Cascade your message
Delivering a new concept to hundreds or thousands of people is something that one person can’t accomplish alone. As the company leader, you need to involve your management team in a cascading approach that engages and creates buy-in level by level.
After Bicket and his team made the decision to shift the focus at Cox Target Media, they took one of Cox Enterprise’s corporate jets on a nationwide barnstorming tour to spread the word. In three days, Bicket and his team met with about half of the company’s franchisees, representing 80 percent of its business.
The face-to-face factor was critical because cultural changes happen on a personal level and need to be communicated as such. When an employee decides to embrace a new direction, vision or set of values, it’s a personal decision at which each person arrives individually — not a directive that is issued and then followed.
“First, we mobilized the leadership of our people — the managers and supervisors — to explain to their people what makes a change necessary and how the changes we envision will meet the challenges we are facing,” Bicket says. “From there, you have to focus on the personal decision that each employee will make. Each employee needs to understand their individual role in effecting these changes and why we think the specific tactics that we are rolling out will be not only worthwhile but the right thing to do for the company in the long term.
“It’s the business variant of the old song about how all politics is local. In the same vein, all cultural change is personal, so you really do need to get out there and communicate face to face.”
Employees need to decide for themselves, and that is how you need to approach communication. It’s seldom a one-and-done deal, in which you appear before a crowd, deliver a speech, disseminate your e-mail address and assume that the mission is accomplished. Different employees will have different concerns and questions. You need to appeal specifically to those individual issues if you expect widespread buy-in on your initiatives.
As the president of a franchisor, Bicket oversees a large number of workers under the Cox Target Media umbrella who are business leaders themselves and needed to see the logic behind the decisions before buying in.
“We had to connect the dots for people who have an entirely different set of priorities,” he says. “Our franchisees needed to see the logic, see the strategies and hear about where all of this was going to take us. They needed to decide for themselves whether this business case was sound.”
If you’ve worked your way up through the business ranks, chances are you held some kind of a sales position at one point or another — or at the very least, held a position that required some kind of salesmanship on your part. When you’re trying to sell your organization on a new concept, you need to go to that place in your own mind. You need to dig down and locate the salesperson within.
“I’m always amused at leaders who don’t consider themselves salespeople or that sales isn’t part of their jobs,” Bicket says. “The best leaders sell concepts and initiatives and new ideas. Whether they’re trying to win the hearts and minds of front-line production people or pitching a capital investment to the board of directors, it is really embracing and selling that idea.”