A tough leadership message can fail when it tries to do too much

A difficult update gets harder to process when employees have to untangle several messages at once. Before it goes out, communicators need to be clear about what employees should understand and where they can respond.

Sarah Bland, interim audit manager at the Office of the Auditor for the City of Seattle, uses employee feedback and audience insight to help shape change leadership communications,. At Ragan’s Internal Communications Conference next month in Seattle, she’ll discuss what employees need from their leadership comms, especially in trying times.

Ragan: What’s going on in an employee’s head when they hear a tough message from a leader?

Sarah Bland: Everyone is different, so you can’t know exactly what’s going to be going on in everyone’s head. That makes knowing your audience really important.

Think about what you want employees to carry forward and how you want them to feel when they walk away from the message. If an executive isn’t close enough to the front line to know how people might react, consult the people who are. Leadership teams and managers can help provide that perspective because they often know the employees and their day-to-day reality much better.

What can an executive do early in a message to help employees stay open to what comes next?

Manage expectations and address the biggest concerns early. Give people enough information to understand what’s happening without trying to pack everything into one message, and give them somewhere to go if they have more questions.

Sometimes you can give people small doses of what’s coming next as information becomes available. You might have to tell them, “We don’t have that information yet.” The important part is telling them that you’ll come back with it and then following through.

What’s one thing leaders do that can unintentionally make employees feel less certain?

A leader can signal very quickly that they don’t understand what it’s like to be on the front line. Maybe employees are working overnight shifts or staffing something 24/7. Something that seems less consequential at the executive level could affect someone’s livelihood or their ability to do the work safely. If a message shows that leadership doesn’t understand that experience, people can turn off right away and think, “You don’t even know what’s happening here.”

Leadership is a social process. Employees are looking to leaders for direction, while leaders are looking to employees to act on that direction. The communication has to account for the reality people are working in.

Can you share an example where changing the wording, order or delivery of a leadership message made a difference?

One example was a midyear performance check-in process. The executive wanted the communication to accomplish several different things at once, including addressing performance expectations, improving some processes and getting feedback from employees about leadership.

The first version went out broadly and asked people to provide feedback. We got almost nothing back. It would have been easy to assume everybody agreed, but I started talking with people individually and found out they actually had all kinds of reactions. The problem was that we were asking them to respond to several separate issues as though they were one thing.

So we changed the delivery completely. We moved the process issues into a separate process-improvement effort with clear ownership. Then we created a different way for employees to provide feedback, including an anonymous option. With a small team, you can also have a trusted person gather that input more informally.

You want people involved before that next draft goes out so their concerns can actually shape the process. That’s also where something like the concerns-based adoption model can help you understand what might look like resistance to change and where people actually are in the change process.

After the message goes out, what signals should communicators look for to know whether they built the right kind of trust?

Look at what people do afterward and whether they choose to come back to the process. With that midyear check-in, we eventually built the new approach into something we could use every year. People felt like they had a chance to raise concerns before the end-of-year evaluation, and leadership was getting better feedback as well.

It took several rounds of review, so it wasn’t a quick fix. But eventually employees started asking, “When are we doing the midyear check-in?” You know something has been adopted when people are coming back and asking for it. You can see that signal even without running a survey.

Note: This interview was conducted in Bland’s personal capacity and does not reflect the views of the City of Seattle.

Sean Devlin is the senior internal communications editor at Ragan. You can connect with him on LinkedIn here.