Tying Your Message To The Medium

If you want to drive change in your organisation, you need to communicate.
A lot.
And you need to do it well.
A grand speech and a resource page on your intranet won’t cut it. It takes a communications strategy, with the full power of your knowledge and personality to succeed.
Constant communication, properly designed and executed with heart.
Anything else is merely playing at change. If you want real outcomes, it requires real communication.
And here’s one of the great communication mistakes I see all the time:
Forgetting to think about the medium.
I once worked with the communications team of a medium-sized government department. They did quite well with this. They used email for quick updates, blog posts to record key events and speeches for anything requiring a human touch.
It worked well, though it would have worked better if every strategic leader embraced this.
Even with a well-constructed plan, they made all sorts of communications blunders.
Leaders would go into excessive detail in speeches, leaving people bored and struggling to track the information.
They’d send long, rambling emails that would disappear under a torrent of other messages.
They’d write blog posts to share sensitive, potentially controversial information. You know, the sort of information that needs tact and empathy to share.
Like I say, they had a plan.
Some leaders even followed it.
Things didn’t always go smoothly, even when they stuck to the plan. But the biggest breakdowns in communication always came from using the wrong medium to send a message, or not sending it at all.
Here’s the way I like to think about it. There are other approaches, but at least consider this.
If there’s an emotional component to a decision or announcement, talk to as many people face to face as you can. Keep it high level and focus on assuaging the concerns. Don’t go into details – those are better sent in writing, as a follow-up.
When you do send it through in writing, take extra care. People are going to do their darnedest to misinterpret you – it’s just human nature. So do your best to make it clear, concise and readable.
This government department I mentioned had a team dedicated to strategic communications. They wrote most of the blog posts and emails – the senior leaders simply put their names against it. But not always. One leader especially had a habit of writing her own messages. They were overly long, dry, convoluted and rambling. There difference between her writing and the communications team’s was stark.
Writing properly takes time and skill. It might be worth farming this out to professionals.
If you don’t, the pressure is on you. Create a plan, stick to it and use each medium the way it’s designed.

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