You’ve heard the old saying that you are what you eat. That’s certainly true. But it is also true that you are what you speak. What you choose to say or not to say, and how you choose to say it, accounts for much of your presence in the world.
For all intents and purposes your words are you. That is true for organizations and individuals alike, and it is true unless and until behavior and actions contradict the words.
At least initially, people will rightly presume you are speaking the truth as you know it. Their presumption of truth carries an institutional sledgehammer of accountability. The accountability is at the heart of our laws on libel, advertising, perjury, contracts, marriage, criminal assault, and commerce. All those laws reflect the need for truth to be stated. They all impose accountability, too, so as to insist on it.
In large organizations, words routinely convey official declarations, intention, and information. We label these words collectively (along with numbers and images in their service) as the organization’s formal voice. The formal voice is foundational to the perceptions and to the regard that people have of any organization. The formal voice also lies at the core of any organization’s capacity to change and grow. It must be managed effectively, for it is absolutely key to the future.
Yet all too often, organizations mismanage the formal voice. They render it as sweet talk, scare talk, and happy talk–in other words, spin. They deliberately mislead, or they inadvertently mislead others by misleading themselves. In doing so, they compromise their own effectiveness as managers and leaders, and they undermine the future of the organization they’re entrusted to lead. They do so for many reasons, some of them enticingly real and worthy. Whatever the reason, mismanagement it is.
What exactly does the formal voice look like and sound like? In a nutshell, it’s the talk of what eventually should be walking the talk.
On the outisde, the formal voice takes the form of advertising, news releases, branding, web sites, government filings, product information, slogans, and the like. On the inside, the formal voice may consist of all-employee announcements, town-hall meetings, intranet sites, newsletters, level-by-level cascading, closed-circuit television, laminated wallet cards, old-fashioned bulletin boards, and much more.
Often the external and internal sides of the formal voice cross paths, as in the case of a major quality certification, or a new commitment to customer service, or a product recall, or a merger or an IPO, or a yearly marketing blitz or retail sale. In those instances and many others, there is a need for coordinated internal and external communication. In any and all cases, though, the formal voice should be cohesive, and it should integrate with its cousins, the semi-formal and informal voices. (More on those voices in subsequent issues.)
For external stakeholders such as customers or investors, and for internal stakeholders such as employees, the formal voice is a window on the company’s thinking.
Ideally it is the verbal representation of reality. It should serve as a reference bank for factual information. When it is deliberately abused, its reliability plummets. The credibility of the company and of its leadership also dwindles. Better to jealously guard the credibility of the formal voice.
In the interest of managing the formal voice effectively, here are important things to keep in mind. Some will strike professionals as commonplace, but for executives and senior line managers, they may be revelatory. Let’s take a look:
- Insist on having and sharing a strategic focus. Much of the power of the formal voice is its ability to train everyone’s sight on a very few priorities. Without a strategic focus, you cannot point people in the same direction.
- Create an industry-specific, unique vision that can productively be drilled down deep into the organization. (We will share more ideas on good vision statements in a future bulletin.)
- Limit the proliferation of messages. Three or four strategic messages are the maximum; any other message should be subordinate to those at the core.
- Maintain those core messages over the long haul. People need a stake in the sand. The inevitability of change is no excuse for here-today, gone-tomorrow strategy.
- Build your mission around your customer’s interest. Making money is not sufficient. Think in terms of why your customers patronize your organization in the first place.
- Minimize and clarify jargon, acronyms, and neologisms. Use jargon only to the extent that everyone in your company understands it. Even then, favor plain language. It has the advantage of actually working.
- Convey a consistent core message through as many of the formal-voice channels as you can. Just as aircraft have built-in redundancy, so should your formal voice. Say the same thing out of both sides of your mouth.
- Let the formal voice be the mouthpiece of leadership, and think of the role of leadership as akin to that of a teacher. Constantly educate the workforce on the changing reality of the industry, its markets, its customers and their expectations.
- Maintain a healthy skepticism toward “cascading” strategic information down through the organization one layer at a time. Cascading alone doesn’t work, and it teases you into thinking that it does. Electronic, mass communication is essential.
- Paradoxically, think of the formal voice ultimate as dialogue, not mere monologue. Ultimately it must move through managers and supervisors, who must initiate and sustain a conversation with ground-level employees about the implications of the strategic messages. Without that conversation, the formal voice is effectively mute.
- Speed counts. Do not wait to “cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s.” Nothing is ever final. Convey information promptly. Otherwise the rumor mill or the news media will rush in to fill the void. Don’t let that happen. Any rumor or news dispatch may or may not be true, but rumors always and news reports usually represent a missed opportunity to convey the context and rationale for a decision.
- Use numbers. Establish clear-cut metrics for performance (and consider developing a “balanced scorecard” if you don’t already have one). Then convey the relevant data in a longitudinal perspective, with historical trends. Represent the data in metaphorical terms, in the way that the late Ronald Reagan did so effectively.
- Be creative. So-called dashboards are efficient, colorful ways to illustrate progress. Strategic maps are likewise effective. Messages need not be verbal. In fact, in most instances, verbal messages are noticed and remembered at significantly lower rates than visual messages are.
- Tell stories. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a story is worth 1,000 pictures. That’s what a good story is, after all: a motion picture in the mind’s eye. Leaders throughout human history have told relevant, brief stories to illustrate their points. People will always digest and remember a story in ways they can never digest and remember a report or a chart.
- View the formal voice in the context of metamessages. No message stands alone. All messages rely for their whole meaning on their environment, expectations, and ultimately their related experience. It’s the metamessage that people receive and remember.
- Strike a balance between simplicity and complexity. Don’t be so reductionist as to ignore important facts and ideas. On the other hand, don’t resort to data dumping just to impress others with your command of detail.
- Periodically audit the content of your formal voice, so that you have assurance it reflects your core strategic messages. If it doesn’t, it is just more ambient noise diluting the impact of your messages.
- Recognize that serious and complete information and ideas rarely move rapidly through an organization. Rumors move fast, but they are simple, anecdotal, and speculative.
- Do not speculate about the future. Discuss alternatives and their implications, but don’t lay odds. Things change too quickly and unpredictably.
- Be prepared to translate the general to the specific. Explain in simple, memorable detail what you hope and expect people in your organization will do with new information as it becomes available.
- Leave the spin cycle to your washing machine. Avoid scare talk, sweet talk, and happy talk. Just tell it like it is. Say what you think, and believe what you have said. When you no longer do, say so.
Above all, proceed to integrate your formal voice with your semi-formal and informal voices. Left to itself, the formal voice will usually fail even at creating simple awareness, let alone the understanding, acceptance and commitment you need to realize your vision for the future. Only through the full integration of all three voices can leadership speak with compelling clarity and credibility.
Thomas Lee has been benchmarking best-practice companies in organizational communication for almost 15 years. To date he has personally benchmarked almost 30 leading American corporations, including 3M, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, DuPont, Weyerhaeuser, Levi-Strauss, McDonald’s, Shell Exploration, Duke Energy, and many others.
