Give and take exchanges, compatible values and personal relationships underlie commitment
by Carol J. Sutton APR, Fellow CPRS
Communicating is about more than telling; getting the word out is not enough. If you already understand the full implication of these statements for the whole of your organization, you could skip this column. However, if you’d like to hear what some recent research says communication is all about, and what kind of information sharing makes a difference, please read on.
Organizational communication – the stuff that greases the wheels of interpersonal and functional interactions across the full spectrum of the company, agency, association or establishment in which you work – is frequently used in the service of promoting the entity’s “vision". What kind of communication is best? How much is enough? Is it sufficient that people know the organization has a vision statement, and maybe remember some of the words used to express it?
Jeffrey C. Kohles, Ph.D.1 says that it is not. Several years ago, while a doctoral candidate at the State University of New York, Buffalo, he completed a study – 1,481 employees of a northeastern US supermarket chain – which found that the corporate vision only had impact on employees’ efforts to achieve it when the communication went beyond the information-sharing stage.
Mere dissemination of the vision statement did not enable people to determine what day-to-day actions would be best to achieve the vision. Dr. Kohles concluded that to achieve the intentions of the vision statement, it was necessary for employees to be able to synthesize meaning and act upon it in their specific tasks. He calls this “vision integration".
In addition, his report “… clearly shows that what is important is immediate supervisors educating and communicating with employees about how the vision is compatible with, and can be applied to, their particular jobs.
“Only at this point, when employees perceive the vision as compatible with their jobs, do they take the next step and integrate/use the vision as a guide for their work.2"
Again, “walk the talk"
The now well-established link between leadership excellence and communication ability is central to the notion of achieving organizational vision through aligned employees taking appropriate action. All of this relies on communication appropriate for the situation; that is, the shared sense-making, action-oriented type.
Dr. Kohles’ findings support this: “While leaders play an important role in the diffusion of vision, we should focus less on how leaders ‘implement vision’, and more on how leaders help every employee integrate vision into their own work behaviors and decisions."
In other words, the mere statement of vision is irrelevant. Only action can make it come alive. That sounds like another aspect of “walk the talk", to me. In this view, integrating the vision into the real stuff of everyday life produces strategic alignment between the big picture vision and the more prosaic matters for which each of us is responsible all the time.
Dr. Kohles says leaders can boost the process by displaying what he calls “vision implementation behaviours" – i.e. walking the talk, acting as teacher, as coach, and organizing tasks and teams in line with making the vision happen.
Two-way means symmetrical communication
He talks at length about “top-down and bottom up vision communication, or convergence communication" as the preferred method for achieving the vision. The description is remarkably similar to Grunig’s3 symmetric model of communication – that is, genuine two-way exchange, rather than simply passing the word along and down through the organization.
Employees who more fully appreciate the significance of the vision message will be able to support and enact it more effectively, leading to greater allegiance to the organization, in Dr. Kohlers’ view.
Finally, Dr. Kohles makes a distinction between vision-related communication and two-way communication between employees and immediate supervisors *. His research found that the former “… had a much stronger direct impact on how much employees feel committed to their organization. Meanwhile, two-way communication between immediate supervisors and subordinates had a much stronger direct impact on how much the employees felt that the vision was applicable to their job, and how much they actually integrated/used the vision in their work."
That last statement certainly echoes some two decades of applied communication research findings that show employees prefer to receive company news from their immediate supervisors. Not only are they the most familiar source, and so the one with the greatest likelihood of credibility, but also subsequent discussion with the supervisor gives employees an opportunity to assimilate the new information into their existing understanding of their jobs and the supervisor’s expectations for their performance.
What’s most interesting to me is that Dr Kohles work comes out of the Graduate School of Management, not communication or social psychology. At long last, maybe authoritative voices in the business world are finally coming to the conclusions many of us have recognized for some time now.
Dedication goes beyond logic
Strongly related to the concept of integrating vision into quotidian activity is the notion of emotional engagement, addressed recently by Ashok Gopal in “Managing an Economy of Emotion, Not Reason", Gallup Management Journal4.
Both professional experience and psychological principles substantiate that human beings do not form bonds based purely on logic. We become dedicated to – or aligned with – employers whose values are consistent with our own and whose actions toward others and ourselves appear to be in line with those values. That is a determination based on feelings.
Mr. Gopal’s writing goes beyond best practices, to talk about “great organizations" and explain that they nurture personal ties with employees in order to connect with customers. “They know that even in the information age, the best way to achieve customer engagement is not through technology, but through people – because human interaction is the fastest and most powerful trigger of emotional states."
Yet even many of the great organizations, he says, still starve the source that most supports positive customer interaction. “The irony is that while about 70 percent of customers’ buying decisions are based on positive human interaction with sales staff, companies dedicate a miniscule 10% of their resources to ensuring that positive human interactions will take place."
The Gallup Organization operates from a database of survey results from some 10 million customers, three million employees, and 200,000 managers around the globe, through a cross-section of industry sectors and positions. His conclusion is that, “Companies – including some of the biggest and best known in the world – are, at best, operating at one-third of their human potential."
He cites six ways in which companies can tackle the problem. Spelled out in detail in Gallup’s Follow This Path, they are:
“Employees who use their natural talents in their jobs produce significantly more than average workers.
“Emotionally committed employees form teams that deliver exceptional outcomes.
“Customers recognize the passion and commitment employees feel toward them and cannot help but respond in an emotional way.
“This emotionally driven reaction builds a bridge between employees and customers that creates engagement.
“This engagement becomes the key factor that drives sustainable growth.
“Sustainable growth is the route to profits and, ultimately, higher stock value."
Gosh that sounds so straightforward, why didn’t all of us see it? And write the book! Probably because, although the situation sounds basic in retrospect and from a very high view, it is much more difficult to comprehend when one is in the thick and heat of the moment.
Old advice still relevant
Far from new, “fluffy" ideas, these findings echo strongly the work of Mary Parker Follett5, a seminal thinker and writer in 20th century management theory, and a tireless worker for the greater development of democratic practices in all areas of society.
She propounded a philosophy that focused on the importance of interconnectedness and on which she based her notions of "circular response", "the law of the situation", and "power with, rather than power over". In the concluding chapter – titled "Experience as Evocation" – of her book Creative Experience, she writes about her thinking as compared with that of others: "What I have tried to show in this book is that the social process may be conceived either as the opposing and battle of desires with the victory of one over the other, or as the confronting and integrating of desires.
“The former means non-freedom for both sides, the defeated bound to the victor, the victor bound to the false situation thus created – both bound. The latter means a freeing for both sides and increased total power or increased capacity in the world."
Ms Follett saw leaders and followers as engaged in an energetic relationship that she called "reciprocal leadership" – i.e. "a partnership in following, of following the invisible leader – the common purpose." Although she long deliberated dropping the word leadership from her work, she finally said, that it "… is far too good a word to abandon; moreover, the leader in one way at least does and should lead in that very sense. He should lead by force of example.
“If those led obey the law of the situation, they must realize that he is doing the same. If they are to follow the invisible leader, the common purpose, so must he. If everyone must work overtime, the president should be willing to do the same. In every way he must show that he is doing what he urges upon others" (p. 256).
There you have it, a voice from before your grandmother’s time, urging those in management, even then, to “walk the talk".
If we apply Ms Follet’s ideas to our work today, we might call to mind all of the change programs that encourage employees to behave differently without providing any guidance about how to take the general information and make it pertinent to their individual circumstances.
Often we are asked to create communication products – newsletters, videos, intranets, etc. – to help inform and persuade. Although the pieces are important to the communication process, as reinforcement of the story, no publication can change minds or actions. Only people-on-people activity can do that, as both Dr. Kohles and Mr. Gopal reported from their research findings.
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Footnotes
1. Jeffry C. Kohles, Ph.D. Candidate, State University of New York at Buffalo; “The Vision Integration Process: Leadership, Communication, and A Reconceptualization of Vision"; Kohles was the 2002 recipient of the Kenneth E. Clark Student Research Award from the Center for Creative Leadership.
2. Managing Public Relations, James E. Grunig and Todd Hunt, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984
3. “The Manager is the Medium" ®, http://www.themanageristhemedium.com
4. “Managing an Economy of Emotion, Not Reason" (Part 1), by Ashok Gopal; Gallup Management Journal; http://gmj.gallup.com
5. Smith, M. K. (2002) 'Mary Parker Follett and informal education', the encyclopedia of informal education, http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-foll.htm. Follet’s book Creative Experience was published 1924. Learning Organizations