Talk Inc.

Michael Slind: Well I knew Boris because I was working at Harvard Business School writing business case studies. I've done different things as a communication professional, including being editor at a business magazine, Fast Company, and also doing some collaborative work with some thought leaders, such as Tom Peters, but at the time I was at Harvard Business School writing teaching cases and had done some of that work with Boris. I was interested in communications generally and had been more and more involved in looking at how companies operate internally and so on, and knew well that was his field of interest; how do organizations create value. We came together and said "How do we put these things together?" We were just very curious, it began as a somewhat small project to look at individual developments, but as we got into it we realized that we thought there were significant new things going on that in our minds coalesced into really a new model for how people communicate in organizations. Basically a practical working definition of communications is: how do leaders manage the flow of key ideas and crucial information to, from and among their employees? So that was what got us in that thing, and eventually we realized we had a book-scale argument to make, that there has been this shift from an old style of communication that's encapsulated by the very bureaucratic sounding term "corporate communications," and what we find is something that we want to call "organizational conversation." Again, it's a series of different ways of managing that communication process, coalescent, really a different way of thinking about it.

Rachel Salaman: So how much research lies behind the book?

Michael Slind: So it was mostly qualitative research, which is to say numerous and fairly lengthy interviews with business professionals. We interviewed nearly 150 people at more than 100 organizations, all types of organizations, including big Fortune 500 companies and small start-ups, non-profit organizations as well as for-profit organizations, and international companies as well as US companies, and we asked question. The research came in a couple of different phases; the first phase was fairly exploratory and we focused on interviewing people who were communication professions, people with titles like Vice President of Corporate Communications. That's where we started to get some of the ideas that developed into this model conversation. Then, as we went on, we started talking to people who had more general management responsibility or people who were in Human Resources, in Operations, and quite a few CEOs as well, and as we did so we found that things were clicking together, that the idea of organizational conversation that emerged early in our research were being reinforced as we talked to people who were in charge of that process at the very top.

Rachel Salaman: You came to use this word "conversation," as you've just described. Can you just help us to understand how conversation, which sounds like something small involving only a few people, something quite intimate, how that can be used or is being used in the context of large organizations?

Michael Slind: We were struck, it was kind of a rolling series of small "ah ha" moments that add up to a big "ah ha," that we were struck at a certain point how people, and when we talked to CEOs this became even more the case, they use the word "conversation." As we were sifting through the interview transcripts we were struck by that, that we would ask questions about communication but they would talk about it in terms of "How do I advance the conversation within my organization, how do I make sure that my people are top of the conversation" and so on. So that was really what led us to think "Well why are they using this word," and the follow-up insight was that what leaders are trying to do, and in some cases we think succeeding, is to bring in some of the qualities of personal conversation into an organizational setting, and it's not easy to do. One point that we make in the book is that this is a very important problem for companies that are large or that are growing. A very small company, a small start-up, is often able to be conversational just by nature, it's 10 people in a loft and they can just get up and walk over and have a conversation, but as an organization gets larger having that kind of free flow of information, where there's back and forth, becomes harder, and that's why people need to create practices that try to recapture that ability to be conversational in a personal sense. You know, in the book we actually break down what we think are what the qualities that distinguish personal conversation. Now I'll just mention a couple of them, because maybe you'll ask about some of the others, but a personal conversation is intimate, it's usually people standing face-to-face, talking face-to-face, or at the very least it may be across the phone line; there's still a sense of closeness, that I am talking to you, I'm not just talking to some broad generic audience. So one key thing that leaders are finding, whether it's by means of technology or simply by getting up and walking around and meeting with a large group of people in their organization, that actually talking to people, getting close to them rather than relying on memos, speeches and such ex cathedra pronouncements was really a better way of communicating. Another key dynamic of conversation, personal conversation as opposed to traditional corporate communication, is that it's interactive, it doesn't simply move information one way but people are able to talk back, to ask questions and to put in their real two cents.

Rachel Salaman: Well let's talk now about the first of those elements of organizational conversation that you mentioned, intimacy. You've talked a little bit about what you mean by that in an organizational setting. Can you give a couple more examples?

Michael Slind: Sure. It can be very, very concrete, of simply creating a leader, by regular scheduled, intentional means creating a situation in which he talks directly to employees, and especially not just his direct reports to the top senior leaders in the company but to people at different levels. One practice that we write about in the book, it can be called "a listening session," it was inaugurated by Jim Rogers, who is the CEO of Duke Energy, a large utility concern in the US, and he basically began the practice of getting together with groups of about 90, it could be much smaller groups and that could make it more intimate, but the key thing is that it wasn't just a big town hall where he says things and maybe takes a few Q&A, he actually put the emphasis of listening and hearing what they had to say; sort of closing that gap, that's what intimacy is about, closing the gap that otherwise opens up as an organization gets bigger.

I'm trying to think of another good example. Oh, another CEO, John Chambers of Cisco Systems, has a thing that he calls "a birthday chat," and about every other month he gathers a group of employees at all levels, and the only thing they have in common is that they happen to have had a birthday in the past two months; so it's a sort of forced randomness in which he gets into a room with a small group of people whom you wouldn't otherwise have any contract with. There's a rule that none of these people who are invited, none of their managers can be there as well, so he's breaking across, he's going across several levels of the organization and making the organization smaller where you can, and Cisco is like 70,000 large. Again I think the key thing is that there's all kinds of things you can do to make the company smaller. These are examples, by the way, that don't involve fancy technology. Some technology is playing a part in the move toward conversational practice, but a lot of it is simply a leader willing to proverbially roll up his sleeves and get in a room with people, and come in there with an agenda not to get across a message but to hear what people have to say.

Rachel Salaman: And just to keep an eye on why leaders are doing this and what the organization is set to gain from something like that, is the idea that if employees feel more connected with their leaders there's a better culture? What's behind all of this?

Michael Slind: Sure, that is part of it, and the watchword here, which we do use in the book, it may be a buzz word in some ways, but the power, the important one is ‘engagement', making employees feel that they're part of the company and they're respected and valued and that their opinions are respected and valued. Kind of a soft goal, as one might say. There's a more hard objective here as well, which is to create strategic alignment, to make sure that people, by having this conversation, by closing the gap that might open up between senior leaders and other people in the organization, you make sure that people on the front lines understand how the leaders are thinking.

Now, this is important, this is one reason why we think this trend is growing, is that the nature of business is changing, such that leaders at the top have a greater than ever need to know what's happening at the front lines; because there's so much change it's often easy for leaders to lose touch with the market place, and once they're actually in conversation with the people in their company who actually face the customer. So that's why listening is a key theme in this element of intimacy, listening to people to understand what's going on out there. There's a lot of attention paid to trying to become better at listening to customers, and what we're finding is a lot of companies are saying ‘The only way we can do that is to become better at listening to our employees'. There's market sensitive business information that comes from that process, it is not all just about in general driving a more cohesive culture.

Rachel Salaman: And I think that interactivity, which you mentioned earlier, plays into that very strongly, doesn't it, because you need that interaction or you won't find out what your customers and your employees are thinking. You talk about interactivity in the book, and interestingly about how social media can be useful. What are your main points about that?

Michael Slind: Well especially as a company gets large or it's growing it becomes harder and harder to have that quality that you can have when two people are in the same room together, where I say something and you can immediately say "Hey, no, it's really like this" or bring up a point, that quick back and forth to really make a rich exchange of information. That's hard to do in a large organization, it's hard to do as organizations become more bureaucratic. We are by no means hardcore evangelists for social media, but we're finding companies are adopting it in a way to sort of recapture that conversational dynamic. The most simple way is look at the development of the corporate intranet; it began a decade and a half or so ago, they were document dumps, repositories of information on policies and procedures and so on. The next stage was making somewhat more dynamic new sites where there would be new content coming from corporate offices or from the communication department; press releases, explanations regarding quarterly news announcements and the like, a new site.

One of the things that the social media dynamic has, and again this is fairly low-tech but it can have actually powerful implications if you think about it, it's adding the comment function or the share and rate function, in which the employee becomes not simply a passive observer of this stream of news coming across the intranet wire, so to speak, but they're able to engage and talk back and say "Hey, wait, I have something to add to that" or "Here's what we're doing in my department that relates to what this thing says." "Oh wait, you said this but you haven't answered this real question that I know everyone in the company wants to know." So just by adding that simple tool you create a channel that wasn't there before. When you have an internet site you can have a lot of comment sections that no one gets involved in, no one contributes to, and you can have a lot of dumb and inane comments in any sort of public internet site where you have this function, but a lot of leaders are finding that it is very helpful. They gain practical information from it, from employees, and again, to go back to the point you made, just by opening up that channel it sends an important message, "That we as a company are willing to hear what employees have to say."

Rachel Salaman: In your experience have any leaders or organizations encountered any issues with monitoring comments from people?

Michael Slind: Well, you know, I think a lot of organizations do monitor comments and reserve the right and imposes as a policy reserves the right to delete comments. One of the more interesting findings though, and I wouldn't say this is universal, but we did come across a number of leaders who said that they don't really do any censorship based monitoring. A lot of leaders expressed how pleasantly surprised they were at how successful employees were at self-policing or policing one another. Well the policing happens at a couple of different levels; one is I think most companies that find that this succeeds do require employees to post comments by name, they don't allow anonymous comments. Often times the actual internet function is set up so that if you want to comment it's attached to your internet log-in, which has no way of disguising who you are. So you're free to comment but if you put a bad factor in the comment sphere it will be seen and you may suffer the consequences of that. But there's also self-policing in which some employees will step in, and people don't like people who are just whiners or complainers or naysayers, and if that's the kind of contribution Employee A is making you'll find Employees B, C and D stepping in and saying "Hey, that's not cool." We've had a lot of leaders say "I don't have to police the comments, people are doing it themselves," and by doing it again it enhances engagement, people are engaged in the conversation, in the content, that they're talking about it in a different way when they can step in and talk to each other about that.

Rachel Salaman: I suppose there's a fine line, isn't there, between engaging employees and employees spending a little bit too much time on these things, perhaps taking them away from the work they're supposed to be doing. How do organizations and leaders stop people wasting time on commenting on blogs or watching the videos that are on the intranet?

Michael Slind: Well a couple of answers to that. One is, I think some companies continue, and often with good reason, to have to police that behavior and watch people and send the message that "We are monitoring." We're not saying that certain companies don't have a reason to do that. The most interesting finding we found is that some companies are finding that its less a problem than they thought, that people again would police themselves because they know that they can take a few minutes out to play on the corporate internet or chat about this, that and the other, but at the end of the day they still have to get their work done.

I'll bring up the example of EMC Corporation. It's the world's largest data storage provider, they're based in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. They're a very serious company, if you just think about what they do, they can't tolerate a lot of laziness. This is not a hip, freewheeling, creative company, they have to have highly engineered products and it's not a friendly market to be in, so they can't tolerate a lot of nonsense, and for that reason, let's just say in their case, they have found that "Our policy is only to hire adults, and we find that if we do that it succeeds and people act like adults on this process." So again they're very happy, pleasantly surprised by opening up the corporate internet, and they have a very elaborate one in which people are allowed to interact not only about… they could start a discussion section, within the intranet you can create mini sites that are dedicated, and these sites might be dedicated not only to business areas and areas in which people aren't collaborating and exchanging information about a new product, for example, but personal interests. There's a group of people who like to share their painting work that they do in their own time, they'll make a JPEG of their painting and share it with their employees and there'll be a little bit of chatting. EMC leaders have found that tolerating some of that is fine and people don't take it too far because if they do they're not going to get their work done and that's going to have other consequences for their employment.

So yeah, again we wouldn't want to say that this is something every company can adopt easily or that it works in every case, but the key finding, the key insight is by opening up and letting people participate in this way you don't have to control as much as you thought you did.

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Rachel Salaman: Earlier in the interview you talked about the four Is, as you call them, of organizational conversation. We've touched on intimacy and interactivity. The third I is "inclusion." Can you talk a bit more about that, and perhaps share that example from the book about the working mother's experience book?

Michael Slind: Again, I guess I've already colonized that topic a little bit in my previous answer, because what I was talking about was the idea of inclusion, by which I mean actually encouraging and empowering employees to become active participants in the conversation to the point of actually generating original content that becomes official organizational content. I mean, it segways from being able to comment on company internet discussion boards to much more elaborate forms of employee generated content, and again we're making a play upon the notion that people are used to, in the world of consumer internet, of user generated content, where the company don't hire professionals to create content but ordinary people do. If you think about Facebook, which gets a lot of attention, that's a huge platform for user generated content. Facebook itself doesn't create content, the users do, and they've been able to build a fairly successful business at it, or at least a prominent one. By analogy, what companies are doing, and this is what we mean by inclusion, is they're empowering employees to be content creators and not simply consumers of the content.

The example that you brought up is a good one that we really like to talk about, is the working mother experience project at EMC Corporation. The issue there was "How do we send a message that EMC is a place where working mothers are able, despite the challenges they face, to thrive?" If you think about it, the traditional way of doing this is the company hires either internally or hire out and they basically create a top-down campaign or an initiative. They may hire outside consultants to do this and they create various products, posters or a special intranet site or brochures and what not, they create a sort of campaign to send the message "Hey, we are an organization that embraces diversity, we're an organization that allows people who have parenting responsibilities to succeed." But what happens, you can see, is quite different, and that's what a woman who had no connection to any of the usual PR, marketing, human resources apparatus of the organization.

She was a program manager in one of the technical departments, one of the product development parts of the company. She had talked to a lot of her colleagues about their stories, about the practicalities of balancing life and work while being an EMC professional. She thought "Hey, we really should tell this story, we should tell all these stories," and she got an executive at EMC to basically sponsor and fund a project to create a book, the end product was a nice coffee-table sized book. I forget the exact number but close to 100, 90-some individual stories, contributions, mostly about working mothers, there was one working father, telling the human stories about "How I used some day care service that EMC helps me out with" or "How I make sure I get my kids to school in the morning and also make sure I meet the deadline I have that day." They put this into a book and they found that it's had tremendous success, not only internally but also externally. The whole theme of inclusion gets up the idea that "In our book we're mostly focused on what is traditionally ‘internal communication.'" In an area of organizational conversation the boundary between internal and external kind of collapses, and often the most trusted messengers externally are going to be your own employees. So EMC has found that if it wants to be able to recruit talented women to its company, they found that a thing like this, working mother experience book, which is available as a PDF on their website, and they distribute it to all kinds of prospects who might want to work at the company. It's been a tremendous success in conveying that message in a way that I think a traditional, corporate, top-down campaign or initiative would not have been.

Rachel Salaman: So it's kind of win-win all round, isn't it, because the organization gets something that helps them recruit talented people, and the people who were actually involved in the project feel more engaged.

Michael Slind: Exactly. A circle on that point is there's a sentence, as in media generally, the distinction between the profession and the amateur and the producer and the consumer is really breaking down in companies. They're willing to loosen up a bit, right, because there was no guarantee that the result of this project would be of high quality, that the company could be proud of, and they're willing to take that risk and not control everything in a top-down way. They're finding the rewards can be quite significant.

Rachel Salaman: With inclusion, and also the interactivity that we talked about before, there's a danger that you're not going to reach everyone in the organization, that some people will be shy or for whatever other reason they don't want to interact, they don't want to be included. Does that matter?

Michael Slind: You know, I suppose it matters. I mean, I guess what I'd say is that in the traditional system they wouldn't have been included anyway, and I guess I'd focus on the glass being half full, that if you're able to bring out of the woodwork people who have important contributions to make to what we call the organizational conversation within a company that's a plus. Can everyone be included or want to be included in that way? Probably not. Some people are simply very talkative, to reference our book title. I don't know that there's any way around that, except that a key part of this is creating the right climate within a company, the right culture, and that's where leadership is important. One thing I'd want to say is that while there's a lot of talk about opening up organizational communication to multiple voices, we're not really a manifesto about corporate democracy. We still believe that leaders need to lead, and what some of these new ways of communicating give leaders a lot of new tools, but also puts an obligation on leaders to create a culture, environment, where people feel safe enough to talk, where they know there won't be reprisals or a lot of judgment that inhibits conversation.

To get back to one of the aspects of conversational intimacy, intimacy is where leaders step out of their comfort zone, get down from the corporate perch and actually engage with people, and that can be risky for the leaders. One key aspect of intimacy as we deem it is authenticity and vulnerability. I mentioned before the example of Jim Rogers at Duke Energy having these listening sessions. He followed up, at a certain stage of these listening sessions he did something else, which was allow the attendees of these listening sessions to grade him; there were grades, A, B, C, D, and F, to use at least the US style academic grading, with A being the best and F being a total failure. It was live, where the results were apparent right away. People voted anonymously but the results were apparent right away that some number of the people in that room did not think he was doing a great job as a CEO. He actually made himself vulnerable, and that's a part of being a leader, part of being a conversational leader.

To get back to your question, we think that by taking those steps leaders can make it so that other people in the company feel comfortable participating as well.

Rachel Salaman: Well let's move on now to the last element of the organizational conversation in your book, which is ‘intentionality'. Now what do you mean by that?

Michael Slind: In the way that you do when you're writing a book like this, we wanted each of these elements to begin with the letter "I," just for ease of memory, and we could play with some puns on the letter "I" and so on, but by "intentionality" what we really mean is having a strategic point of view. The key point here is that conversations, it kind of breaks down into two subsidiary points; conversation, communication or organizational conversation should be approached from a strategic perspective, not in a merely reactive, event driven way. But more than that, and secondly, the conversation should be used to help reinforce the company's organizational and competitive strategy. To get back to some of the changes that are driving this move to organizational conversation that I mentioned earlier, it's much more important than it used to be for everyone in the company to actually be conversant in the organizational strategy, to know who the company's competitors are and what our markets are. To know that is more important than ever. It used to be someone could just do their job and take orders, but it's much less the case, you need everyone to understand what the company strategy is.

So intentionality is that aspect of an organizational conversation in which leaders make sure that however open the conversation within their company may be, that's it's ultimately aligned with and converging upon activities and ideas and information that support the strategic objectives. We put intentionality last but in some ways its of primary importance, and we do want to send the signal that while we think companies are gaining tremendously, as we've observed, in opening up the communication process, ultimately there has to be some kind of closure as well, it can't all be just talk, it also has to be about aligning the conversation to what the company is trying to achieve. That can mean a lot of different things; practically the one thing is it just means inaugurating communication practices that explicitly try to train employees at all levels in understanding the company strategy. It can also mean, and we encountered this at a company, a very well-known and large technology services company in India called Infosys, they have what they call their "bottom-up strategy practice," in which, leading up to devising the strategic objectives for the company in the following fiscal year, they opened up a series of discussion sessions on the company intranet, in which people throughout the organization were able to contribute their ideas as to what the key strategic objectives for the company should be in the following year. Now again, it's not corporate democracy at the end, it was the senior leadership team that made the decisions, but it was strongly informative, sort of back and forth on the intranet among people from any part of the company, saying "You know what? I think that we have a real opportunity in this segment of our market, I want to see us do more there." Having that input helped the leaders make a better strategy, and it also helped the employees become more engaged and more thoughtful about that strategy.

So that's really an important piece, we very much want to emphasize that this is not, again, a literal hang-out, "Let's just let everyone have a chat session here." Ultimately organizational conversation has to support the organization, it has to have that kind of organic unity that's based on a company strategy.

Rachel Salaman: Now if a leader was listening to this or reads your book and feels that his organization is perhaps lacking in all four of these areas, would you advise him to focus on just one of these four areas we've talked about, or to try and do a little bit in all four of them?

Michael Slind: You know, probably to do a little bit in all four of them. I think you almost begin with the first and the last, I think as a leader you have to change your own style and become more intimate. It can start small, if you have a large organization it may simply be approaching the way in which top leaders in the company, the top tier, interact with one another. That can be just breaking down the traditional command and control system, it can be a start. Again, becoming more accessible, more open, at least at the top tier, and then seeing if you can move that down the organization. Then I think, at the same time, you want to have in mind that intentionality; move communication away from something, where you delegate the actual communication, responsible for generating the annual report, generating press releases and earnings announcements, to something which is much more strategic, where you really say "You know, what is the conversation in this company, what do we want people to be talking about when they talk about our company?" So I think those are the points at which I would start, and then some of the more practical, operational things about what kinds of channels you use or how you deploy social media if you decide to do so, those would sort of follow from those initial investments in becoming a more intimate leader and becoming more intentional in your approach to communication.

Rachel Salaman: And are there one or two top tips that you can give now, quick fixes if you like, because those things that you just mentioned are long-term goals I would think? Are there perhaps one or two things that people could start doing tomorrow?

Michael Slind: One thing I would say is that in the book, we structure the book, I hate to not answer your question but simply to turn people to the book, but I just want to make the point about the structure of the book, that we have some long extended stories in the book. There's a category we call Walking the Talk, about how companies are doing this, but we also have chapters that are brief, what we called Talk Inc. Points, or to use the acronym, TIPs, in which we do give very targeted pieces of advice that we gleaned among our research. There are several TIPs chapters in the book that I think would address that issue.

Rachel Salaman: Michael Slind, thanks very much for joining us.

Michael Slind: It's been a pleasure, thank you very much.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Michael's book again is "Talk, Inc.: How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power their Organizations," and it's co-written with Boris Groysberg. You can find out more about it at www.talkincbook.com.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.