Communicating Strategically

What does business communication mean?

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” George Bernard Shaw

As humans, we are the only animal on earth to be able to communicate verbally.

The basis of business, more than any other subject is communication. From pre-historic times, humans were exchanging objects against other objects, but they already needed to communicate, to negotiate, to bargain, to find a way to prove their object was as valuable as the other one, they wanted.

Then, when the first organizations were created (all religions), communication was also an essential part of human lives: who was blessed thanks to his faculty to communicate with God and then who had the power to communicate holy messages to other humans.

Finally after a huge jump in the history, nowadays, with our globalized world, communication is continuously improving a lot thanks to new technologies, allowing people to stay in touch with other persons at the opposite side of the world (approximately a century ago it was a miracle to have the first phone calls and it took months to a letter to arrive, but now social media or new ways of communication are spreading, like Facebook, blogs, Skype, Smart phones…).

So we use this ability everyday in all parts of our lives and it is a particularly strategic task of our work as business people, because no matter the service where you are working in, you need to provide latest update your colleagues, or internal constituencies (financial department needs to communicate financial information to managers, top executives need to let the employees know about the rules, policies, decisions…). Then, you also need to inform external stakeholders, or also called external constituencies (shareholders, stakeholders, government), about financial statements, decision-making and so forth.

But sometimes you need them to accept something difficult, and there is a challenge: for example, why would stakeholders (so shareholders, other employees of other companies, and government) agree with a delocalization plan? How can a company justify that? How important is the reputation of your company in the mind of customers? In these cases, companies need plans, strategies to influence, even to attract different constituencies. They have to identify the right channel and right moment to proactively avoid a crisis or to reactively stop escalating a bad situation.

Basically communicating strategically implies three factors: defining the organization’s overall strategy for the communication, analyzing the relevant constituencies, and delivering messages appropriately.

Personal ideas of communication

Finally, as a student the first thing I pay attention to is the consistency between the company goals, employees’ satisfaction and empowerment and the reality. For that several magazines are every year rating the top 100 best companies to work for. For further information you can have a look to the following website:

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2010/

However, everyone is not lucky enough to work for these companies, and sometimes it is not necessary!

My last work experience was for the world leader in water adduction pipes, whose headquarters are located in a very small French city, buildings are old, people are not motivated, worried about everything and not cooperative...Well, to sum up: not a good environment where to work! I was not paying a lot of attention to that as my mission was taking place in Abu Dhabi (nice place to live, cheap daily life, nice compensations…), with a small international team, apparently very happy with their work. My only contact with my French supervisor was perfect, he seemed friendly and nice. But finally when I arrived, I discovered that he was exactly as other employees in the headquarters and wanted to control every little thing (e.g. emails among employees, meetings I had to take…) and not giving a chance for me to prove that I was able to do a good work. It was a huge disappointment and I figured out that he was a gigantic “de-motivator” towards the employees. His messages were not consistent with his actions. But fortunately for me, he was not the boss, so after some weeks I tried to overpass him and work directly with the real manager. Finally I succeeded to do that and was more than happy with my experience.


References:

For a reference of how a company manage a crisis situation here is the Toyota safety recall announce:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xc1mqs_toyota-safety-recall-spreads-to-eur_auto

And an evaluation of different communication strategies between Toyota and Johnson & Johnson:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFMLrCNX4HY