Building Peak Performance – The Consulting Artist

The Future of Internal Communication

The future of internal communication, that’s quite a grand title for a blog post huh? It was a subject that came up for discussion when I facilitated an afternoon of conversation for the Institute of Internal Communication recently. There were around 100 of us in the room and the conversation took place as part of the IoIC Annual Conference. I’d been asked to come in and facilitate something a little different so I figured it would be useful to get the delegates talking with each other in among a day and a half of presentations. It certainly felt very useful though I expect our snap decision to hold part of the session outdoors in the sunshine helped.

People talked about what they wanted the future of internal communication to be, and perhaps more importantly, how could they make that future come about? Here are a few things people talked about that interested me:

Future

Increase communication skills of the workforce – decentralise
The impact of social depends on the culture – autocrats should be worried
Social risks and opportunities – lose control, gain understanding

Bold thinking being demonstrated here. I was pleasantly surprised to read this as I sometimes work with internal comms teams and I find their desire to control very limiting. Expressing a desire to let go more feels very useful to me.

Facilitate, coach and enable
Move from craft to coach, doing to enabling – more informality
Anarchy

Coming from a background of facilitation I guess you’d expect me to highlight these. There was lots of talk of developing a coaching culture and even a a murmur of anarchy! It’ll never catch on, surely? 😉

There were a couple of things I was less comfortable with, including:

Communications as part of engagement scores
How do we get others to adopt communication principles?

Resist the temptation to measure everything I say, and if you are serious about coaching as part of the role of internal communications, that has to be the answer to the adoption question, no?

There was also some talk about being a part of HR and/or merging internal and external communication. I’d be interested to know what HR practitioners think about that.

Making it Happen

I like it that people were willing to give this next conversation a try. It’s easy to think about what might be, less so to start to plan how to make it happen. There was some discomfort borne out of ‘we’re not the decision makers’ coming from a few voices but hey – if the IoIC can’t decide how to make it happen – who can?! Here are a few things that stood out for me, and I’d be keen to be a fly on the wall in 2013 to learn how much of this has begun to happen.

Build bridges. At the top level to improve our understanding of decision making processes and at the front line to understand what is needed there. Then connect the two.
Get out there – be seen
Invest in digital – HR and IT as delivery partners
Learn from listening. Trust and openness, don’t shoot people down the first time they make a mistake, we all make them
Define guidelines – ask the audience
Social media restrictions come from a place of fear, re-educate

I enjoyed this session very much. It’s useful fun to spend time with different people and gather different perspectives, that’s definitely a big plus about my line of work.

Touched

Some days the stars are aligned, and everything clicks into place. It’s great to enjoy those days and to be thankful for them. I had one of those days yesterday and I’d like to share it with you.

The Forest

I spent the day with the Institute of Internal Communication at their annual conference yesterday. I facilitated some conversations in the afternoon which were a lot of useful fun. It was such a nice day that we took some of the conversations outside, sometimes having no slides to hold you back is just the best! I’ll share more about the content of the conversations on a later date but for now I just want to acknowledge all the lovely feedback from people, it was very motivating.

The Big Apple

After the conference I was sitting at Birmingham International station waiting for my train back to London when the phone rang. A small seed of an idea that’s been slowly growing suddenly blossomed into flower. Turns out I’m heading to New York City to do some work after the Ohio gig. I have a postcard from Laurie on my desk depicting the Empire State Building and of course my Dad and I enjoyed a super trip to NYC a few short years ago. I hope to share more on this at a future date, for now my sincerest thanks go to the lovely person who called me yesterday with such great news.

The Letter

On arriving home I found a letter which turned out to be from someone Dad worked with. They’d not seen each other for over thirty years, and news of Dad’s death had recently reached this person. I’m grateful to the letter writer for being in touch, and I hope you don’t mind but I’d like to share an extract from the letter with you:

Paul was my manager in the early 1980’s. He was a good manager to us and a very kind friend to those around him. He also loved children and played delightfully with my son when he used to visit the office. I hope Paul has grandchildren as he would have been a lovely grandfather. I remember when your Mother died how much Paul grieved for her. But above all his concern was how he could love and care for you, and so all the right things. We were very fortunate that he extended his fatherly concern to his staff.

I couldn’t sleep last night with all of these things buzzing in my head, what a day! I’m very fortunate.

The weekend is nearly here and I plan to spend most of it in the garden. How about you? Whatever you are up to I hope the stars align for you too.

Better Communication

Later on today I’m heading to Birmingham to take part in the Institute of Internal Communication’s annual conference, the theme of which is Building Peak Performance. I’ll be doing my usual thing of wandering about finding interesting people and trying to learn something new and fun. Tomorrow afternoon I’m facilitating a conversation among the 100 or so guests. We’ve generously been given two and a half hours to have some useful fun together. What are we going to talk about? I’m not sure yet, but as a way of getting me thinking I posed a question on Facebook and Twitter yesterday. The question was:

‘You’ve been given the job of Director of Internal Communications. What things would you change to help make work better?’

I thought I’d share the responses and invite you to add your own.

Via Twitter velotester kicked us off with, ‘Tell the CEO to walk the floor and just talk to people.’

Which led to humapuk suggesting, ‘Send one email to say no-one to send emails to anyone that day and all mobiles off. Invite everyone to lunch together.’

Next up was Chutzpah84, ‘ I actually think I’d turn off email you know…..’

Julsbo said, ‘Give people a space to have ideas that are heard outside hierarchical management lines.’ I replied, ‘online? offline? both? Culture issues would be interesting to watch :)’ which in turn led to, ‘Both! Face to face is to be encouraged, but is not the only way. Ambient idea chatter has value for speakers & listeners.’

mirgray added, ‘Set a max limit of 200 words per internal email blast. If that teaser doesn’t inspire there is little point blathering on.’

The Twitter stuff was fed into the Facebook conversation so I’ll share the whole thing for completeness (with apologies for duplication).