Communication: dot, dot, dot

…is screaming at me. My 34,000 words, penned in haste in 2003 are waiting for the light of day. The time is coming soon…

Here’s an approach to renewing your organization, starting at the beginning (ABCDE):

Attract
new talent, additional resources

Build
relationships & teamwork

Clarify
roles & responsibilities

Develop
tools, skills & learning opportunities

Enable
clients & each other

CLARITY — CLARITY — CLARITY — CLARITY

Roles & Responsibilities
How do we clarify roles and responsibilities? This exercise is not an easy thing to pin down but once it’s done, if can prove to be more than useful: it’s critical. You avoid confusion, overlap, wasted resources and very few things get missed.

Blended Approach
To clarify roles and responsibilities, here are some of the steps to consider:
1. Establish a team to analyze current status
2. Define and list basic services, roles, responsibilities
3. Categorize common roles and responsibilities
4. Put together a plan that shows a combination of generalists and specialists and how they can work together
5. Communicate who does which service, who plays which role and who is responsible for what

The excerpt below (By Mark Price and James Works) is taken from the following site: http://http://finance.isixsigma.com/library/content/c040211a.asp

A typical model used to define, categorize and subsequently clarify roles and responsibilities is called RACI (pronounced ray-see). This model has four main categories that help determine the level of responsibility for a given role or task.
Responsibility — People who are to actively participate in the activity and contribute to the best of their abilities.
Accountability — The (pronounced ‘thee’) person who is ultimately responsible for the results.
Consultation — People who either have a particular expertise they can contribute to specific decisions (i.e., their advice will be sought) or who must be consulted for some other reason before a final decision is made (e.g., finance, HR, communications are often in a consulting role for projects).
Inform — People who are affected by the activity/decision and therefore need to be kept informed, but do not participate in the effort. (They are notified after the final decisions are made.)

Next steps
Communicate the process and the results

About the Authors of the RACI model: Mark Price is a vice president with George Group and has led Lean Six Sigma deployments for Global 500 clients in service and product companies. Mr. Price has been working with corporate teams to design and implement performance improvement programs for the last 15 years. He can be reached at mprice@georgegroup.com. James Works is president and chief operating officer of George Group. During the last 16 years, he has gained a reputation for making strategy actionable and for turning action into results through process improvement and complexity reduction. He has worked with CEOs and executive teams at companies such as ITT Industries, ALCAN, Xerox and Johns Manville. Mr. Works can be reached at jworks@georgegroup.com.

DE to come…Next week: D for Develop

bobbie, dot, dot, dot

Here’s an approach to renewing your organization, starting at the beginning (ABCDE):

Attract
new talent, additional resources

Build
relationships & teamwork

Clarify
roles & responsibilities

Develop
tools, skills & learning opportunities

Enable
clients & each other

BUILD — BUILD — BUILD — BUILD

Relationships and Teamwork
What is so important about building relationships and teams? Strong, elastic relationships and teams allow you to do more with less.

Integrated People Approach
There are two necessary elements for building relationships and teams in an organization:
1. Trust
2. Collaboration

How do we build relationships and teams? Ways of improving any relationship:

Explore the relationship from the other person’s point of view. Imagine how they experience your behaviour. What sort of label would they put on it? How do they feel? Shake off that emotional state before continuing.

Shift your question from ‘How can I change that person’s behaviour?’ to ‘How am I reinforcing or triggering that person’s behaviour?’ Explore how else you could respond to him or her.

Next steps:
Cluster teams with consistent service standards
Strengthen internal communications activities
Facilitate employee development

“If you can be interested in other people, you can own the world.”
Jay Abraham, Author of: Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform and Out-Earn the Competition

CDE to come…Next week: C for Clarity

bobbie, dot, dot, dot

Here’s an approach to renewing your organization, starting at the beginning (ABCDE):

Attract
new talent, additional resources

Build
relationships & teamwork

Clarify
roles & responsibilities

Develop
tools, skills & learning opportunities

Enable
clients & each other

ATTRACT — ATTRACT — ATTRACT — ATTRACT

New Talent, Additional Resources
How do we attract new talent and additional resources? How do we retain the great talent we already have? Are there actions we can take now to begin drawing people to our teams and keeping them there?

There are two necessities for bringing new people to an organization and for keeping current employees interested in staying:

1. Visible activity that improves employee health and well-being
2. Word-of-mouth messages of a positive work environment

Magnetic Approach
Each of us can play a role to attract people to our organization. Just as North attracts South, so does positive energy attract others. When we use positive energy and activity, we draw people in and can bring people together. Toxicity draws no one in for long.

Directors / Executives
o Set a positive tone throughout your teams, despite the setbacks
o Facilitate employee development
o Encourage people with personality to act as energy champions

Managers / Supervisors
o Set a positive tone throughout your teams, despite the setbacks
o Organize a social committee

Employees
o Strive to have a positive tone in all your interactions, despite frustrations and being short-staffed
o Participate in group activities

BCDE to come…

bobbie, dot, dot, dot

There are two main kinds of communications:
Strategic and Operations

Organization communicate for strategy or for operations.

For strategy, organizations generally have agenda, a specific problem or issue to address overall or they have an approach to something new that they’d like to exposure their employees to. So, for example, the company has come up with a new way to improve life-work balance. Through communications, the company can make this already-positive message sing even louder. Or on the downside, the company has to tighten the rules on life-work balance during a tough period. In this case, communications strategy can help executives deliver the tough message, come across in a way that employees respond to and still stay positive. Good communications strategy can do this.

For operations, organizations usually have information items that must get to their employees on a timely basis in order for them to do their jobs. So, for example, the company has designed new electronic forms to be used with clients for a certain situation. All the communications around that such as: telling them about it, showing them the basics of how to use it (more indepth how-to would fall under training/learning), highlighting key points, etc… would all be considered operational communications.

Timing is critical for both kinds, as well as strategy, however, I would argue timing is MORE important for operational comms (short for communications) as it can affect a company’s ability to deliver to clients — a be all end all issue.

dot, dot, dot
bobbie smith

When people ask me what I do, I say I’m in Communications.
Unfortunately for me and for them, that answer brings them no further ahead.

Some people know. Some pretend to know, God love ‘em.
I only realized this recently when someone said: “okay, but what do you do?

Good question. And the answer is lots of different things…
I’ll start with the term communications.

Part 1 of many…
Communications is a function or expertise in an organization like Finance or Information Technology (IT) that takes care of getting messages to the right people at the right time through the right medium. So, for example, any written materials produced by an organization has likely been done by a communications professional:

> written materials such as newsletters, emails, memos, announcements, web pages, press releases, briefing notes, issues papers, etc…;

> written materials for the purposes of supporting verbal interactions such as speeches, media lines, presentations (usually in PowerPoint)

Depending on company size and whether or not the organization is in the private, public or non-profit sectors can have a major influence on the type of communications activities that happen, and the kinds of documents prepared.

For example, in the public sector, media lines are an important communications product. When an issue breaks, and the organization needs to respond, someone in the communications branch or division will pull together a set of media lines to prepare the spokesperson for any media calls. The reason this approach is so important, usually in government, is because of the number of people who need to confirm the position. At least, if it’s in writing, it can be worked out and then it becomes the spokesperson’s ‘cheat sheet’.

In the private sector, very rarely do communicators do media lines. Private sector communications teams (or often it is one or two people) will simply write up the press release and speak about it freely, without concern for public interest, political will, the policies and processes of democracy, etc…

dot, dot, dot,
bobbie smith