“If they are to be effective, all communicative acts must be interactive.”
-Conrad and Poole, Strategic Organizational Communication (2005)
Yukl (2001) examined a number of definitions of leadership and concluded that no one definition encompasses all of the aspects required of a leader. Most agree, however, that communication plays a huge role in effective leadership. Communication rolls into some of the other leadership traits like setting an agenda, strategic planning, modeling the way, inspiring a shared vision, and transformational leadership.
Employee engagement largely rests on upper management’s ability to communicate with line and staff. According to Towers Watson, 15 of the 20 factors of engagement are directly related to the manager. The other 5 are engagement factors related to the organization – meaning that it very important for the employee to feel connected to a company’s culture, policies, and strategic direction.
Let’s look at 8 of the 20 following factors for engagement for both sets:
• Provide fair and accurate informal feedback
• Emphasize employee strengths in performance reviews
• Clarify performance expectations
• Leverage employee “fit” to the job
• Provide solutions to day-to-day challenges
• Amplify positive employee performance traits and filters negative effects
• Connect employees with the organizations’ strategy and its success
• Instill a performance culture of open communication, flexibility, and innovation
What do all of these have in common? Communication…!
HR is the staff function that should facilitate organizational communication. Communication, like other competencies, has different behavioral anchors depending on the leadership level. Certainly CEO’s in large companies have anchors that require them to communicate with the entire organization.
So how does a CEO/Leadership connect with the company of 10,000 employees? How does operations roll out a project? How does a VP of HR convey new programs? I happened to be in demonstration with a major ERP vendor when they presented a new product called “Workforce Communications”. It gives a company the ability to do targeted communications with its employees based on attributes contained in their HR systems. It also has the ability to conduct bi-fabricated organizational surveys (meaning a certain answer in the first survey could trigger another survey or follow-up question) like employee engagement. So if the CEO of a company wanted to send a congratulations to the engineering team for obtaining 100% safety compliance, you could simply identify the requisite job codes in the HR tables (and throw in other criteria to personalize it) and send the targeted communication. Does it send a message to those engineers that safety is important when the CEO writes? Absolutely!
Pretty inventive software which you would not expect coming from an ERP vendor, which by the way, was Oracle.
#1 by Brian Webb on June 17th, 2010 - 3:04 pm
Image working at a company where all of the corporate communications where personalized. More than just first and last name, but the content was personalzied. The corporate email and web pages had relevent content. Employees would have time to be more productive!
#2 by Bryon Adams on June 24th, 2010 - 9:01 am
I agree with the connection between communication and leadership. It is not just 10,000+ companies who struggle with communication. Our boutique consulting firm (< 20 people) is virtual and comprised of individuals spread over a broad geographical area. Email and phones only do so much, so you have to work hard to stay connected with individuals you do not see in person. If you fail to communicate as a manager, it is only a matter of time before your team loses confidence and it is nearly impossible to regain it. Good article!