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In our first lecture we talked about audience characteristics and the ways we hope to influence their attitudes and behaviors through communication.

Last week we focused on strategic messages – the thought process involved in translating a strategic initiative, large or small, into a Conversation Platform that helps us think through what we want our target audience to do, know, and feel.

But what channel will be use to convey the message? That’s where the concept of communication networks come in.

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What is a communication network?

I think the best way to grasp the concept is to think of a network as a channel through which messages are delivered using any number of media.

The network, whether it’s formal or informal, is really defined by the audiences that it connects.

Vertical networks exist within organizations and connect leadership with employees. Many of the effective communication practices identified by Towers Watson and John Finney involve vertical networks. The People Channel described in Matha & Boehm is good example of a vertical communication network.

The flow of communication from an organization’s leadership to employees moves information downward – employee feedback mechanisms move information upward.

Horizontal networks are essentially cross-functional channels on both a large or a small scale. The CEO’s staff meeting with functional heads is a horizontal network. A guiding coalition gathered from across an organization to drive a change process or a team pulled together to plan for a crisis or a cross-functional project team – those too are horizontal networks.

External networks link an organization’s employees with external stakeholders. These networks often are major structural components of an organization: the PR department, the Investor Relations unit, the Customer Service department. It’s i t t t t th t t l t k i l t fl f i ti

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important to note that external networks involve two-way flows of communication.

Much of my thinking about communication networks has been influenced by a book by Ander Gronstedt, The Customer Century, published about ten years ago.

In his book, Gronstedt argued that at the turn of the century, companies were transitioning from what he called a production mentality where the focus was on production and distribution to a focus on building relationships with customers and potential customers.

Even before the advent of social media, Gronstedt noted that “instead of manipulating customers with price, product, promotion and place, customers themselves are seizing control of these levers.”

To address this shift, he argued that organizations should do a far better job in integrating their communication efforts in three dimensions: vertical, horizontal, and external.

Gronstedt’s definition of integrated communications incorporates the bullet points g above:

“It is the strategic management process of facilitating a desired meaning of the company and its brands by creating unity of effort at every point of contact with key customers and stakeholders for the purpose of building profitable relationships with them.”

One could easily expand this definition to apply to governmental and nonprofit y p pp y g p organizations.

Building integrated communication networks is no easy task, either strategically or tactically.

But Gronstedt argued that the real breakthroughs in product innovation, team collaboration, customer service, and stakeholder relations have come from the alignment of communication across functions, businesses, and regions.

For evidence, he highlighted the communication practices of14 European and US companies, including Xerox, Federal Express, ABB, and Ericsson – all had strong, integrated communication networks and leadership teams who were committed to nurturing an open communication climate.

Ten years after the book’s publication, some of these companies are still top performers.

Here again, it’s worth emphasizing that excellent communication practices g g and strong communication networks can’t guarantee organizational success. Markets evolve, competitors emerge, organizational cultures stagnate – these forces influence the destiny of organizations over long and short periods of time.

But as the evidence shows, communication practices play an important role – and the concept of communication networks is an excellent diagnostic tool i h l i d t d d i ti flin helping us understand and manage communication flows.

I came across a dramatic example of the negative impact of weak communication networks in an article about Boeing’s Dreamliner project in June 2009.

Boeing is, of course, an enormous company with a well-developed communication infrastructure. But that doesn’t ensure that communication flows are working properly.

In this case, the Dreamliner project involved scores of Boeing units and external suppliers – coordinating these audiences involved both external and horizontal networks, and these networks were not functioning effectively. The project encountered numerous delays.

This is where a weak vertical network complicated matters. Project managers did not effectively communicate these delays to Boeing upper management.

As a result, Boeing leaders and spokespersons raised expectations about the Dreamliner project with key external constituencies (the media, investors, customers, etc.) that could not be met.

In June 2009, Boeing executives at the Paris Air Show made promises about the Dreamliner’s maiden flight – and a week later the company announced yet another long delay in the project!

The following two days, Boeing’s share price dropped 12%.

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One wonders how Boeing’s employees would have answered the following questions:

Who are our most important customers? This gets to the strength of external networks, especially the flow of information about customers inside the organization.

Does senior management listens to employee feedback? This question relates to the upward flow of information through the vertical network.

Are we kept informed of what’s going on elsewhere in the organization?” This question can only be answered if there are strong horizontal networks in the organization.

As the Watson Towers research also demonstrates, if an organization’s communication networks are working effectively, these questions will be answered on an ongoing basis and probably with a high degree of g g y g g transparency and credibility.

When we think about communication networks, the vertical kind generally come to mind.

Why? Because top-down communication has been the traditional focus in most organizations. This is where we’ve invested the resources to convey senior management messages to employees and to create the technology infrastructure (email systems, websites, etc.) that bind an organization together.

More recently, much more attention has been paid to the two-way nature of the vertical network – the need to gather employee feedback on a systematic basis and promote the bottom-up flow of communication.

This is what Matha & Boehm advocate in their People Channel model.

In any vertical network, a major factor that we have to pay attention to is serial distortion – in both directions!

I’m sure that you can think of many instances in which senior management messages have been distorted as they make their way through the ranks.

As the communication director for a nationwide sales force, I faced the challenge of serial distortion at every step in the communication process. In our organizational structure, each sales rep was affiliated with a specific sales office. Traditionally, we sent messages to the managers of these offices, who in turn were supposed to pass the message long to their sale reps. We encountered every form of serial distortion imaginable…and over time, began to communicate messages directly to the sales reps.

Even with the benefit of our instantaneous communication technologies, serial distortion continues to be factor that can adversely affect the ff ti f ti l t keffectiveness of a vertical network.

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It’s interesting to see Gronstedt’s prescriptions for integrating and strengthening vertical networks.

Make the organization’s strategic direction and brand identity clear to all internal stakeholders.

Involve every manager as a participant and teacher.

Recognize that employees prefer to get information from their immediate supervisors – this is a research-grounded theme that runs through Towersupervisors this is a research grounded theme that runs through Tower Watson and Matha & Boehm.

I like Gronstedt’s litmus test for gauging the effectiveness of a vertical network: how “long it takes for bad news to reach senior management.”

The People Channel is all about delivering the message we’ve so carefully crafted. We’ll discuss the People Channel in more depth next week when we review the concept of communication networks.

As M&B note, research consistently shows that employees prefer to receive information from their supervisors. This middle level of management must be educated and motivated first, before communicating with employees.

Translate this idea to other types of stakeholders, internal and external.

The traditional approach to strategic communication is to rely heavily on top management and ask middle managers to play back ‘canned’ versions of the strategy to employees – even with slick materials, the opportunity here for message distortion is enormous.

Rather, M&B want to engage leaders and employees in discussions about strategy.gy

Think about your equivalent of the people channel and how strategic communication currently percolates through the organization

If leaders are not aligned in their understanding of the strategic message – then they cannot be strong advocates of it – makes sense!

So how can we align the management of an organization so that they can effectively communicate a strategy?

Matha & Boehm recommend a variety of methods, including what they call ‘intake meetings’ where a facilitator can confirm a leader’s understanding of the Conversation Platform and surface any ‘why nots’ – issues that stand in the way of alignment.

M&B also recommend field testing the Conversation Platform, what they call the red face test to see if top leadership’s perception of reality is in alignment with that of middle managers. The red face test also reveals whether the Conversation Platform “expresses strategy in terms and language employees will understand and support.”

Another step is to identify the informal leaders in the organization – the opinion leaders who are respected by other employees – in field testing the message.

Only once the organization’s leadership is aligned is it possible to effectively communicate the strategy throughout the organization.

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We know that managers and supervisors are the most trusted communication link with employees. Therefore, we need to equip them with the training and tools they need to communicate the strategy effectively.

This start with clear expectations about what we want them to do!

M&B make the point that managers typically do no receive training in communication skills – well, the launch of a major initiative is a critical moment to provide that training.

We also need to keep them updated on progress. Strategic initiatives, typically, roll out over a period of months. Too often, there is a burst of communication to managers at the beginning of an initiative, and then weeks and months later, people are left wondering what happened.

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The final step in bringing the People Channel to life is to raise the volume of communication so that every employee becomes aware of the strategic message and is engaged in the conversation.

How do you prevent mixed messages from going out to employees? How do you keep them focused on the strategic initiative? Here’s where the communication and HR teams come into play. They need to use the Conversation Platform as a filter and focus in deciding what messages need t t t lto go out to employees.

M&B also recommend that the launch of a strategic initiative is the right time to raise the volume of communication “for a short period and for a specific purpose.”

“Campaigns involve a greater frequency in pushing ideas and information through the People Channel and, in turn, greater support through traditional

i ti hi l ”communication vehicles.”

Next week we’ll consider how we can tap media, especially social media, to energize a campaign of this sort.

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Let’s shift our attention now to horizontal networks, which facilitate the flow of information across organizations and which historically have been very weak within organizations.

Why?

First, we know that most organizational communication flows within functional areas – the folks in the legal department, for example, spend most of their workday communicating with their co-workers in legal.

As a result, functional subsystems and subcultures tend to develop very strong silo mentalities – that is, members of those functional subsystems often view the organization through functional lenses and frequently evolve their own jargon, their own language. Think about this pattern of communication based on your own experience.

At the same time, we also know that organizations depend on the effective g coordination of functional responsibilities, the management of core processes that cut across the organization. This is where horizontal networks come into play.

You can probably cite examples where a lack of horizontal communication has negatively impacted the design and implementation of a major organizational initiative.

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Here are some approaches to creating and sustaining horizontal networks.

First, we need to build the technological infrastructure that supports and encourages communication across functions. The functionality of employee portals has increasingly begun to address this need, and many of the social technologies described in Groundswell are ideally suited for cultivating horizontal communication.

A second approach is to create a common language for core interactive processes. For example, if an entire organization adopts the same norms of interaction for its meetings, then employees – regardless of function or location -- will have the same expectations for meeting interaction. This will make meetings more efficient and potentially more productive by reducing misunderstandings.

Anders Gronstedt argued that many organizations manage functions much better than they manage core processes which are vital for organizational performance.

So we need to recognize that the coordination of core processes require g communication tactics that support horizontal networks. Tactics that promote information sharing, cross-functional collaboration , and interaction across the “fault lines” of expertise, culture, and rank.

The growing importance of teamwork is a response to this need for horizontal coordination.

Ancona summarize some fascinating research about what makes teams effective –g and it turns out that the better teams communicate with sponsors and advocates outside the team – the more successful they will be in actually getting their project recommendations implemented.

Here is an example of how networks works in the real world. In this instance, a global engineering company MWH charted the strength and frequency of communication between their seven technology offices. What they discovered in 2003 was that communication occurred within the offices and that there was very little collaboration among units. The analysis showed that “there were silos and there were gatekeepers”

By creating a variety of horizontal networks by 2008 the level ofBy creating a variety of horizontal networks, by 2008, the level of communication among the technology offices was much higher, employees worked more efficiently and feel more connected to each other.

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The third network connects the organization with external stakeholders.

With the emergence of social technologies, external networks are being radically reinvented.

Disciplines like public relations, advertising, and marketing communications are undergoing major changes to keep pace with the shift in the balance between senders and receivers.

A major theme in Gronstedt’s book is the need for companies to becomeA major theme in Gronstedt s book is the need for companies to become much more focused on the customer. This is also a theme in the Towers Watson research.

We can easily expand the scope of external stakeholders to donors (for nonprofits), investors, opinion leaders, etc.

Gronstedt has several suggestions for integrating external networks. The first is to identify the most profitable customers (or donors…) – which customer segments really add value to the organization’s performance? The old 80/20 rule – 80% of revenues derive from 20% of customers – still has considerable validity.

Another thing we know from research is that customer retention (or employee retention for that matter) is much more cost effective than

i iacquiring new ones.

Once we’ve done this segmentation, the key is to share customer information and feedback in order to connect employees across the organization with the marketplace. So customer information does not remain within the market research silo or sales silo, but is distributed to employees across the organization in ways that help them understand both the value of customers and their role in supporting the customer retention and acquisitioncustomers and their role in supporting the customer retention and acquisition process.

In short, create a ‘voice of the customer’ communication process that draws on intelligence from the customer database and encourage employees – even those who are not customer-facing – to learn about customer needs. There is some evidence to suggest that this approach can stimulate innovation and responsiveness to market changes.p g

In Groundswell, you will learn about the way organizations are leveraging social media and communication technologies to interact with external audiences in ways that we never thought possible.

Bernoff and Li describe 5 objectives that organizations can pursue using social media – we’ll talk about the communication tactics in greater detail over the next couple of weeks.

The point I want to make here is that, while Bernoff and Li focus on external communication networks with customers, these communication objectives and tactics can also be applied to vertical and horizontal networks within an organization.

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While some organizations have, say, a strong vertical network, but weak horizontal or external networks, the goal is to strengthen all three – because by nature there is overlap and interdependence between them.

By thinking about how these networks connect key receivers and audiences and how we can send effective messages using targeted media through the networks – can help us achieve communication objectives and support organizational performance.

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