The nine stages of a message | Performance Tuning for Linux(R) Servers

After the 12 Cs of communication, we have the nine stages of the message. ˜Nine stages!' exclaim most people when you tell them this for the first time. But there are, and our memo to staff, our announcement of organisational change, must run through them all if it is to be in any way successful. I mean there is not much point in crafting and sending it in the first place if it isn't going to lead to some action or under- standing is there?

A message must be:

sent
received
understood
believed or trusted
believed to be important to the organisation
felt (more than just believed) to be relevant to the employee personally
held at the front of the mind and acted on continuously (corporate values and goals)
˜stored', then retrieved and acted on when necessary (operational information)
communicated to teams , customers and other external contacts. ^[3]

You can be pretty sure your message is being sent, has got off the blocks - but do you really know that it is completing the race? And if you do know that it is still in the race after hurdle five - ˜message believed to be important' - (most messages crash out at this point), what can you do to ensure that it clears hurdles six to nine?

If your messages are not making it, here's a handy troubleshooter guide. The reasons can include the following.

Key managers attend the global briefings, cascade meetings and so on. Although they may learn and absorb , they go home and carry on as before.
Junior managers and employees complain that they do not know enough about corporate values, goals or strategies to do their jobs well.
The intranet and other innovations are admired and then left unused or so overused that messages become redundant.
Printed communications are read, believed, thought to be useful and then forgotten.
Messages that are ˜not relevant now' are lost forever.
You are surprised and frustrated at how long it takes to get any real response to your initiatives.
There are just too many messages out there. In the flow of ˜chaff' people eventually give up reading anything at all.

Yes, corporate internal communications is fraught with frustration and hamstrung with hopelessness.

And certainly , the most worrying thing is the tendency to information overload. That is why it is very important to centralise the key messages. Sure you can deliver them in different ways in different places to make them understandable and palatable to a local audience, but you need to keep a hold on ˜the message' at corporate centre .

Some years ago, I was involved with a major multinational that had expanded hugely through aggressive acquisition tactics. Their concern was that many of the key players in the companies they had acquired weren't playing for the new big team. Remember, it is always easier for communications when growth is organic, as you maintain your own people constantly. What the company in question did was set up two programmes.

Programme 1 was aimed at getting the top 250 people to understand that there was no going back and there was a single global company.

Programme 2 was aimed at getting the rank and file to understand the same message.

The tough part was programme 2. I was involved in auditing the messages that were circulating from formerly independent factories to the workers. The entire exercise was a nightmare. However, eventually, we managed to lay our hands on all the hard copy items: employee handbooks, newsletters, magazines, training videos and staff memoranda. We had them in every conceivable language (the company had been on a buying spree from Brazil to Bangladesh, from Spain to Sweden via the US and Canada). What we found was a huge shock . After sifting through this mound of communication material we realised that there were more than 80 (yes, 80) messages out there about what this company stood for and where it was going. And not one of them was correct!

We got hold of a big classroom in the corporate training and development centre and we covered the walls in everything from Polish newsletters to Portuguese handbooks. There were 23 versions of the company logo; seven different colours for the company logo and some give-away t-shirts from India with the wrong spelling. We brought the top 20 managers in to see our exhibition and they could not believe it. But it worked. We got their attention.

We then created an employee roadshow where, over a total period of three months, the four most senior managers (well at least the four who sounded credible and could present) divided up the globe and went to meet every employee (there were over 80,000). Every employee met them. Some were small groups, the Poles hired a soccer pitch), but everyone was able to ask a question if they wanted. We had a video and a text in local languages that described the organisation and its future and where they fitted into it all. Even the usually intransigent unions got involved and helped at local sites, sometimes acting as interpreters and organisers.

The message was uncompromisingly simple:

This is who we are.
This is where we (and therefore you) fit into the world economy.
This is where we are going.
This is what it means for your future.

At some locations (and I wish I had thought of this from the beginning) wives and children came to. We had a barbecue on a Friday night outside Barcelona for 1,600 people.

And the amazing thing about it all was that it wasn't that expensive to stage. We had our film costs, but the top four managers appeared in it and did the voiceover and we stole the rest of the film from the marketing department's product movies and spliced it together. Local country managers and division chiefs had to put local costs on their budget. For the corporate centre it was the cost of transporting four executives, and two technicians to each location. So you do South America in a week (and you do other stuff while you are there). Then you do North America, while someone else is doing Asia/Pacific and another is in Europe and the Middle East. Within four weeks - it took eight weeks to plan and get the hardware ready and translated into 20 plus languages - every employee had heard the exact, same message from one of the company's leaders . And it was simple. ˜We have created this company because together we are not just stronger, but more agile, more productive and able to do things that we cannot do as small independent companies. We are here to secure your futures , your lives. Here is our order book, here is what we are going to do next .' Fifteen minutes plus a Q&A and everyone went home with a book and a video.

That is the largest-scale operation in which I have ever taken part. Eighty thousand people in two weeks! Not a bad piece of communicating.

But there's an unfortunate d nouement to all this. Six months after our efforts a new CEO took over. Instead of building a cohesive whole, he was there in the role of cost- cutter . Factories were closed and sold up. Some of the acquisitions were sold off, meetings of the top 250 people (which were to have been held every six months) were cancelled. We never saw the 80,000 people again. And they never saw top management either. The new CEO hid in his ivory tower in Frankfurt. Sadly too, the business declined. The good, the bad and even the ugly voted with their feet and moved on. It had been a great communication challenge and it had worked. Unfortunately, in the real world, nothing lasts for very long.

This may well be a good time to talk about corporate reputation and what that means in the whole battle for respect and commitment from Mr and Mrs lifestyle/workstyle.

^[3] Adapted from a concept by Nick Winkfield of Stakeholder Studies.