Page 209 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

190 The Disney Way

Storyboarding, then, can be an inestimable tool for getting to the heart
of customer problems, and innovative response to customer problems is the
stuff of business legend.

Solving the Communications Dilemma
Intracompany communication is a hot topic these days. People fret about it in
management meetings; employees complain about it around the water cooler;
and everyone agrees on the need for more and better dialogue. But several
questions remain: Is anyone really communicating? How many organizations
have a formal plan to facilitate better communication?
One of our clients, Whirlpool, understands better than most the impor-
tance of formalizing communications. At its Lavergne, Tennessee, manu-
facturing plant, the company has developed an entire center devoted solely
to increasing the level of interaction between management and production
employees. The center, which is actually located on the manufacturing floor,
contains several museum-quality display booths that disseminate division and
union news, highlight corporate initiatives, and answer employee questions
using storyboarding techniques. In addition, people on the plant floor have
direct access to a communications manager.
More important, the center is part of a much broader communications
plan that encourages face-to-face interaction between management and
production people, proposes electronic communication technology, oversees
written communication, and holds managers accountable for communica-
tions in their performance process.
A formal plan is important because not everyone responds to the various
forms of communication in the same way. Some people like it written; some
want information delivered face-to-face; and some don’t care about the method,
but they do care about the quality and the frequency. Obviously, meeting
the needs of a diverse work group requires experimentation with various
options—quarterly town hall–type meetings perhaps, or skip-level meetings
that allow top management to hear from people once or twice removed from
the usual information chain, or implementation of a 360-degree feedback
approach. The point is that management can’t depend on a haphazard com-
munication system. It must consider the various styles and needs of its work
group audience and then devise a formal plan for delivering information.
Storyboarding is an ideal way to share ideas and concepts, throwing them
into the public arena for discussion and tapping a team’s collective creativity
to figure out where and how an idea might work in any given function or