Driving communication his way at Volvo
Communicating with a global and divergent workforce is a key feature of Charlie Nordblom's work, which he believes requires a strategic approach and support for leaders.
When discussing career highlights with most senior-level internal communicators, you don't often hear that they have previously published bestselling books that have outed several undercover KGB officers - but then again, Charlie Nordblom is not your average communicator.
During the mid-1970s, while he was training to become a lawyer, he changed course and started working as a journalist, moving into investigative journalism for various magazines and newspapers as a freelancer. In 1984, he wrote a book entitled Soviet Industrial Espionage that caused commotion in Sweden and topped the bestseller list. It identified a number of active KGB and military intelligence officers who were working undercover as diplomats. Following this, he wrote a second book in 1988, called Warfare During Times of Peace, which involved 18 months of extensive research. He says that boiling down all that research helped hone his skills for his future career as an internal communicator. "When every chapter is more than 30 pages, each paragraph must move the story forward. You need to get the flow of the story right, so I think I developed a lot of storytelling skills in performing this research."
Other posts followed, including roles at several large multinational companies until, in 2001, he arrived at Volvo Group. In his role as vice president of strategic internal communication, Nordblom heads up communication across the Volvo Group, which employs more than 100,000 employees, spread across production facilities in 19 countries and sales locations in more than 180 markets.
Regardless of what channel you use, it's about facilitating a support base for leaders to stand up and push an active dialogue with their employees.
Communicating globally
Nordblom is a great believer in learning by listening to the groundswell and exposing yourself to different perspectives.
He applied this philosophy in 2009, at the height of the economic downturn, where he looked into the organization's processes, and what needed to change. "We had to let go of 20,757 people that year. We were fighting for our life. We lost SEK24 billion (US$3.47 billion) that year and at the same time we decided to invest time, money and resources to rediscover and redesign our corporate culture. This was an extremely important exercise for the company; realizing that we needed to have a culture that enabled us to drive change, innovation and help us align, commit and engage people. We needed to have leaders with an international outlook and experience, as well as global leadership skills," he says. "We needed to be much better at learning and sharing best practice across different parts of the world and different parts of the organization."
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This article was originally published in Strategic Communication Management.
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