These days it seems harder than ever for leaders to communicate their message. There are a host of voices clamoring for our peoples’ attention. The phone is ringing, there are conversations around the coffee pot, and they get continuous updates on their smart phones from Facebook and text messages from friends. On-line media provides short sound-bites that help shape their opinions on everything.
Meanwhile, we hold monthly town halls, send out newsletters or emails, hold occasional focus groups and wonder why our episodic, sporadic efforts don’t get the message across. What is the one right method? What should the message be? It is true that some of our people just aren’t listening. But the onus is on us to tell the story in a way they’d want to hear. It is even more important in an organization or industry that is under stress. And in these tumultuous times, which industry isn’t? Ultimately, it means we can’t just do one thing. We have to do everything.
The motive.
Simon Sinek in his book, “Start with Why” stresses that the underlying core strength of the most successful corporations is a clear sense of “why.” The notion of why has to be believable and must inspire action from the members of the organization. The job of the leader is to believe, understand and communicate why. “Energy motivates,” Sinek writes, “but charisma inspires. Charisma…comes from clarity of WHY. It comes from the absolute conviction of an idea bigger than oneself.” Communicating “why” is the work of the leader. “The CEO’s job is personify WHY. To ooze of it. To talk about it. To preach it. To be a symbol of what the company believes. They are the intention and WHAT the company says and does is their voice.” The message must clearly communicate “why” to the intended audience. President Ronald Reagan was called “the Great Communicator.” He once said, “I am not a great communicator, I just communicate great things.” Great communication starts with why.
The message.
One of my more recent bosses is a senior Navy officer. I heard him ask more than once, “What is your elevator message on that?” He knew that the essence of successful strategic communication was understanding that the message should be succinct and easy to remember, the kind of thing that a leader could tell a subordinate in the time it takes to ride between floors on an elevator. (He also talked about a “back of the business card message,” one that was brief enough to be explained on the back of a card.) A former hospital COO friend used to say to our subordinates, “There’s always money” in an effort to get them to think with innovation and openness. What I find remarkable about the message is that people at his hospital still recall him saying it years after he left the organization. The message matters. It is worth getting it right and making it memorable.
The method.
There is no one way to communicate the message so that everyone hears it. We have to use all the tools available. In short the message must be seen, heard and read.
Be seen. We have spoken about the “Four Seens” of leadership before but it is the essence of executive rounding, or “management by walking around” popularized first at Hewlett Packard in the seventies and popularized by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman in the 1982 book, “In Search of Excellence”. It is critical that we remember that the most powerful way that a message is communicated is through the acts of the leaders. “What you are speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you are saying” (Ralph Waldo Emerson). I would argue that one has to be seen by his or her direct reports as close to daily as possible. (Technology makes this more practical than it has ever been.) I cannot imagine leading without looking into the eyes of the people who report to me directly every day, and encouraging them to look into mine.
Be heard. We have to tell the story, to speak the message frequently and in a range of settings. This includes the typical town-hall, but also in scheduled and spontaneous focus groups gathered together in work places throughout the organization, in the dining facility while we wait together for meals, and walking to the parking deck. Short video clips can be posted on Facebook or distributed by email. The cardinal skills of the leader are reading, writing, rounding and rhetoric. Every occasion to speak is an opportunity to repeat the message: award ceremonies, dinner remarks, graduations. Leaders need to speak so that they are heard and listened to. Rehearse. Review. Seek feedback. Improve. If the leader cannot inspire in the telling of the story, who can?
Be read. Many of our staff members spend their whole days on computers. The same is true of our external customers. We must be able to write and distribute the message so that people will want to read it. It is helpful to have a professional writer on staff, but there are scores of simple things we can do. Keep the message brief. Break up emails or columns into smaller paragraphs to hold interest. Mix facts and narrative to encourage the use of the right and left brain. Embed graphics, symbols, and logos for the same reason. Use social media whenever possible. By whatever means necessary, get the message out.
Our organization’s leaders down to the chiefs of departments, services and work units have recently been challenged to articulate their communication plans to their next higher supervisor. When faced with a break-down in communication we will hold one another accountable to apply the key tenets of successful medical practice: “Ask yourself why, and do something different.” We all have developed comfortable patterns of communication, but the future calls for us to move outside what is comfortable to craft the message and get it to our people. The words of Albert Einstein could be applied to a successful strategy for communication, “Thinking like we always have is what got us where we are. It is not going to get us where we’re going.”
Chuck Callahan Henry V 4.3 – Lead from the Front https://henryv43.wordpress.com/
Henry V 4.3 
The sentiments in the Motive, Message, and Method paragraphs remind of a book I once read titled ‘Say It In Six’. Chapter 2 lends the question, “but what’s the burning issue here?” The concept of “What is your elevator message on that?” is a good one that instills communication that is short winded which is what our Soldiers, Sailors, and Civilian staff much appreciates.