Helping leaders make sense of strategy at City & Guilds
As the UK's leading awarding body City & Guilds goes through significant change, its Director General has outlined four new strategic priorities to help put this change into perspective. Here, Henri Forde, head of internal communication, describes the tools her team has been providing to senior and middle managers, in order to translate these priorities to employees in a clear and compelling way.
by Henri Forde, head of internal communication, the City & Guilds Group.
In the first half of 2008, we identified a number of organizational challenges: our 2006-2011 Strategic Plan was directionally sound but lacked focus, many programs were falling short of objectives and the vocational qualifications market around us was changing and becoming increasingly competitive.
Also, the feedback received from our 2008 employee survey showed that employees were disengaged and lacked understanding of organizational direction and processes.
The turning point was the arrival of the new Director General, Chris Jones who, in July 2008, swiftly launched a new strategy centered on four strategic priorities.
The challenge for internal communications was to align leaders to an agreed set of strategic messages in a consistent and coordinated approach as well as communicating the organization's strategy in an involving way for employees.
Boosting leadership communication
With the help of communication consultancy Hill & Knowlton, we developed new tools to create shared understanding of the vision and the strategy as well as the individual's role in supporting them.
A further aim was to boost leadership communication by providing the right tools and support for leaders to run with this and engage their teams. The target audience was senior and middle managers as they provide context and locally relevant meaning to the strategy.
The tools developed included "What is" cards and a journey map, which were designed for roll out at our annual managers' conference in November 2008.
The "What is" cards articulated the context, vision and meaning of the four strategic priorities in a simple and meaningful way by breaking down what each of the priorities meant for the group, our customers and our people.
The journey map was based on two principles:
- Employees are most likely to buy into it when they have participated in the process; and,
- A picture speaks a thousand words.
By using icons, colors and symbols, the journey map visually represented the various aspects of the organizational strategy for the next 18 months. They were collaboratively created with managers and illustrators at the managers' conference.
We knew we were taking a risk in that we'd never done anything like this before at City & Guilds, but the key to success was getting managers involved in creating the journey themselves. The buzz around the room at the end of the day was fantastic.
Maintaining the momentum
After the managers' conference, the follow up survey showed both improved knowledge and heightened understanding of the four key strategic themes.
But we knew that this was only the start of embedding our strategy and we needed to keep up the momentum following the conference. So, we consolidated all the input from managers and created a single, final journey map.
This was then sent to all managers, along with a toolkit including instructions and guidelines of how to run the same exercise with their teams.
The aim was for managers to engage their teams and help them identify their role in achieving our strategy, by creating their own personalized journey map.
The response so far has been really positive and the feedback we've received from managers and staff has included comments such as: "I've gained further understanding of how I can contribute to the strategic aims. We now have a clear and sustainable plan that's understandable, relevant and applicable to all members of my team, and that can be transferred into activities that they all undertake."
Training leaders at all levels
Our focus now is to continue to build leadership communication capabilities across the group. We've already trained the top 35 leaders and provided them with practical tools and techniques to implement back in the workplace. Some 96 percent of them said they felt more equipped to be better leaders through improved communication.
The next stage is to focus on middle and line managers. This is the group that need the most support to improve their communication. We're going to develop a range of tools and templates that will be rolled out together with leadership communication training later this year.
Also, I'm spending more time coaching leaders about their communication requirements, getting them to think about what they need employees to do, and then identify ways in which communication can support that. It's challenging, but fun. And most importantly, we're slowly but surely beginning to see a difference.
Have your say
Have you ever used journey maps? Was it a successful method? If not, why not? How are you supporting managers to clearly communicate in this unsettling economic time? Or perhaps you've initiated similarly innovative ways of communicating a new strategy? Share your experiences with other Hub members below.
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