To thoughtful perspectives on this notion around communicating change, I'm fairly confident that playwright George Bernard Shaw was not thinking about changing organizations when he came up with his quote, but more and more and more, I believe that this notion is fully in meshed. In many organizations. Many organizations just take the communication challenge as a check the box activity and simply send the email out to everyone. Therefore, communication is complete. And of course, that's simply an illusion. Max Dupree was talking about communicating change in organizations.

He was the long retired now. a delightful writer I've never had a chance to meet Max and would love to have him when he was still active. He was the senior executive for a medium sized furniture company. in the Midwest of the US, he was beloved, simply from what I could understand. And he really understood the challenge of communication. In fact, I remember reading somewhere that he had a conversation with a newly hired communication professional in his organization.

And when he sat down with her, he wanted to get clear that they were both on the same page. And he said, I want you to understand that your job is to make me a better communicator, which is vastly different than the approach a lot of senior executives would take with Communication Department thinking that it's your job to do the communication. Max was very clear that he wanted the communication professionals to help make him a better communicator, some interesting thoughts to get started. Let's look at your organization. And I'd like you to think about the habits that you've got right now as an organization that have been developed over the years. First of all, how much volume of communication Do you have going on in the organization?

If you think about how many messages every day, every week, every month, I mean, that is a daunting amount of information that's flying around the organization. If we dig into this idea around volume, in a little bit more depth, we think about who are these messages coming from? Are they known or not known to the sender? That makes a huge difference. And you can think about this. In your own inbox.

If you're using email a lot in your organization, one of the first things you will scan is who's the message coming from? And if you don't know who it is unlikely you're going to give it much credence. Then the next thing we'll look at, in terms of information that's coming to us. Who's it coming to? Is it directly and specifically to me? Is it a BCC list that could be everybody and their dog?

Is that a group of people that you're involved with or not? This is all information that's helpful for us to consider. So then given that overwhelming volume of communication, are you making a distinction between change related information and day to day transactional communication? Many organizations don't. And they wonder why people aren't paying attention to the change information. It's because it's being lost in the noise.

Who's responsible for change related communication? Now, Max Dupree had this figured out, it wasn't the Communication Department, its leaders, senior leaders, middle managers, supervisors, project teams, we'll get to talk more about that in a little bit. But it's not the Communication Department. Are we using a variety of methods or do we use a tried and true many organizations or email Holic organizations, some organizations or social media organizations ran into a large public sector organization and the senior executive was fundamentally trying to change the organization. Now this is an organization of I think it was 21 22,000 people across the country, trying to change the organization by using Twitter and Twitter almost exclusively? Well, as you can appreciate, that's a challenge.

If you think about the volume, how much time is actually required to process the information. Remember, one organization actually took time to look at a week. And they looked at the volume of information that was flying around the organization in the week, and it was just the week past, they decided to look at didn't want to get too far into this. And they recognize that if someone was to pay attention to to attend the meetings, to read all of the memos, all of the rest of that actually process all the information flying around the organization, it would have taken them 14 or 15 days I think it was, that's a small problem. We've got way more information flying around and people can possibly process and bottom line of all the communication that's flying around how relevant is it to personal action on the ground, as it relates to change quite often It's not if we start by looking at our habits, we can start to recognize, we have real challenge here.

So let's look at some of the basic essentials around effective communication and a changing organization. As I've already mentioned, the Communication Department isn't responsible for communicating change, they can be helpful, and they can be very helpful, but they can't own it, they can't be accountable for it. We'll figure out who must be in a few minutes. One of the truths about communication is that it is the sender of the information that owns the responsibility for that communication to be effective, not the receiver and a lot of check the box activities around communication, put the responsibility for communication on the receiver. And that's simply wrong. With all the volume of information that's flying around the organization.

People aren't reading much. They're not listening much. They're watching Are Watching the leaders, and they're watching the leaders behavior. Is she doing what she wants me to do? Are they all aligned and behaving in a way they want us all to behave? People trust what they see, technology communication can be helpful, but it is just a start.

And it's interesting, of course, as we see multiple generations now in the workplace, how technology has woven its way into all kinds of communication. Nonetheless, communication, using technology is often over emphasized or over relied on, and we miss some of the more engaging ways of communicating long before Twitter or Facebook or project websites or email or broadcast messages or whatever it might be. human systems changed very successfully and they did it with stories and pictures. metaphors and analogies. So how can you use a much more primal much more visceral form of communication in your organization that gets beyond a PowerPoint slideshow that everybody falls asleep? through.

One of the fundamental realities of communicating change is that telling people the truth is way more important than waiting for snippets of good news. Going into the cone of silence, if you will, isn't helpful, simply telling people the truth is critical. We've all been anatomically equipped from birth with the right equipment. We have two ears and one mouth and listening is not only twice as difficult, it's twice as important as talking leaders that are effective max Dupree understood this, which is one of the reasons he was beloved he took time to listen to people. And bottom line study after study after study after study has proven that employees by far one They're change related information from their immediate supervisor. They don't want it from the executives.

They don't want it from the project team. They don't want it from the Communication Department. They want their boss, their shift foreman or supervisor, their manager, whoever it is, tell them what's going on. So those are a few of the communication essentials. balance those against your habits, and see if there's any room for improvement.