Budget or Bandwidth? Learnings from conversations with leaders at my London Business School Reunion

Until we can explain what we do in seven seconds, we will struggle.

Spending time with senior leaders, management consultants, investors, and finance folk this past weekend at the London Business School (LBS) reunion was a rare opportunity to engage them about the work we internal comms folk do, and the game-changing potential that effective internal communication represents for the world's organizations.

In my numerous discussions with my MBA colleagues and the other LBS alumni and faculty I met, the main challenge is that much of effective internal communication is counter-intuitive.?

Or, more precisely, that counter-intuitive ideas take time to explain.?

Sometimes it’s because they're nuanced - like balancing the need to reduce noise with the need to make sure that the right people get complete-enough information to act on, without inundating all employees in a tsunami of financial reports and change programme PMO minutes.

In other cases, it’s because the ideas are still seen as radical - like the idea that there’s actually a way to systematically find the three-to-ten percent of employees who drive the conversations within organizations.

Capturing a leader’s attention - even when that leader is a friendly classmate or fellow alum - can be even more challenging when leaders believe they have already improved things as much as necessary, or when they think they “get it” as well as they need to.?

The big question in my conversations centered around what the leaders and managers I was speaking with thought were their top priorities.??

Leaders who were concerned about talent and retention were more interested in discussing internal comms in some depth, than those focused on short-term corrections to the share price, general macro-economic concerns, or, frankly expressed, their own exit strategies.

And in a world where war, environmental crises, a vacuum of responsible political leadership, and macroeconomic gyrations occupy the daily business pages along with ongoing pressures on organizations and their talent, our concerns (or for that matter, their employees' concerns) aren’t always top of mind.

Even more, leaders I spoke with who were interested in discussing people issues did so in fairly traditional terms.?

Like referring glibly to the communities and networks they lead as "the employees."?

Saying seemingly supportive things like "we need to communicate, communicate, communicate."?

Or beaming about an uptick in employee engagement or eNPS scores.??

Are cost, budget, and perceived value really the major constraints that we face??

The issue I saw with my leader friends and connections at LBS this past weekend was bandwidth - the limited supply of urgency or patience for considering alternative approach to something that leaders already think works well, or at least, well enough.?

Based on my dozen or so conversations, here are some additional observations.

• We lack a snappy sentence or “marketing” catchphrase that spells out the what, how, and why of what we do - without which, grabbing attention at a cocktail party or reaching someone whose attention is on something else.
• Our biggest competitors are not each other but Dr. Free (making do with ‘no cost’ tools or practices), Mr. Good Enough (muddling through with the status quo) and Ms. Not Right Now (because other things are so much more important)
• Winning that competition needs us to capture the conversation about urgency as well as about opportunity or ROI.
• Competing IC tech vendors and consultancies waste tons of time and energy replicating the same use cases and case studies, rather than building up a common case for step changes in IC - and then making their own specific cases as to why their approaches make them exceptional.?
• 20% of organizations really embracing what we do would give all of us serious IC pros and vendors enough to thrive on
• Opportunities to engage leaders are rare - we need to share the insights we get.

I left LBS 25 years ago with my MBA and started my career in internal comms, indeed after a masters thesis looking at IC in top UK and global companies.??

It’s a common lament in IC circles that little seems to have changed or moved forward in that time.??

Whether or not that is true, the next steps remain ours:?

Make our story sharper and shorter.

Spark some urgency.?

Make the business case obvious, not just persuasive.

Seek allies within our companies, and also in spheres which actually have access to the limited bandwidth of C-suiters: business school academics and business writers.

Accept that some leaders may have other things on their minds - and find the leaders who know they need real help.

Be resilient, not intimidated.

And remember that our biggest competitors are not each other - but the other alternative choices leaders can make: to settle for what’s "free" or “good enough”, or not to act at all.

Mike Klein is Principal of Changing The Terms, a communication consultancy based in Reykjavik, Iceland. An MBA graduate of London Business School, Mike is the author of "From Lincoln to Linked In - the 55 Minute Guide to Social Communication" and is the founder of #WeLeadComms.