Communicate at every stage
Once you have a road map, share it with everyone.
“I can have in my mind how I get from Cleveland to New York, but we employ thousands and thousands of employees,” Bouts says. “If they don’t get it, if they don’t understand what we want to achieve, it’s all useless.”
This was quite the paradigm shift for the company.
“I think in the old day, strategy was done in boardrooms — it was secret, big binders about scenarios and [they] were all being put in a cupboard and nobody was reading it,” Bouts says.
Instead of taking this approach, he broke it all open and shared the strategy with all the key stakeholders — customers, employees and suppliers.
“There’s a certain risk to it, you know,” he says. “Of course, company strategy is confidential — there’s some competitor sensitivity in there, but by the end of the day, having a totally informed and engaged company understanding where it’s going is by far better than not sharing it all.”
One of the biggest keys to effectively communicating your new path is to be mindful of who you’re talking to.
“It’s telling the same story in 10 different ways actually,” Bouts says. “… It all depends on who you’re talking to and how much time you have. Typically, you don’t have hours to communicate — people have maybe an attention span of 10 minutes, so if you’re not able to explain your vision and strategy in 10 minutes, you have an issue.”
Tailor your message to the specific audience you’re facing.
“Typically, the groups you’re talking to, they’re seldomly mixed,” he says. “If you talk to analysts, you won’t have employees and customers. If you talk to customers, there won’t be an analyst in that meeting. If you talk to employees, there won’t be suppliers or customers in there. Your audience, in most cases, is pretty focused and pretty single-minded.”
And because you’ll know in advance who you’ll be speaking to, it’s crucial to actually take the time to make that message most relevant to that particular audience.
“Preparation is important,” Bouts says. “You have to understand who you’re talking to, what they want to hear and how you bring over that message.”
After Bouts communicates his message to any given group, he follows up with a closing-the-loop survey.
“How did you perceive the presentation?” he asks. “Did it convey the right message? Did you get the information you were looking for?”
And lastly, he says that during this process you have to communicate often.
“Keep it short,” he says. “Do it frequently. A one-off communication doesn’t make sense. It’s a journey. It has to build. Five minutes every month is more meaningful than an hour presentation once a year.”
While it’s important to communicate the initial journey, Bouts says it’s even more critical to maintain honesty with everyone as you move along that road.
“[Have] a brutally honest communication to the company — where do we stand?” he says. “It’s all great to have big strategy plans and visions about the future. Are we going there and milestones, but you have to be fair too. If you’re off track and behind, you need to share the two with employees because if you’re behind, it means you have to plan for corrective action and people have to understand that, and sometimes that’s difficult, especially in economic harsh times.
“It’s always easy to share success stories, and as we say in Europe, ‘With a tailwind, everybody is a good sailor.’ The fact of the matter is, the economy is still facing a lot of headwinds. Maybe it’s turning the corner a little bit, but in my view, the economy might be out of intensive care, but it’s still in the hospital. It’s not safe yet.”
But that’s not what people want to hear, and that’s why it becomes difficult to communicate as you move forward, but if you want to lead change successfully, it’s just part of the package.
“You have to be brutally honest and deliver both good news and bad news to the company, and that’s a challenge in and of itself,” Bouts says.
The key to overcoming that challenge is to not just look at the data that you’re monitoring.
“There is so much data available that you have to use it,” he says. “You have to absorb it. You have to digest it. There’s so much information, especially in this day and age, you know exactly how the company is performing. That’s not difficult. It’s more acknowledging what the real performance is.”
If you don’t do this, you’re going to have a hard time moving forward and improving the company as you try to change.
“You can’t move the company in a kind of dream world, where everybody thinks things are hunky dory,” Bouts says. “The truth is much less rosy. Otherwise you’re being dishonest with your people. You’re misleading them, you’re driving the wrong behavior, you’re driving the wrong actions. If you’re not performing as you should be, everybody has to understand where that performance lack is and what we have to do to close the gap. That’s, at the end of the day, what you want to achieve — that you perform as a company. It’s like in every sport, you have to know where you stand, otherwise there’s no improvement possible or no change possible.”
As Bouts went through this process over the last two years, he noticed AkzoNobel changing and overcoming its challenges.
“It’s a major change process,” he says. “This was not a simple change. I’m happy with the progress the company is making. I think there is a lot of appreciation of where we’re heading to. It is meaningful to most people I talk to. They support the direction. And as a result, I think we have a more positive climate here — a more engaged company.”
And as he moves forward, Bouts recognizes that no matter how much progress you make on your journey, you never really arrive.
“Are we there yet?” he says. “No. It’s a long, long journey, but the company is moving in the right direction. We’re moving all together, meeting many milestones. Again, it’s we’re moving toward the endpoint. I don’t take an endpoint too literally. Once we’re there, probably, we’ll define a new endpoint, and a new endpoint and a new endpoint. It’s an ongoing journey, but for the next two to three years, we have a clear endpoint in mind.”
How to reach: AkzoNobel Paints LLC, (440) 297-8000 or www.akzonobel.com