Guiding Senior Leaders

Support a strong corporate culture by guiding your senior leaders to speak with authenticity and transparency
Diana Kowalsky (@dianakowalsky), Internal Communications Manager
Libby Catalinich (@lcatali), Director of Corporate Communications, REI

REI has 123 stores in 30 states, with 10,500 employees and has over $2 billion in sales. The have a co-op ownership – anyone can become a member for as little as $20. Pay dividends of around 10% each year. Because they are not a shareholder owned company, they tend to be more transparent and open. However, when you tell everyone, everything, you need to be more focused on being strategic about messages. The company has many long-tenured employees and it has traditionally been a smaller company. Now, as they are growing, the culture is changing and growing which is a bit uncomfortable for many. Two-thirds of employees don’t even have a company email address, making connecting with employees a bit difficult. Therefore, leaders are the source of information, especially since research indicates their leaders are the best source of information.

2 Types of Leaders at REI:

• Day-to-day leaders – lots of direct contact with employees
• Strategic leaders – Set long-term vision and direction of the company

3 Characteristics of trustworthy leadership

1. Honesty – Leaders need to tell it like it is, and mean what they say.
2. Humility – Leaders are open to feedback and learning from employees.
3. Humanity – Leaders speak from the heart and make personal connections with employees.

Honesty

They accomplish this by encouraging conversations – The leadership team visits every store, every year to do this. The CEO and other leaders also stay connected by living among employees – at lunch, in the vanpool, at service projects, etc.

They also connect online, using various social media – recently built www.aroundthecampfire.mobi as an employee portal (built on WordPress). In the first month, they’ve had over 200 comments, and average use is 5 minutes.  CEO and other senior leaders blog here, no filters.

They learned that leaders weren’t necessarily prepared to blog, and they’ve had to teach them what to talk about and give them direction. Make sure you keep it real, prepare leaders for what to expect, and be consistent.

Humility

Make sure you ask for feedback.  Get data and act on it.  They give each leader feedback on themselves.  They’ve also focused on sharing ideas, and recently created REIdea, a SharePoint community to share ideas between store managers.

They learned that feedback isn’t always easy to get or give, but you can drive it by telling stories with examples of how change was driven by feedback.  Most the time, if you want to know, just ask.

Humanity

You need to focus on cultivating personality, having fun, and being real.  Focus on making leaders accessible and doing things to bring out their personality.

They’ve learned it’s about incremental change.  You need to start small – suggest they talk about something other than business on their blog.  Mix in personal learnings and illustrations with your talks and erase the corporate speak.

Case Studies

• Marriage Equality – CEO came out on blog and gave reasons for the change in the company.
• Layoffs – Prepared information for local leaders, so they had consistent speaking points and knew how to handle situations.

Results

People stick around when they have leaders they trust, like and believe in.  They’re ranked as one of the best companies to work for, and have record retention of employees in the retail industry.

Changing Nature and Pace of Communications

Strategies for the changing nature and pace of communicationsFrank X Shaw (@FXShaw), Corporate Vice President of Corporate Communications, Microsoft

Trends impacting communications:

• Tech trends – personal computing, cloud computing, social computing.
• Consumer trends – multi device world, your stuff – everywhere, social networking
• Marketing trends – Social media marketing, multi channel marketing, video, Interactivity

Nature and pace of communications has changed in the following ways:

• Publishing explosion – Technology tools make it easier and faster than ever for everyone to publish.
• Influencers are dynamic – Microsoft now watches and develops relationships with blogging influencers. They are literally scouting the up and coming influencers on industry blogs.
• Direct storytelling drives action– You can now tell your story as a brand without having to go through anyone else. Microsoft created a News Center to tell their story directly. Internally, they created a news center (includes social features) – it has 5 million page views/month and reachs about 85% of employee base on a monthly basis. They also utilize their corporate Facebook page and have learned, images and tone is everything. People engage most frequently with images. Tone has to be light, some humor, invites conversation, and there’s almost no selling.
• Engaging invites attention – Before engaging, Microsoft asks the following questions.
  
  • Do you have the right resources to engage or respond?
    It’s not cheap. You need a dedicated resource to engage. An example: Smoked by Windows Phone – It has a lower cost as a campaign, but it requires a dedicated resource.  They’ve invested in resources because it has great ROI.
  • Does engaging align to your goals?
    Engagement should support a goal. Example: Microsoft Lost Decade – respond, but didn’t want to draw attention to source article, so they responded on TechCrunch article.
  • What is the value you can deliver or contribute?
    On internal surveys, they discovered that external press coverage is one of their most influential things which impacts their employees’ view of the company. Now, when they run a story from the media on their News Central site about the company, they run an accompanying article to tell employees their point of view and give them message points for responding. This clearly adds value to their employees view of company. Externally, goals have clearly defined marketing goals and are usually part of a larger campaign.
  • Will you shift the conversation in your favor?
    Anticipate debate and issues, and share your company’s point of view to help shift the conversation. After a conversation emerges, always discuss whether or not to engage in the conversation. Then when you decide to, track the conversation.
  • Does the risk out weigh the reward?
    If results are going to be negative, what is the impact? Think about it from a short term vs long term – if there’s long-term gain, that will be the focus. Also examine legal/shareholder responsibility and potential impact. Brand, customer, and employee implications need to be reviewed. Finally, personal/professional reputation is examined.

Slashing Red Tape to Revolutionize Corporate Communications

Presenter: Paula Berg – linhartpr.com – formerly at Southwest Airlines

When Paula Berg started in the customer service area at Southwest Airlines, she never thought she’d end up where she did – with a seven personal social media team.  She started doing some of the social media stuff on the side and made it her goal to integrate social media into every internal and external communication effort in a way that made sense for the community and brand.  She offered five tips for inspiring organization change and helping both the organization and its executives to “get it.”

1. Make jaw-dropping reports – Don’t just focus on the numbers and great looking charts (although great design helps).  Be sure to thoroughly evaluate what the numbers mean, especially in terms of your business and communications goals (make sure they care about the results).  Include what you learned and your intended next steps to do things differently.

2. Launch an Internal PR Assault – People can’t just hear about social media, they have to live it.  Insert social media into every newsletter, magazine, mailer, department update, every meeting, lucheon, summit, etc.

3. Make your executives love it – Make sure you dazzel them, scare them, hypnotize them, and whatever you have to do to get them to understand and appreciate social media.  They need to understand that the risk of not going into it is greater than the risk of doing it.

4. Get your house in order – Social media is more than just PR and/or marketing.  It’s about engaging with consumers when/how they want.  This requires speed, agility, and trusted employees who know the business.  Too often companies try to hand this job over to the “young guns” – the interns or first year people – who must know social media.  It’s better to get people who know your culture implicitly and teach them how to use the tools to communicate.

5. Get tough – It’s a new world, and it’s not going to be easy.  You have to be willing to fight and you have to be willing to take risks and be wrong.  No matter what, things are going to fail, or things will go wrong, and you have to be ready and willing to personally take it on the chin for your company.