ~ Helen Keller The story of how Helen Keller, who became totally blind and deaf from being 19 months old, emerged from a total lack of language into a world of communication, meaning, understanding and connection was made famous in the play and subsequent film The Miracle Worker and is an inspiration for our argument that language is the motive force of leadership and action. Before language: nothingness (or simply a series of nameless sensations). After language: lights on, meaning, power, thirst for growth; to everything it means to be a human being. A shift from being a helpless passenger in her life into being a creator of it. Our intention is to lead and inquire into how leaders can have their own rebirths into a fuller, more powerful, more intentional life by getting a new access to the power of language.
So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it. Isaiah 55:11 6
Communication is the leadership imperative Leadership has only one priority and that is to deliver results beyond the ordinary. There is only one resource: the people around you. And ultimately there is only one tool: the words you use to engage with those people to work together. Today, as a leader, you are likely to speak around 16,000 words. How many of those words will be of value? How many of those words will add to the noise of business life – the noise of attack and defence, of opinion and point of view, of justifications and excuses, of gossip and rumor?
How many of those words will break through the interference of complexity, uncertainty, dilemma and CREATE PURPOSEFUL ACTION? How many of those words will literally make you a leader? And how many of those words will express who you truly are in the world? This Booklet is aimed at sharing our latest thinking as we develop a fuller and more expansive expression of it in our forthcoming book Change your Organization One Word at a Time. We aim to help leaders raise their ability to communicate to new levels. To use the words, the only tool they have, to build new relationships with the people around them, to engage with them in ways that create the level of results they and their people deserve.
We have two very bold aims to create major benefits for the reader.
How to use this booklet This Booklet is not a static piece of work. It is part of a dynamic project that is growing and being nurtured all the time. We are looking for and will actively seek out input from many business people around the world. One of our assertions is that any channel of communication is conversational in nature. Any communication produces a response – at the very least in the mind of the listener – and so it is really necessary to become curious about that response (rather than assume you’ve made it or can predict it). So, as you read this booklet, we’d ask you to become aware of your own conversational responses to the ideas being presented. What resonates with you? What speaks to your experience or current challenges? Where do you find yourself strongly agreeing with or reacting against what we say? What questions does it evoke for you?
1. PROFESSIONAL IMPACT A measureable improvement, both in speed and size, of the results you are creating 2. PERSONAL WELL-BEING A deeper feeling of personal centeredness, satisfaction and integrity derived from experiencing yourself as the source of action and connection in your organizations.
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This booklet about communication is communicating with you and in your responses you are communicating with it. And that’s what we’d like to capture and engage with! We invite you to contribute to the ideas and assertions in the booklet through our blog www.changeonewordatatime.com. Let us know what response it generates in you. Maybe you have a story to share that illustrates an idea we write about. Maybe you have a request that we look closer at a particular aspect or challenge. Let us know.
Join the conversation www.linkedin.com Our conviction is that the ideas in this book can bring whole new levels of success and satisfaction to organizations and the individual leaders in them. We hope you like the booklet and we know that you will have something to contribute to the development of these ideas about a new way of thinking, acting and talking! – about communication.
David Firth & Mike Rix Spring 2015
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CHANGE YOUR ORGANIZATION ONE WORD AT A TIME
Part 1 SOME KEY IDEAS 1. This is communication, Jim, but not as we know it 2. The Three Laws of Communication 3. Leader as Author 4. Engagement
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CHANGE YOUR ORGANIZATION ONE WORD AT A TIME
CHAPTER ONE Introduction Chapter Summary
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Leaders and the people around them have an inbuilt desire to be successful
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To be successful in an organization, conventional communication has to change and reach a new level
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To achieve this, we have to move away from thinking of communication as the transfer of information, towards: •
communication that generates meaning
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communication that engages people
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communication as a cause of something
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communication that delivers results
This is communication, but not as we know it! 11
Communication, as we instinctively think of it in business organizations – the transmitting of messages and information – doesn’t work. Transferring information does not deliver results. Nor does telling people things, or marketing ideas and visions to them. Or ‘engaging them’ - getting their ‘buy-in’ with presentations, newsletters, websites, blogs and PowerPoint just does not work – forget it. In this sense, as Michael Neill suggests, ‘influence sucks’. The background conversation of ‘they are trying to change us’ will always undermine these formal attempts and approaches. Engaging people in conventional ways, oneto-one is no better. The very word “debate”, around which so much of traditional thinking about communications revolves, literally means “to beat down”. Even the word “discussion” literally means “to strike asunder”. Like two enemy battleships lined against each other, debate and discussion encourage people to slug it out until one is persuaded or very often surrenders – just for now, for the sake of short-term pain relief.
they got promoted in the first place, by a quick response and by seemingly getting the job done, being completely task oriented in copycat actions of the people that went before. Task orientation becomes a symbol, a badge to wear. We have worked in global organizations where travelling to 100 countries is looked on as an initiation right for the leadership club. Of course, they often forget or feel immune to the negative effects, the stress, the sleepless nights and the burn-out that acute task orientation brings as they continue to drive themselves into the ground. That is, they feel immune until the boss, the family or their health reminds them that they are only human like the rest of us. This macho behavior (for men and women) often means that the most valuable but under-utilized resource around the leader is left frustrated and disillusioned. And the most underutilized resource…? The people around them, the people in their own team, in the department, division or business segment, these people are the key to unlock the results everybody is looking for.
Currently, far too many executives don’t even get that far or simply go through the motions of trying to communicate.
These people also want to be successful and achieve things, together with the leader, to everybody’s benefit.
Those who are designated leaders are all too often bogged down with their own role and the pressure they feel directly from the external environment and their own boss.
To turn the key and unlock these results, leaders have to harness the efforts of all the people around them. This in turn demands communication of a completely different order; or as we like to think of “communication, Jim, but not as we know it”.
They usually have a direct line to this external pressure and more often than not respond directly to it. After all, this is how 12
In the 1980s, Tom Peters identified that
“Communication is everyone’s panacea for everything.” In our experience not much has changed. We work with people in organizations who long for good communications. We work with organizations that spend millions on employee engagement and engagement surveys. In fact, we have seen managers tremble at the thought of poor engagement scores from the latest Gallup Survey. Their own career can depend on good engagement scores. Please notice, that is good engagement scores, not necessarily good engagement, they are not the same thing.
Companies that take communication seriously enough to throw significant amounts of money at it. Organizations are apparently trying to buy the Holy Grail called engagement but in our view they can completely miss the point. The money usually only addresses the symptoms, not the cause, and we know where that will end up. There has to be a fundamental change in approach that starts in the foundations and builds upwards. We have to move away from communication as passing information, towards communication that generates meaning that engages people at a “hearts and minds level”, so that communication prompts action in the people around us and becomes the cause of something. These thoughts are the foundation of action that starts to deliver results and that causes people to pull together and along in delivering the results we are striving for. Of course, leaders have no choice if they want to succeed. There is so much noise,
Moving away from communication as a transfer of information.... Moving towards communication that generates meaning, engages people, is a cause of something, and delivers results. at work from myriads of emails with long circulation lists generating further emails and so on, from home, friends and family, from the culture of 24 hour news. Leadership communication has to punch through, not merely add to all this noise. What can make this even more difficult is that there is already a communication medium alive and well in all organizations. This medium is often dismissed but in fact cuts through all this noise, is a cause and prompts negative action. In most organizations it is usually called the grapevine. This means that leaders, even when they have punched through the noise, have to communicate in ways that are powerful enough to overcome the stories prompted and supported on the grapevine before they can cause something for the good of the company. The grapevine always seems to have stories to tell which very often become the truth. Who writes these stories nobody knows but leaders have to write their own and tell them in ways that overcome both the noise and the grapevine before their stories can become cause.
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Reflections Think about a particular project or activity you are involved in. Ask yourself the following questions now and perhaps in four weeks’ time: 1.
How much time do I spend actually talking and listening to people?
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What meaning am I trying to get across?
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How much noise am I creating compared to how much action am I causing?
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What chance does my story have against the noise and the grapevine?
Join the conversation www.linkedin.com
In the next Chapter As organizations become more complex, managers and leaders in particular have to become more sophisticated in their approach to doing business. But sophistication is like a skyscraper, the higher the building, the more secure the foundations need to be. The next chapter introduces Three Laws that represent those foundations in communicating meaning. The Three Laws of Communication, at first glance are obvious yet so many people either don’t understand or ignore them. 14
CHANGE YOUR ORGANIZATION ONE WORD AT A TIME
CHAPTER TWO The three laws of communication Chapter Summary In this chapter we will introduce the three laws of communication: 1.
It is NOT possible to NOT communicate
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It is not possible to UN-communicate
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You will UNDERESTIMATE the time and effort required to communicate
We argue that even though these rules appear simple and straightforward, leaders
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people we are working with. We believe that there are three laws governing the way leaders should communicate. These laws are the foundations for successful communication and therefore the foundations for the results the leader and others are looking to deliver. Leaders, and for that matter the rest of us, will break these laws at our peril.
LAW #1 It is NOT possible to NOT communicate break these rules at their peril. In fact, we suspect that all leaders have broken them at some time or other and have been left puzzling about what is going on around them.
THE 3 LAWS OF COMMUNICATION The reasons that conventional communications don’t work are many and varied. Leaders often feel under so much pressure they feel they don’t have time, often they don’t know the full picture themselves, the news is not good or they may feel it is confidential. This often leads to leaders saying nothing or even inventing a convenient truth as a short term expedient, or perhaps making a halfhearted attempt. We know variations on these themes here will sound familiar. However, these approaches are a recipe for disaster and can have a lasting negative effect on the 16
How many times do we wonder “What’s going on here?” “What are they up to?” How many times does the apparent lack of communication unsettle us, create the very opposite of energy, enthusiasm and drive. We all know how we feel ourselves when this so called “communication vacuum” occurs. Of course, there is no such thing as a communication vacuum. We consider communication as the transfer of meaning and not information. If leaders do not communicate fully, then the meaning that transfers is that “they don’t care about us or there is something going on they don’t want us to know about.” At this point, the grapevine fills the gap or, more precisely, does not let any gap emerge. We have realized that saying nothing is still communicating. Leaders either write the script, tell the story, or the grapevine will. We find that emails, newsletters, presentations and so on
can help communications be effective but there is no substitute for talking to people. Talking to people regularly, consistently, in deliberated, deliberate and skilful ways, is the only way to ensure meaning transfers effectively. Emails, newsletters and the like do not in themselves prompt action, change or cause something. Leaders have to talk to others themselves and not rely solely on these other props. The props can help but nothing beats talking. We realize this is hard in a busy schedule, dominated by other demands, it is certainly time consuming but it is not negotiable for leaders. Change is not something leaders have to communicate; change is an outcome of communications. The only way to prioritize the effort required to communicate successfully is to move communications from a have to...... towards a want to....... Leaders, who want to deliver results, make change happen, prompt action - have to want to communicate. There is no other way to make sure enough priority is given. Any other way of thinking will inevitably mean that consistency suffers and the time spent will simply deteriorate and disappear - enter the grapevine.
LAW #2 It is NOT possible to UN-communicate So there you are, playing your part, learning the lines and the moves, trying to do your best, and all the time the spotlight of your people’s gaze is following you about. Occasionally you come upstage and deliver a speech: “OK everyone, here’s the vision!’’
and you are disappointed by the response. They don’t seem to be quite with you; they may even make some of the right noises but you can tell that these are not a true reflection of how they feel. The thing is, no matter how well you deliver that line, no matter how much you personally believe your message, no matter how scout-camp committed you are to the cause it heralds, your audience aren’t looking at you alone. They are looking at you and the shadows that their spotlight creates. The light of their gaze is shining on you and is casting shadows. The spotlight, in fact, casts three shadows, all of which follow you around. You cannot shake them off but you have to deal with them.
The Personal Shadow The first shadow is called The Personal Shadow. It’s your shadow side - all the dark parts of your psychological makeup which you’d prefer not to acknowledge and which you mostly do a pretty good job of covering up. That tendency to anger, or sarcasm, or to projecting your weaknesses onto others’ behavior - that’s part of your shadow stuff. Indeed, you have a whole repertoire of different ways of behaving which you would rather keep to yourself – we all do; it’s quite normal. Most of the time, as we say, you’ve got it under control. But whenever it slips out, your people will construct a whole new You out of it. The Personal Shadow isn’t just constructed from you and your conditioning and education, it is constructed by how other people talk about you (most often when you are not in the room!). We’ve got used to the 17
idea in the past few years that leaders need to be good at telling stories, for example instead of relying on PowerPoint slides. Here the idea is that you, as leader, are a story. And the story is made up by others. It’s your reputation, it’s your impact, it’s what people immediately think of when they hear your name spoken. Some of the personal shadow is constructed from direct experience of you but a lot of it is constructed from other people’s experiences of you and what they report about you. And it is not just a story about your behavior; it is a story about your influences, intentions and motivations. You are a story being told at the water cooler. Some of it is truth, some of it fiction, some of it exaggeration. Just like a real story!
Shadow of Context & History The next shadow outwards is what we call the Shadow of Context & History. This shadow holds all the fears people project about the context within which you are operating. It colors your speech with all the mess of corporate culture and history. So when you say: “Trust me...”, they don’t just hear you speak, they hear all the voices of your company’s history, real and imagined, which have spoken those words too. Because of the Shadow of Context they’re not listening to you alone because they’re listening to their idea of what the corporate culture says. They’re not listening to what you give permission for because they’re listening to their idea of what the corporate culture grants. They’re not listening to how you’re going to break the mould because they’re listening to their idea of how the corporate culture has made the mould. 18
Furthermore, back in their own offices or on the factory floor, they talk about their views with all their work colleagues and, as they do this, they make this context become more concrete and more real. Very often, the myths last for a long time; indeed, the people can change but the myths go on becoming embedded. The Shadow of Context is a nightmare for change-agents because however much you want to push your people into the future, they want to use what they see hovering behind you as an excuse for dragging you into the past. The next shadow is even bigger and even more threatening!
The Outer Shadow This Shadow - the otherwise Unnameable - casts a greater gloom over the work of change agents anywhere in the world. It’s not specific to any country or company, although the manifestations and consequences will vary. The Outer Shadow tells them: “‘Don’t trust him,
because he is The Boss”. The Outer Shadow is the one that thrives on every human being’s core beliefs about work and organizations. Two of those core beliefs are: Work is something we’d prefer not to have to do and Bosses are untrustworthy. In our workshops, trainings and coaching, we work with our clients to create strategies and practices to deal with these shadows.
already communicating and you have to work with all that. Communication is the work, and is hard work; and that brings us to Communication Law number three.
LAW #3
In this booklet, we mainly want to invite you to let go of any wish to have an easy solution or a magic wand.
You will underestimate the time and effort required
The prime way that leaders can be successful in spite of the shadow projections is actually by investing a huge amount of time and energy into conversation with their people. That is how the shadows begin to dissipate. That is how people begin to shift from an emphasis on telling stories about you, to becoming actors in your story as a leader of the future.
It seems to us that it is easier to underestimate the time and effort required for effective communications than to judge it accurately. After all, there is no formula to help and each case will have a different context, geography, number of people involved etc. There is no way to calculate the exact resource required to be truly effective but the Third Law can be demonstrated by simple arithmetic.
You cannot un-communicate; you cannot revert everyone and everything to a blank slate. It’s
John Kotter recognized in his book “Leading Change” that typically a corporate message about a change or other initiative will be resourced something like this, over a three month period, say:
One 30 minute speech One hour long briefing meeting, including questions and answers One 600 word article on the company intranet and One 2000 word memo
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This equates to about 13,400 words or numbers over the period. However, the average human being will receive and assimilate about 2,300,000 words in that three month period. These words will come from family, friends, newspapers, television, internet and so on. We are all surrounded by a constant stream of data every single day, which mainly translates to background noise but interferes heavily with the meaning leaders are trying to transmit with their own messages. Here comes the arithmetic:
13,400 divided by 2,300,000 equals 0.58% That is, the leader’s message will absorb 0.58% of the time and attention prospective followers have available. Even if the leader doubles or trebles the resource requirements as above, the challenge is still obvious and there is only one solution. The Third Law leads us to the same conclusion as Law 1. Leaders have to want to communicate and they have to talk to their people constantly in deliberated, deliberate and skilful ways. Leaders have to tell their story at every opportunity if they want others to follow. There is no choice and just like in the law of the jungle, the grapevine is waiting to strike at the unwary.
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Reflections Think about a particular project or activity you are involved in. Ask yourself the following questions now and perhaps in four weeks’ time: 1.
How have I implemented or worked with the Three Rules in the past?
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How are the Three Rules affecting the way I communicate with people now?
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To what extent am I being deliberated, deliberate and skilful in the way I am communicating?
Join the conversation www.linkedin.com
In the next Chapter Telling stories is the most ancient tool used in communicating because stories are particularly effective in transferring meaning rather than just information
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BUT Who writes the script? Do we just make it up as we go along? How much impact do the words we use and how we put them together actually have? The concept of Leader as Author suggests that leaders have to imagine a future, with the help of others around them, write the script and then talk it into existence in deliberated, deliberate and skilful ways. Leaders must assign meaning to be transferred. They tell us that ‘everyone has a novel in them’. We don’t know about that. But we do know that every leader must have a compelling story to tell – and be. 21