Intelligence has to make sense to the boss

I’m a massive fan of the role of intelligence gathering for communicators. It's something I always ask about when doing communications health checks for clients.

Leaders are often too busy to really know what is going on among their people. And many of the people around them come with an agenda which potentially distorts the truth; show me a marketing director who admits to the boss that his team is demotivated or the HRD ready to own up that unwanted turnover is down to poor L&D options.

Good comms people are a bridge between an organisation and its publics. A media relations specialist can explain a key policy and know how the press will respond. A financial PR understands the reasons for a fall in EBIT and what questions analysts will be asking. Understanding both sides enables the communicator to challenge the corporate policies that will tarnish reputation or is on hand to argue for action to address a crisis.

The same is true for employee communicators. They have insight into business challenges and know the audience well enough to explain what will work or not. Instead of simply trying to promote a lame and cheap online training platform they should be able to point out why it represents a breach of the employee brand proposition. When colleagues are going to be up in arms about an impractical change to the IT system, internal communicators should be the voice of reality.

However, we run the risk of being corporate Cassandras forever accurately predicting disaster, only to be ignored or dismissed. Oftentimes senior colleagues can only take so much bad news or they are hoping that a forthcoming promotion will get them out of roost before the chickens come home.

Or, simply, in the words of Simon and Garfunkel:

“...a man hears what he wants to hear

And disregards the rest”

Our challenge is to present information in a way that helps leaders make better communications decisions. Great sources and methods, and analysis only work when a reporting officer can help the leader make sense of the insights on offer.

Over the years, I have developed a reporting pro forma which walks leaders through a conversation. It lends itself to being turned into a graphical approach but, crucially, it is designed as a conversation guide.

The aim is work through the feedback that is being gathered and invite the boss to consider whether the feedback is what she’d hoped for. Then the conversation can turn to the communications that have happened and which are planned and invite a discussion about whether or how these impact the feedback.

In essence it moves the discussion away from showing how wonderful we are and what great service we are delivering to “how do we move the needle?”

In writing Successful Employee Communications with Sue Dewhurst , I became aware that great practitioners have a variety of ways of holding this conversation. It seems that many comms leaders have learnt, as I have, of the need to feed intel in digestible chunks.

I’m always interested in hearing how people report or use dashboards - feel free to share.