Chapter 9 LC Estabishing Leadership Through Strategic Internal Communication Summary

One of the major responsibilities of an organizational leader is communication with employees. By communicating effectively with employees, however, CEOs are not simply, creating ambassadors of goodwill for their companies, they are providing direction, establishing a positive and productive working environment, and influencing their bottom lines.

For employee communication to play a strategic role in an organization, the leader must realize its importance in accomplishing the company’s strategic objectives and performance goals and integrate it into the company’s overall strategy and business processes. The communication objectives would be (1) to ensure all business units receive the same corporate message that joint decision making is now a priority and (2) to establish forums (meetings if appropriate) for the joint decision making to occur.

Best ways to accomplish the following basic employee communication objectives:
Educate employees in the company vision and strategic goals.
Motivate employee support for the company’s strategy.
Encourage higher performance and discretionary effort.
Limit misunderstandings and rumors that may damage productivity.
Align employees behind the company’s performance objectives and position them to help achieve them.

To accomplish these goals, your messages need to be clear, consistent, and targeted. Effective employee communication is both the product—the messages that the organization wants to transfer—and the process—the conduit for transferring the messages.

To ensure your internal communication is comprehensive, you will want to use an analytical approach to developing a communication strategy for any of your important communication.

Effective internal communication consists of the following:
Supportive management
Targeted messages
Effective media/forum
Well-positioned staff
Ongoing assessment

Missions, visions, values, and guiding principles make up one category of major strategic messages that most organizations convey to their employees. Your ability to establish and communicate the mission and the vision effectively strengthens your position in leading the organization.

Effective mission and vision statements are important to a company for the following reasons:
Inspire individual action, determine behavior, and fuel motivation.
Establish a firm foundation of goals, standards, and objectives to guide corporate planners and managers.
Satisfy both the company’s need for efficiency and the employees’ need for group identity.
Provide direction, which is particularly important in times of change, to keep everyone moving toward the same goals.

Missions
A mission is a statement of the reason a company exists that is intended primarily for internal use. It should ensure that employees understand the company’s purpose by defining a company’s basic business. It should establish a single, noble purpose and an enduring reality.

Visions
A vision statement establishes the company’s aspirations. It describes an inspiring new reality, achievable in a well-understood and reasonable time frame.

To test a mission, the leaders should look for the following characteristics:
Inspirational and suggestive of excellence
Clear, making sense in the marketplace
Stable but flexible enough to last with only incremental changes
Beacons and controls when all else is up for grabs
Aimed at empowering employees first, customers second

To test the vision, the organizational leaders should ask if it does the following:
Suggests goals and provides a direction
Inspires and prepares for the future but honors the past
Applies specifically to the company, providing details that are actionable

The following steps in a leader-led, interactive, employee-involved approach to building a mission and a vision:
Create Initial Draft
Clarify the Meaning
Tell the World in 25 Words or Less What You Are and What You Want to Become
Develop the Strategic Objectives to Make the Vision Specific and Actionable
Hold Cascading Meetings with Employees to Test the Mission and the Vision


The greatest difficulty leaders face in bringing about to change involves the people. To achieve successful change, leaders must confront the challenges of reaching the employees through effective leadership communication before, during, and after any major, companywide programs. Without effective employee communication and a rigorous approach to the leadership communication, a change program has little chance to succeed.

The magnitude of the proposed organizational changes and the effectiveness of the company’s current internal communication practices will determine how comprehensive the communication program needs to be and where you should start, you should assess how effective our company’s current internal communication practices are and decide if they are strong enough to support major change.

A high level action plan needs a very detailed work plan to specify all actions, responsibilities, and deadlines.
· Phase 1: Design Change Communication Strategy and Plan
· Phase 2:Launch Change Communication and Ensure Employee Understanding
· Phase 3: Monitor Results and Make Adjustments