ENDEAVOR
Responding to a classified ad for a bank magazine editor, I was interviewed for – and eventually landed – my first job in a bank nearly five decades ago.
Last week, I spoke at the Management Association of the Philippines (MAP) Strategic Human Resources Summit. The forum focused on strategizing HR communications: From transacting to transforming.
I was asked to comment on a presentation by Dr. Karen Remo who emphasized the power of good storytelling. She is the CEO and managing director of The Filipino Times and New Perspective Media Group.
Dr. Remo focused on the power of good storytelling in building a unique corporate culture. She said an organization must purposively craft its own story. A good story has five attributes: “sensory, simple, stick, snake, and safe.”
Illustrative examples of “sensory” storytellers are global digital behemoths Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple. Google represents the head as it is the leading source of information. Facebook tugs at the heart as it brings people together. Amazon grabs at the gut as it could supply virtually everything. Apple has “sex appeal” or flair.
Simple storytelling is “easy to follow” as depicted by the Christian Bible, the Muslim Quran and the Buddhist canon Tipitaka. To stick, a story must be told frequently and consistently – in different forms and plat-forms. Snake means injecting a villain or enemy into the dialogue. Or presenting a counterpoint that will make your story even more persuasive. Safe means building trustworthiness and earning sustained patronage.
I commended Karen for her powerful presentation and proceeded to share with the audience my two cents’ worth.
The late Filemon “Jun” Berba, a topnotch CEO of leading companies like Globe Telecom, Manila Water, and Philippine Electric Co., had a simple formula: the Danver principle.
Danver was a messenger in one of the companies he headed. Jun Berba told his secretary that “all outgoing communications and announcements for posting on bulletin boards” be read first by their messenger, Danver, who was typical of factory and field employees. “If Danver understood them, then the memos could be formalized and sent out. If not, they must be revised until Danver fully understood. This instruction held even if a vice president or I myself wrote the memo,” Jun Berba emphasized in his book, Leadership for Extraordinary Re-sults.
So there: Communication to employees must be simple, direct and easy to understand.
In terms of channels of communication, Jun Berba preferred to speak with small groups of employees over lunch at the company cafeteria. He said American-style town hall meetings are not effective; Filipinos are generally more reserved and not at ease expressing their true sentiments in large assemblies.
Winning employee trust and loyalty is key to an organization’s ability to sell its products or services – and cement long-term relationships with legions of loyal customers. How can an organization convince other people if it is not believed or liked by its own employees?
Targeting employees is pivotal in enabling an organization to achieve its objectives. Customer satisfaction flows from employee well-being. Especially in customer-centric businesses, the quality of employee interface could make or break the quality of customer experience.
Chade-Meng Tan designed and conducted the most popular training program at Google, namely, Search In-side Yourself. He then parlayed this into a best-selling book that won endorsements from the Dalai Lama and former US President Jimmy Carter. Tan’s twin guideposts for communicators – as well as corporate coaches and mentors – are mindfulness and emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence and empathy enable one to “understand and recognize one’s own emotions and those of others; foster better connections, and build trust through heightened sensitivity.”
The key success factors in communicating change in an organization are the following: senior leaders’ buy-in; creating change champions; availability of information for responding to queries and concerns; responding directly to employees’ or customers’ needs; openness to questions and feedback.
In 2021, Mani Maheshwari developed for LinkedIn publishing an innovative approach to employee communication by using design thinking. The process of design thinking is represented by the infinity symbol, signifying seamless flow and continuity through five interactive processes, namely: Empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test.
Like Chade-Meng Tan, Maheshwari believes in the primacy of empathy, or understanding people, as the basis for figuring out the problem and generating ideas on how to solve it. This leads to creation, experimentation and testing of prototypes – an iterative process that goes on until an optimum solution is found.
He espouses five essential principles of design thinking and employee communication.
First: “Employee is regal queen.” Do you want your people to feel engaged or think harder? Second: Customize your message. If your pitch is commonplace and generic, it is likely to be deleted, ending up in the trash folder. Third: “Old is not always gold.” What has proven effective may not be as compelling or engaging anymore. While Baby Boomers may still prefer email, GenZers and millennials might prefer Podcast. Fourth: Persevere. “Failed communications is better than failed business objectives.” Fast and continuous experimentation enables the communications team to “fail early, fail cheap” and thus avoid expensive, long-term losses.
Finally: “Storytellers always win.” Beautiful stories make communications memorable, as Dr. Karen Remo emphasized.
Indeed, it was Jun Berba’s Danver principle that was most appreciated by the audience: Make sure your message is understood by the office messenger.