Leadership communication style

I am in Canada this week -- a sort of home-coming -- for a European client, to run a course in leadership communications.

As part of the process we look at 'communication style'. I've been using Bill Clinton's famous 'A town called Hope' commercial from the 1992 USA election to demonstrate the 'considerate' communication style. But political commercials could be used to illustrate all of them.

Think of Ross Perot that same year. If you remember he travelled around with cardboard charts showing what he would do for the economy. A 'systematic' communicator.

Then last year's famous primary speech from former Vermont Governor, and surprise front-runner, Dr. Howard Dean was over-the-top 'spirited'.

Most other political speeches tend to fall into the final 'direct' style: Here's what I want you to do and how to do it.

The real truth of the matter however is that political dialogue and most organisational communication requires a bit of each. What I am doing outside Toronto this week is talking to people about how to recognise, understand and apply each one.

/df

What is change & internal communications?

... and why should you care!

Those of us working in the occidental world aren't really making things as much as we used to. And even if we are manufacturing we have largely taken all the possible cost out of the production cycle.

So what does that leave?

People.

If you look at the financial statements of any FT 100 company you will see that 'people' costs make up the majority of the business costs. What do we do about them? How do we help them to work smarter? How do we get them to do what is best for the organisation?

That's where change & internal communications comes in.

In the first quarter of this year there were 28.61 million people working in the United Kingdom, for example. How many of them know what their organisation is trying to do? How many actually know what they could and should be doing to help?

We've been talking to a lot of people in the public sector recently too. Did you know there are 5,818,000 public sector employees in the UK? (It took me £1 and ten minutes to get that information from AQA!) In many ways they have a clearer idea of what they should be doing. But few public sector employees receive effective internal communications. If you compare them to places like Vodafone or Diageo, where internal communications is a fairly advanced science, our friends in the public sector are miles behind.

Who is going to fix all this? Good question.

I think I know a few people.

/df