COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR the magazine for corporate communications and public relations
eu ropean issu e
Number 2/2015 www.communication-director.com
Direct! Empower! Inspire! The real cost of a seat at the table The responsibilities of having a voice on the executive board
Looking at leadership and communication
Views from the top What Europe’s CEOs want to talk about
Mentorship and motivation How to inspire the next generation of communicators
WHERE EUROPE‘S COMMUNICATION COMMUNITY COMES TOGETHER
Herbert Heitmann Bayer AG
Edna Ayme Nissan
Nicolas Brusson BlaBlaCar
Moran Cerf Kellogg School of Management
Machteld Merens Randstad Holding
25/26 Greg Dawson Samsung
JUNE 2015 BRUSSELS
EUROPEAN
COMMUNICAT ION SUMMIT2015
I N T E R N AT I O N A L C O N F E R E N C E F O R C O R P O R AT E C O M M U N I C AT I O N A N D P U B L I C R E L AT I O N S STORYTELLING
INTERNAL COMMUNICATION
SOCIAL MEDIA & ONLINE COMMUNITY
POLITICAL & PUBLIC AFFAIRS
REPUTATION MANAGEMENT
CHANGE COMMUNICATION
BRAND MANAGEMENT
COMMUNICATION STRATEGY
FOCUS TOPIC 2015 Lasse Hoegfeld Jyske Bank
Maria Sebregondi Moleskine
Tom Betts Financial Times
A N T I C I PAT I O N &DISRUPTION COMMUNICATIONS AT THE CUTTING-EDGE
Frederik Pferdt Google
Roger Strandahl E.ON
Christiaan Prins Unilever
Markus Weldon Alcatel-Lucent
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger Oxford Internet Institute
Gabi Zedlmayer Hewlett-Packard
W W W. C O M M U NI CAT I O N-SU M M I T. E U
Bill McAndrews BMW Group
Angeles Moreno University Rey Juan Carlos Madrid
Mattias Radström AB Electrolux
Pieter Bosschaart Mr. Prezident
Dani Buijtenhek danibu
Viviane Huybrecht KBC Group
Aykan Gulten Coca-Cola Icecek
Tony Bosma Extend Limits
Ben Hunt Amadeus IT Group
Reidar Gjaerum Statoil ASA
Emily Gibbs Financial Times
Egmont Philips ING Group
Per Nilsson Volvo Trucks
Inge Wallage IWA
Seth Faison The Global Fund
Rich Kylberg Arrow Electronics
Jayne Lewis The Chalfont Project
Sumeet Chatterjee RPG Enterprises
REGISTER NOW!
Christopher Storck Quadriga University
Anna Mitchell Coats plc
Ignacio Tena Rubio BBVA
Scott Dille Novo Nordisk
Richard Doherty IECA
Paul van Hattem Mr. Prezident
Piet Verhoeven University of Amsterdam
Sabine Schauer Novelis
Ulrika Romantschuk Fazer Group
Fredrik Tukk Maersk Drilling
Florence Ranson FoodDrinkEurope
Louise Wadman Lloyds Banking Group
COMMUNICATION
DIRECTOR
Magazine for Corporate Communications and Public Relations
Mark Redgrove Orgalime
Bernd Rettberg Tebble
Caroline Tieney The Chalfont Project
Dr. Jörg E. Allgäuer Sky Deutschland
Ansgar Zerfaß University of Leipzig
Kendy Jason UBS Japan
What does brand and digital leadership look like in 2015? Old-school ideas of brand and digital effectiveness are lagging behind today’s mobile world. So how can leading companies disrupt traditions and deliver brand experiences that truly matter online?
Join us at the European Communications Summit next month, to gain first-hand, exclusive access to our latest research findings. We’ll be revealing today’s Euro100 brand and digital leaders and sharing how they deliver purposeful brands consistently across websites, social media and mobile. 11:15–12:15, Thursday 25 June 2015 SQUARE – Brussels Meeting Centre Rue Mont des Arts B-1000 Brussels, Belgium
Limited spaces, book your place early by emailing: events@ry.com
@RadleyYeldar
ry.com
EDITORIAL
Welcome, There is a lot to learn from leaders: especially when considering that all of us will be called upon at some point in our personal and certainly our professional lives to make hard decisions and manage a team to victory. However, the exact nature of a great leader, and the skills that make them so successful, are often harder to pin down. While easy to admire they are tougher to analyse, with leaders coming in all shapes and sizes, leading with different styles and through many different circumstances. For example, consider how the leadership strategies change between one leader, managing several multi-disciplinary teams and another, helping to lead an entire organisation from the top table. So to delve deeper into what makes a great leader, we present to you this new-look edition of Communication Director, set out with the hope of inspiring and helping you to hone your own leadership skills. Amongst the pages of our cover theme section we bring you stories from communication leaders with years of experience under their belts, and thought-leaders with valuable academic perspectives. They share own takes on leadership and provide up to date research on what makes a leader tick. Still on the agenda are our regular topics in order to continue our delivery of those themes most important in the communication and public relations sphere.
MARC-OLIVER VOIGT
Photo Private
Publisher
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2/15
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Out of the shadows, into the light What happens when a communicator sits on the executive board?
ISSUE FOCUS
Leadership & Communication
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Sharing the excitement It’s the responsibility of leaders to pass on their wisdom to the younger generation
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Covering the pole positions 68
A balancing act Heading up more than one department requires discipline, delimitation and delegation
The art of communicative leadership The history books are full of examples of great leadership
8 • AGENDA SETTER
18 • DIGITAL
Standing out with stunts
Digital first! Increased digital thinking leads to more participation at work
Cut through the noise by making a public relations splash
24 • INDUSTRY FOCUS
12 • PR ESSENTIALS
Here comes the science bit – concentrate!
Presenting the CEO perspective
Bringing clarity to complex science communications
European CEOs share what strategic communication means to them
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COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR 2/2015
Photo Private
The issues, developments, hopes and fears keeping today’s CEOs on their toes
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CONTENT
36 • INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS
I heard the news today, oh boy
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Be yourself; everybody else is already taken How external coaching develops leadership skills
How negative press affects morale
40 • PUBLIC AFFAIRS
Speaking for the ICC Communicating the mission of the International Criminal Court
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Lessons from the podium Tips on inspiring the best out of your team, courtesy of the great conductors
44 • MARKETING
The knock-on effect Engaging online influencers with smart content
46 • CRISIS
Cultural diversity and crisis communication The search for new perspectives
50 • THEORY
Feeling lucky? 86
54 • INTERVIEW
Words of encouragement The rules of rhetoric allow charismatic leaders to transform their organisations
Frederik G. Pferdt Google’s head of innovation and creativity on leadership and trust
How organisations handle risk and uncertainty
90 • COMMUNICATION READER
Books
Photo thinkstock.com; DB AG / Philipp von Recklinghausen / lux-fotografen.de
A selection of recent and forthcoming titles 28 • HR 92 •ASSOCIATION
Symptom or disease?
European Association of Communication Directors
It’s time to talk about bullying in the workplace
The latest developments in the EACD
32 • MANAGEMENT 98 • QUESTIONS TO
The crucial first 100 days
Magdalena Wawrzonkowska
The do’s and don’ts of surviving your first few months as a manager
Introducing European communicators
COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR 2/2015
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AGENDA SETTER
Standing out with stunts Well-crafted stunts can catapult your cause into the media. But how to pull them off with measurable impact? BY ANNA GARDINER
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COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR 2/2015
AGENDA SETTER
and Facebook posts forced Starbucks to abandon the stunt and left the organisation with a poorer reputation than before the campaign. So how can you avoid such negative sentiment and ensure your stunt is a help and not a hindrance? To gain a better insight into how to get it right, Communication Director asked two communicators behind successful stunts to share their processes.
“We wanted to do something that got our message across effectively but also started to reposition ANZ in the minds of people.”
Photo Keren Dobia
W
What’s pink, glittery and accepts all major credit cards?
ith new technological developments and the associated viral culture, the creative possibilities for public relations activities and the impact they can achieve are growing exponentially. This brings new potential for organisations to champion their messages by matching their communications to an accompanying eye-catching stunt to have real impact on their audience. By going viral, stunts now have the power to both increase awareness of your organisation’s brand and to change your audience’s attitude towards it. You only need to consider the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge to see the global reach and social impact campaigns can create by combining strong content with a striking stunt. When celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates posted videos of themselves pouring ice cold water over their heads, it helped spark a viral sensation which saw the ALS Association gain a 3,500 per cent increase in donations, receiving money from more than three million people around the world. As powerful as a stunt can be in helping a campaign reach a global audience, the search for the superlative stunt is a serious challenge. Not only do they require a lot of research and often a lot of resources, when things go wrong it can quickly escalate on social media. Only last month, Starbucks received an angry backlash when their baristas wrote ‘race together’ on coffee cups as part of an anti-racism campaign. Thousands of angry tweets
In 2014, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, or ANZ for short, transformed 10 ordinary ATMs into sequin studded, fur covered GAYTMs to celebrate and promote ANZ becoming the principle partner of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. The surprise reveal of these GAYTMs caused a global stir on social media, bringing the bank over 62 million media impressions and thousands of new customers. Off the back of this success, the GAYTMs returned in February this year, with a new feature, ‘the only GAYTM in the village’, where over 20,000 Australians voted for a rural town to have one of the creative cash machines installed. We spoke to ANZ’s head of marketing, Carolyn Bendall, to better understand how they created such success. “When looking to do these big and impactful things”, Carolyn recommends, “it’s always important to stay commercial as well. Be very clear about what it is that you’re trying to achieve and build a business case to do these great things that you know are going to work for the organisation and have the return your organisation is looking for”. Carolyn also stresses that when planning a stunt it’s essential to ensure that it is authentic to your brand. When talking about the GAYTMs she says, “I honestly believe it worked for us not only because of the great ideas and great execution but also because it’s true to our brand.” While ANZ only became the principle partner of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in 2014, it had been a major sponsor of the event for the seven years prior to the GAYTM campaign. During this time, it had extensively communicated the bank’s belief in diversity, inclusion and respect. Because these messages had already been made public by ANZ, Carolyn believes that, when the time came to create the GAYTM campaign, “we had the right to.” She comments further that, “I see some brands, when things fail on social media or fail overall, it’s because they don’t really have the right to be in that space in the first place”. A great example of this is the already-mentioned Starbucks ‘race together’ campaign. With no prior strong anti-racism ties to the Starbucks brand, the campaign was not perceived as authentic by their audiences who were consequently critical of the organisation.
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PR ESSENTIALS
Presenting the CEO perspective CEOs are figureheads of their organisations, key elements of corporate reputation. Their biographical information is carefully presented on their corporate websites; but what are their attitudes to strategic communication? We asked a handful of Europe’s leading CEOs.
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Kurt Bock
PR ESSENTIALS
“The overarching goal of communications is to maintain and increase trust in our company and thus ensure our license to operate.”
José Antonio Álvarez
“Strategic internal and external communication propagates our culture internally, and helps broadcast out to the world why we exist and how we do things.”
Vittorio Colao
“Communication with customers is key to maintaining their trust and confidence and to building long-term relationships with them.”
KURT BOCK
Photos BASF SE; Private (2)
JOSÉ ANTONIO ÁLVAREZ
1 Chief Executive Officer, Banco Santander, S.A. — 2 Age: 54 — 3 Start date: 2015 — 4 Previous position: Chief Financial Officer, Banco Santander — 5 Education: BA (Hons) Economics & Business, Santiago de Compostela University; MA Business Administration (University of Chicago) — 6 Other leadership roles: chairman, European Banking Federation Banking Supervision Committee, 2009 to 2012. Banco Santander – Industry: banking; Founded: 1857; Employees: 185,405; Headquarters: Santander
1 Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors, BASF SE — 2 Age: 56 — 3 Start date: 2011 — 4 Previous position: Member of the Board of Executive Directors, Chief Financial Officer — 5 Education: Business Administration, Universities of Münster and Cologne/Pennsylvania State University; Diploma, University of Cologne; Doctorate in Economics, University of Bonn — 6 Other leadership roles: board member, International Council of Chemical Associations (ICCA); member of the board and executive committee, The European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC); vice president, German chemical industry association (VCI). BASF SE – Industry: chemicals; Founded: 1865,; Employees: 113,292; Headquarters: Ludwigshafen
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VITTORIO COLAO
1 Vittorio Colao, Chief Executive,Vodafone Group Plc — 2 Age: 53 — 3 Start date: 2008 — 4 Previous position: Chief Executive, RCS MediaGroup — 5 Education: Business Degree, Bocconi University; MBA, Harvard Business School — 6 Other leadership roles: member, international advisory board, Bocconi University, Italy; member, steering committee, European Round Table of Industrialists. Vodafone Group – Industry: telecommunications; Founded: 1982; Employees: 89,146; Headquarters: London
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DIGITAL
Digital first! By being relevant, compelling and shareable, digital communication can have a measureable impact on the business bottom line. BY THORSTEN STRAUĂ&#x;
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DIGITAL
I
n January this year, Deutsche Bank celebrated a premiere: when we published the Bank’s results for the full year 2014, we broadcast a video statement by our co-CEOs for the first time ever. Jürgen Fitschen and Anshu Jain explained the relevant figures and key messages of the past year. Feedback on the video was great. The New York Times quoted it, numerous online media integrated it into their websites, television stations used it and we reached a vast audience through social media. This new video format is a good example of how Deutsche Bank uses the opportunities offered by digitalisation. It illustrates how corporate strategy goes hand in hand with digital and corporate communications. To put principles into practice, we established ground rules to ensure our digital communications are part of our identity. More about that later.
Screenshots Deutsche Bank/YouTube
Changing the competitive landscape Digitalisation affects us at all levels: social, political and financial. It also impacts companies and their business: the number of contact points are declining in the offline world while stakeholder dialogue is increasingly taking place online. Products and sales are becoming more digital. Social media and digitalisation are changing how companies interact with the outside world. The financial sector is no exception. In the past, clients wanting to take out a loan were advised by staff in bank branches. Today, clients can use an app to handle large parts of this process. Digital strategies, smart products and more efficient processes are becoming decisive for success in business. Every service should
therefore be aligned to the digital first concept. This means that thinking about how digital tools could facilitate the advisory service when taking out a loan, for example, should already be embedded into product development. However, without communication that connects with our audience it is impossible for us to create added value digitally. Interactivity as well as new participation and recommendation models are already influencing every link on the value chain. This is why banks need to be where people obtain information, interact and engage in discussions. These are places where banks must actively present their content, products and services. Banks must recognise and make better use of the trend towards a mobile internet and the economics of inclusion through social networks. A bank can only achieve this if it makes digitalisation a core topic for the entire organisation. Digital communications have to become an integral part of corporate strategy, which means they are emerging from a niche area to a company-wide function. The priority for content and channel management is to develop comprehensive concepts to achieve a consistent and significant digital footprint for the company. New formats must have digital DNA and communication content needs to be more tightly knit with topics that promise to appeal to a broad digital audience. Five principles for successful digital communications guide us at Deutsche Bank: 1) Courage to innovate: If you try to exclude all risks, you can easily miss today’s digital trends. Of course, there are legal and regulatory restrictions and observing them is a must. However, digital communications need managers willing to
COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR 2/2015
Deutsche Bank released short animated films on YouTube to explain reasons for – and solutions to – the euro crisis
venture something new. Companies need to promote a culture that encourages staff to put forward their ideas and supports their review and implementation. If not, someone else quickly takes the lead in the digital world. Managers must be able to accept that an idea can also fail. This, too, requires courage. Digitalisation cannot take place in just one functional area of a company. It has to be part of the firm’s identity and presupposes a culture that embraces opportunity instead of risk. This creates an environment for employees to develop. In fact, this is the only way for a company to proactively shape digitalisation, instead of being driven by it, and to sustainably secure its leadership in innovation. To put it succinctly: digitalisation is a leadership issue. 2) A comprehensive strategy for content and channels: Digital communications must form an integral part of corporate communications, both strategically and operationally. Strategic means that digital communication itself must become a central topic of corporate communications.
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INDUSTRY FOCUS
Here comes the science bit – concentrate! Whether talking about the Higgs Boson particle, dark matter or artificial intelligence, storytelling, demystification and stakeholder relations play their part in complex science communications INTERVIEW BY PHILIPPE BORREMANS
P H I L I P P E B O R R E M A N S What are your biggest challenges as professional communicators who have to explain something far removed from consumer products? J A M E S G I L L I E S For us it is a challenge but not the challenge that I thought it was going to be. Way back before the Large Hadron Collider started we did market research to figure out what people understand about science. My prejudice was that communicating the value of basic, blue sky research was going to be a
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real challenge. But what surprised me is that people fundamentally get the need for basic research but at the same time, they don’t understand it. They don’t know what’s inside an atom, they don’t know how the universe ticks and they haven’t got a clue what a Higgs Boson is, but they very clearly say that humankind should be doing basic research. Then they wonder what practical benefit it brings. So that’s the real challenge for us – engaging people with the process of science, and communicating the whole range of societal benefits it brings.
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Chris, people who are interested in technology understand supercomputing, for instance, or the impact of big data. But when you’re talking about computational engineering, parallel computing or computational biochemistry, does IBM face the same challenge as CERN? CHRIS SCIACCA Yes. We’re over 100 years old and people still associate IBM with being a PC company, which we haven’t produced in over a decade. So the challenge is embracing our legacy while talking about the future. For example, here at the Zurich lab we are most famous for our two Nobel prizes for very fundamental science, but we do even more research in applied areas like software and services — including the security software used on billions of smart cards. We like to say that we span everything from atoms to analyt-
Photo CERN/Maximilien Brice
INDUSTRY FOCUS
ics here at IBM research. That comes with its own challenges because we need to be able to encapsulate this storyline to help people understand why we are looking at things at the Nano scale and how that translates into making computers more energy efficient and analysing data faster. It is a difficult story to tell because it spans multiple disciplines, you have a large audience that you’re reaching, from the person that wants to know “how is this going to impact IBM’s stock price?” to the person that wants to know “why is this a company I want to work for?”
Inside one of the particle collision detectors at the Large Hadron Collider
“It is a difficult story to tell because it spans multiple disciplines and you have a large audience.”
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CERN is an international public organisation and IBM a commercial corporation. Both organisations have to explain why huge amounts of money are spent on research – is that a challenge? C H R I S S C I ACC A We do a lot, particularly here in Europe. We work with the European Commission, we participate in many FP7 and Horizon 2020 projects and it’s very important that the average European tax payer understands why this funding is going to IBM. We speak about how this is going to translate into the consumer marketplace, for example, in topics like data protection. And of course its impact on job creation and the economy. J A M E S G I L L I E S C E R N does have a substantial budget; we’re very open and transparent about that. The income from our member states is in the order of one billion Swiss francs per year. We put that into context by comparing ourselves to large universities: our member states have around 300 universities with a similar income to us. We also talk about how we’re an organisation with 21 member states and we share the cost around countries. One thing that is extremely important to us is that although I have a great team here at CERN, we also have contacts in all of our member states and other stakeholder nations throughout the world. When we’re telling our stories here, there are people telling them in the Netherlands, in Germany, everywhere around the world, making them locally relevant and telling them in terms that their stakeholders appreciate as well. What are the tactics that work in making things more understandable for the average stakeholder? C H R I S S C I ACC A One of the things that we work very closely with scientists on is storytelling. How can they talk about their research the same way they
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HUMAN RESOURCES
SYMPTOM OR DISEASE?
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HUMAN RESOURCES
Grappling with bullying in the workplace means taking a long hard look at the areas of organisational functioning that enable bullying to occur – especially the interface between managers and employees. BY MICHELLE TUCKEY
I
once read an article that named bullying the cancer of the workplace. I used to agree with this belief. Like cancer, the most severe consequence of bullying for its victims can be death or other devastating health effects – through suicide or by creating strain and vulnerability to mental and physical illness. Like cancer, bullying will affect a majority of employees during their working life, as a victim or a witness, or perhaps as the alleged bully. The fifth European Working Conditions Survey suggests that each year across the European Union four per cent of workers are exposed to bullying at work (the figure is nearly 10 per cent in some countries). Yet at any one time up to 70 per cent of employees report being bullied on a less frequent or less intense basis. And like cancer, there is no silver bullet to cure bullying; it is considered by many as being an intractable problem. To illustrate, well over 200 academic studies have been published on the negative effects of bullying and the potential causes but just 12 published studies have evaluated methods to tackle it.
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Approaches to bullying prevention within organisations highlight aggressive behaviour as the problem that needs to be treated. The rationale of existing prevention programmes is to increase employees’ awareness, self-confidence and skills in managing negative workplace interactions and/or to improve social relationships more generally. Priority has also been given to anti-bullying policies that clearly define bullying and emphasise management commitment to zero tolerance. While such policies are a key ingredient in addressing inappropriate behaviour at work, unfortunately they do not prevent bullying or shape organisational responses to it. The ultimate effect of anti-bullying policies and existing training programmes is to place responsibility on individual employees to regulate their own behaviour, rather than on eliminating the underlying processes that allow bullying to occur. So is bullying the cancer of the workplace? During the last 10 years researching this topic I’ve come to understand one fundamental point of difference: unlike cancer, bullying is not the disease. Rather, bullying is a symptom of poor organisational functioning. Treating the symptom – focussing only, or even primarily, on the bullying behaviour itself – will not stop the underlying illness. To prevent bullying and to resolve issues connected to harmful behaviour, managers at all levels need to make changes to restore to full health certain vital aspects of organisational functioning.
Unanswered questions What underscores my view of bullying as just one of a range of undesirable symptoms of underlying organisational ill health? For a long time, academics have known that the balance of evidence highlights organisational rather than individual factors as the primary contributors to workplace bullying. Across the body of scholarly research,
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MANAGEMENT
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 The crucial first 100 days 32
COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR 2/2015
MANAGEMENT
When communication managers take on new leadership roles it can be a tricky situation for the company as well as for the manager. How to succeed in the new position? New research offers some insights. BY ALEXANDER GUTZMER
On
January 10, 1999, television history was made. The first episode of the ground-breaking series “The Sopranos” aired for the very first time. Viewers were shocked, not only because of the frequent bursts of violence but also because the violence clashed with the family orientation that was also part of the show. Both elements were embodied by the lead character, Tony Soprano. The show established Tony as a complex character, but also as one who is very conscious about the way he represents himself in his professional environment. Tony is a mobster and his major career move is to take over the New Jersey branch of the New York mafia. In the first episode, he positions himself for this role through a display of pure (in his case, criminal) energy. He chases a man who owes him money, and eventually runs him over with his car. The poor man then gets a beating, together with a great deal of “Where’s my money!” being shouted.
This display of violence has three target groups: a) the victim, b) Tony’s nephew Christopher, who will spread the word among the other New Jersey mafiosi, and c) the general public, represented by a couple of bystanders witnessing Tony’s performance. If we subtract from the scene all the elements of criminality and mafia-style misbehaviour, what remains is an example of very conscious – and also quite smart – career management. Tony knows he will soon take over New Jersey so he establishes himself as a strong leader, a man who knows what he wants and who is clear in his actions if he does not get it. Tony symbolically creates a sense of respect (externally towards the bystanders) and belonging (internally towards his nephew, with whom he bonds throughout the scene). And he signals: “Once I reign, the rules of what we do will be rewritten.” Obviously, Tony has a clear plan. The management situation Tony finds himself in (preparing to take over New Jersey) is by no means untypical. Each day, new leaders take on power somewhere, especially in change-prone environments such as internationally operating firms. It is clear (and we know this from business literature as much as from reporting on politics, business or sport) that the first 100 days are crucial to succeed in a new job, not only for new chief executive officers but also on lower hierarchical levels. Whenever someone takes on a new job that involves leadership elements, the question of how to prepare for the new role must be answered. Do you have to bring an elaborate strategy with you? How distinctly are you supposed to position yourself beforehand? And, once in the new office, how much change makes sense in the first few days? How do you communicate the change?
COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR 2/2015
And what to do with employees who hinder the implementation of the change processes? These questions are particularly nagging for someone taking over a leadership position in communications. In order to answer some of these questions, I conducted a survey among communication professionals who recently took on new jobs that included leadership responsibilities. We used a public relations newsletter and sent a questionnaire to candidates whose change to a new position had been reported in the newsletter. My first question was simply: “When taking on the new job, did you have an elaborate plan about the strategic measures to be taken?” Only 14 per cent of all interviewees definitely had such a plan. Apparently, a clear strategy on what to do once in the new job can by no means be seen as standard. Now, this can be read either as conscious flexibility or as lack of preparation. Whatever the reason, the call for careful strategic preparation found in several management books can by no means be seen as fulfilled.
Questions, plans and strategies Interestingly, most of those interviewees who had a plan had agreed about it explicitly with top management (80 per cent) and they usually managed to execute their plan successfully (70 per cent). This indicates that a clear written plan can reduce the inherent insecurity of what to tackle first within the initial 100 days on the new job . But what about those managers without a plan? Should they have formulated one? Only 15 per cent felt that this was
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I heard the news today, oh boy How bad news affects employees and what this means for internal communication. BY SABI N E EI NWI LLER AN D CH RISTI N E KORN
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he fact that bad news is more attention-grabbing than good news is old news. Evolutionary psychology teaches us that this is a result of human survival instinct: ignoring a dramatic event could negatively affect a person’s health or existence and therefore needs to be attended to for reasons of survival. The modern business equivalent of the Pleistocene era’s sabre-tooth tiger are events like business failure or economic downturn because they represent a threat to our economic wellbeing. This applies particularly to those who are most closely connected, physically and emotionally, to an organisation: its employees. For them, negative news about their employer contains a threat, if not always to their life then certainly to their reputation, since they are perceived as part of the organisation.
COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR 2/2015
Thus, bad news about an organisation is particularly relevant to its employees, and they always pay close attention to it. Employees also infer from media coverage how well or badly the organisation is esteemed, which is relevant to the formation of their identification with the organisation.
Bad news day If the attack of the sabre-tooth tiger was expected, our prehistoric ancestors had a chance to prepare themselves and gear up for the threat. But when the attack caught the person off guard, he or she was extremely vulnerable and most likely reacted in a disadvantageous man-
Photo www.thinkstock.com
IX NXT X EX RX NX AX L
ner. Exactly the same is true for employees. If they learn bad news about their employer from an external source such as the media, they are more likely to be shocked and taken aback than if they had been informed about it beforehand by their employer. Also, trust in their employer takes a hit because employees assume that the organisation’s management team knew about the unfavourable event and withheld this information from its staff. In a series of empirical studies we analysed how employees respond to negative news about their employer and how organisations deal with it through internal communication. Despite the many recommendations found in handbooks on internal and crisis communication that stress the importance of “internal before external communication”, we found that employees often learn bad news from the media. In a survey of 496 workers in Germany, nearly 300 had received bad news about their organisation from the media. For about half of these, external mass media, such as newspapers, television, internet and radio, was the first source of bad news. Less than one fifth had been informed through official internal communication measures. Unsurprisingly, employees experience predominantly negative feelings when their organisation is portrayed unfavourably in the media. In interviews with
people whose employer was subject to negative coverage during a crisis, interviewees described their feelings when receiving the bad news as unpleasant, anxious, appalled, concerned, ashamed, helpless, pressured or simply “bad”. This impinged on their work motivation and loyalty to their employer. To keep up with the bad news, conversations with colleagues were particularly important. Exchanging feelings and perceptions with peers who are in the same boat is a common reaction in coping with anxiety in critical situations. A problem shared is a problem halved, as they say, and conversations with colleagues create an atmosphere of unity und mutual support (however, this can also be fertile soil for rumours). Employees also mentioned team meetings and the organisation’s intranet as important sources of information. Furthermore, the internet was noted as a channel of heightened significance in quickly gathering new and independent information.
Dark clouds on the horizon While employees are particularly attentive to bad news about their employer, survival instincts – or just cravings for
COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR 2/2015
sensation – are also triggered in other stakeholders such as customers, local residents or acquaintances and family members of employees. In their hunger for more information, they are especially keen on receiving insider information. Thus, employees are not only recipients of bad news but also sought-after sources of information. More than 80 per cent of participants in our research were confronted with the bad news in both their professional and private lives because they were addressed by customers, acquaintances or family members. Since regular employees have particular credibility – generally more so than spokespeople or other representatives of the organisation – the way they respond to questions can influence how well the organisation’s reputation is preserved or restored in a critical situation. Whether or not employees react in a way that defends and supports the organisation depends on how much they want to and are able to do so. Employee willingness strongly depends on their level of identification with their employer. “Identified employees” feel strongly connected to their organisation: they feel personally attacked by the negative coverage. They are therefore more motivated to defend the organisation than their colleagues who are not identified.
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PUBLIC AFFAIRS
“What are the biggest misconceptions people have about the International Criminal Court?” Fadi el Abdallah, spokesperson and head of the public affairs unit at the International Criminal Court, shares his take on the court’s sometimes controversial mission, vision and values. INTERVIEW BY DAFYDD PHILLIPS
DA F Y D D P H I L L I P S How would you sum up the main mission of the International Criminal Court (ICC)? F A D I E L A B DA L L A H The court’s mission is to investigate and prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, thereby contributing to the prevention of such crimes. The states parties, as indicated in the preamble of the ICC’s founding treaty, created the ICC because, while “all peoples are united by common bonds, their cultures pieced together in a shared heritage”, this delicate mosaic “may be shattered at any time”. In order to protect it, “the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole must not go unpunished”.
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In your experience as spokesperson, what are the biggest misconceptions people have about the ICC? Because the ICC is a relatively young institution and because there are a number of conditions to our action, the court faces a number of misconceptions on its basic operations. There are a few basic facts which are often wrongly portrayed. For example, the ICC is not a humanitarian agency or a political body: it is a judicial body. It prosecutes individuals and not states, and it is a permanent institution and not a temporary one. The ICC is created by an international treaty and is independent from the United Nations, it is meant to be a universal institution and does not focus on a specific region. It is a court of last resort: it complements national judicial systems, without replacing them. It does not have a police force and relies on the cooperation of states and international organisations. Finally, the ICC does not recognise immunities and has no statute of limitations. As a spokesperson for the ICC, who are your main audiences?
PUBLIC AFFAIRS
William Pace, an early advocate for establishing the ICC, predicted that the court “will save millions of humans from suffering unspeakably horrible and inhumane death in the coming decades.” To what extent is an organisation that must operate in such a complicated landscape such as international law – and all the compromises that entails – hampered by such lofty declarations? It is indeed a very big responsibility and ambition that is placed on our shoulders. And indeed the ICC cannot, alone, do this job: it needs the support and cooperation of states, international organisations and others to deliver on its mission. It also needs more states to join the court to fully become a universal institution. While the challenges are manifold, we strongly believe in the role of the rule of law in helping to break cycles of violence.
Photos AccuSoft Inc.; ICC
As the ICC spokesperson, I represent the organisation with journalists, i.e., both international media and media from the countries where the court is investigating. However, as the head of the public affairs unit, I also interact with other groups worldwide interested in the work of the ICC: diplomats, professors, students and civil society, amongst others. The court has developed different communications and outreach programmes, messages and tools for each target audience as these various groups have specific needs. For example, the court has established moot court competitions for university students, developed campaigns to encourage African female lawyers to join the ICC list of counsel, and put together a photo exhibit that has been used to introduce the court to a range of audiences and reach diplomats during several seminars. The ICC is partly the brainchild of a coalition of a handful of NGOs formed in 1995, and today it enjoys close corporation with several NGOs. Could you talk to us about the importance of this relationship to the ICC - what role do NGOs play in the court’s work? Civil society organisations have indeed played a crucial role in advocating for the creation of the ICC; so did like-minded governments and diplomats at the time of the Rome Conference (which created the court). NGOs continue to be important partners in helping to raise awareness about the court worldwide and advocating for the universal acceptance of our founding treaty, the Rome Statute. A number of events are held with civil society in the countries where the court is investigating. The ICC also holds consultations on issues of mutual interest with representatives of international and local NGOs in The Hague and in situation countries. In addition, NGO members of the Coalition for the ICC are observers to the sessions of the Assembly of States Parties. These are all essential partnerships that can contribute to the court’s success.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) sits in The Hague in the Netherlands. It began functioning on 1 July 2002. The ICC has the jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. It can only exercise its jurisdiction when certain conditions are met, such as when national courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute criminals or when the United Nations Security Council or individual states refer investigations to the Court. Currently, it has 123 member states. To date, 36 individuals have been indicted in the ICC, including Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony, Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo.
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In 2012, the case against Joseph Kony, commander-in-chief of the Lord’s Resistance Army and someone who has been indicted by the ICC, became an unlikely cause célèbre, with a social-media campaign earning the support of George Clooney, among others. Are these types of high-profile public awareness campaigns a help or a hindrance to your work? The court can definitely benefit from high level supportive personalities to contribute to our efforts to raise public awareness about its activities. Such support can help stress the importance of justice processes among audiences that would not always be aware of these issues or would not be reached by other communications campaigns. An ever-present spectre behind criticism of the ICC is the threat of politicised prosecution: Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta has called the court a “toy of declining imperialist powers”. How do you answer charges that the ICC is unfairly focussed on poorer states, specifically Africa?
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CRISIS
Cultural diversity and crisis communication Increased cultural diversity challenges traditional crisisstrategies: a new perspective combining old and new theories is needed. B Y M AT S H E I D E A N D J E S P E R FA L K H E I M E R
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CRISIS
D
uring the last few decades, our society has increasingly turned into a multicultural and heterogeneous society. Increased migration, mobility and digitalisation have challenged traditional communication formulas such as “one message sent to all via one channel”. At the same time, the gatekeeping function of traditional journalism has been supplemented, and perhaps replaced by, a social media system where anyone anywhere may communicate to a wide audience. We now live in a society that is full of communicative paradoxes. On the one hand technological and economical advancements have made the world more global: using crisis as an example, disasters all over the world may be followed by a global audience as they occur. On the other hand, the same advancements have led to a multi-channel system where individuals choose specialised platforms and communicate mainly with people that share their cultural values. We live in a culturally diverse society that demands new communication strategies and tactics.
Photo thinkstock.com
Culture is a debated concept In strategic communication and public relations research, culture has mainly been interpreted as “national culture”. But culture is a much wider concept, focusing on different social systems of lifestyles, norms, values and ways of understanding the world. Basically, traditional societies are defined
by a common cultural understanding while modern societies are defined by increasing cultural diversity. The clash between traditional and fundamentalist, culturalists and modern cosmopolitans, is not new but has increased in intensity during recent decades, both inside nations and between nations and different groups. Krishnamurthy Sriramesh has observed that “Sadly, culture has yet to be integrated into
“Organisations that want to be successful must leave behind the old models of crisis communication and adapt to the changing, multicultural reality.”
the public relations body of knowledge. It appears that culture’s time has not yet come after all for our field”. Even though communications have undergone radical changes for years, crisis communication scholars have only recently started to pay attention to the consequences. Crisis communication has traditionally been based on a mass communication paradigm dominated by sender-oriented perspectives, rational message distribution and response strategies.
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Here, we want to focus on structural changes to crisis communication in relation to increased cultural diversity. But our main goal is not just to describe what is happening, but to put forward ideas of how to manage the new communicative situation.
The law of requisite variety Ever since publishing his book The Social Psychology of Organising in 1969, the organisation scholar Karl E. Weick has been a pioneer in the area of social constructionism. His Theory of Organising states that an organisation is continually produced and reproduced through communication between the organisation’s members. Furthermore, the theory states that members’ “sensemaking” processes enact the surrounding environment - in other words, the environment is a socially-produced reality because it is a product of the members’ interpretation of available information. As a consequence, an organisation will not react to changes in the environment in a totally rational, causal and predictable way. Organisational members will not only try to make sense and react to information in the environment, but also actively enact the social reality of the organisation and act on the basis of this produced social reality. A social-constructionist perspective on crisis emphasises communication and the social construction of reality. This means that a crisis does not simply arise by itself; the members make sense of changes in or outside the organisation and slowly enact the crisis. An important concept in the field of crisis communication is variety requisite. In 1956 William Ross Ashby formulated the “law of requisite variety” which states
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ORGANISATIONAL THEORY
Feeling lucky? Organisations faced with difficult decisions can use different forms and functions of organisational communication to reduce elements of risk and uncertainty. BY STEFFEN BLASCH KE
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ORGANISATIONAL THEORY
S
problem. Decisions are not only bound by the cognitive capacity of individuals to process information; rather, interpretations of information become more important than providing facts and figures. Companies can use the idea of an organisation’s communicative constitution to reduce risk and uncertainty in decision making by means of communication rather than overcoming the limits of individual consciousness.
ome decisions are risky. Others are uncertain. In either case, companies traditionally strive to provide their employees with up-todate, precise and elaborate information in order to reduce the risk and uncertainty of decision making. However, decisions made by individuals are irrelevant to organisations. Just consider a manager who decides to increase investment in research and development after reading a newspaper at the breakfast table. The decision is her own. It does not affect the company she works for until other employees take note. Indeed, her individual decision may not lead to an organisational decision if others in the company reject the investment. We rarely distinguish between decisions made by individuals and decisions made by organisations. But analysing the distinction between the two allows us to focus on what we can manage. Individual decisions are products of consciousness, whereas organisational decisions are products of communication. Thoughts cannot be managed by someone other than the individual who has the thoughts, but communication may be controlled or influenced by participation. The idea of the communicative constitution of an organisation sees decision making as primarily a communicative
Risk and uncertainty The difference between risk and uncertainty boils down to the available information about the probability of the decision’s outcome. Buying a lottery ticket is a risky decision but the probability of winning is known. However, developing a new corporate strategy is an uncertain decision and the probability of success is unknown. Decisions taken under risk are made on the basis of information about probabilities of future states, information that reduces the risk of decision making. Information, however, does not reduce the uncertainty of decisions. Companies deal with uncertainty by labelling it risk. They estimate the probability of, for example, the success of a new corporate strategy based on historical data or future scenarios. This is how companies are capable of action despite the uncertainty of decisions. Up-to-date and extensive information provides answers to explicit or known questions. Dealing with uncertainty in terms of risk requires companies to seek answers to implicit or unknown questions. Companies must treat the development of a new corporate strategy like buying a lottery ticket: they must at least pretend that they know the odds.
Photo thinkstock.com
“Companies deal with uncertainty by labelling it risk.”
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The classic perspective: individual decisions Over 50 years ago, Nobel laureate Herbert Simon argued that humans possess a “bounded rationality”. They try to be rational in their decision making yet their capacity to seek and process information is limited and they must make decisions on the basis of satisfactory information. Reducing uncertainty is one of the mechanisms by which they deal with their own bounded rationality. In addition, individuals are prone to a number of cognitive biases. An investment decision with a likely loss at 20 per cent may look attractive in the light of no alternatives. Individuals regularly display overconfidence in their own competences and skills and tend to take riskier decisions in maintaining the status quo than in changing it. After all, losses hurt more than wins bring pleasure, as Daniel Kahneman, another Nobel laureate, demonstrated in several experiments. Risk and uncertainty are prone to systematic misjudgement on account of bounded rationality and cognitive biases. Yet companies attribute decision making to particular individuals. Whether it is the company-wide agency of a chief executive officer, the project responsibility of a middle manager, or the decision of an expert, it all boils down to individuals who make decisions on behalf of their company.
An alternative perspective: organisation as communication Communication constitutes organisation. This alternative perspective breaks with the idea that people make up a company. Instead, organisations are seen as interlocking networks of communication events and episodes.
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INTERVIEW
“What’s the link between innovation, leadership and trust?” Frederik G. Pferdt, head of innovation and creativity programs at Google, shares his insights into the values and practices that reinforce the company’s thriving culture of experimentation. INTERVIEW BY DAFYDD PHILLIPS
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INTERVIEW
Frederik G. Pferdt inspires the crowd at a Google Creative Skills for Innovation Lab event
Photo DB AG / Philipp von Recklinghausen / lux-fotografen.de
How important is a culture of innovation to successful leadership? Innovation is crucial to leadership, but I would encourage people to look at in reverse: it takes successful leadership to be able to foster a culture of innovation. You’ve created design experiences for various groups, from kindergarteners and teachers to CEOs. What attitudes to design and creativity have you found among the CEOs you’ve worked with? I feel lucky to engage with two to three organisations and their CEOs per week, including NGOs, governments, start-ups and corporates. We explore the importance of creativity and how they can nurture a culture of innovation. Also, getting inspiration from children is important for me, because they remind me about the power of playfulness and a beginner’s mind. For a lot of executives this concept sometimes seems hard to grasp. But once they explore playfulness, they love it and consider it something that helps them dream up big ideas while finding fun in the question: what if? Everybody walks away with a deeper understanding of what creativity and ‘design’, as a verb, can do in their organisation. I deeply believe that there’s no single model of innovation and you can’t force it. But as an organisation you can facilitate it by providing the cultural norms and infrastructure so that it can be allowed. So ask yourself: how can you create an environment where you’re empowering employees with information and the freedom to take risks, giving them the time and the passion to pursue their dreams, and activating these moments of synergy where innovation simply happens? Projects like CSI: Lab and The Garage represent a leap of faith by Google in the effectiveness and resourcefulness of their people. What is it about Google’s leadership that makes it willing to put so much trust in their employees that they gift them with so much ‘play’ time?
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ISSUE FOCUS
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ISSUE FOCUS
ISSUE FOCUS
Leadership & Communication 60
Out of the shadows, into the light What happens when a communicator sits on the executive board? By Helena Norrman
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Covering the pole positions The issues, developments, hopes and fears keeping today’s CEOs on their toes By Mike Davies
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A balancing act Heading up more than one department requires discipline, delimitation and delegation By Sarita Laras
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Sharing the excitement It’s the responsibility of leaders to pass on their wisdom to the younger generation By Mia Norcaro
Lessons from the podium Tips on getting the best out of your team, courtesy of the great conductors Interview with Itay Talgam
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The art of communicative leadership The history books are full of examples of great leadership By Claus Grue
Words of encouragement The rules of rhetoric allow charismatic leaders to transform their organisations By Antonio Marturano
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Be yourself; everybody else is already taken How external coaching develops leadership skills By Sunita Sehmi
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