Welcome to the first-ever episode of On the Same Page, the new employee communication podcast from communication veterans Shel Holtz and Steve Crescenzo. In this first episode, Shel and Steve tell their origin story, recount how this podcast came to be, what listeners can expect, and riff on how to tap into managers to help support communication to their team members.

We hope you’ll participate in the show by sharing your comments, questions, experiences, and anecdotes by sending an email to [email protected] (include an audio clip; we’ll play it), or commenting on this page or on the announcement posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, or BlueSky. As you can see below, you can also watch the YouTube video version of the show.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: If your managers are improvising messages, you don’t have a communication strategy, you have a rumor pipeline.

Steve Crescenzo: Manager communications — one of the most misunderstood and ignored parts of employee communications, but one we need to pay attention to. But before we get there, welcome to the first-ever episode of On the Same Page.

Shel Holtz: Now, factoring managers into communication is the kind of challenge, Steve, you and I are going to be talking about here on this brand spanking new internal comms podcast.

Steve Crescenzo: I prefer to say employee comms podcast show, but we’ll be sure to be talking about that as we go. Yeah, we’ve obviously launched this podcast for communicators primarily, but we’re also hoping some managers listen in, some executives, some leaders, some CEOs — they could all benefit from what we’re going to be talking about, right?

Shel Holtz: Absolutely. This is for anybody who’s engaged in communication inside the organization, whether it’s the formal communication that is the work of we employee communicators, or just people who know that they have to do it, whether that’s senior executives or department managers or whomever. But we’ll cover one dimension of employee comms, internal comms, whatever you want to call it — EC/IC — in each episode.

Steve Crescenzo: Yep, exactly right. And yeah, you know, if you work in an organization, you have to communicate. You may not do it for a living, but you have to communicate. So why don’t we tell the gang where — you and I have known each other for 30 years, 32 years, something like that. And we’ve talked about this before, and we always say we’re going to do it. We never do it. You’re already doing podcasts, and I’m lazy. I’m like, this is extra work. I never give myself extra work. But this is the right time to do it. Why do you think I finally caved and you finally said, you know, we need to carve out time for this. Why now?

Shel Holtz: Well, there’s a couple of reasons. Some are based on what’s going on in the world right now, and some are based on the fact that I’m working on a book that covers all this. And it has the same title as this podcast. The topics we’re going to cover come from the framework from this book. The book is a framework for internal comms — employee… I call it employee communications in the book, by the way. And I do that for a very specific reason. I got some pushback on that from one of the internal communications experts, thought leaders out there, whom I asked to review it. And he said, call it internal comms, don’t call it employee comms because there are other audiences that are internal besides employees. And I said, yeah, but this book is just for communicating with employees because they are, as Roger D’Aprix called them, informed insiders. Those other people, the contractors that come in and are embedded in the organization — yeah, they’re there, they’re getting a lot of that internal messaging, but they’re accountable to the values and the purpose of the company that they work for, the one that pays them.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, they have their own mission and values and everything. Yeah, I’m glad you stuck to your guns on that, Shel.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and I do think internal communicators need to factor in those audiences, those stakeholders, but not for the purposes of the book that I wrote. That’s really aimed at employees. The framework came when I was an independent consultant. I haven’t been one of those for — it’ll be nine years in October. It really is. The older you get, the faster that time goes by. But when I was doing independent consulting, I found myself sort of reinventing this on every engagement, particularly on internal communication audits. And I said, this is ridiculous. If I just had the framework fleshed out, I could just pull it out and I could do the audit report much more quickly. So I sat down and I came up with it, and I worked with a few other people to get their thoughts. And finally I had it in front of me and I said, it looks like there’s about 28 elements of this. I ought to flesh these out. So I did a blog post for each of them. And about halfway through, somebody said, you are going to turn this into a book, aren’t you? And I said, well, I hadn’t thought about that. But now that I have, yeah, I will. So that took — yeah, all of this has taken 15, 16 years since I first sat down and hammered out the framework. And I mean, I had some great help. Brian O’Mara-Croft actually did the visuals to take my terrible graphic and turn it into something that looked nice.

Steve Crescenzo: Hello, Brian. Hello, Brian. Well, I’m very lucky in that I’m one of the rare people who’ve read the book and really, really love the book. And when you said you wanted to start a podcast to further explore the topics in that book, I was all over it. Now, there’s so much to cover, but we’ve got the rest of our lives, Shel, right? Well, I’m not going anywhere. You got at least five years left, right?

Shel Holtz: My dog has at least five years left and I don’t want to leave her alone.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, when he goes, you go, probably. But we’re gonna try to stick to, what, about 20 minutes? I mean, that’s hard for me and you. I think that’s gonna be hard. That’s gonna be our biggest challenge. I’ll tell you that right now. I got a lot to say, and I want a lot to learn from you, and I got a lot of opinions, so it’ll be tough to stick to 20 minutes, but we can.

Shel Holtz: It will. We’ll try. My view on the length of podcasts — and anybody who’s listened to FIR already knows this — is that they should be as long as it takes to say what you wanted to say, as long as it remains interesting for the people who are listening. If people are going, my God, they’re just droning on and on, I’m going to go listen to something else, then…

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, I always get the question in my writing workshops about how long can an online article be? And I said, as short as humanly possible without leaving anything important out. That’s it. Not an extra word after that.

Shel Holtz: I think that’s a great answer. So we’re going to shoot for 20 minutes. If we go over, we’ll go over. If during the editing process I think I can make it shorter without leaving out anything that needed to be said, I’ll edit mercilessly. But the point here is to be entertaining and informative at the same time. And that’s why I wanted to do this with you, Steve — besides your experience with employee communications, all the various companies you’ve worked with, everything you’ve learned. I figure you and I are gonna host an entertaining show.

Steve Crescenzo: Have some fun. We’ll have fun. These things aren’t worth it. We’re not getting paid, Shel. I don’t know if you realize that, but we’re not getting paid. Well, you gotta have fun. We’re love. So we’re gonna do one every other week, right?

Shel Holtz: No, this is a labor of love. And speaking of that, we’re going to bring your wife into this every now and then.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, we’re gonna — that sounds kind of weird. All right, let’s just take… but yeah. We’re gonna bring Cindy in once in a while. We’re not gonna have a lot of guests though, right? Do we agree to that?

Shel Holtz: Now, the goal here is not to do another interview podcast. This is two people who have been doing internal comms for their entire careers and sharing what we have learned and what we know around each of these topics that we will introduce. And these topics — we’re not going to do a topic just once. We’ll come back to them as there are new things to talk about. But when we get to measurement, that’s Cindy’s area of expertise. She works with you at Crescenzo Communications.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, she runs our audits. She’s a measurement queen — dashboards, measuring behavior, not outcomes, outputs. I mean, she lives and breathes that stuff. So yeah, you know, there’s open marriages where they introduce somebody else into the marriage. And this is an open podcast. Once in a while, we’ll bring Cindy in.

Shel Holtz: And once in a while, we’ll bring in another communicator, presumably somebody who is doing this in an organization, but not to interview them — just to have the conversation with them because they have expertise or experience around the topic that we’re discussing.

Steve Crescenzo: So, you know, people know you and people know me, but they may not know us and how long we’ve known each other. So I remember the first time I met you. It was in New Orleans, and I had just almost pretty much just started at Ragan Communications. I was a nobody, you were already well known. And it was the days of CompuServe. And I went out to CompuServe and I met you and Pete Shinbach and Charles Pizzo and Craig Jolly. And you guys were doing like a barnstorming tour all over the place. And Charles Pizzo invited me down to New Orleans, which is where he lives, to be the lunch speaker. So you guys are going to handle all the heavy hitting, all the big topics, and I’m going to come in and be the lunch speaker — my first speech ever, except for college. I threw up right before I got on the stage and it went great. I said, you know what? I don’t know how else to do this but to be myself. And I’m a little unfiltered. I’m a little irreverent. I’m a little — whatever you want to call it — unprofessional, maybe. But I got up there and I did what I did. I just do what I do. And it was a huge hit. And it basically launched my career. And then we went on to have one of the most epic weekends of all time at Jazz Fest.

Shel Holtz: I remember this well enough to know that you were physically sick at the idea of getting up and speaking in front of people. Not to mention an epic dinner at Emeril’s.

Steve Crescenzo: Oh, that 12 courses in his wine cellar at Emeril’s. God, I’ll never forget that meal. And then since then, we’ve been on vacation together. You and I did a barnstorming tour with our wives up and down the East Coast, from Boston all the way down to D.C.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, we did. We stopped and saw a concert in Hartford, Connecticut on the way. We had many good meals. And yeah, you spoke the first day, I spoke the second day. And the wives hung out with whichever of us was not presenting. We went out and did stuff. And then we were all together for our drives between locations. We didn’t fly from place to place. We rented a car and we drove. But we vacationed.

Steve Crescenzo: That’s right, you’re Dead. Dead. Yeah, no, we drove. We drove. You know, the reason we’ve never done that again, because every time I was speaking, Michele would try to get Cindy to spend money shopping, and we couldn’t afford it at the time. I was barely making any money.

Shel Holtz: I remember that well. I think you had more money when we spent a week together in Hawaii.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, we were doing a little better then. It helps that it was free for us because of your kindness. You know, we promised we would talk about managers as communicators.

Shel Holtz: Yes, we did.

Steve Crescenzo: So, what I’d like to tell you is what’s happening in Crescenzo Communications. And this is a really good thing. I want to say this is a good thing. We are getting at least eight to 10 requests every year now to directly address managers on how to be more effective communicators, how to carry the water, how to explain complicated business initiatives to your teams. People — I used to say, you know, we speak to the communicators about how to galvanize managers, and how to — don’t give them a big toolkit, don’t give them some big obnoxious thing they’re never gonna pay attention to, but you can help them communicate. I would always go to the communicator. Lately now, the communicators are bringing us in and saying, we just want to talk to our managers directly. And that’s happening more and more. I think people are finally kind of starting to get it a little bit, that — yeah, channels are important, yes, messaging is important, our vehicles are important, what we do as corporate communicators is important, but where the rubber hits the road is down there at the work level, and the frontline supervisors and the managers.

Shel Holtz: I used to resist this like crazy. I understand that managers are important in the communication mix. If you look at research, you ask employees, what is your preferred source of information on these 10 things? And five of them will be my manager. And the reason for that is that those five things are going… my phone is ringing.

Steve Crescenzo: Oh, okay.

Shel Holtz: It’s my cable company trying to upsell me. Okay, let me go back to that.

Steve Crescenzo: Okay.

Shel Holtz: If you look at surveys that ask employees what is their preferred source of information, you give them a list of 10 things, five of them will be my immediate supervisor. And the reason for that is those five things are going to have an impact on the way they do their work, on what their outputs are supposed to be, what’s expected of them in that department, on that team. And the manager is the one they expect to know — what are we supposed to do different here? You’re not going to ask your manager to explain a new benefit or the strategic plan; those things you expect to hear from the benefits department or the executive team. But if it has to do with what you are expected to do differently — this change that we’re making is going to drive some kind of change in your team — the manager is the one who’s going to talk about that at the ground level. My issue has always been that managers are never held accountable for communication. And every one of them does it differently. I mean, let’s face it, most managers were not promoted into their position because of their great management style. They were promoted because of what they were doing as an individual contributor, and they kept getting promoted and promoted, and to get promoted again and to get more money, now they have to be a manager because that’s the hierarchy of the organization. So because they did this great work as an individual contributor, they now have people reporting to them. Most companies will put them through some kind of training. My company does. It’s called management essentials. There is a communication module. But again, they’re not held accountable. And you ask them to communicate, and some of them will forward the email to their employees, some of them will mention it at a meeting, some of them won’t do anything, some of them will do a great job, some of them will do a terrible job. But manager communication, to me, was always like that children’s party game of telephone, where you whisper something into the ear of the first kid, then they whisper it into the ear of the next. By the time it gets to the last kid, the message has been corrupted so much it doesn’t sound anything like what was whispered into the ear of the first kid.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. I’m the living embodiment of that. When I came out of college — and I had like 85 jobs in college and leading up to college — I’ve only had two jobs since college: Ragan Communications and Crescenzo Communications. But I started at Ragan as an editor and I was good at what I did, I guess. Next thing I knew, I had six people reporting to me, and I couldn’t stand it. I was a terrible manager. I wasn’t relaying information. I would just do the work myself. I hated all the people that worked for me after a while because I just — I wasn’t a good manager. I’d skip them. I didn’t do them sometimes. Here’s a great example. One of the guys that we worked with had such bad body odor. And everybody came to me and said, you gotta tell him he can’t ride his bike to work, he’s gonna stink up the office. And I was like, I’m not telling him that. They said, it’s your job, you’re his manager. I’m like, no, I’m not doing it. You want to tell him? I was just terrible. But that’s exactly… You remember this guy, what was his name? Grunig, Grunig…

Shel Holtz: I bet you hated doing performance evaluations. Jim Grunig.

Steve Crescenzo: Grunig, that was his name. Grunig. Jim Grunig. He wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review about how companies shouldn’t even have communications departments. They should just pour all their money into helping managers communicate. Forget about a newsletter, forget about this, forget about that, town halls — forget all about it. Pour everything into the managers. And I was asked to debate him once in Toronto. And I’ll never forget, I went up to him before the debate and I said, hey, let’s do a real debate. I said, because I really disagree with you. Don’t be one of these conference debates where we basically just agree with each other the whole time and we’re nice to each other. I vehemently disagree with you. So let’s have it out. And we had a slugfest up there. And I just disagreed with him. I think that — truth be told, now with a little more wisdom — I was young then, we probably had to meet in the middle somewhere. Communicators should put more emphasis on managers and help them communicate. Help them localize the corporate news for their teams, make it relevant to their teams, start conversations, gather questions from employees. We should be helping managers do all that. In the meantime, we also need enterprise-wide communications and all the good stuff that we’re good at.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and I’m really glad that communication teams are recognizing the importance of this to the degree that they’re asking you to come out and talk to managers. And I’m glad you’re getting that work. But it’s like anything else that we’re doing right now — it’s a one-shot thing. And in a year, managers will have moved on. The pressures of the job, the expectations for their teams, the numbers they need to produce. And the simple fact is, if you’re looking at your performance review, and 90% of what you are scored on is all about productivity, and 3% is communication, you’re going to blow off the communication. So what we need to do is find ways to make sure that we have an ongoing dialogue with managers where they understand what it is that they need to communicate without putting extra pressure on them. For example, where I work, we do a monthly email newsletter called Manager Talking Points. And the first thing is four bullets, right? We want you to remind your employees of this. We want you to tell your employees this. If it’s a big deal, we’ll also put out something we call Manager Briefing, which is an FAQ on the topic so that they can answer specific questions. We’re not trying to get them to become communicators, but we are trying to promote consistency of…

Steve Crescenzo: But it’s still short, it’s tight, right?

Shel Holtz: …the primary message, while leaving them the room to say, here’s what this means to us here in this team, this department, this location.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. I’ve never, in all my years of building the companies and helping managers communicate all over the world, I’ve never seen a manager’s toolkit, for lack of a better word, work if it’s extensive — if there’s “watch this video, do this, do that.” Every time we do focus groups with managers, and Cindy does a hundred a year, maybe 50 a year for our audience, they all start off by saying, I don’t have any time to communicate. I don’t have time to communicate. After Cindy digs in a little bit, as you do in a focus group, she gets to the bottom — they say, well, you know what? They do have time to communicate. They communicate every day to their teams. They’re talking to their teams every day. They just don’t know what to communicate. They don’t know what’s for their ears only, what they should pass on. That’s why one of the things we do whenever we do a newsletter for managers, we always do Know, Do, and Share. Put them in categories. Here’s stuff we need you to know — this is just for the managers’ ears. Here’s stuff we need you to do as a manager. And here’s what we want you to share with your employees. It makes it very easy for them to share that information. And lately what we’ve been doing is including conversation starters where they can actually talk — that way they can facilitate that two-way up and down communication. And you know what, managers appreciate it. They appreciate the help. They don’t want to be bad communicators. You know, I was just out at PG&E, in your neck of the woods, Shel — San Francisco. And I was addressing 600 people leaders at PG&E. And I got there and I said, how many people here have miscommunicated? How many people here have screwed up a communication to their teams? Every hand went up. I said, how many people did it out of malice? How many people did it because you wanted to sow confusion? You wanted to irritate? You wanted to bring productivity to a halt? You’re just a bad, lousy, rotten person. Every hand went down, of course. I said, no, we just — we have bad habits. We write too long. Our emails aren’t clear. We don’t like to get negative feedback. I mean, we got bad habits, and communications can help managers get rid of some of those habits.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, absolutely. And I think they appreciate learning how to do something that is going to advance their own careers, which, by the way, is something that we can also impress upon them — is if you do a good job of communication, you’re going to get better outcomes from your teams. You’re going to get more promotions and more money and more prestige within the organization. But we’re not trying to turn them into communicators. We’re not trying to make them do what we do.

Steve Crescenzo: No, no, they have a job! They have a job!

Shel Holtz: They do, but we are trying to make them better managers. And in my framework, under employee engagement, one of the four topics listed there is engaging managers. And if you want to be an engaging manager and boost the engagement of your employees, being a better manager who communicates well is a big part of that.

Steve Crescenzo: Shel, I like that. That’s for our first podcast — that’s a keeper right there. We are not trying to turn managers into communicators. We’re trying to help them be better managers using communication. No, I didn’t say that right. I agree — we are not… I like that. Close enough, Shel, come on, for God’s sake, edit that out. No, no, I like that. You said it. It was really good. We’re not trying to turn managers into communicators. We’re trying to help them be better managers using communication tactics.

Shel Holtz: Exactly. Close enough. I can pull it out of the transcript later. Exactly what I said. Yeah. So, and by the way, I’m sure that when you implemented those newsletters for managers, you had a mechanism for measuring how effective they were.

Steve Crescenzo: I didn’t implement them, Shel. I started them. We don’t implement over here. Yes, we launched, and we started. We didn’t facilitate them. We didn’t implement them. We didn’t utilize them. Yes, we did. Yes, we did. And you know what? One of the companies we did that for was the Mayo Clinic. I know we have to get to the end here, but we did it at the Mayo Clinic. And now Cindy and I just finished a project where we interviewed 50 Mayo Clinic nurses, leaders, nurse leaders.

Shel Holtz: Got it. The client did it. But you provided the client with the means of measuring how effective they were.

Steve Crescenzo: We built a whole 41-course curriculum for them. And we heard in our interviews that they love the manager newsletter — it’s called Supervisor Update — because it has that Know, Share, Do. They love them. People said it without knowing that we were the ones that created it, that we gave them the format. They just talked about, yeah, this was really effective. I like doing this. I like getting that newsletter because it’s quick. Tells me what I need to pass on to my team. So yeah, the measurement’s there. If we can help them communicate without taking up a lot of their time, that’s the silver bullet.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. Yeah, for my Talking Points newsletter, the measure is real easy. I get a list of 50 random employees who are frontline workers. I send them a survey. It’s four questions. Did your manager in the last week or two talk to you about this? How about this? What about that? All four of those points. And we can find out if these messages are getting passed along.

Steve Crescenzo: Oh wait, so you bypass the managers, you go right to the people, and you can figure out if the managers are using your bullet points? That is smart. That’s something — every time I talk to you, that’s smart.

Shel Holtz: Yes. Yeah. And I’m able to detect trends — which kinds of talking points they are inclined to share, and which ones, I guess, bore them and they don’t share.

Steve Crescenzo: Now if there’s one manager who’s particularly not doing anything, do you snitch on them? Do you rat them out?

Shel Holtz: We don’t know who’s answering. It’s an anonymous survey. But what it tells us is that we need to find a different channel to communicate these messages because managers aren’t passing them along. While at the same time working with managers to get them to understand the importance of sharing this information.

Steve Crescenzo: Well, I hope this isn’t going to be the last time we talk about manager communications.

Shel Holtz: I can’t imagine that it is. We are going to talk about other things, though, like the elements of culture where employees can have an impact. The other enablers of employee engagement, like organizational integrity, closing the say-do gap between what leaders say and what they actually do. Strategic narratives, elevating the employee voice.

Steve Crescenzo: Love it. There’s so much on my mind, and luckily it all does fit into your framework. You know, the employee experience, how they can influence the customer experience, how can you turn them into ambassadors? And obviously we’re going to talk a little bit about AI, Shel — I mean, you’re Shel Holtz. But I’m hoping to learn from you about AI.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, we’ll definitely talk about technology. I can’t imagine that we could do this whole podcast without talking tech. But we’ll get down to some of the fundamentals too, like delivering the news to employees. I’ve talked to some communicators who are so into the strategy, they don’t think they need to share news anymore, but the news is how we create a shared reality in the organization.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, yeah, I love that. We got to have the two C’s — crisis and change communications — both of which are often butchered. Well, it’s just going to be fun, Shel. I can’t wait. Can’t forget those. Are we doing it every other week, right?

Shel Holtz: Every other week. I can’t swear what day it’ll be. I’m not going to promise the first and the 15th or every other Thursday, but twice a month. And you’ll be able to get this wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe. And it’ll also be on YouTube on the FIR Podcast Network. That’s also where this one will live — on the FIR Podcast Network at FIRpodcastnetwork.com. That’s where Neville Hobson and I have been doing For Immediate Release for 21 years.

Steve Crescenzo: I know.

Shel Holtz: So you have to look forward to, Steve, will be doing this when I am in my nineties.

Steve Crescenzo: Well, I want to end with one more anecdote about you and your podcast and your ability and your forethinking. Is that a word? Forethinking? Your thinking forward, your forward thinking. My wedding to Cindy was 20 years ago. And you’d pretty much almost just started the podcast. And you showed up, came into my house, like the day before the wedding, with your suitcase — your podcast suitcase. Remember that? And you had all this equipment.

Shel Holtz: It is now. I do.

Steve Crescenzo: Run it all over the dining room table, and you did your podcast from my house. Probably that was the first year you were doing it, right?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, it would have been. I had a travel mixer and a travel mic. I don’t use a mixer anymore. I don’t need that stuff anymore because of what’s available online. But yeah, I absolutely remember that.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, yeah, I remember all that. I remember — what kind of nerd brings podcast stuff to a wedding? But you’re dedicated, man. You are dedicated.

Shel Holtz: Well, we did them on a regular cadence and had to get it done. So, yeah. And I think I came to your place because the Wi-Fi in the hotel wasn’t cutting it.

Steve Crescenzo: That’s awesome. That’s great. Yes, that’s right. That’s right. You couldn’t do it in a Starbucks, you told me. I remember that very clearly.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, well, a little too much ambient noise in a Starbucks. But anyway, we’re recording this first episode for two reasons. One, you have to do a first episode that tells people what it’s all about. But two, you can’t get listed in the podcast directories until you actually have an episode in the RSS feed. So this will be an episode that will get us listed in the directories so that you’ll be able to find us there, everybody.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. Is that why we did this? I don’t even know. Okay. Now, can people comment on the podcast — like ask us questions?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, absolutely. We will let people know when there’s a new episode up. We’ll share some information about it through the social channels, primarily LinkedIn, Facebook, Bluesky, and Threads. And we’ll also have the post on the FIR Podcast Network. You can comment there. You can comment where we leave the announcements on the social feeds. We’ll check them all, and we will use those as launching points for additional conversations.

Steve Crescenzo: All right, my friend. Well, I want to thank you for asking me to do this. I’m looking forward to it every other week. Plan on learning a lot, plan on laughing a lot, and I will see you in a couple of weeks.

Shel Holtz: I’ll see you then. It’s going to be a blast.

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