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During the week I had the double frustration of not only meeting with a CEO who is not a natural communicator, thus making the selling of the concepts of transparency, openness and informality — aka the internal CEO blog — a nigh impossible sell, but I had the double joy of finding that CEO’s management team, because of the autocratic culture created by the CEO, equally unwilling to communicate.
I noted from one of Shel’s always-illuminating posts that research certainly points with blinking neon arrows to the importance of top-down comms during a time of change, that is if that magic word ‘engagement’ is considered to be of any interest. So the idea of anyone from the top two levels of the company communicating anything about what the future holds for the working man or woman on the bottom few rungs is almost anathema to them.
However, to be fair to the CEO, at least they did listen to my views and have agreed to release a small comms piece about the CEO’s vision for the company and what plans and projects are currently in progress and why. As the CEO has a few radical ideas for restructuring the mid-sized company there are naturally concerns about raising people’s fear levels over their future. But as I pointed out, and the CEO seemed to appreciate, the fears are already there, being discussed in the tea and breakout rooms, and in furtive emails to colleagues.
The CEO has agreed to at least get the issues out in the open; what will be interesting is if and how the next tier down pass on those comms to their troops.
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