It’s a sad truth that difficult conversations are likely to loom large on many leaders’ agendas over the coming months. As governments rein in their support schemes, it feels inevitable that there will be short-term shrinkage, and beyond that, some major restructuring to be done in many organisations.
Purpose and transformation. Big forces in play in organisations today (and for a while yet), and often in conflict. While purpose aims to define an organisation’s place in the world and give it meaning,
I’m a sucker for a McKinsey report (the Productivity Imperative for Healthcare Delivery in the United States anyone?), and so given just about every conversation I have with a client is transformation-related, I felt compelled to revisit an article from 2017: ‘The People Power of Transformations’.
We all know that the chances of the December-to-January date change triggering some kind of major personal reinvention are pretty much zero. New Year, new you, no thanks! That said, January can be a platform for making a positive commitment to build on what’s gone before. And that’s precisely what we’ve done at Visible Leaders.
Many of the conversations we have with leaders, HR and Communication business partners centre on providing tailored communication support to individual leaders. What’s fascinating is how it’s the same issues that consistently come to the surface. Here are our eight most common requests.
Effectively communicating strategy can be one of the more tricky challenges facing an organisation. Go into too much detail and audiences glaze over pretty quickly as death-by-PowerPoint is inflicted upon them. Or pitch it at too high a level and no-one is any the wiser about what it means for them. Which, by the way, is the question that the majority of audiences are most interested in hearing the answer to.
I spent the other week at the IABC World Conference in Montreal. The scale of the thing is impressive, over 1,300 communications professionals from around the globe (although most unsurprisingly from North America) attending a 4-day action-packed programme with Seth Godin headlining.
Here’s a fun exercise… think back to some of the things you’ve heard people say about their leaders.
2017 will not pass into history books unnoticed. A cast list of technologies, tyrants and technocrats have conspired to make it a red-letter year, and surely one that future generations will study with some curiosity.
You can’t pick up a leadership book or piece of engagement research without someone telling you how fundamentally important ‘being a great communicator’ is in a leader’s skillset. And let’s face it, it’s not an assertion that many are going to argue with.
It’s funny how sometimes a word finds an idea, and once in the lingua franca, there’s no letting go. Up until a few months ago, I’m not sure ‘digitisation’ was a thing, but now it’s everywhere, and like a fantastic pop song, it now feels like it’s been around forever.
A lot of our work is angled towards the C-suite and senior leaders, with a healthy dose of development for emerging talent thrown in for good measure. But I’ve been asked several times in the last few months about communication support for frontline leaders, and when that happens, it usually means there’s something going on that’s worth exploring.