Communicate the building blocks
The understanding of your building blocks can’t only be fresh in your mind and the minds of your top management team.
Twice a year, Frey meets with about 50 employees whom he considers key managers, and about every other year, he speaks to all of his employees about strategy. Those are specific meetings that speak to the company’s goals. But as the leader of the company, the mission, vision and strategy must be conveyed by you as well as your managers on a regular basis. And there needs to be an even greater emphasis on communication during difficult times.
“Communication needs to be heightened,” Frey says. “When you go through each step in an action, you have to stop and talk to people about why you’re doing it.”
In this recent recession, maybe you had to cut budgets and lay off employees. Those hard decisions were probably made in an effort to strengthen the company in the long run. Still, those choices affect employees in every level of the business. You need to explain why the decisions took place and how those decisions position the company to meet its goals.
“It’s not only painful and a very unhappy and unpleasant experience for the people who lost their jobs because of the economic pressure we’ve been through, but it’s also a trauma of sorts for the managers who have to manage through that and the people who are still with the organization,” Frey says. “You have to make sure that you continue to communicate with those people, as well, so we all know why we’re taking the steps that we’re taking and what the long-term goals and visions are — where we’re getting to, why we’re taking these steps, and why we’re going to move forward and be better off in the longer term as an organization.”
Explaining the “why” aspect of the latest decisions, along with the company’s future steps, helps employees realize how the organization can be successful and the role they play in progressing toward those goals.
The key to getting your message across is reaching out to employees with multiple forms of communication and through multiple levels of management.
Frey recently held a webinar, which allowed employees to submit questions in an open forum to him, the CFO and the COO about how the company is doing financially and what direction the manufacturer is headed.
“The best way to communicate to employees is face to face in conversation, where they have the chance to ask you questions,” Frey says. “We as leaders should do that as much as we possibly can. The president isn’t the only person that communicates with people. Part of my responsibility, or any president’s responsibility, is to have an organization of leaders who likewise communicate and are honest and forthright people who are going to express the values you want expressed and treat people the way you want them treated, [and] that includes communication.”
When it comes to communicating messages as important as your company’s mission, vision and strategy, you need to make sure all of your employees are hearing the same information.
Frey doesn’t tell his managers word for word what to say and in what format. But when he’s asking them to communicate important topics, he makes suggestions on what should be included in the conversation.
“I do talk to our leaders and ask them in certain important communications to script themselves, and I counsel them on that script,” he says. “By script, I don’t mean tell them exactly what to say. Say it in your own way, but let’s be sure you’re incorporating these elements of the message so that the message that the whole company is trying to communicate gets across to your team the same way it gets across to other teams in the organization.”
