Communications Made Complex by Colleagues?
In my years of managing and navigating various corporate structures, be it leading organizational transformation or being part of a cog in the wheel of change, I have learnt that:
changes are often made more complicated than usual due to people
this complication increases even more when these people get caught up in less than ideal processes
add politics to the fold and you get lots of resistance, inertia, quiet quitters or passive-aggressive behaviour
I have had my fair share of being the wide eye doe, especially during the earlier days of my career when I thought naively that everyone should see the newbie (aka me) as being harmless.
It took me a good five years at least to wise up about a thing or two and not take things to heart when the going gets tough.
That is why I place huge emphasis on internal communications at the following levels when it comes to transformation of any sort:
organization-wide
within departments and teams
between managers and their one-downs
amongst working peers
across functional lines, regardless of seniority
The importance of internal communications and internal stakeholder management includes making an effort to strengthen one’s interpersonal skills.
It is not so much about whether one is an extrovert or introvert. Good interpersonal skills comes with being able to connect and communicate with empathy, active listening and having the bigger picture in mind of what you are trying to achieve.
Just always bear in mind that majority of people are innately fearful of change, disruptions to the familiar and protective of what they care about. Thus, when we are the ones responsible for implementing and communicating that change, we should be prepared for resistance, complications, and people going out of the way to make it almost impossible for you to achieve what you want.
Also important to keep in mind - it’s nothing personal; it’s just business. Focus on establishing that position of trust, impartiality and highlighting the benefits to those impacted by the change.
It takes time, patience, conviction and confidence, and resist playing petty politics.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
Corporate Succession Planning: When the King of the Jungle Vacates and Monkeys Run Amok
I liken the corporate environment for certain organizations to a jungle sometimes in terms of the power plays that come into the picture when the king of the jungle vacates its position for whatever reason.
This happens often in organizations that are undergoing transitions or that lack a good succession plan to prepare for senior movements. This, I have come to observe is regardless of organizational size and years in existence. The situation worsens for sure if both are true for the organization - lack of a good succession plan when you are undergoing a transition.
When it comes to succession planning, just having bums to fill seats is not good enough. It needs to be the right bum for the right seat so you avoid a square peg in a round hole situation. You also need to ensure these transitional leaders are actually capable of leading and not just PowerPoint slide reviewers or campaign and content approvers since both roles can be replaced by Gen AI strictly speaking.
By leading it means, they need to be capable of planning, developing a strategy and capable of engaging their new teams as part of the planning process. In short, treat them like people that matter and not treat them as just arms and legs to do the work that you don’t wish to do or are incapable of doing yourself.
This is also where the power plays start coming into the picture like monkeys having a field day calling the shots and insisting that every animal should only eat fruits and nuts like them and swing around by their tails from tree to tree because that is how they know to eat, live and act. There is a reason why monkeys are not the king of the jungle just as there is a difference between a leader versus a manager by appointment.
Although it’s normal to have layers of reporting lines if you have a huge team of more than 15 people or where you need to split the team into sub functions and appoint team leads or function leads, I personally believe every leader should still remain connected with even the most junior member of their team. This is especially during times of transition and if you are a newly minted lead. Until you are fully confident and sure of your functional leads or team leads’ capabilities as well as alignment on the way forward as a team, you should ensure the rest of the team is not left behind in terms of important communications, planning sessions and not being relinquished to silent executors or you will end up with a bunch of quiet quitters.
The power plays become more evident especially when you have team leads or functional leads who are actually in a square peg, round hole situation and act out their insecurities with a few obvious actions, including:
pushing down work and delegating all the hard to do stuff to their one-downs, who might not even be able to do the work without guidance or clear direction of how this fits into the intended plan or bigger picture. I.e. they are told to just do blindly.
fighting for the limelight by focusing on presenting the nice and showy stuff instead of doing actual work that matters to customers. I.e. power point becomes their best friend and their one-downs spent most of their time doing slide after slide showcasing how well they have done, so they can in turn present that to their bosses.
taking credit for others’ work or worse, not giving credit to their one-downs for fear that they themselves will be made redundant.
thinking and acting selfishly by not working with other colleagues on projects that they know would be relevant to what they are doing currently and by working together, it would enhance the output. Instead, they choose to shut them off having access to the project so they can be seen as the sole owner for that project though it would create win-win outcomes for their customers.
Organizations therefore should always take succession planning and leadership development seriously, regardless of whether they are in transition mode or not. Succession planning should not be a game of thrones, musical chairs or a case of appointing people you are familiar with or like even if they don’t actually have the capability to be that bum on the seat without breaking the chair.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
Helping Employees Cope with Transitions & Transformation
When companies go through transformation and restructuring, it’s almost inevitable that some roles might be displaced. Similar to coping with loss and grief, some employees are more emotionally and mentally impacted than others, be it whether they are the ones being displaced or seeing their peers or managers being displaced.
Just based on personal experience of what’s been done well and what has room for improvement, companies who are truly people centric will try to do the following to help their employees:
1) redesign the roles that are to be displaced and work with the employees to reskill and realign to the new scope if possible
2) help the displaced employees to look for alternative roles within the organization and options for them to be reskilled if needed
3) help the displaced employees to look for roles outside of the organization and options for reskilling, coaching, counselling and resume reviews where needed.
I have intentionally positioned this in sequential order as I think companies should ideally start from 1) and utilize 3) as the very last resort. I recall when I was involved in a transformation exercise in a previous company, I had to go through this flow and after discussing with the direct manager and CEO potential options, I eventually went with 2) for the employee concerned as it was simply the right thing to do in order to be truly people centric and empathetic. Also from a business viability perspective, as long as your company is still planning to remain in business, you will save more time, resources and money with 1) and 2) as the recruitment as well as onboarding process usually take an average of 6 months to a year in totality, depending on the seniority of the role.
There is a reason why certain talents are hired to join you in the first place and it should go beyond their hard skills or academic background to the soft skills. These employees should also have accumulated new skills and knowledge with you as their employer over the years. If you say these are no longer needed, it’s as good as shooting yourself in the foot and saying you have basically not done a good job with developing your own employees with viable skills to help your company’s growth. The question then you also need to ask yourself is - what have you been doing all this while? What processes then do you need to relook to improve upon that?
In terms of employees who are impacted by other employees leaving in option 2) and 3), it is ideal for companies and their senior leadership to be both transparent and timely in communicating such impact to them. Openly acknowledge the decisions made and consult the outplaced employee beforehand as well if he/she would prefer to be present when the news is shared or would prefer to be the one sharing the news to his/her team concerned.
Importantly, acknowledge the contributions of the displaced employee and be transparent as well if the remaining employees are to expect further displacements to take place. Be upfront of the options explored and offered as well, so they know what to expect if their own roles are likely to be transformed or made obsolete during the transformation process.
Be sure to avail avenues of two-way communications to them, be it directly to the senior leadership or an independent channel similar to a counselling hotline for those who just want a listening ear to voice their fears and distress.
Companies and their leaders should always bear in mind that their decisions and actions, including the way they have handled the entire process and managed the communications will have a downstream impact on their employer brand reputation. Such impact is often longstanding and no amount of employer related awards can help salvage once the damage is done.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
The Sandwiched Leadership
The majority of us who have been working for at least two decades and grown into people management roles can probably identify with what I’m about to say.
Not all of us are able to move into the C-Suite level at this point, meaning the bulk of us would be sitting somewhere in mid to upper mid management with direct and indirect reports.
Concurrently, we would also have both direct and indirect managers hovering above us and around us.
This makes us a sandwiched leadership as we constantly need to think about upwards and downwards management and best ways to manage both without tipping that intricate balance.
Team management is not something for everyone nor does having the title automatically makes you a ‘real’ manager.
Having been in roles where I have inherited teams and grown teams from scratch, each has its own unique challenges but also satisfaction when the team flourishes over time.
Team management is also not about micromanaging or throwing them into the pits and leaving them to their own demise. Again, it’s a fine line as it depends as well between individuals. One man’s meat is another man’s poison as we say.
It’s also not about talking down or talking up for that matter but about paving the way to enable your team’s success while managing your bosses’ expectations and enabling their own success.
We are not expected to know everything and be a specialist in every single area that we’re managing but rather, we need to have the strategic view, forward looking vision and appreciation of the ground up challenges and pitfalls to be addressed.
The majority of our time is spent anticipating issues and identifying ways to prevent or address them. We also need to balance the dynamics of the team’s emotions, strengths, weaknesses, chemistry and expectations towards each other. The last part is simply shielding them from the upper management’s own expectations, pressures and politics so they can function seamlessly.
It’s not a walk in the park and one thing at least to me for sure is that one can never effectively lead a team to succeed without genuinely caring for them as people.
With that said, I think the sandwiched managers have it the hardest and it’s also not surprising that many have given up, especially when they don’t get the appreciation or support needed from their managers as well as their own teams.
Some simply decided to go back to being individual contributors while others might decide to just venture out to smaller companies where they can be the top management instead with a more manageable leadership structure.
There’s no right or wrong but companies who truly cherish talent and their people should pay more attention to the sandwiched managers before it’s too late.
In my upcoming post(s), I’ll highlight a few key challenges facing sandwiched managers, the impact they have on business continuity and culture, as well as how companies can better support them.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
The Dying Empathetic Leadership
Empathy is something not every senior management or leader has unfortunately and it’s very telling in their behind-the-scenes speech and actions.
In all my years of working, I have come across very few truly empathetic leaders who are genuine in their treatment of their employees and customers.
Some I wish I can work with them longer when I choose to move on for other reasons as I know they would have taught me a lot more than I know now in terms of thinking, doing and communicating with empathy.
Empathy is something not every senior management or leader has unfortunately and it’s very telling in their behind-the-scenes speech and actions.
It’s undervalued simply because leaders don’t really get rated on their ability to connect with their employees and treat them with empathy.
I have witnessed many failures in terms of leaders in 1) not communicating emphatically to their people, 2) not showing true empathy in trying to understand the challenges faced by their workforce and 3) not listening with empathy when their employees provide feedback through forums.
It ends up being lip service or more trying to appear to do what is expected of them to look good and not because they genuinely care.
Classic examples are when there are organizational layoffs or restructuring.
The onset of how decisions are made have nothing to do with empathy but rather the bottom line of cost, profitability and returns.
That is why things never really change for the better in the longer term for most organizations and their leaders that make decisions without empathy.
Over the years, I have been privy to how such decisions are made, sometimes callously and without even sound logic. Rather, it’s more a stop-gap and band-aid approach where true impact on the people are not even considered in the decision making process.
What is worse though is the way such changes are communicated or not communicated to the workforce.
They talk about stock prices, shareholders equity and customers but forget their employees, the backbone of the company carrying that mission on their shoulders and believing in the promises made during the town halls, leadership emails and pep talks.
Poorly worded communications, which is as clear as mud and clueless management sitting around trying to find the right things to say or lend some insights to their team doesn’t help either.
Good, solid, reliable and empathetic corporate communications is a dying art in this sense.
For any self respecting CEO, my advice is to at least make sure you have a solid and empathetic communications advisor if you, yourself are not empathetic by nature.
Empathy might not bring you immediate revenue but it will have longer term benefits to the organization as you will make decisions that actually solve problems for both your customers and employees for the longer term.
Less attrition, less churn and more sustainable growth.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.