Forster N. - Maximum performance (2005)(en)

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Exercise 3.4

Having read through this section on interpersonal communication, think about how you can translate any new insights you have acquired into your communication strategies in the future.

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Communicating from the top

Everyone is talking about communication these days. Any self-respecting business now has a communication director, a communication department, a communication policy, a communication culture or turns to a communication consultancy.

(Heinz Goldman, Communicate to Win, 1995)

In Chapter 1, we saw that leader/managers influence the behaviour, thoughts and feelings of their followers, by their actions, deeds and words. Despite rapid advances in communication technologies in recent years, personal communication is still, by far, the most powerful medium for leaders to communicate with their followers. Leaders, in politics and business, still meet to discuss important issues face-to-face; they do not send emails or have video-conferences with each other. It is the only way to truly engage with others, and to touch hearts as well as minds. Through this medium, leader/managers are able to build bridges and establish relationships with their followers. As we saw earlier, this requires two-way communication, listening and demonstrating that they have both heard and understood their followers’ ideas, needs and concerns. Furthermore, employee attitude surveys, in the USA, the UK and Australia, have revealed that one of the most consistent complaints that employees have about their jobs is the imbalance between top-down communication and upward communication in organizations (for example, Trinca, 2000; Trapp, 1996). Many organizations still spend an inordinate amount of time pushing vision and mission statements, employee newsletters and directives from the top down, but still fail to listen actively to their own employees. At the same time, confronted by accelerating change, globalization and intensifying

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competition, many leaders have recognized that effective two-way communication with employees is becoming a much more important part of organizational management, and a constructive way to harness the ideas, commitment and enthusiasm of their staff.

A significant component of effective leadership is communication, and many transformational leaders do have exceptional communication skills. They are adept at telling staff who they are, where they are going and why they are going there. Some of these leaders are, or were, exceptional storytellers. Throughout history, leaders of all kinds have used storytelling as a powerful motivational tool, particularly during times of uncertainty, change and upheaval or in response to crises. The importance of storytelling in organizational life has been largely overlooked in the current organizational and leadership literature. In this section, we will look at how transformational leaders try to engage with all of their employees, and how some of these have used storytelling to transform their employees’ behaviours, beliefs and attitudes.

How to communicate with a nation

‘No other President, before or since, has ever so thoroughly occupied the imagination of the American people. Using the new medium of the radio, he spoke directly to them, using simple words and everyday analogies, in a series of “fireside chats”, designed not only to educate and move public opinion forward but also to inspire people to act, making them participants in a shared drama. People felt like he was talking to them personally, not to millions of others [ ] Roosevelt purposely limited his fireside talks to an average of two or three a year, in contrast to the modern presidential practice of weekly radio addresses. Timed at dramatic moments, they commanded gigantic audiences, larger than any other program on the radio, including the biggest prizefights and the most popular comedy shows.

The novelist Paul Bellow recalls walking down the street on a hot summer’s day in Chicago while Roosevelt was speaking. Through lit windows, families could be seen sitting at their kitchen tables or gathered in the parlour listening to the radio. Under the elm trees, drivers had pulled over, parking bumper to bumper and turned on their radios to listen to Roosevelt. They had rolled down their windows and opened the car doors. Everywhere the same voice. You could follow without missing a single word as you strolled by. The press conference became another critical tool in reaching the hearts and minds of the American people. At his very first conference, he announced that he was suspending the wooden practice of requiring written questions submitted in advance. He promised to meet reporters twice a week and, by and large, kept this promise, holding nearly one thousand press conferences during the course of his presidency.

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Talking in a relaxed style with reporters, he explained complex legislation, announced appointments and established friendly contact, calling them all by their first name, teasing them about their hangovers and exuding warmth. Roosevelt’s accessibility helped explain the paradox that although 80–85 per cent of the newspaper publishers regularly opposed his policies, his coverage was generally full and fair.’

(Editorial [Time], 1999)

How transformational leaders engage with their followers

In the industrial age, the CEO sat on the top of the hierarchy and didn’t really have to listen to anybody. In the information age you have to listen to the ideas of everyone, regardless of where they are in the organization.

(John Sculley, Former CEO, Apple Computer Co., 1992)

In Chapter 1, we observed that transformational leaders seek something much more than mere unthinking obedience and compliance from their followers. They are capable of changing their followers’ basic beliefs, values and attitudes in order to get superior levels of achievement out of them. They lead by virtue of their ability to inspire devotion and extraordinary effort from their followers. In order to do this, they have to believe in and trust their employees, and they have to communicate with their employees on a regular basis. Leaders throughout history, particularly in the military, have long understood the operational power of this principle. In modern times, the need to communicate the value of innovations, products and services quickly both within the organization and to suppliers, customers and clients is also becoming much more important. Below are some examples of transformational leaders who have achieved extraordinary results for their companies through effective two-way communication (adapted from Nelson, 1997; Fries, 1997; Adams, 1997; de Pree, 1989; personal anecdotes).

In the early 1990s, the CEO of Alcatel Bell, John Gossens, flew all 1200 of his managers to a large aircraft hangar and put all of them (not just section heads) in charge of change in the company. He asked each one to suggest at least one change they could make to improve their work. Every manager had to send him a signed letter with their suggestions. This became known as the ‘Thousand Points of Light Approach’ to change. While there were successes and failures, the overall results were spectacular. The 40 best innovations were incorporated into ‘Learning by Experience Workshops’, and company profits have risen consistently since. Jerre Stead, CEO of the Legert Corporation, places great emphasis on communication. He estimates that 60 per cent of his

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time is taken up with this. Peter West, the former MD of BP (British Petroleum) in Western Australia, spent ‘at least 50 per cent’ of his time communicating with his staff. The seven directors of Viking Freight Systems in California spend about three months each year visiting their 4000 employees in the company in eight different states. Andy Grove, founder and Chairman of Intel, holds at least six open forums at different locations within the company each year, ‘to hear my employees’ ideas first hand and keep them informed about where the company is heading’. They have even put the company’s two main corporate goals ‘Stay at No. 1’ and ’Make the PC it’ inside fortune cookies distributed at the company’s HQ in Sunnyvale, California. Nicki Lauda, the ex-Formula One driver, and CEO of Lauda airlines, used to spend about 700 hours a year on his planes, because ‘For me it’s the easiest way of knowing what’s going on. If you sit in an office you have three levels of bullshit below you – whenever a story comes through, it’s completely different to how a passenger sees it.’

After Paul Anderson joined BHP-Billiton in December 1998, he spent his first 90 days visiting all of the company’s operations throughout the world. He held management forums and shop-floor breakfast meetings with employees, organized symposia with investors and held numerous press interviews. Then he completely revamped top-level reporting systems to shorten lines of communication across and up and down the whole of BHP-Billiton’s organizational structure. Under his astute leadership, the company was transformed from a potential basket case into an international behemoth. After a successful four years at the helm, he made these comments when he left the company in June 2002: ‘The Al Dunlap approach would have been to come in and fire everybody . . . [in] senior management, because obviously the place wouldn’t have been in such a mess if any of them had a lick of sense. The other approach was to think that these people were basically good and capable, but lacking a bit of direction . . . and that’s what I found when I got there. I asked each of my managers two questions: what do you do, and what would you do if you were me? The interesting thing is, nothing took place in the next two years that wasn’t on those pieces of paper’ (abridged from Bachelard, 2002).

When the US company, Herman Miller, introduced an employee suggestion scheme in the 1980s, this led to savings of three million dollars a year (or about $US3000 per day per employee). All staff who have worked there for a year own company stock, and so benefit directly from bottom-line improvements in the company’s profitability. Ben Edwards, the CEO of stock brokerage firm Edwards and Son in St Louis, conducts a nationwide real-time speakerphone meeting every Friday with his staff to answer their queries and get ideas for

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improvements direct from his employees. During the 1990s, Noel Goutard, the former CEO of the French auto parts maker Valeo, expected all his employees to make at least ten suggestions for quality and process improvements each year. On average, his senior management team received 25 000 a year. Employees who suggested the best ones received performance bonuses linked to the success of these improvements. Lincoln Electric, in Cleveland, generates more than 200 new ideas every month from its employees. These are linked to profit sharing. Preston Trucking, in Maryland, receives more than 8000 suggestions a year from its employees – these too are linked to profit sharing.

Sam Walton, the legendary founder of Wal-Mart, often wandered into his stores to chat with his employees, discuss service and product quality with customers, and often dropped in unannounced on the company’s suppliers. He was renowned for giving off-the-cuff talks over store announcement systems, talking about how the company was doing and new initiatives. Wherever he went, he conveyed simple mantras: the customer is at the centre of what we do, and you should be proud both of what you do and the contribution you make to the success of the company. Unusually for a leader of his generation, he also listened to his employees and often took on board suggestions they had for improving value to the customer, as well as any gripes they had about the company or its senior management. His presence often had a galvanizing effect on staff, because of the simple fact that he bothered to visit and mix with his employees on a regular basis, something that few leaders of his time would have bothered to do. His legacy lives on in the company, where senior management continues to utilize his hands-on philosophy. In 2003, Wal-Mart became the biggest publicly listed company in the USA.

Upward communication is also vital for promoting innovation and change. Among the dozens of examples that could be used to illustrate this point is the story of Dow Chemicals. Ken Wilson, an engineer at Dow, was asked to help run a contest to improve energy performance at the company. For 12 years, between 1981 and 1993, he organized a contest among the Louisiana Division’s 2400 staff – never going higher than supervisor level – to suggest projects that could save energy or reduce waste. The results were staggering. Of the 575 projects that were audited, the average return on investment (ROI) was 202 per cent a year, with total savings amounting to $US110 million a year. Even in the tenth year of the project, nearly 700 projects later, the 109 winning projects averaged a 305 per cent ROI. In the final year of the contest, the year that Wilson retired, 140 projects had delivered an average of 298 per cent ROI. Employees were rewarded through a company

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recognition ceremony and a profit-sharing scheme tied to each employee’s pay deal (abridged from Fries, 1997).

Ever wondered why the main fuel tank on the Shuttle is a grubby-look- ing brown colour, and not the pristine white of the booster rockets? In the early 1980s, NASA was confronted with a seemingly insurmountable problem; the Shuttle was 800 pounds overweight and there seemed to be no way of reducing this to the required launch weight. After months of considering major re-engineering options, and the use of increasingly exotic light construction materials, a line worker observed that the total weight of the paint used on the huge fuel-tank, supplied by Lockheed Martin, was almost exactly 800 pounds. The decision was quickly taken to leave the tank unpainted – an already expensive piece of kit that is in use for just eight minutes during shuttle flights and which then gets dropped into the Indian Ocean as waste by-product.

Over the last decade, leaders of many cutting-edge companies have introduced more formal communication strategies to improve communication up, down, across and outside their organizations. These include suggestion boxes, consultative councils, quality teams, focus groups, speak-up systems, employee participation groups, 360 feedback, upward communication systems, staff attitude surveys and customer liaison systems. The range of options is huge and no company these days really has any excuse for not listening to and rewarding the ideas of all their employees. Com Corporation, in the USA, even replaced suggestion boxes with ‘screw-up boxes’ in the 1990s where junior staff could point out senior management failings. Senior managers had to respond to these within one month. These forms of organizational communication also play a pivotal role in the management of change, innovation, organizational learning and knowledge management, topics we will return to in later chapters.

In some companies, the importance of communication as a strategic tool has become ingrained in their cultures and people management policies. Sir Jack Cohen, the former CEO of the Tesco supermarket chain in the UK, was fond of saying that a leader could not lead by being a SOYA Bean (Sitting On Your Arse). In Microsoft, this is referred to as MBCAL (Management By Communicating A Lot). In the Body Shop this is known as DODGI (the Department Of Damn Good Ideas) and, most notably, in Hewlett-Packard, as MBWA (Management By Wandering About), a source of some amusement to the creator of Dilbert, Scott Adams. However, even this often-mocked HP practice still has many supporters. For example, Chuck Goodyear, who took over at the helm of BHP-Billiton in January 2003, was asked

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Storytelling has been part of the fabric of human life from the time our ancient ancestors sat around fires in caves to the present day, and has been an integral feature of every human culture and civilization throughout history. It has been an important element of the human experience for millennia, dealing with issues of self-identity, group membership, the past and the future, and good and evil. From early childhood to adulthood, stories are an important means of learning and communication. As children, our parents read fairytales and other stories to us as both a form of entertainment and as a way of learning about morality, culture and acceptable standards of behaviour and conduct. They also strengthen the parent–child bond. By the age of five, young children all over the world have become consumers and creators of stories. Listening to stories, and learning from these, is an aptitude we acquire at an early age and remains an important method of learning throughout life. Even in adulthood they can be used to help us (re)define who we are, why we are here, the goals we aspire to and our roles in life. Stories are still used widely as teaching and entertainment devices. Stories also act as both mirrors and windows on the human experience, showing people either how to look at reality or how to look at reality in a different way (Edwards and Sienkewicz, 1994).

Throughout history, political and religious leaders have utilized storytelling. They have created characters, settings and events to convey a particular perspective or world-view. The leaders of early civilizations, such as the Indus Valley civilization, the Incas, the Greeks and the Romans, constructed mythologies within which issues of life and death, the physical and the spiritual world and individual and group identity were explored. Religious leaders such as Jesus Christ, Buddha and Mohammed were storytellers par excellence. These long traditions of storytelling have enabled human beings to make sense of the world that surrounds them, and their place in it, for millennia. For most of human history, the oral tradition was the only medium used by human beings when communicating a particular viewpoint, idea or vision of life. Even early written works such as the Hindu epic Mahabharata, the Norse Vedic myths, the Greek epics of The Iliad and The Odyssey were textual works based on rich oral histories dating back to at least 5000 BCE. The performances of Japanese serial stories in Kodan theatres, the oral histories of American folk preachers, African–American folkhistories, Aboriginal dream times, Maori rituals of encounter and the oral epic Sunjata performed in parts of West Africa, have all utilized narrative stories to communicate information (Kaye, 1996; Gardner, 1995).

These all served essentially the same function: to make sense of cultural, philosophical or spiritual questions, and to give people a

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sense of who they were and what they might become. Influential leaders in all cultures have used different types of stories (inspirational, motivational, directional, instructional, spiritual and philosophical) in order to change the way their followers looked at the world. They narrated stories about themselves and their groups, about where they have come from and where they are headed; about what was to be feared, overcome and dreamt about. These leaders have also been adept at taking narratives that have lain dormant in the population and brought renewed attention or a fresh twist to those stories. Through such stories visionary leaders have been able to engage with their followers and inspire people to action. For example, the ideas of Martin Luther King Jnr. spread with amazing rapidity, because he was able to engage in a particularly intimate way with the fears, hopes and aspirations of most African–Americans during the 1950s and 1960s. His speeches and writings made extensive use of his audiences’ familiarity with stories about the founding fathers of America (‘All men are born equal’) and biblical mythologies (‘The promised land’). His most famous and influential speech, revolving around the simple mantra, ‘I have a dream’, lasted less than ten minutes, but its worldwide impact was enormous and the sentiments it expressed still resonate today. In another context, Mahatma Gandhi also drew from religious and cultural stories in developing his own vision of satyagraha (non-violent resistance). He also embodied this vision and ‘walked the talk’, by never resorting to violence in his struggle against British imperial rule in the 1930s and 1940s.

Storytelling in organizational settings

Whilst storytelling has been widely used by leaders throughout history, its role in contemporary organizational life has received limited attention. This is surprising because it has been an indispensable element of human communication for millennia. Stories are a rich communication medium that can be used to convey complex ideas in ways that are more likely to be understood and remembered, and most importantly, can be used to appeal to both the hearts and minds of followers. Storytelling can also help to ‘frame’ and ‘reframe’ the big picture and communicate it to different groups within organizations. They can also convey the company’s desired objectives and culture in forms that are more likely to be understood and remembered. Furthermore, organizations now function within an increasingly complex and uncertain world. Leaders have to be able to make sense of this fast-changing world and convey this to their employees. Through their words and actions they can influence the behaviours, thoughts and feelings of their followers. This can only be achieved by creating