I blogged about teams wanting ‘internal visibility’ a while ago. Often requests for internal branding do come to internal communicators and unless you tread carefully these requests can snowball into an unmanageable mess.
Rita, the internal communicator got into one such situation and this blog post seeks solutions to help her mitigate the crisis. Here is how the conversation with Anil, the business manager for the CEO of a leading FMCG player with over 15,000 employees across 4 cities in India.
Anil: “Rita, I need your help. Our leadership team has been around for a while but there is very little awareness of their impact and role.”
Rita: “Anil, are you saying our staff is not clear about what our leadership team does? We have all the details on the company’s intranet and they have been conducting periodic Town Halls. Why do you say so?”
Anil: “It isn’t that they aren’t visible to our staff – they don’t have a brand recall. There has to be a brand around and about them. They must be recognizable and they must be inspiring. I am facing a lot of pressure to get the word around about our leaders and the work they do”.
Rita (confused): “What do you mean by brand?”
Anil: “Just like Steve Jobs was an icon and like Richard Branson is a brand himself”
Rita: “Anil, both Steve and Richard stood for certain attributes – do you know what our leaders stand for?”
Anil: “Not exactly. I was hoping that we create a logo with the team name and brand it. The logo can be acronym of the team name”.
Rita (taken aback): “But, how will the logo help? What do you want to achieve?”
Anil: “It will be used in all our communication, will be created with a recognizable font and interesting colors to depict the team. I am sure it will catch our staff’s fancy”.
Rita realized that she had a long way to go before getting Anil to think differently. She parked the conversation and told Anil that she would evaluate his request and come back.
- According to you, what is the issue?
- How can Rita handle this request from Anil?
- What can she do differently to ensure Anil understands how internal communication works?
Keen to hear your thoughts.
This almost sounds like the travails of my job!
The inherent issue here is the manager ‘s lack of understanding the function of Communications and its potential strategic impact!
Coupled with that is the manager’s perceived notion of communications and the expectations that follow.How do you explain the role of communications to an organization that perceives it as graphic designing and event managing??? You can argue that to be allowed to venture into strategic matters, its important to demonstate Corpcom’s valueadd to the Org, but even to do that Corpcom should be able carry out its real functions instead of getting stuck doing only the perceived functions! I often quote “Industry practice”, to begin activties that are not thought of as corpcom area of work (but in reality are) or vice versa to distance myself from myopic tasks with no real benenfit like the one mentioned in here, unfortunately 9/10 times even that doesnt work. I am eager to know your appraoch in a situation like this.
I’m going to be controversial here and say that if my leadership came to me with such a request, I’d be looking to move on!
This company has a serious problem and tackling it would most likely prove a serious political challenge for them and the non-exec board to fix, it’s not a comms one (though they should have an input and of course communicate out the new look final state).
As I read this a few things lept to my mind. First of all, it’s now common to hear the role of the CEO now described as the Chief Engagement Officer, and rightly so. They set the tone for the business and along with their leadership, should live and breathe this everyday, both in front of employees and external stakeholders.
As an internal comms team, you can communicate the vision and roadmap, values, targets, CSR strategy, successes and performance et al. However, there’s absoultely no substitute for the time the LT spend with their enployees. They need to be seen, they need to deliver, they must lead by example. That’s what engages and sets expectations. Employees, investors and all other stakeholders should see and feel the benefits every single day.
A pretty logo will never do that. A consistent identity or template for all LT comms could maybe help, but should not be treated as a brand. They should be doing it in person.