COMMUNICATING STRATEGICALLY

To communicate strategically means several things. First, it means that your plans for communication,
your proposed messages, the medium (or media) you select, the code you employ, the context and
experience you bring to situations, and the ethics you adopt will all have a direct effect on the outcome.
Remember the elements of communication we discussed earlier? Those are the keys to successful
strategic communication.

You should know, however, that those are all just tools; they are means to an end. You should first ask
what end you hope to reach. What are your communication goals? If you are communicating
strategically, those goals will be aligned with and will directly support the goals of the organization you
work for. And, at each level of your organization, the ways in which you communicate will be consistent
and aimed at the same objectives.

To develop a communication strategy that will help you and your organization achieve the goals you
have set for yourselves, you first must ask yourself a few questions related to the elements of
communication we’ve discussed.

SENDER: Who should communicate this message? Will your signature compel people to action? Should
you ask your manager or vice president to sign this letter? Should someone closer to the intended
audience send the message?

RECEIVER: Who is the intended audience for this message? What do you know about them? More
important, what do they know about you and your subject? What feelings do they have about it and
you? What’s their previous experience with this subject and this sender? What’s their likely reaction?

MESSAGE: What should your message contain? How should your message say what you intend for your
audience to know? Should your message contain the bare minimum to evoke a reaction, or should you
provide greater detail? Should the message focus on just one topic or should you include many issues
for them to consider?

MEDIUM: What’s the best way to send this message? Is one medium quicker than another? Will one
medium offer your audience better opportunities for feedback? Will one medium carry more detail than
another? Does one medium carry a greater sense of urgency than another? Will one medium cost more
than another?

CODE: Encoding your message simply means selecting the right words and images. Style and tone
matter as you approach readers and listeners with new information. Will they understand the words
you plan to use? Will they understand the concepts you offer them? For your audience, decoding is a
more complex matter of assigning meaning to the words and images you have selected. Will they mean
the same thing to your receiver as they mean to you? Do these words and images have multiple
meanings for you and your audience?

FEEDBACK: What’s the reaction of your audience? How will you know if you’ve communicated
successfully? What measure will you use to determine whether they understand this subject the same
way you understand it? Will the audience response be delayed? Will it be filtered through another
source? How much feedback will you need before you decide to communicate again?

NOISE: How many other senders and messages are out there? Whose message traffic are you
competing with? Will others try to deflect, distort, or disable your communication attempts? How can
you get the attention of your intended audience with all that they have to read, see, hear, and think
about each day?

EFFECT: To achieve the goals you’ve set for yourself and your organization, you must know how to
motivate others. You must show them how the information or ideas you have shown them are useful
and worth acting upon.

SUCCESSFUL STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION

Getting people to listen to what you say, read what you write, or look at what you show them isn’t easy.
More often than not, people up and down the line have other interests that seem more immediate and
other concerns to focus on. How, then, do you persuade them that paying attention to your message
and cooperating with you is in their best interest?

Successful strategic communication usually involves the following six steps:

1. Link your message to the strategy and goals of the organization: What are the strategic
objectives of your business? Chances are good that your organization has published a document
outlining its vision, values, and beliefs. Of course, the corporate annual report to shareholders is
a good place to look for business strategy. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, call
corporate communication and explain what you want and why you want it.

Every division within a business should have a set of simple, easy-to-understand business
objectives(e.g.: “Increase cash flow by 10% during this fiscal year,” or “Increase market share by
15% within the next three years.”) All of your communication – no matter what the audience,
no matter what the medium, no matter what the purpose for communicating – should be
consistent with and directly supportive of those business objectives. If your writing and speaking
don’t fit that description, either you don’t understand the company’s objectives or you don’t
agree with them. If that is the case, you should make an effort to learn and understand them or
look for work elsewhere.

2. Attract the attention of your intended audience: Appeal to basic needs or to the fundamentals
of physiology to attract the attention of your intended audience. Basic needs would include the
bottom rungs of Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs. This hierarchy explains the
frequent focus on issues related to survival, food, water, sex appeal, and other needs. The
fundamentals of physiology are simply activities designed to appeal to the sight, hearing, taste,
touch, or smell capacities of the audience. Loud noises, bright lights, and similar devices can
attract attention; the more important issue is whether you can hold that attention once the
audience knows who you are and what you want.
3. Explain your position in terms they will understand and accept: If your audience is willing to
spend time and effort attending to your message but cannot understand what you intend, you’ll
raise nothing other than their frustration level. As you will see in Chapter 5, using language they
are likely to understand and accept will make comprehension and compliance that much easier.
This implies knowing your audience; knowing who they are, how much they know about this
subject, how they feel about it, and their level of sophistication.

4. Motivate your audience to accept and act on your message: Several motivational appeals are
available for you to reach and move your audience. First, consider an appeal to authority. IF
you are either in a position of organizational authority or are an acknowledged expert on the
matter, you may legitimately ask your audience to respond to those forms of authority. It is the
equivalent, to some, of hearing “… because I’m you’re mother,” but it works more often than
not. And, in some instances, you may have neither the time nor the motivation to explain in
detail why the audience should comply. Successful appeals to authority usually involve a follow-
up stage in which the authority figure provides justification for the request.

Second, you might consider social conformity to move your audience, which is equivalent to the
“celebrity endorsement” or “millions of satisfied customers can’t be wrong” approach. The vast
majority of people don’t like to be out of step with other members of the society in which they
live; they appreciate and value conformity and what it does for society. An endorsement to
your intended audience from a person they respect (it doesn’t matter if you respect him or her)
may prove helpful. If not, you can always resort to opinion polls (“Four out of five dentists who
chew gum recommend our product”).

Finally, you might use rationality and consistency theory to motivate your audience. Just as the
majority of people wish to conform to what others think is proper, so too do they want rational,
consistent behavior in their lives. If they see what you are advocating as irrational or
inconsistent with their existing beliefs, they won’t buy it. You must show them that it is
consistent with what they already believe and – for those who admire logic – entirely rational.

5. Inoculate them against contrary messages and positions: Persuasion theorists have shown that
beliefs persist in the face of contrary evidence if the holder of those beliefs has been inoculated
against counter persuasion at some point. Several means exist to make those actions you
advocate resistant to the appeals of your competitors. First, you can ask for a tangible
commitment from your audience. If that commitment is public, or at least known to other
members of the target audience, so much the better. Everything from signing a pledge card to
wearing a campaign button will bolster the beliefs of your audience. A Los Angles restauranteur
dramatically cut the number of reservations: “Do you promise to call us if your dinner plans
change?” The act of saying “yes” on the telephone committed them to a course of behavior that
benefited the restaurant substantially.

6. Manage audience expectations: People are disappointed in the service or the products you
deliver only if their expectations exceed the quality of what they receive. The same is true of
communication. Always deliver what you promise, never less. Always meet or exceed your
audience’s expectations. Manage those expectations by cueing your audience about what to
expect from your communications with them. If you deliver what you say you will, your
audience will reward you with its attention and consideration for your message.
Why communicating as a manager is different?
Communication is a fundamental skill central to the human experience. We each know how to do it;
we’ve done it since birth and receive additional practice each day. So, why is it so difficult to
communicate on the job? What does the workplace do to change the nature of communication?
Several factors in business life alter the way we look at communication. These factors influence the way
we write and speak with others, right down to word selection and format. They influence our
willingness to listen or to devote time to the concerns of others. And they influence the way we think
about our daily problems, responsibilities, and challenges.

Levels of responsibility and accountability: The higher your level of responsibility in an organization,
the more you have to think about. If you spend the majority of your day focused on just one or a few
fairly well-defined issues, your communication will tend to be much more keenly focused. If you have
many problems, many challenges to address during the day, your communication style will be more
fragmented and broadly focused. As you read in Chapter I, time management and communication
efficiency become core skills.

Additionally, as you become more accountable, you tend to keep better records. If you know you’ll
be asked about particular issues, it’s to your advantage to update and maintain what you know about
those subjects. A phone call from your boss, posing questions you can’t answer, is always a difficult
experience.

Organizational culture: Some organizations have a very written culture. Procter & Gamble, for
example, requires that every issue be written in memo form and circulated t team members before it
can be raised as an agenda issue in a team meeting. Other organizations, such as 3M Canada, are more
“oral” in nature, offering employees an opportunity to talk things through before writing anything down.
Many companies rely on a particular culture to move day-to-day information through the organization,
and to succeed in such a business, you must adapt to the existing culture rather than try to change it or
ask it to adapt to you.

Organizational dynamics: Organizations, like the humans who populate and animate them, are in
constant flux. Businesses change with the conditions of the marketplace and the lives of the managers
who run them. Your communication will have to adapt to the conditions in which you find yourself.

That does not mean signing your name to a document that is false or passing along information
that you know isn’t true, even if the organization presses you for time or will not give you access to
information you really need to do your job. It does mean adapting your style to the standards and norms
of the industry. It may mean greater concision or more detail than you might personally prefer. It may
mean shorter turnaround times on requests than you think are reasonable. Or it may mean sharing or
withholding information from those you work with each day. Each organization has its own style that is
conditionally and temporally affected by a range of issues from market share to target-status in a
takeover.
Personality preferences: Finally, it’s important to acknowledge that each of us has his or her own
preference for gathering, organizing and disseminating information. Each of us also has a style for
making decisions. You’ll have to accommodate those you work with and work for in order to succeed in
business.

If the boss wants plenty of detail and plenty of time to think it over before making a decision,
accommodate that. Provide an executive summary, but give her the detail in tabular or annex form if
that is what she wants. Meet or beat submission deadlines. And provide the information in the form
your reader or listener most wants. If your client likes e-mail, learn to live with brief, typewritten
messages and attached text files. If your client likes, personal briefings, schedule the time it will take to
go over the information in detail. It is counter-intuitive, but if you put the information-gathering and
decision-making needs of others – particularly your boss and your clients – ahead of your own
preferences, you’ll get what you want faster and with much less pain.