Strive for clarity
When you’re taking your organization in a new direction, Swedish says you should expect three questions from your employees.
“I tell my leadership team that they should always be prepared to answer these questions: ‘What about me?’ and, ‘What about me?’ and, ‘What about me?’” he says. “When it comes to communication, you need to start with the belief that it is all about how you treat people. The expectations that you communicate spread throughout the entire organization.”
With that in mind, you need to focus on delivering clear messages and doing so repeatedly through all of the channels available to you. If your communication loses steam over time, the message will fail to take root, and you could jeopardize your new strategy entirely.
“Once you’ve established the importance of treating people well, the second essential point is to remember that no amount of communication is ever enough,” Swedish says. “Effective communication will get you to a point where you maybe have achieved meeting your plan and expectations, where you’ve met those initial goals that you had established. But it’s remarkable to me how quickly success devolves into failure because you don’t maintain the level of intensity that you had when you first started communicating. That’s why no amount of communication is ever enough. You can’t stop.”
After you’ve established a sense of clarity and a method for driving home your core messages on an ongoing basis, you need to find new ways to reach your work force. Putting your shoes on the ground and visiting all of your offices is the ideal way that most leaders would like to communicate, particularly on matters that affect the whole company. But it’s not always realistic. You can’t be everywhere at once, and you can’t be the lone conduit through which managers and employees at different locations can share ideas and best practices.
That is where technology comes into play. With the growing popularity of social networking tools such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter, modern business leaders can reach employees with essential messages in many different ways. Over the past six years, Swedish has taken advantage of the entire spectrum of social networking opportunities that are available.
“Technology has evolved to the point that we are now working with multiple media outlets,” he says. “That’s the third point. In our organization, we are now challenged with the implementation of our best practices around social networks and how that can help create better relationships with both our associates and our external customers — be they patients, families, physicians or vendors. It has always been about effective use of technology. Earlier, it was printed-word mediums like newsletters. Now, it is about technologies and Internet-based approaches that support social networking.”
