Communications

As you may know if you follow this blog, Weber Shandwick took a deep look at where executives of the world’s most admired companies spoke in 2009 compared to earlier years. The analysis  (Five Star Conferences) showed that executives are ramping up their speaking engagements in an effort to get their messages out and narrate their company stories. At Weber Shandwick, we have a group dedicated to executive engagements that ultimately help boost and solidify company reputations. They are called our Global Strategic Media Group and they do fine work, including the analysis just mentioned! Since my days at Fortune, I have always been fascinated by executive conferences so it is a continuing interest of mine. Executive speaking is definitely one tool in the reputation tool box just like awards and scorecards, among other things.

We thought it would be equally interesting to see what executive communications professionals think about the executive conference scene and teamed with Vital Speeches and David Murray to query this segment. If you are an executive communications professional or executive speechwriter that positions CEOs and other C-level executives at top tier executive conferences, please take several minutes to answer this survey. We would greatly appreciate and will share the results once they are in!

“Integrated reporting is now the holy grail in corporate public disclosure,” says John Elkington, co-founder, SustainAbility. Well, the time has arrived for corporate reporting that integrates financial performance and non-financial information such as environmental, social and governance issues. Integrated reporting is the subject of Harvard Business School Senior Lecturer Robert Eccles’ new book, One Report: Integrated Reporting for a Sustainable Strategy (John Wiley, 2010). According to Professor Eccles, there are only a handful of companies in the world that practice integrated reporting. To learn more, check out their web site. The idea behind integrated reporting is much more than a static paper document or PDF. It’s a web-based approach that makes strategic use of Web 2.0 tools and technologies to enable users to do their own analyses. This may just be the corporate reporting standard of the future. Integrated reporting as described in Eccles’ new book offers several benefits….such as deepened engagement with stakeholders, improved corporate governance and communication of performance with “ONE” conversation. Just imagine, one conversation to share your reputation.

I recently stumbled over a quote from David Axelrod, President Obama’s chief communications strategist. He said “We need to involve all the other members of the team.” He was referring to the uni-focus on Obama and the need to take some of the 24/7 news cycle spotlight off him by giving his team roles to play in the administration’s strategies. It was a smart statement because it applies to most CEOs as well. Reputation is often driven by the ability of the CEO to build a top bench strength. Not all but several of the top team in an organization need to play supporting roles and build the brand by what they do and say. The chief sustainability officer or chief financial officer, to name two,  can add needed gravitas and thought leadership to a company. Demonstrating that there are successors and that leadership ability is a prime ingredient of a company’s strength helps build reputations. It was interesting to hear Axelrod mention this factor and he makes a good point. It cannot be Obama all the time.

  I was recently in Phoenix, Arizona at a conference on building and protecting reputation. It was hosted by Henkel. My part was to talk about what CEOs should be talking about now. More on that later this coming week but wanted to blog about the talk from Henkel’s NA Consumer Goods president and CEO Brad Casper about working with corporate communications. It was good to hear a CEO talk so positively about the importance of his corporate communications team. Just by taking to time to talk to us at lunch time said boatloads.  Casper said that he believes that there are 6A’s in how a CEO and corporate communications function can work together to establish and build trust. The CEO mentioned that his philosophy was that not communicating was far riskier than communication. His 6 A’s are:

1. Anticipation (knowing what the organization needs to see and hear).  Casper talked about what he did once he agreed to take the job. He was an “outsider” CEO so he was unknown to employees who were dealing with a change in ownership.  He mentioned how the first person he asked to talk to was the head of corporate communications because that person would know best  what he needed to know, how to resonate with employees  and gain traction internally and externally. He was delighted when she showed up with a playbook in hand.
2. Access (making sure that he demonstrated that he was available and accessible personally). To develop that bond with employees, Casper along with corporate communications set up regular lunches with high potentials, monthly town meetings, and an online ABCs (Ask Brad Casper) on the intranet. He also started Breakfast with Brad and had lunch with new employees. Being accessible was one way to create that bond that builds CEO reputation and drives productivity and inspiration.
3. Awareness (to demonstrate that this was a new beginning since they had just been bought by consumer goods giant Henkel in Germany), the CEO and corporate communications decided to bring everyone together to participate on this journey. They rented out a nearby movie theatre within the first 100 days and had all employees attend to hear about the new strategy, hear about the future, create a vision, and help build a bridge between being what was once a U.S. company (Dial Corporation) and the multinational they were now.
4. Alignment (aligning the strategy with the core values and history of Henkel). Casper talked about the resonance of being part of a family. Several generations of the Henkel family had created this Fortune 500 company and this emotional narrative had to be intertwined into the NA Henkel fabric. He used this expression at our conference that stuck in my mind—that they would build their brand not as a company “but as a house.” That has a nice ring to it.
5. Affinity (creating a family atmosphere that is inclusive and engaged with the community). Working with corporate communications, the leadership team worked hard to celebrate innovation, community service and other ways of giving back.  Accidentally as they moved headquarters to a beautiful new building, instead of giving everyone the day off on a Friday as the movers packed up, they decided to give back to the community by having everyone volunteer their time in the community. This turned out to be one very smart way to build that camaraderie that helps bind employees to companies and remove doubt that business is all about the bottom line.
6. Accountability (the CEO is accountable as well as its employees for the company’s success).

Reputation is often said to be greater than the sum of its parts. However, making sure that all the parts work together and are communicated internally and externally builds longer-lasting reputations. CEO communicators can help make reputations stickier and advance a common purpose.

  As a reputation watcher who gets daily alerts about reputation, I recently noticed that there are fewer alerts about reputation and its ties to SEO (search engine optimization). It used to be that nearly every alert detailed some article or company on how to maximize your reputation by managing search engines better to help lift your reputation.  I do not know why there has been this decline but perhaps it is a widely known secret that many companies and brands have already mastered. Additionally, social media such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have rendered search engine optimization more complex and harder to control. I am not exactly sure but it has been on my mind. There were moments in time when I thought that reputation had been reduced to SEO tactics so I am much relieved that my favorite topic is broadening and not narrowing. My next observation is that “personal branding” has become a major theme in the reputation space.

Lately there has been alot of requests for more information on thought leadership. One of the questions I like to ask a company leadership is …what is their “moon shot?” Today I read something that made me think of another question to ask: What’s your oxygen? What is absolutely necessary for you to breathe and thrive in the years ahead?

I am wondering if there are just too many awards out there.  Several major ones were released this week. Are awards becoming commoditized because there are so many? Hard to say but they sure are “good and plenty.” (That’s an expression from years ago. You may not be familiar with it.)

Next week I am speaking at a conference on What CEOs are Talking About Now. More to come.

Very cool research study I just learned about in a WSJ blog. FIT researchers’ Ronaldo Menezes and Ben Collingsworth tracked emails between employees during Enron’s shakedown. They examined  nearly 517,000 emails sent by 150 senior managers during the last year and a half of Enron. They found that there was a spike in email exchange one month prior to the Fortune 500 company’s collapse. They learned that “the number of  active email ‘cliques’ — defined as a group in which every member has direct email contact with each other — surged to 800 from about 100.” Due to privacy laws, they could not dig deeper but this research demonstrates that companies may have a built-in early warning system that might be worth noting. The research is covered in New Scientist.

Early warning systems are very important to detecting clear and present danger that can impact reputations. It would be interesting to determine whether customer service teams have spikes in their emails before a problem unfolds publicly or whether some other company functions (compliance, safety) are chatting more than usual.

Reputations are so vulnerable today that any chance of capturing a problem is worth investigating and testing further. I imagine that Enron top managers had alot to talk about prior to its demise. As we all know, it is often too late by then.

  Harvard Business Review’s January issue features an interview about charisma and social signals that people send. Research by MIT’s Alex Pentland who directs the MIT Human Dynamics Lab found that social signals or charisma can be measured and matters (better to have than not). He and fellow researchers found that it’s not what you say but how you say it. High energy and a positive point of view can drive success. “Honest signals” such as people’s gestures, expressions and tone change the receivers of those signals and change their behavior. “The more successful people are more energetic. They talk more, but they also listen more. They spend more face-to-face time with others. They pick up cues from others, draw people out, and get them to be more outgoing. It’s not just what they project that makes them charismatic; it’s what they elicit. The more of these energetic, positive people you put on a team, the better the team’s performance,” says Professor Pentland.

I am a big proponent of more face-to-face communications from CEOs and senior officers. To me, the best reputations are built that way.  After all, aren’t we social creatures? In the HBR interview, a fact jumped out at me which business leaders should think twice about. The professor said that some of their research is showing that being face to face with colleagues is 2.5 times as important to success as additional access to information. In their research with call centers, they are finding a 10% increase in productivity by restructuring the environment to enhance more employee interaction. More positive or employee face to face and social interaction, listening and engagement delivers a higher return on investment. Although I am fairly “social” myself (have a blog, twitter and use email like crazy), I believe that the mix of face to face and electronic needs to find a better balance. CEOs really do need to walk the halls and send the right signals that show that they are listening to what’s on people’s minds. If I recall, there is a CEO who has “office hours” like teachers do. Not a bad idea.

Pentland ‘s research is not saying that charisma and energy alone can change company culture and performance. But he is saying that charisma and positive energy impact others, send positive signals that can charge up people and foster greater cooperation and collaboration. At least, that is how I read it.

CEO visibility is a double edged sword. You can decline conference invitations, be selective about the ones you speak at or accept them all. For CEOs, external communications including conferences, interviews, industry events, seminars, etc. all carry some sort of risk . Today the audience can boo you via Twitter, blog poor reviews or erroneously extrapolate a sentence out of context and then accuse you of being a CEO celebrity (the worst offense ever these days). On the up side, CEOs can speak at conferences, network with others and get the company’s story told before a receptive and interested audience. In the many years that I have been advising CEOs and commenting on their behavior, I’ve always thought that speaking up and out is beneficial to employees, customers, the industry and the overall reputation of this select executive class (which needs mending). Today, more than ever, executive conferencing should be strategic, smart and as my friend Carol says, “advance the business.”

Weber Shandwick just released its new analysis on CEO and C-level participation at executive conferences. We compared the past year with 2007’s results on where All-Star CEOs (from Fortune World’s Most Admired Companies survey) took to the podium. Here are some of the key results. For more detail, check out the press release from our Voiceboxx team.

• CEO participation at top global forums increased 96% from 2007 among the top 50 world’s most admired companies. The increase in the 2009 CEO speaking circuit roster was most probably the result of more CEO speakers from the financial sector and more CEOs who saw their rivals on stage and decided to “if you can’t beat them, join them.”
• Other C-level executives (CMOs, CFOs, CIO/CTOs) increased their participation by 40% from 2007. The Five-Star Events at which All-Star CEOs have been the most likely to speak in 2009 were (in rank order): Clinton Global Initiative, Chief Executives’ Club of Boston, the Wall Street Journal CEO Council, the World Economic Forum, Fortune Brainstorm: Tech, Committee to Encourage Corporate Philanthropy (CECP) Board of Boards, and the Detroit Economic Club’s National Summit.
• Top events for other C-level executives included (in rank order): FT (Financial Times) Innovate, Fortune Brainstorm: Tech, Massachusetts Institute of Technology CFO Summit, Conference Board’s Marketing Conference and the Milken Institute’s Global Conference. For C-suite executives in good times and bad, innovation and technology are attractive platforms for companies to position themselves competitively, to listen to trends and to interact personally with customers and prospects.

Some insights from the analysis are:

1. Despite this past year’s tough economy, heightened executive scrutiny and limited budgets, top level conferences continue to attract executives from the most respected organizations in the world. Businesses are clearly hungry for channels to network with customers and communicate their points of view. Our results highlight how many of the world’s most admired company leaders selected speaking platforms in 2009 to demonstrate leadership strength and competitive differentiation.
2. For the most part, a fair number of the most admired company CEOs did not shy away from the spotlight but instead participated in conferences that required their insights and ideas in economic problem-solving, corporate responsibility and innovative business practices. This class of respected CEOs appeared to understand that speaking up was one way of being part of the solution rather than the problem derailing the world economy. Some of these leading CEOs clearly decided to participate in the reinvention of business and help drive renewed prosperity. This is a good thing and we expect no less.

Looking forward to this conference in February on reputation building through executive communications. Take a look. I will be speaking as well. Looks good. Hope to see you there.

  I have written before about different rules or guiding principles that leaders recommend to protect reputation. Warren Buffett’s advice about imagining your planned actions on the front page of The New York Times is a classic. However, here’s another that should carry equal weight. In an interview in the Wall Street Journal, SunGard Data System’s CEO Cristóbal Conde says he’s learned a lot about bad bosses by reading “Dilbert” daily. Now before sending a company-wide e-mail, Conde asks himself, “How would Dilbert react to this?”  Imagining your communications missive or plan as the subject in a Dilbert strip is a smart way to prevent doing something that could quickly go awry.  Try really hard to imagine how what you want to do looks from the perspective of that fellow sitting in the cubicle.

This brings to mind an encounter I had with a CEO awhile back. He asked me to review a memo he wanted to send as his first form of communications.  My response was that the memo was fine but that there were too many “I’s” and not  enough “we’s.” I said that nearly all CEOs use the royal “we” to infer that we’re all in this together and need to collaborate to get the job done. For example, he should be saying “We’re going to set a new direction,” NOT “I’m going to set a new direction.”  The new CEO looked me in the eye and said, “But I’m the CEO and people have to understand that.”  I replied that employees knew that he was the CEO and that it was the CEO’s job to create unity and reduce the distance between the CEO and everyone else if he wanted to be successful.  It truly was a Dilbert moment. Happy new year!