Clear communications
Before you can change a company culture, you have to have clarity around your vision, mission and values. You start there, then everything else will fall into place.
“You can’t get your strategy if you don’t know your vision, mission and values,” says Weiss. “The vision, mission and values will clarify what the business is about.”
For American Greetings, the new vision, mission and values focused on driving creative value rather than being an organization focused on manufacturing and sales.
“We are going to be good at a lot of things, but we have to be great on the creative side because that is what is really going to create our shareholder value,” says Weiss.
Once clear goals are established, they have to be communicated throughout the organization. Communication is perhaps most important at the top. All the managers have to be on the same page, because ultimately, they will be developing for their departments individual plans that are supposed to be in alignment with the overall corporate goals.
Once a year, American Greetings assembles its 100 top managers for a two-day meeting.
“It’s not that we create a strategy or a brilliance of ideas come out of the two days,” says Weiss. “The two days are principally about aligning communication so that as different groups are out implementing strategies, the whole organization is in-step and aligned with where we are going and why.
“Each person is involved in the pieces parts, but they don’t know how their parts fit together. This is a way for them to get the holistic view of where we are going and what we are doing and get that alignment. The alignment is very important, because they use that to start their planning process for their operating plan for this year and the year after.”
Everyone understands their overall role and makes individual plans off of the same master blueprint.
“It eliminates surprises,” says Weiss.
Once the management team had clarity around what direction the company was going to go, the changes had to be communicated to the employees.
“Getting the alignment through the organization, so that everyone is able to say the same things, move in the same direction and have that consistency and clarity of what we are doing and why we are doing this takes iterations and responding to things and staying very focused against it,” says Weiss.
Quarterly all-employee meetings were instituted to go over the changes and explain the reasons behind them. There were brown-bag lunches, where small groups of employees could sign up to have lunch with a senior executive to learn more. The changes were emphasized in newsletters, e-mails, drop-down meetings and other company communications.
“It was both a demonstrable element of signaling change, which is important to transition a culture, as well as helping the organization hear consistent messages and help the senior team hear a clear understanding of the issues from the associates,” he says.
Weiss says the ideas you are trying to drive through the organization are more easily communicated if there is jargon involved.
“Jargon becomes very important, because it becomes the shorthand to communicate the strategies, vision and behaviors,” he says. “The ability to keep referencing in a consistent way the shorthand and understand the depth behind it helps keep everyone stay focused and aligned.”
For example, the strategy, goals and behaviors associated with American Greetings greeting card business is called “Win at Cards.” It’s a simple way to reference all the elements of the strategy with one short phrase that everyone understands and makes further communication about the strategy easier.
And while jargon may make communicating some concepts easier, it doesn’t eliminate the need for constant reinforcement of the message.
“You can’t scale back your communication, but it does get easier,” says Weiss. “When you start, you have a very rough stone and you are not even sure what your message needs to be. You start to wrap some things around key messages and initiatives, then it starts to come into clearer focus.
“Once you get the mission, vision and values, which takes some time to gel, you get to the strategy.”
