Transformational Leadership and Employee Communication
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The role of transformational leaders is to communicate clearly how the changes in the organization will impact their team members. Too often we assume that because someone has made it to a leadership or management role then they know instinctively how to do this but frequently this is not the case. However there are tools available to ensure that they stay on message and feel comfortable in communicating face to face with their employees about sensitive change issues.
A formalised approach to communicating with teams will ensure that leadership communication is focussed and that the same message is delivered to employees across the organization. A simple team briefing process that has three levels of cascading messages works as followings:
1. The first is the CEO who at his executive team briefings decides which topics for that week he wants communicated to employees. 2. This is then circulated out to his direct reports who then have to communicate those issues and decide the top 5 issues for their respective divisions and then finally the top 5 issues for their teams. 3. So the only aspect of a team brief that changes is the last section which is how what is happening in the company and our division relates to the work we are doing in our team. This is the section that always changes depending on your team in the division.
Team briefing always works because it is very easy. It ensures that each manager and leader in the organization understands what the top 5 issues are for the corporation, and their division. Most importantly they then have to think about what is important for their team and how it relates back to the top issues. So by using team briefing you are changing behaviour and creating a simple way for face to face communication to occur for all leaders and their teams.
Team briefing has the added discipline of occuring on a regular basis and and therefore all leaders and managers can know in advance and plan for the next team briefing session.
The key factor to the success of team briefings is that they are driven by the CEO. Whenever your CEO talks with managers and employees he should ask whether they had in fact attended a team briefing and how regularly they occured. This way if they are not he can say to his direct reports, “I am conducting my team brief with you now so there is no excuse for you not to do the same with your team members”.
These are the essential factors in team briefings working.
1. Make sure that you put in place a simple process 2. Make sure that the CEO drives it and that his direct reports understand the importance to the CEO – not you. Afterall you are not their boss, he is. 3. Ensure that the topics are the type of content that management are comfortable and knowledgeable about 4. Provide a feedback loop, again this is part of the process, if there is a question that management do not know the answer to, there must be a formal easy process for them to follow to quickly obtain the answer and respond to the employee. 5. Team briefings should only take 15 minutes, they can also be incorporated into regular weekly meetings.
The best aspect of team briefing is that is it a very easy tool for leaders and managers at every level of the organization to use to ensure that consistent messages are delivered to employees in a timely fashion. There will however always be topics of major significance that employees will just simply want to hear from their Company President or CEO. This includes leaders and managers throughout the organization – this is the essence of transformational leadership, communicating with leaders at all levels of the organization and tailorimg messages to suit the audience.
To learn more about transformational leadership and team dynamics visit www.transformational-leadership.com
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