CommLog

The Power of Upward Feedback

I drove to the Toledo airport Friday evening amidst a flurry of NPR commentary about Scooter Libby's indictment and Harriet Mier's stepping down (gotta love All Things Considered).  At the end of the segment, Bob Siegel made an interesting point...and one that many of us make almost every day: One of the most out of touch people in any organization (if not the most) is the person at the top.

Managing the survey process

Gathering data from employees and stakeholders (both internal and external) helps us make smarter decisions. But if we want our audiences to continue responding to our surveys and to take our improvement efforts seriously, we need to make sure that all data-gathering efforts:

• Reflect the Right Methodology (the right sample, questions, data collection method, and analyses)
• Send the Right Messages--implicitly and explicitly, to the respondents whose perceptions we're trying to improve
• Have the Right Follow-through Strategy (we know how we're going to translate the data into action) Here are some questions you may want to ask before deploying a survey.

Embracing Instant Messaging

It wasn't that long ago that we were talking about the backlash from messaging. Not anymore. According to a recent article on CNET, "Businesses are getting the (instant) message." While some companies have locked down their systems to prevent personal IM use, many companies (including those) have implemented enterprise-specific applications for employee communication. It seems that financial industry is one of the first to take hold as a group:

"If you don't have IM in this business, you're not there," says Sal Morreale, a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald. "I tend to have 10 or 11 IM windows open at a time."

Organizations face obvious challenges, too. Go here to read the CNET article...it outlines the cons, as well as pros, to implementing IM.

Radio Shows, Cocktail Parties, & The Encyclopedia

Earlier today I took a call to help a client think through how they could use message boards and blogs to manage and disseminate competitive intelligence among their employees (+/- 10,000 folks, globally distributed). In doing so, I sprung wikis on them … a tool with which they (like many people) were unfamiliar. Here’s how I described the three tools: * Message boards are like cocktail parties. Walk in, poke around, start a conversation about nearly anything with nearly anyone. Of course, like a cocktail party, you miss a lot, and finding the conversation you want can be difficult. * Blogs are like radio shows. Get one or more passionate experts together, give them the mic, and let them go. The audience may be hundreds of thousands, and they’ll vacuum up the content as long as it’s relevant. And if they want to engage, they can call in and be part of the conversation (through comment threads). What’s more, the broadcasters will talk about what each other is saying, and in doing so, drive the discourse along. * Wikis are like encyclopedias. Or archives. Or a filing cabinet. They’re where the reference documents go. You don’t know you need it until you look for it, but with a simple search what you’re looking for rises to the top. What’s more, the material is in pencil, not ink, so the people before and after you can improve the article as they see fit, making it more and more robust over time, and adding any articles they think should be part of the reference set along the way. In this schema, my suggestion was: * Find 10 or 20 opinion leaders in the company who are passionate about competitive intelligence. Give them each a blog, or let them all contribute to one blog, and let them start broadcasting. Don’t worry about the ones that don’t post often or do a poor job – the best will rise to the top and the audience will read the best. * Set up a wiki to which all 10,000 of the employees in the audience can create and update topics related to individual competitors and matters of competitive intelligence. Link to it from the blog / blogs, and encourage the opinion leaders to archive their wisdom there as they see fit. * Create a message board just for the heck of it. Use it as a “tip line” where any of the 10,000 employees can start, join, or eavesdrop on a conversation about competitive intelligence. Have the bloggers prowl the message boards for things worth broadcasting, and when you find stuff that’s worth keeping, archive it in the wiki. That was my thumbnail take. I’ll add to it this article from CommonCraft (a very strong blog by Social Design Consultant Lee LeFever that’s worth a regular read, by the way; tip of the hat to CorporateBlogging.info, and tip of the hat for it to CommEcon … see how this “blogs linking to blogs” thing works?) about how blogs and wikis can interrelate. It’s consistent with my thumbnail, and goes to the next level of granularity.

The Most Important Outlook Tool Of All Time

Some time ago I stumbled across David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and it’s been extremely influential in helping the members of our firm enjoy dramatic increases in our ability to manage our time, understand our priorities, and true to the title, get things done. With our lives of relationships, tasks, and travel, it’s been our killer app of 2005. Given how wired our professionals are, however, and given that our information platform is Outlook, David’s method would be more difficult for us to implement if not for his Getting Things Done add-in for Outlook. It’s difficult to describe what it does, but I can tell you what it creates: a full inventory of everything you need to do, now, soon, or someday, on your PC (sorry Mac owners) and your PDA of choice, and … best of all … an empty inbox at the end of every day. That alone has been invaluable: we’ve all found the add-in a remarkable tool for managing email, and the days of 10, 100, or 1,000 (you know who you are) emails sitting in an inbox unprocessed are long gone. The add-in has a free 30-day trial, after which there’s a $70 fee to register the tool. Worth every penny, and in fact, I would have paid more. And I’ve been referring it (and the book) to clients daily … indeed, the more senior and busy you are, the more you need the tool.

A CEO Blog As Direct Channel To Employees

I posted yesterday about how Thomas Nelson publishing encourages employees to write blogs. The CEO, Michael Hyatt, as published a blog on personal effectiveness for a while now, and he inspired the corporate policy. But here’s something new: Michael has also launched a blog, From Where I Sit (which is available outside the corporate firewall) as a platform for him to communicate directly with Thomas Nelson employees. Talk about embracing transparency. I think it’s a fantastic idea. It’s a symbol of openness, not just to employees, but to current and potential shareholders. And if Thomas Nelson, a publicly traded company, can do this with the approval of their attorneys, other firms can as well. What’s more, the CEO blog in particular has potential as a powerful tool of leadership. It’s an opportunity for a leader to express his or her style, communicate values as well as direction, and not least important, address uncertainty quickly and directly. Witness this recent post by Michael regarding a hiring freeze rumor:

Twice yesterday, I heard, “Management has put a new hiring freeze in place.” I was dumbfounded. Where does this stuff come from? Not from me, I can assure you. Yes, we are trying to be very careful about adding expenses. Yes, we are scrutinizing every new position request. And, yes, we are even asking managers to justify replacement positions. But we have not put a hiring freeze into place—and we don’t plan to. Rest assured, our company is healthier than it has ever been. If you haven’t already, take a look at our operating results through the December 31 quarter (our fiscal third quarter and our most recent reporting period). Revenues are up 8% over the prior year; profits are up 18%. This is healthy by any standard, and I want to keep it that way.

What’s more, once a leader begins to put such an unfiltered face on his or her leadership via such public statements (inside or outside the firewall), it pressures the leader to deliver. In this, blogging can become an accountability mechanism not for the tasks of leadership so much as its character. These reasons are precisely why I’ve been counseling leaders to blog for several years. If only more would follow Michael’s example: their leadership would be better for it.

Simple Rules For Corporate Blogging

Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishing and publisher of Working Smart has recently posted his firm’s Corporate Blogging Guidelines. They provide simple rules of thumbs for Thomas Nelson employees who may choose to blog (a practice which the firm encourages). It’s a model. And in keeping with our standing advice to leaders that they should always frame an issue before it’s framed for them, it’s a model that progressive companies should build from now, rather than later. What’s more, it’s a model of an effective internal communication “voice”: simple language, respectful, not pedantic, and written as if to an individual rather than a mass. A sample:

Be nice. Avoid attacking other individuals or companies. This includes fellow employees, authors, customers, vendors, competitors, or shareholders. You are welcome to disagree with the Company’s leaders, provided your tone is respectful. If in doubt, we suggest that you “sleep on it” and then submit your entry to the BOC before posting it on your blog.

Another smart idea in the Thomas Nelson approach: an aggregation page that aggregates (using RSS and XML feeds) each employee blog post in real time, creating an easy forum for employees (and managers) to keep tabs on who’s writing what. It’s a nice nod to transparency and personal responsibility without a ton of bureaucracy.

Team Collaboration Via Wikis and Blogs

You're all members of one team or another. How much do you love it when one team member sends out an email asking for feedback and another team member decides that they should "reply to all" with their response? And THEN, another team member replies to that message...and then someone else replies to the first message...and next thing you know you have 25 emails that all originate from one that was sent to you 13 minutes ago. It's happened to all of us. A recent article from the Houston Chronicle reports that many teams have started to use wikis and blogs for online teams collaboration (and to reduce email). For the full article, go here...

PowerPoint Presentation View

Here's something useful: PowerPoint's "Presentation View." Your slides on the big screen; your current slide, notes, a timer, and the series of slides before and after the one being displayed on the screen of your laptop. And while you're checking it out, spend some time reading the other posts of Working Smart ... it's a great blog.

More praise for wikis

InfoWorld columnist Chad Dickerson weighed in on wikis last week:

After my conversation with Peter, I was psyched up to give TWiki a spin, so I logged into our intranet server planning to set TWiki up and check it out. Guess what? It had already been installed months ago by our IT manager. I took this as yet another reason that I needed to pay attention. Worthwhile IT innovation is nearly always a bottom-up affair. If you were a naysayer about the Internet, Linux, or even Weblogs, embracing the Wiki might be your chance to beat your staffers to the punch at last.

For the entire article, go here...