OPINION: Developing a sustainable leadership communication strategy

By Rebecca Richmond, group director of research and content

Reading this month's article on leadership communication styles and how to work with them made me think back to a number of recent conversations I've had with our Strategic Communication Research Forum members about the wider issue of leadership communication across their businesses.

A number of times in these discussions, we've chewed over the options for developing a long-term, leader-led communication strategy, versus the somewhat tactical short-term "fixes" we might have to come up with if we're dealing with a leader who's not a natural communicator, or in a crisis situation, or if we're looking to them to help sustain employee engagement across a lengthy change initiative, for example.

There are four key areas that we've explored in our research in which - if communicators could engineer small wins - would come together to dramatically enhance the strategic focus of our senior leadership communication programs:

1. Match downward with upward
The lack of true upward channels in many organizations is still a common issue. It's often the case that employee survey results get seen by the senior management teams as their one way into the upward communication of employee issues, ideas and concerns. But the notion of really enabling ongoing and meaningful two-way dialogue along the hierarchy of the business is still tough for many of us. Implementing some forum for upward communication to executives - a standing employee committee, perhaps, that reports to the executive team on a periodic basis, or a series of lunches/skip-level briefings in which discussion is centered on the issues employees bring to the table. Simple though they may seem, these are just a couple of the ways we've seen communicators dramatically enhance the organization's multilateral approach to leadership communication.

2. Manage interventions tailored to the individual and situation
This is about drilling down on two things: the needs of the leader, and the needs of the employees. Such evaluation does, of course, happen in best-practice organizations. Many recognize the value of tailoring their tools to the individual leader and their personal styles (e.g., gregarious leaders may eschew a formal presentation and conduct a free-form discussion; but those who need the emotional crutch of a script and slide deck will have them). There are those, too, who will be sure to structure their senior leadership intervention around an audience's individual needs. However, even in these better practices, there are caveats worth considering.

Members can read the rest of the article here.

This article was originally published in Strategic Communication Management.