Page 81 - Great Communication Secrets of Great Leaders

Ch04_Baldoni_141496-7 5/22/03 12:27 PM Page 59
59
LEADERSHIP COMMUNICATIONS PLANNING
CHAPTER 4
have many to-dos. The leader of an organization with hundreds or thousands
of employees cannot be expected to respond to every email. What he or she
can do is assign people to screen the mail and provide some response, and also
respond personally to certain messages.
Another good tactic is to hold a webchat, which is an online question-and-
answer session between leader and employees over a secure Internet connec-
tion. One way to begin the session is to have the leader sum up what he or she
has heard so far and then open the session to questions from employees. (Hint:
It never hurts to prepare a few questions in advance in case respondents are
slow in submitting questions.)
YES, BAD NEWS HERE
Leadership brings with it isolation. As a leader moves higher up in an organi-
zation, he or she loses touch with the people at the grassroots level. Ensuring
that feedback channels are kept open helps the boss stay in touch. But leaders
need to do more. They need to establish ground rules that say that it’s okay to
deliver “bad news.” Enron is a classic example of a company where the deliv-
ery of bad news was punished; people who asked probing questions, ques-
tioned decision making, or reported bad news were not promoted, and in some
8
cases were asked to leave the company. Enron is not an isolated example.
Many companies do this, and in the process they isolate their leaders from the
truth. Leaders themselves can make it clear that they want the unvarnished
facts. Abraham Lincoln was constantly nagging his generals to give him the
truth, especially when the Union was losing. Successful business leaders do
the same.
Let’s face it, isolation at the top is often the leader’s own fault. He or she
fails to meet and mingle with front-line supervisors or talk to customers.
Worse, the leader promotes those who tell him or her what a good job he or
she is doing and are always ready with the positive spin. Some leaders shun
candid speakers because they fear that listening to them will reflect poorly
on their leadership. In fact, the opposite is often the case. When small prob-
lems go unnoticed and untreated, they can mushroom into huge issues, even
catastrophes. Colin Powell has said that if a leader is not hearing bad news,
something is wrong. “The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is
the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence
that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a
failure of leadership.” 9
The Challenger disaster is one such example. The engineers at Morton-
Thiokol knew that the O-rings in the booster rockets were not certified to
withstand freezing temperatures. Yet when NASA pushed for a launch in
near-freezing weather, the engineers had no ready way to communicate their
knowledge. The “no bad news” culture that permeated the space program at