The week before lock down happened I went to see The Script in Dublin's Three Arena. It was a great concert but the one thing that really stuck out was the number of people with their phones out.
People weren't actually watching the gig live - they were one step removed, watching it through their cameras. There was only one band and only one gig, yet each of the people there was going home with a slightly different angle or perspective on the exact same thing.
Now transfer that to the corporate world and how messages are communicated - one company, one CEO and one message right?
But of course it isn't one message. Because the same thing happens when you communicate to people across your organisations - they see and hear everything you say through a lens.
Their own lens.
Everyone has one and each person's lens is made up of many different things - their experience, their attitude, their expectations of you and where they are in their career. Even whats going on at home, how they feel on that day and the traffic on their journey to work can have an impact on how they see and hear messages at work
And, of course, because of all the variables, that lens changes seamlessly from day-to-day in a way that a single email or intranet post sent out by the internal communications team just can't.
THAT is why, for me, leaders are so critically important when it comes to internal communications - because they are the ones who know their teams and how to best position or communicate a message on any given day.
What can you ask your leaders to do to ensure that your message lands?
Contextualise - Whatever the message is, your leaders should be able to explain the message in the context of their team
Translate - Taking language and ideas from a general organisation-wide email and translating it into words their team understand and can relate to
Discuss - Your leaders can kick-off conversations at team meetings to find out how people feel and what they think you need to do next
During change, the question on everyone's lips is - 'What's gonna happen to me' So providing your leaders with the knowledge, confidence and tools to be able to understand the impact of a change is money well spent.
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About Inspiring Change
Based in Dublin, we are a strategic internal communications, employee engagement and leadership consultancy.
We help you to implement sustainable change and drive business performance by putting your people first. If you want to have a chat please get in touch.