The Internal Communication Black Belt Programme

Making managers better communicators

Everyone has heard the adage, “people don’t leave companies, they leave
their manager.” And with employee engagement becoming an ever more
important priority for business, companies now need to build frameworks
and competencies to promote better internal communication through
middle and front-line managers.
Melcrum’s research comprised a quantitative and qualitative study, with findings
from a global survey of 712 communication and HR practitioners and 44 in-
depth interviews with internal communication professionals at large, multi-
national organizations (see Figure 1). Supplementary interviews were conducted
with communication leaders including Roger D’Aprix, Bill
Fig 1 Survey respondent Quirke, Jim Shaffer and Angela Sinickas.
geographical breakdown In addition to comprehensively covering the views and
innovations of communication and HR practitioners,
Making Managers Better Communicators also provides a
Rest of
World 9%
holistic view of how line manager communication is
perceived by employees by using a select cut of Mercer
Asia/ UK 31% Human Resource Consulting’s study of workforce opinion
Australasia 15% in the US and UK, entitled What’s WorkingTM.

Building the Business Case

Europe 11%
There is no single piece of data that will demonstrate why
North America 34% you need to invest in making managers better
communicators. To a large extent, the numbers that matter
most will be those you get from your internal research that
will highlight the variables linked to your own company –
your culture, values, goals and management style should all influence how you
approach the issue.
Often the “burning platform” for change comes from within, such as less-than-
happy employee survey results on the core issues the company is focused on (e.g.
employee engagement, becoming an employer of choice, etc.). For some, as at
General Motors, it was lost revenue that spurred the company on to address the
issue (see case study, below).

¤ CASE
GENERAL MOTORS: The case for pre-emptive action
STUDY Gary Grates, vice-president of communications North America at General
Motors Corporation, says that the “burning platform” for their Internal
Communication Improvement Process (ICIP), much of which encompasses
greater support and skills-building for the company’s facilities managers, is on
two levels: the debilitating corollary effects of industrial action, and the resultant
objectives of the company, therefore, to improve relationships among the
workforce. “In retrospect, the action was over an issue that could and should have
been resolved with far less pain and suffering than it ended with,” says Grates.
“But at the time, it was seen as very important to each party to stand their
ground.” The end result of the stand-off? A 54-day strike that resulted in
approximately US$2 billion lost in revenue and a two-point market share impact.
Reports showed that GM lost $104 pre-tax per vehicle in North America that

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 The Internal Communication Black Belt Programme

year while the rest of the ‘Big Three’, Ford and Chrysler made, respectively,
$1,520 and $1,366.
“Once it was over,” continues Grates, “the first thing our CEO, Rick Wagoner,
said about ensuring it never happened again was: ‘We have to concentrate on
building relationships within this company, beginning at the plant facility level.’
For whatever reason, we’d taken our eye off how important relationships are to
creating harmony, industry and productivity – and how important information
flow and context are. Sure, we have to get things out of the door. But that doesn’t
happen in a vacuum. People need to feel confident that these things are
happening in the right way and for the right reasons – and that they know what’s
going on – long before you can even get to talk about them being productive. We
realized that disagreements like ours can be managed by a simple, rational trust
in people, along with good working relationships between employees and
‘corporate’ through line managers – all without it being a 54-day, $2billion
nightmare.”

Performance and Delivery

Today’s communicators are no longer expected to just churn out company
magazines. They now help the business meet its strategic targets, cut waste,
improve retention, and manage costs. But has the role of the front-line manager
in the communication process evolved to the same extent? We asked respondents
how they rate the process of line manager communication in their organizations.
Just 14% of communicators rated it as “good” or “very good” and among HR
professionals, this was only 11%. Forty percent of HR professionals described
managerial communication as “poor” or “very poor.”
How does measurement affect views of performance?
Only 21% of respondents measure the communication performance of managers.
However, more than twice as many of those who measure it view their managers
as effective than those who don’t. But this still means that, at most, only one in
four give managers the thumbs up. So if managerial communication is indeed as
ineffective as this, what’s the root cause? Here, the answer came back with force –
managers are just not up to the job.
This chapter assesses the shortfall in managers’ skills and capabilities and outlines
what needs to be improved. The biggest problem areas were felt to be: managers
skills at communicating upwards the views and concerns of their team (51%);
managers not acting as leaders in the organization (52%); and not knowing their
employees’ needs (49%). It was generally accepted that managers don’t lack
confidence or knowledge of the business. It is not business literacy or the
communication process that managers trip up on – it is simply in their ability to
manage and represent their own people. They know the business and they know
how to communicate. What they don’t do is get to know their own teams
intimately, listen to their issues, and then feed this back up the organization.
This was echoed in our qualitative interviews who agreed that the problems were
not just skills-based – they encompassed behaviors in management, treatment of
management, the process of communication, the harried life of the line manager
and remote management.
The role of the communication professional
In terms of behavioral blockages, respondents most commonly put the blame at

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 The Internal Communication Black Belt Programme

the door of managers themselves – 60%

said that it was not that managers lacked
Fig 2 Have you defined
communication competencies
the time to communicate, but rather that for managers?
they didn’t make the time. (Large company data)

Communication Competencies for 58%

Managers 60%

While the majority of organizations have

50%
some kind of codified package of core
competencies for leaders, the prevalence

Percentage of respondents
of specific communication competencies 40%
is far smaller. Our interviewees suggested 30%
that the likelihood of competencies being 30%
labeled “communication” is even smaller
– many of those who said they had 20%
communication competencies for leaders
12%
mentioned “people” and “team-building”
10%
skills. These qualitative findings were
validated by the quantitative data. Just
under 29% of respondents had 0%
communication competencies defined for Yes No Don't Know
their managers. This figure was
marginally higher in large companies (those with over 10,000 employees – see
Figure 2). Least likely to have the competencies were large companies in
mainland Europe (20%) and the UK (25%). They were most common in North
America (33%) and significantly more common in Asia (41%).
Defining communication competencies for managers
An excellent place to start with communication competencies for managers is the
model developed by Ed Robertson at FedEx. His was a well-researched and
widely acclaimed model, and we used his 11 “interpersonal interaction skills” as a
guide when devising our list of competencies. In this chapter, we investigate the
kinds of competencies that businesses currently employ, as well as outlining the
current trends. Here are the highlights:
• Emotional responsiveness is not a commonly used value for managers – the
bottom responses in both the full and large company data were “demonstrating
empathy” and “disclosing emotions.”
• The business comes first. “Providing direction” was listed as the most
important competency – suggesting that driving the team to higher productivity
is the most common need invested in managers.
• The listening manager. The commonness of “active listening,” “soliciting
feedback” and “encouraging input” suggests that, for those with competencies,
a key factor in them is to demonstrate that a manager’s communication
responsibility must be two-way.
Measuring Communication Effectiveness in Managers
Only one in five of our survey respondents were actually measuring the
communication performance of managers. Measurement was most common in
Information Services (31%) and Transport/Logistics (29%) and least in Public
Administration (14%) and Retail (12%). Such low scores are a stark indicator
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 The Internal Communication Black Belt Programme

Fig 3 When you track the communication performance of managers,

what exactly are you measuring? (All data, those who measure)

Changes in employee satisfaction 70%

Feedback received in 360-degree evaluations 59%

Changes to employee's understanding

54%
of the business strategy/goals

Changes in employee motivation 39%

Changes in team performance 39%

Changes to employee's understanding

37%
of their personal objectives

Changes in employee engagement 37%

Changes to employee's understanding

31%
of their personal performance

Only feedback received from employees 27%

Changes in team retention rates 26%

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70%

Percentage of respondents
that the difficulty in measuring managers’ communication effectiveness is the
same as that which has always dogged communicators: finding a “hard” measure
for a “soft” skill. The best solution is to attach measures not to the activity, but to
the changes in outcomes the activity generates. At the heart of the issue,
therefore, is which outcomes exactly to measure. We asked those who said they
measured their line managers’ communication performance to choose which
factors were most important.
The top three measures
One of the most common measures of managers’ performance was 360-degree
feedback. In total, 59% of respondents said that this was a chosen methodology.
More surprisingly, however, the single most common metric was “changes in
employee satisfaction” – 70% of respondents cited this as a preferred method of
assessment. Third was “changes to employees’ understanding of the business
strategy/goals,” with 54% electing to use this measure (see Figure 3). These top
three metrics were the same everywhere, although the extent of the prevalence
did differ – for example, 360-degree evaluations were more common in the UK
(62%) and Asia (68%) than in North America (53%).
Supervisors are NOT the preferred communicators
We found that the view of the line manager as “universally preferred
communicator” is still highly prevalent. When asked about their impetus for
concentrating on managerial communication, the majority of interviewees
claimed it was based on the “common knowledge” that managers were the most
impactful and most preferred communication channel. Many referenced
“research” that proved this. When quizzed deeper, none could actually name any
such research. And only a few interviewees had formally measured which
information streams in their own organizations were most preferred by
employees.
At the end of this chapter, Angela Sinickas has updated her landmark article,
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 The Internal Communication Black Belt Programme

“Supervisors are NOT the preferred communicators.” This piece blows away the
“myth” that employees want to receive all information from their managers. She
states that this is based on gut-instinct and false methodology – i.e. when asked to
name their “preferred communicator” in surveys and focus groups, employees
may plump for their direct manager. However, if you drill deeper and monitor
which specific pieces of information they prefer to get from their manager, the
results are startlingly open. Sinickas presents a decade’s worth of data to show
which pieces of information employees typically want to receive from managers –
figures that demonstrate that your hard work on newsletters, intranets and CEO
forums has not been misplaced.

Best Practice Training for Managers

The concept of training line managers in communication really covers two
categories: formal education or coaching (through training modules and courses);
and “spoon feeding” managers with tools, models, templates, flow charts, etc. to
help them deliver more effective briefs or communications on a day-by-day basis.
Although there is some overlap, we deal with each of these separately – the first,
we call “training” and is dealt with in this chapter. The second, “tools” is covered
in Chapter 6.
54% don’t offer training
Over half the respondents to our survey – 54% – said they offer no
communication training to any level of manager in their organization (the score
was less bleak among large companies, with 49% doing some form of leadership
communication training).
For those who do communication training, we offered three possible positive
responses on this question – that the company trains front-line, middle or senior
managers (with the option of ticking as many as were applicable). The results,
broken out, can be seen in Figure 4, below. Over one-third of organizations who
do offer training train all three levels of management in communication, and one-

Fig 4: Have you implemented communication training for managers in

your organization? (All data)
Percentage of respondents

35%
34%
30%

25%

20%

15% 16% 16%

14%
13%
10%

5% 7%

0%
Train Train middle Train senior Train both Train both Train all three
front-line managers managers front-line middle types of
managers only only managers managers managers
only and and senior
middle managers managers

Training provided for different levels of manager

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sixth train only one of the levels. Interestingly, of those that only do a couple,
twice as many offer training to front-line and middle management on
communication skills as deliver it to middle and top management. Despite the
significant trust issues with senior corporate leaders over the last few years, it
seems that more companies are still focusing their attention, therefore, on the
base skills needs when it comes to communication. This also perhaps reflects the
type of communication training typically offered – tactical and presentation skills
were a consistent training suite among interviewees.

Best Practice Communication Tools

Communicators are well-versed in producing team briefing documents,
presentation slides and Q&A sheets to facilitate better managerial
communication. In this chapter, we look at who is doing this well, which
companies use what tools, and find out who is employing the most innovative
practices. The quantitative data in this chapter provides a broad overview of the
tools in use in global organizations, with the overwhelming majority of
respondents (73%) using communication toolkits.
TOP TIP: Make team briefing sheets vocal
Effective team briefings by managers are a critical component of the
communication cascade. But many will know that, all too often, the core
information gets lost along the way. Bill Quirke argues that this is simply because
the communication has not been drafted with the right medium in mind – the
voice.
“Everything you produce for managers has to be written to be ‘said not read,’” he
argues. “But presentation notes for managers are commonly prepared in
ignorance of that. A communicator has sat down and written a draft that’s wholly
accurate and possibly intelligible to a reader – but which no-one listening to
would understand. The listener has no document to read along with, so you must

Fig 5: Which of the following do you consider the biggest barrier to rewarding and recognizing
communication performance in managers? (All data, large company data, HR professionals)

4% All data Large companies HR professionals

A lack of buy-in from HR to make
communication a performance measure 6%
0%

Insufficient funds to reward 7%

and/or recognize 7%
communication performance
8%

A lack of buy-in 25%

from senior management
to make communication 25%
a performance measure 32%

32%
The company’s culture does not
include recognizing communication 29%
as a core competency for managers 24%

32%
6%
Lack of method to measure
32%
communication performance
36%

0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40%

Percentage of respondents
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address how people take in information aurally – and that’s a very different
dynamic. When you’re reading a document, you take in the information as a
whole. But when you’re listening to a speech, the last point in the sentence is the
one you get. If you have long, rambling sentences about how ‘This is the initial
phase of an integrated pan-European review process which will deliver its
conclusions in the third financial quarter,’ your employees will miss the
punchline. Is the ‘third financial quarter’ the point? Is ‘pan-European’? But if you
use short, sharp sentences, with the key point at the end of each one, you’ll
achieve much better comprehension. Even more so if you make sure the language
is clear and free of Latinate management speak.” For this second point, he
suggests, look at the way union leaders excel at deploying visual language – the
“thin end of the wedge” or “salami-slicing” – to get their message across. “That
kind of phrase is instantly recognizable to the listener, and it’s easily repeatable,
which is why these people excel at communicating.” (Bill Quirke, director,
Synopsis Communication Consulting.)

Rewarding and Recognizing Effective Communication

“Our greatest problem is that we all agree line manager communication is an area
that needs attention, but no one will support it with rewards or consequences.
Without the necessary reinforcement, our efforts to improve the front-line
managers’ communication skills are somewhat futile.”
Respondent to Melcrum QuickPoll, September 2003
The views of this respondent to a survey last year was an exemplar of the many
conversations we have had with communication professionals on the issue of line
managers’ reward structures. Without some form of incentive for line managers to
actively communicate better, the common view is that any attempt to rectify the
problem is just swimming against the tide.
However, the majority is now tackling the issue head-on: auditing current
performance, tracking results and fighting to have communication competencies
in place. Without these clear measures and clearly defined expectations, the
campaign to get managers rewarded on communication cannot get off the
ground.
We have therefore taken a broader view on the issue in this chapter. “Rewards
and Recognition” is obviously not just about formal cash incentives or
ceremonies – it is about simply getting communication to impact something that
matters to managers. We also asked in our survey: what is the single biggest
barrier to implementing rewards and recognition of managers’ communication?
See Figure 5, previous page, for the key findings.

What’s WorkingTM
Mercer’s What’s WorkingTM research, conducted last year, is a landmark social
study of over 5,500 employees working in medium-large organizations in the US
and UK. This year, the What’s WorkingTM research project is expanding to include
14 additional countries.
The study asked employees a range of questions about their work experience
including: leadership; commitment; management; and communication. The
survey sample was stratified by industry sector, job level, and gender. This
chapter presents an overview of the What’s WorkingTM findings that relate to the

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 The Internal Communication Black Belt Programme

issues of “communication” and “management” and shows how the views of US

and UK managers and employees compare.
Trust in management communication
One of the major challenges for communication professionals and senior leaders
in the new millennium is raising trust levels within the organization. The
combination of major corporate scandals and workforce downsizing has eroded
trust to an all-time low.
The What’s WorkingTM study asked respondents whether they trust their
management to communicate honestly – a clear pre-requisite for trust (see Figure
6, below). Less than 40% of US and UK respondents answered in the
affirmative. Amongst management – a group expected to have higher levels of
trust – the problem is still evident, with less than 50% of UK and 60% of US
managers responding positively to the question. More significant still is the
finding that the longer people have worked for an organization the less likely they
are to trust management communication – 53% of UK employees with less than
two years service trust management, declining to only 33% of those who have
over 15 years service. In this illuminating chapter, Mercer selects some
segmentations of this data for the benefit of Melcrum’ readers, giving us a handle
on how employees and managers feel about leadership and communication in
their organizations.

Fig 6: Trust in management communication (Mercer)

% trust in management communication

National norm - UK 39%

National norm - US 34%

Senior management - UK 49%

Senior management - US 60%

UK less than 2 years service 53%

UK 2-5 years 37%

UK 6-14 years 35%

UK 15 years and over 33%

© Mercer Human Resource Consulting

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 The Internal Communication Black Belt Programme

FEDEX: Managerial climate and competency model

An excellent place to start when looking at the issue of communication

competencies is with the work of Ed Robertson, for 25 years a
communication manager at FedEx.
In the 1990s, Robertson did a great deal of academic research of, among others,
the work of Jack Gibb on “supportive” and “defensive” communication
behaviors. From this, he constructed a model for the “ideal” organizational
communication climate (see Figure 1, below). The model was fed by two key
processes: how open the flow of information is in the organization, and how
supportive the workplace is in its human interactions. In both factors, he found
that the role of the line manager was critical to success. He therefore used his
research findings to generate a list of skills and practices for managers that would
meet the requirements of the two sides of the model. This was later piloted as a
competency framework within FedEx, which was measured to create a
comprehensive index of managerial communication performance.

Eleven “Interpersonal Interaction Skills” for managers

1. Active listening 7. Providing feedback

2. Empathetic listening 8. Soliciting feedback
3. Checking accuracy 9. Giving instructions
4. Clarifying meaning 10. Managing conflict
5. Disclosing emotions 11. Constructive feedback
6. Encouraging input

Five “Managerial Information-sharing Practices”

1. Communicates job information 4. Communicates strategic

2. Communicates personal information
information 5. Communicates upward
3. Communicates operational information
information

Fig 1: The Managerial Communication Climate Model

Open and Supportive

Information Communication Interactive
Openness Climate Supportiveness

Topic Information
Adequacy Flow

Five Managerial Eleven Managerial

Information Sharing Interaction skills
Practices

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¤ CASE
STUDY
SIEMENS: Leadership Framework

In addition to the 17 “Global Capabilities” for leaders at Siemens, the

organization has a structure called the “Siemens Leadership Framework.” It
is, in essence, a competency philosophy, centring on four quadrants of a
scorecard: Drive, Focus, Impact, Guide.
Each of those four areas has a subset of competencies (some derived from the 17
Global Capabilities) within it.
Siemens Power Generation
In the Power Generation business, “Communication skills” sits under the Impact
quadrant of the framework, along with “Assertiveness,” “Networking Skills,” and
“Customer Focus.” “Essentially, we want to make sure that we have managers
who have a balanced view of the results they need to get,” says Stephen
Urquhart, lead communicator at Siemens Power Generation. “They need to have
performance objectives, measures and rewards that are based on getting results
for the business, but then also on being available to their employees, being good
role models, and those softer hygiene issues.”
As such, the Siemens Leadership Framework forms the basis of all managerial
appraisals across the Siemens organization. At Power Generation, this is done
through a process known as “People Development and Performance” or “PDP.”
“To all intents and purposes, it’s management by objective,” says Urquhart. “And
although all employees go through PDP, for managers there is a section that
specifically grades them against the Leadership Framework, as well as one that
marks them against the Siemens Balanced Scorecard.”
Manager’s PDPs are done with their own senior manager, in which they grade
the performance of the manager and then compare ratings. The form covers
open-ended feedback on:
• Areas of responsibility: What are the manager’s technical, commercial and
managerial areas of responsibility?
• Competencies: Which skills, experience and knowledge should be particularly
strong to fulfil the areas of responsibility?
• Objectives: Which objectives (in each of the four areas of the Siemens
scorecard – Financials, Customers/Markets, Processes/Innovations, and
Employees) will the manager work on in the coming period?
It then asks the appraising manager and the appraized to give performance scores
on each of 18 areas within the Siemens Leadership Framework. There are six
possible scores: three areas (“Needs Improvement,” “Meets Expectations,” and
“Exceeds Expectations”) each of which can be ticked in one of two ways –
trending upwards towards the next area, or trending downward towards the
previous. (See Figure 1, for an example of this area of the PDP).

Siemens Plc.
In the UK Siemens organization, a similar strategy is used, with slight
modifications. Assessment is done through a process called “management
dialogue.” The scoring system and specific competency list behind each of the
four Siemens Leadership Framework quadrants is slightly different.
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 The Internal Communication Black Belt Programme

Fig 1: Siemens PDP

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USAA: Tips for delivering training

Betsy Pasley has several top tips from her own experiences in terms of
delivering effective managerial training.
TOP TIP: Train leaders to deliver it
The first win is that the communication team at USAA is actually training leaders
within the business to deliver the communications class – and this is something
she sees as crucial to its success. “In terms of getting managers engaged, it’s
vital,” she says. “This is being delivered by the company’s own management, not
by some outsiders coming in. It’s their own leadership telling them what’s to be
done. That’s extremely powerful, and it’s really paying off for us, because the
conversations in those sessions are dynamic, topical and substantiated by
someone high up in the business.”

TOP TIP: Lead classes from the bottom up

Another lesson learned has been in the way the class develops – from the bottom
up. Discussion and interaction are core, critical needs in any type of training, but
at USAA they are positively encouraged to push the direction of the class.
“This has been really a crucial learning for us as we’ve gone along,” she says. “In
every single one of the hundreds of modules we’ve run, we’ve found that there
are always a couple of managers in every class who really get behind the message
– people who see the value in it instantly and say to everyone something like:
‘Hey, this is like when we had that big financial changeover last year.’ So we’ve
learned to build it into the way we do the classes. We look out for that level of
engagement with the messages, and we respond to it, and then let those people
start driving the content of the class itself, rather than the person presenting.”
The communications and training teams have even been collecting and pooling
these stories, analogies and anecdotes – and then using them not only to drive the
classes in which they were quoted, but to build up a bank of stories to strengthen
and validate other classes. “If we can use really timely and relevant examples with
our audiences in the training, or use timely events that have resonated with other
groups in the exercises, then that’s going to be a lot more compelling and will
instantly help ‘connect the dots’ more than some standard generic ‘business
problem’ template brought in from the outside.”

TOP TIP: Don’t frighten people away

Finally, she feels it has been important not to convey to managers a huge sense of
foreboding about their talents or the work involved. “That’s partly emotional
intelligence stuff,” she explains. “We try to impress upon them simply the
importance of them knowing what they are good at – and that the point is not
necessarily that they must (or can) achieve peak brilliance at this, just that they
know when and where to turn where they are not so good.”
It is also, in part, she says, facilitating an understanding of how to prioritize
time-consuming activities like face-to-face communication. And this despite the
fact that Pasley is a passionate advocate of face-to-face. “It’s just a mistake to go
in on a crusade like that,” she says. “You’ll just scare them and they’ll end up
ignoring it all.”
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In part aided by a audit from Sinickas Communications Inc., Pasley’s team

stresses the when and why of face-to-face communication. “We set up the
business case with them, we talk about the importance of personal leadership
communication. But then we also take in the data from our audits and explain
that they don’t have to communicate everything face-to-face. So we focus on the
key issues where face-to-face communication is important, and say, ‘For the rest,
send an e-mail or put out a memo,’ and so on. It’s important that they don’t leave
the class fazed by how much they have to know and remember – or else they’ll do
their best to forget it!”
The final, crucial, part, she says, is then making sure there are tools available to
support the training, to use this knowledge on an ongoing basis, and remind
them of it whenever it comes up, to keep the learning fresh and alive.

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