Introducing blogging and podcasting to management

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Here’s a challenge:

Take a typical management team — busy, time poor, concerned with meeting budgets, deadlines and KPIs.

Take a typical professional communicator — busy, trying to find new ways to engage in dialogue with the target audience.

Put them all together in a room and see how quickly the communicator can make the managers eyes glaze over.

We communicators may be really excited about how blogging and podcasting can enable even greater levels of discussion within an organization, but unless we can enthuse both management and shopfloor employee in the new tech, then we are pushing a wet string up a drainpipe.

I recently set up a bulletin board at a company aimed at helping employees communicate with each other, share knowledge and throw around ideas. The result was less than impressive.

Whilst management were keen to introduce any new technology that allowed their teams to keep working but also share knowledge, the team members (with all but two exceptions) steadfastly refused to embrace what was for them ‘new’ technology.

Any communication initiative must, first and foremost, consider the target audience. If the audience is largely technologically illiterate (which this audience definately wasn’t), or scared of the new technology (possibly they were), then it is the communicator’s role to ensure management gives enough incentive for teams to change existing behaviours and embrace new behaviours.

In other words, the communicator must become a change manager, using the team manager as a change agent.

So… you can now add ‘Change Manager’ to your portfolio!