On the Same Page

Companies are urging employees to adopt AI—but a software rollout, training session, or announcement doesn’t necessarily prepare people for changes to their work. When expectations keep shifting, and the destination remains uncertain, how can organizations build trust and help employees move forward?

In episode 9 of On the Same Page, Shel and Mark explore AI adoption as a change management challenge and the role internal communicators should play. They discuss listening to employees, challenging leadership assumptions, and building a flexible approach to change—along with the gap between recognizing the need for change management skills and developing them.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: Hey, Mark, how’s your experience with AI these days?

Mark Dollins: It’s never-ending. I keep getting both excited and frustrated with it, but it’s all about learning, right?

Shel Holtz: It is. It’s about learning for a lot of employees as well. Many companies are still struggling to introduce AI and drive adoption in their organizations.

I was reading about the Financial Times’ AI transformation program in 2024. They started by listening. They surveyed employees and received 725 responses. What they found was that the biggest obstacle was a lack of time, and that helped shape their approach.

A lack of time isn’t resistance. When we’re asking people to adopt AI and integrate it into their workflows, we’re asking them to make a change. We tend to look for resistance, but not every challenge is resistance. How have you been thinking about change management and AI adoption, given your passion for change management and internal communications?

Mark Dollins: Ironically, one thing communicators have increasingly been doing over the last several years is using AI to become more productive. It’s already saving us time.

But I think professionals in this space increasingly understand that AI isn’t simply a technology rollout. It’s one of the biggest waves of change we need to step into, get in front of, and help manage.

Shel Holtz: I guess the question starts with our role in managing this change. Are we taking the lead? Are we trying to get that coveted seat at the table so we can influence it? Are we waiting for the training and IT departments to say, “Here’s the program. Communicate this and drive the change”? What should we be doing?

Mark Dollins: It’s a little of everything. In the research we’ve done—and we’ll talk more about this in another podcast—Jon Stemmle and I conduct an annual survey about communicators’ attitudes toward and uses of AI. We talk to a couple of hundred communicators around the world to understand what’s changing, what we’re working with, and what we’re struggling with.

We’re finding that communicators are getting a bigger seat at the table. We’re having more influence in setting governance and policies, which is good. We’re using AI more, but we aren’t using it for more strategic purposes.

The biggest thing we haven’t fully signed up for is treating AI as a change management initiative that we should help lead. We tend to view it as a technology rollout or a policy rollout connected to AI. But artificial intelligence is itself a massive change. We’re talking about seismic adjustments in how organizations work. That’s a space employee communicators should be stepping into, and some are beginning to do that.

Shel Holtz: I absolutely agree. The question is whether we’re being asked to help design the change or simply sell decisions that have already been made.

We should use the expertise we bring that others in the organization may not have to the same degree: identifying impacts on employees, testing leaders’ assumptions before a rollout, and listening.

But responsibility requires authority. We can’t resolve workload, staffing, or incentive problems through messaging. What decisions must we be able to influence if we’re going to be held accountable, to any degree, for AI adoption?

Mark Dollins: Even better, let’s not wait to be asked. Let’s step up and say, “We believe we can help this organization better manage this wave of change. Let’s figure out how.”

Some numbers provide context for what I call moving upstream. In 2024, about 45% of communicators reported being involved in shaping AI usage in their organizations. That rose to 70% last year and 76% this year. That’s a good sign. We’re saying we’re shaping it, although I’m not exactly sure how that’s happening in every organization.

Communicators aren’t just using new tools. We’re helping organizations explain, govern, and normalize new ways of working. That’s where change management comes in.

We asked communicators whether they view change management as a competency they should have. That figure rose from 73% in 2024 to 81% last year and is at 79% this year. That tells us this isn’t being treated as a fad. It’s more of a structural expectation.

We’re also seeing growing interest in training or certification to become more proficient at managing change through communications. Around 72–73% of this year’s respondents said AI requires significant change management communications. About 80% believe change management—which is different from change communications—is a competency they should acquire. And about 76% believe communicators should be involved in influencing AI use in their organizations.

There’s clear evidence that, as a global community of employee communicators, we know what we should be doing. The real question is whether we’re doing what needs to be done.

Shel Holtz: At some level, everything we communicate is change communication. We’re putting something out because we want something from people. We want them to do something new or different, stop doing something, do more of something, or think or believe something. All of that is change.

But when it’s a software rollout, the scope may be more contained. We’re adopting Workday as our HR and payroll software, and everyone needs to start using it. I don’t know how much of that requires the full Prosci process or whatever change management protocols you follow.

AI is different. What does the change look like at the end? One thing I learned when I began studying change communication—and I had a great mentor in Tudor Williams—was that you should be able to close your eyes and envision the outcome. I don’t think anybody can do that with AI yet. That presents an interesting challenge for a change program.

Mark Dollins: AI can be a tool for some change management and communication tactics, but we still need to understand the disciplines themselves.

The question we should ask is whether we really understand change management and how change communications works with it. Over the years, I’ve asked communicators that question, and I often hear, “Yes, I understand change communications. I put out organizational structure announcements, leadership changes, and executive updates.”

Then I ask, “What else went with that?” Often, there’s silence.

That doesn’t happen every time. Our community is getting better at this. But my experience is that many communicators don’t get into the specifics of the change management discipline.

What do I mean by that? Understanding organizational readiness for change, for example. Is the organization ready to make this change? Who are the executive sponsors? Who are the champions who will help lead it? Do we understand the detractors and barriers? Do we have governance and processes for addressing barriers when the people involved can’t reach a resolution?

Those are parts of change management that organizational communicators often aren’t taught when they learn how to communicate change.

Whether the topic is digital transformation, cultural transformation, or AI adoption, it’s deeper than simply a technology change. These aren’t one-and-done activities. They require sustained, focused, strategic communications and an understanding of stakeholders’ individual needs. Not everybody experiences change in the same way, and that understanding should inform our communication.

There’s far more to change management communications when it’s structured and aligned with the discipline of change management. Without that alignment, you can find yourself in a situation I’ve experienced: “Hey, Mark, we have a big change we want you to communicate.” I ask, “What’s the change management plan?” and get blank stares. Then someone says, “Why don’t you develop that?”

That’s why, more than 10 or 15 years ago, I took the time to become certified as a change management professional. I chose Prosci, one of several options. It changed how I viewed the relationship between change communications and change management. The training took about four days and was tremendously helpful.

I’m agnostic about which certification people choose. What matters is understanding the concepts we’ve discussed. That understanding helps us drive successful change through communications.

How’s that for getting on my soapbox?

Shel Holtz: That’s fine. I loved it. What we’ve seen in many organizations is almost the opposite of what you’re describing.

Initially, companies asked communicators to tell employees to experiment with AI, without much clarity about the purpose. Then we told people to use AI a lot. We got into this whole “token maxing” thing, where people were using so much that they blew through a company’s annual budget in a month, and organizations had to dial it back.

It’s hard to get people to buy into a change when you’re continually clawing back the messages you sent earlier. What are we asking employees to trust? What happens to the time they save? Will there be new expectations? Will roles change or disappear? Who gets development opportunities?

We shouldn’t simply accept the message we’re asked to deliver. Part of change communication is pressing leaders to explain what’s been decided, what’s still uncertain, and how employees will be involved.

Blanket assurances that AI won’t cost any jobs, or that it will completely transform the way we work, can make the job harder if we don’t have a plan, a vision, or an understanding of the outcomes.

Mark Dollins: Completely agreed. There’s a difference between being a tactical communicator who says, “We’re rolling out AI. Use it in these three ways,” and asking, before the message goes out, “And then what? Where is this going? What’s the longer-term vision for AI in this organization?”

I’ve had conversations with CEOs who have told me, “In less than a year, every role in our organization will have an AI component.” That’s fascinating, but how are you communicating it, and in what context? If every role has an AI component, what happens next? Will roles be redefined? Should employees expect that?

A responsible communicator, working with the CEO, CHRO, and other leaders, should say, “We can’t communicate only one phase of this. We need to think more broadly.”

It’s okay if some questions haven’t been answered. But let’s not promise that no jobs will ever go away because of AI. We can acknowledge that it’s possible while also explaining the opportunity for employees to learn technologies that expand their capabilities, wherever they are and wherever they go.

Ideally, employees can help us redefine their roles within the organization. That doesn’t always happen, but it’s an outcome worth working toward.

We need to be open about what we know and what we don’t: “We don’t know exactly where this technology will take us. Here’s where we are now, and here’s what we want you to explore so we can learn, improve, and help define the next chapter.”

Shel Holtz: I read about a company that brought together 100 employees, I think in Nashville. They identified challenges they faced in their jobs, grouped people with similar challenges, and had them vibe-code AI solutions. Rather than look for existing tools to buy—or rent, as is often the case—they built solutions to their own problems.

It was apparently successful. But I wondered whether it was a separate, one-off activity or part of a comprehensive strategy. Did employees know it was coming? Had they helped identify it as an approach they wanted to take?

I think it’s great that the company did it. I don’t know whether it was part of a broader change strategy. But I worry about one-off activities that aren’t integrated into a process where employees can see progress toward an articulated goal.

Mark Dollins: You’re describing exactly why change management creates value. It prompts those questions and discussions before communications go out.

Ideally, in that situation, people would have discussed the direction and addressed the questions: “This is one step in a multistep process of defining our future through AI.”

That’s where understanding change management comes into play. I’ll be candid: I don’t use every element of my training every time I help communicate a change. I put it in context. We may not need to go deeply into stakeholder assessment because much of that work has already been done. Or I may recognize that we don’t have executive sponsorship and that we need to address that weakness before moving forward.

It’s about understanding all the components of successful change management.

People sometimes hate hearing this, but communication should follow the change management plan. It shouldn’t have to define the whole plan. We should be able to say, “Here’s our plan for managing change. Now let’s determine how communications can best support it.”

We can become better change management practitioners. With the right credentials and experience, we may even lead the change effort. But especially when we’re getting started, we’ll probably need a partner who knows more about the discipline and who sees us as a partner as well.

Communication is the thread running across every element of change management. Without it, we’re done.

Shel Holtz: Try making a change without communication and see how that goes.

Mark Dollins: Without thoughtful communication. People communicate all the time, but without a strategic approach, their efforts can fail miserably.

Shel Holtz: It’s important to get involved early enough. We’ve said that not every employee difficulty with AI is resistance, but there may well be resistance. You won’t discover what it is unless you ask.

You can make assumptions, but I worry about relying on them. Our employee populations reflect the public to a large degree, and we know the range of public concerns about AI: the environmental impact of data centers, privacy and data security, even fears that it’s going to kill us all.

You can’t address resistance without understanding it. If a sizable group of employees is likely to resist the way management plans to introduce AI, you need to be able to say, “We should rethink this approach.” That won’t happen if we’re brought in too late.

Mark Dollins: Our survey also measured communicators’ skepticism about AI. Skepticism rose in 2026 after falling in 2025. Something happened between last year and this year that made us less trusting.

About 45% of respondents said they remained worried about accuracy and privacy. If communicators have those concerns, we can be certain that many of our colleagues do as well.

Resistance can have many sources, but as you said, you have to ask.

Shel Holtz: You have to ask, and you may need to acknowledge that these issues exist across society, not just within our company. Explain how we’re addressing them, how we plan to use AI, and what we consider ethical adoption.

I also think the plan needs to be a living, breathing thing. In many change programs, you know the outcome. With the Dow–DuPont merger, for example, you knew the endgame. We don’t know the endgame with AI.

We don’t know exactly how workflows will change. Many companies haven’t even gotten that far. Many haven’t prepared their data so AI can retrieve information appropriately as part of a knowledge management system.

This is a different animal. We need a sustainable, ongoing, flexible plan that can pivot as we get new information or frontier model companies release new capabilities. Many factors may require us to change direction. We need to do that strategically and consistently while maintaining employees’ trust that we know what we’re doing.

Mark Dollins: Not to mention emerging regulation. The EU is ahead of the United States in this area. Accountability and regulatory frameworks will be another influence on how we use AI.

When we talk about both struggling with AI and seeing its possibilities, we also have to recognize all the other influences taking shape.

There’s one other research finding I wanted to mention. We looked at whether employee communicators—people with employee or internal communications in their titles or roles—were becoming certified in change management.

We reviewed more than 500 public LinkedIn profiles and found a substantial disparity. Remember, 79% of our survey respondents said change management was a competency they needed. But in the LinkedIn profile sample, about 8% indicated that they were certified in change management.

There was also a difference by seniority. We saw figures around 10–15% for VPs or heads of internal communications, compared with 2–4% for individual contributors with employee or internal communications in their titles.

That suggests more senior communicators are recognizing the value of change management certification, while fewer people further down the talent pipeline are pursuing it. That concerns me.

I’ll go back to your earlier question, Shel: What do we do that isn’t related to change? That’s particularly true of internal communications, but I’d make the argument for external communications too. A new product, service, or person involves change.

Understanding what enables acceptance and the associated behavior feels like a natural part of our work. Why wouldn’t we want to understand that discipline if we’re going to be held accountable for communicating change and, in theory, the resulting behavior?

It was an interesting finding from those LinkedIn profiles.

Shel Holtz: It’s fascinating. You know I’m vice chair of the Global Communication Certification Council, and I’m trying to encourage communicators to become certified in communications. But, good heavens, you can have more than one set of letters after your name. They all provide value.

I appreciate the time, Mark.

Mark Dollins: Always fun, Shel.

Shel Holtz: Listeners, we’d love to hear about your AI adoption, change communication, and change management journeys. Let us know.

There were comments on our last episode, but I haven’t had a chance to pull them together. The next time we meet, we’ll discuss comments from that episode and this one before moving into our next topic.

Mark Dollins: Great. We’d love that.

Shel Holtz: See you then.

Mark Dollins: All right. Take care.

The post OTSP #9: The Uneven Introduction of AI to Employees appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Employee engagement is often treated as a goal — or worse, as a standalone annual survey score that needs to be nudged upward to placate the CEO. But engagement is not an end in itself. It is a condition that makes employees more likely to flag problems, share knowledge, question bad instructions, help colleagues, and contribute discretionary effort. Measuring it can be valuable, but only if an organization asks the right questions, receives honest answers, and acts on what it learns.

In this episode of “On The Same Page,” Shel Holtz and Mark Dollins examine what employee engagement really means, the limitations of standardized surveys, and why disengagement is a leading indicator while turnover is a lagging one. They also explore the role communicators can play — without assuming responsibility for factors they cannot control — and why equipping managers to listen, provide feedback, and translate organizational messages for their teams may be one of Communication’s most effective contributions.

Links from this episode:

Raw Transcript:

Mark Dollins:

Shel Holtz:

Mark Dollins:

But you and I have a very different orientation to engagement in the world of employee communication, and I thought we could talk about that. I’m going to start with something fundamental that a lot of people struggle with: defining it. There’s a big-picture version of engagement, but for employee communicators, what we need to consider can be very specific to an organization or even to a person within that organization. What is your 30,000-foot view?

Shel Holtz:

I’ve also heard that engagement means bringing discretionary effort to the job—going above and beyond. Of all the definitions I’ve heard, one I like is the analogy to a car. If the transmission is engaged, the car is moving. If the transmission is disengaged, it’s idling. How do you want your organization to be moving? You want it going forward, not standing still.

Before we jump into this discussion in more detail, I want to invite everybody watching or listening to share your comments with us. You can do that in the show notes, where there’s a field for comments, or wherever we post updates announcing a new episode. We would love to discuss your comments in an upcoming episode.

Mark Dollins:

Moving on to the broader topic of engagement, I think about some of the studies that have been done. Gallup, obviously, spends a lot of time focusing on the details of employee engagement. This year, it released a report saying that about 20% of the global workforce was engaged at work last year. In 2022, its comparison point, the figure was 23%. So it’s starting to fall again toward almost COVID-level territory. Gallup is quite confident in its reporting and says the margin of error is less than 0.1%.

The report makes some interesting points about the value of paying attention to engagement. It says engaged people are 69% less likely to burn out at work, half as likely to be job hunting and 69% more likely to be “thriving” in life, even beyond work. Gallup takes a very holistic approach.

As you noted earlier, Shel, it measures many factors in determining what it means to be engaged: whether employees know what’s expected of them, whether they have the right materials and equipment, whether they are allowed to do what they do best and whether they receive recognition. The list goes on and on. As you think about this big-picture world of capital-E Engagement, what are you finding with your clients and in your own organization?

Shel Holtz:

More importantly, we can identify opportunities to improve and come back to employees to say, “These are the things we’re going to change as a result.” We can also narrow the results down. There may be a very low score in one part of the organization and a much better score elsewhere. That enables us to take action locally and work with the leaders of those groups to make improvements that will lift the rest of the organization.

Mark Dollins:

In my experience working with many organizations, an organizational-health or pulse survey typically has a finite set of perhaps eight to 10 questions that someone—usually the chief people officer—has decided matter most and represent what the organization cares about for engagement.

Here’s where it gets interesting for employee communicators. We want to help, be accountable and deliver results that help employees feel engaged. But then we sign up for things without understanding what we’re responsible for or whether we can influence them. Many questions, for example, are about what a manager does. I can’t control all time and space for every manager. But if we spend time determining which questions reflect outcomes we can influence, that’s where we should focus.

Sometimes we’re behind the eight ball because we don’t have a say in the questions being asked. Some questions are worded so broadly that you could drive a truck through them. Take a question about understanding the company mission. People may interpret that in different ways. Some will think it means the enterprise mission; some, their functional leader’s mission; and others, their team leader’s vision of where the team is going. You end up with a mixture of feedback you can’t meaningfully act on.

There are three lessons here. First, understand what the questions are. Second, choose what you’re able to influence. Third, make sure the questions are worded in a way that can produce actionable information.

Shel Holtz:

It’s not just Communication that uses the survey. It’s a significant input for Human Resources and for leadership in how they lead the organization. Part of the process is parceling out the data to the people who can act on it, even if Communication can’t.

Mark Dollins:

Shel Holtz:

There is an engagement-survey industry, and I think that industry has diminished the perceived value of engagement for many people. A lot of people “study for the test.” It’s engagement-survey time, leadership wants a high engagement score and the boss tells employees how to answer so they won’t get in trouble for contributing to a lower score. That’s not helpful. We need sincere answers. We need people to tell the truth when they respond.

Look at Gallup’s Q12 survey, for example. One question that drives me crazy is, “Do you have a best friend at work?” It’s not one of my favorite engagement questions. I understand the rationale and why it’s there, but I don’t think that really drives engagement. Some people want to come to work, do their jobs and go home. They don’t want to go out for a beer after work or do the axe-throwing team-building activity. That doesn’t mean they aren’t engaged. Other things drive engagement besides wanting to party with your colleagues.

Mark Dollins:

Digging deeper with those “why” questions can help communicators understand the thinking. If the questions come from the CHRO or someone else in HR, ask, “Help me understand why we’re asking this. Why do you think it’s so important?” Push a little. Healthy discernment—and sometimes healthy debate—will give us better information for making informed communication decisions.

Shel Holtz:

Think about what disengaged people don’t do. They don’t flag a problem early. They don’t help a colleague, share what they know, question a bad instruction or stay late when it matters. These are effectiveness behaviors that don’t show up on a decision-rights audit.

Some people who are critical of engagement as a metric say what we really need is competence. But a competent, disengaged employee is the one updating a résumé. Mike Klein, who has written about his objections to engagement as a metric, says people vote with their feet. He’s absolutely right—but disengagement is the leading indicator. Turnover is the lagging indicator.

Mark Dollins:

Shel Holtz:

Mark, you’ve written two books about communication and engagement. What do you see as Communication’s leading role in driving, supporting or sustaining engagement?

Mark Dollins:

We spend a lot of time on general employee communication, but if we don’t focus on and equip and empower leaders—all the way out to the front line—we’re doing our organizations a disservice. That is where the big levers get pulled: in day-to-day interactions.

You’ve heard the expression that employees don’t leave companies; they leave managers. It comes down to that relationship: whether employees feel informed, equipped and empowered, and whether the mission is clear. All of those things are funneled through leaders to the front line. We have to invest time there. I have a couple of chapters in my books about this because I feel so passionately about it. Organizations that do this well typically have lower attrition and higher engagement.

Shel Holtz:

Engage for Success has four enablers of engagement, and I like that framework better than any other I’ve seen. One of those enablers is engaging managers. It’s absolutely critical to have managers who engage with their people.

My problem with many managers is that they were promoted into the role based on their performance as individual contributors. They hit the top of their pay range, and the way to promote them and give them a higher paycheck is to make them managers. Then they don’t receive the training, resources or help they need to learn how to manage. They are just suddenly in charge of a team.

Mark Dollins:

If we’re thinking ahead about where employee communicators can make an impact on engagement, we should consider how we can help managers not just with content, but also with skills. That’s not limited to delivering a message. How do you learn to listen? How do you learn to provide feedback? Those are critical skills for leaders, as well as individual contributors.

As you said, people are often promoted without those skills, which creates a compound problem: They don’t know how to do these things themselves, and now they’re in charge of other people. Supporting them is a worthwhile place to invest time and energy.

Have you worked in organizations on programs that support managers’ team and small-group interpersonal communication skills?

Shel Holtz:

IBM used to have that culture. Business schools would visit IBM to see how its managers managed. The company has lost some of that over the last couple of decades, but my current organization is very serious about it.

We do several things in Communication to support managers. One is a monthly email newsletter called Manager Talking Points. It always starts with three or four things we believe are important enough for managers to share with their teams. The message should come from the manager because we want managers to add the local angle—to translate or interpret what the information means for their teams and the work they’re doing.

The newsletter also includes a couple of articles. One might cover a recent survey or study about management. We also have a managers’ blog where we invite managers to share something small they did that helped. It isn’t a major business-school lesson, just a practical tip others can try.

One manager, for example, invited someone at each monthly team meeting to cook something from their ethnic background and share it with the group. That led to conversations about those backgrounds, helped people get to know one another, was fun and built the team. I love it when people write about those kinds of ideas.

Mark Dollins:

Shel Holtz:

Engagement is not the end game. It’s a condition we need to achieve, and we need it in concert with other things, such as capability. The best approach is to view engagement as a strategic component of leading an organization rather than saying, “It’s time for the annual engagement exercise. Let’s see if we can move our score up 0.3%.”

Mark Dollins:

At the end of the day, the holy grail for me in employee communication and engagement is behavior change. If something isn’t working, how do we as communicators help change the behavior? That has always been the holy grail in the work I’ve done.

This has been a really engaging conversation, Shel. Thank you for that.

Shel Holtz:

Mark Dollins:

Shel Holtz:

Mark Dollins:

Shel Holtz:

The post OTSP #8: Employee Engagement Matters. It Is Not the Goal. appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

A strategic narrative is a critical asset for any organization. It is the overarching story that explains where an organization came from, what it stands for, where it is going, and why that direction matters. Grounded in the organization’s purpose, values, vision, and strategy, it provides a common foundation for communication and helps employees and other stakeholders understand how they fit into the larger story and why they would want to be part of it. In this episode, Mark and Shel dig into strategic narratives, why they are so important, and why so many organizations seem to dismiss their importance.

Links from this episode

Raw Transcript

Shel Holtz: Mark, how are you doing?

Mark Dollins: I’m good, Shel. How are you? Happy Sunday on the West Coast to you.

Shel Holtz: Thanks, and happy Sunday on the East Coast to you.

Mark Dollins: Thank you very much. We’re loving it. We’re getting close to Labor Day.

Shel Holtz: It’s getting there—a day off for us. I find strategic narratives to be a fascinating topic. They’re well established in theory. You can’t pick up a book on communications, internal or external, and not find strategic narratives in there. Engage for Success, the UK employee engagement movement, lists a strategic narrative as one of the four enablers of employee engagement.

And yet, in 21 years of consulting on internal communications, I was never asked to be involved in developing or evolving one, and one was never given to me as part of the package when I was preparing to work with a client. I think the theory is more prevalent than the actual practice. Is that what you’ve found?

Mark Dollins: I think that’s true. In fact, when I’m working with clients, I always ask them, “What is your story?” I could go online and say what I think their story is based on what they’ve put on digitally managed channels, but when I ask them to tell me their story, often there isn’t a lot there.

Pardon the pun, but it’s the North Star. It is the single most important element for any communication because it’s all about purpose and mission. If you can’t make that really clear, it’s hard to tell a story about it.

Shel Holtz: I remember when I was working on the strategic narrative where I work, I had to explain that we weren’t inventing something. We weren’t going to introduce concepts that we’d have to get employees to buy into. We were creating a package containing all of these statements and philosophies: our core values, purpose, mission, vision and strategic plan, all baked into a narrative. Where did we come from? Where are we today? Where are we going? Wouldn’t you like to join us on this journey?

Mark Dollins: Exactly. I did a little research and found that the word “narrative” comes from the Latin narrare, meaning “to relate,” and gnarus, meaning “knowing.” It’s all about attaching meaning to the facts we’re presenting. That’s really important for any kind of North Star narrative because everything comes from that.

Shel Holtz: I thought we would talk about the strategic narrative as an element of communication and the role the internal communicator plays in it. I was surprised in my research to find that sometimes these are delivered fully baked to the internal communicator, who is told to convey the narrative rather than play a part in developing it.

Mark Dollins: Bummer—as if we have nothing to add to it. We’d have to be involved. There’s no question, because we work with internal stakeholders. If the external message doesn’t live up to, inspire or align with the internal experience, we’re wasting a lot of time and energy.

Shel Holtz: Right. It’s particularly important because the narrative gives you the “why” behind everything. You should be able to connect the stories you tell to the narrative. More importantly, as you’re developing those stories, the narrative should be their foundation. They should all be consistent.

What you want to avoid is having your salespeople tell one story while your investor relations team tells another and your CEO delivers a keynote telling a third. These should all be the same story.

Mark Dollins: They absolutely should. You’re raising an important point about the connection between a narrative and a story. Let me give you my framing of it.

I believe the narrative is a never-ending story. It is your North Star. It takes place over time and doesn’t have an ending. It presents the very big picture. It is usually purpose- and vision-driven, and it’s inspirational. It gets to the heart. It gives people a reason not only to understand the “why,” but to ask, “What’s in this for me? Why should I care?” As I said, it really has no end. That’s a narrative in my framing.

A story is a proof point connected to the narrative. It addresses a specific problem, issue or opportunity. You use the traditional elements of storytelling. That may include a hero or a catalyst and an antagonist. You’ve got a conflict, a turning point, a resolution and, importantly, a lesson to be learned. It often highlights the hero’s role, and you can decide whether that’s the company, internal communications, HR or whoever the story is about.

At the end of the day, there’s a hierarchy. It starts at the top with the narrative. Then it gets to what I’m going to call the capital-S Story—the presentation, event or other thing you’re going to communicate. Within that are the proof points: stories with those traditional elements. I often advise clients to think about this connectivity, but it has to start at the top with the narrative.

Shel Holtz: Absolutely. I’ll give you a great example. I work, as you know, for a commercial general contractor, and one of our value propositions is that we’re a client advocate. You won’t find a big commercial contractor that doesn’t say that: “We’re on board with the client. We’re there to help them realize their vision. We’re not going to keep secrets. We’re going to be upfront and fill them in on everything that’s happening. We’re committed to transparency.” Claiming to be a client advocate is not a unique marketing approach.

But if you look at our strategic narrative, you learn from our history that two of our founders were general contractors—and also developers. In other words, the client perspective was represented in the organization’s leadership, rather than being someone you worked with only externally.

When we talk about being a client advocate, we can say it’s in our DNA because two of our founders were clients. We were founded with this philosophy. We’re different. If that finds its way into the interviews the business development team conducts after being shortlisted for a project, it makes a difference. That’s why having the narrative is important, but so is making sure people pay attention to it.

Mark Dollins: I love that. Exactly—it’s got to be real. The other thing about narratives, and I think you’ll agree, Shel, is that they change over time. It doesn’t mean they change fundamentally. The mission and purpose remain the same. But as organizations go through change, they have to evolve the narrative that goes with them.

I’ll give you a quick example. Pittsburgh International Airport launched a $1.8 billion new terminal last November. The narrative the leadership team developed positioned it as more than an airport. They looked at positioning themselves as a leader in aviation and a driver of economic growth for the region. Those words are really important because they stood the test of time.

The airport announced it was going to build the new terminal. Then it entered what I’ll call the narrative’s second chapter: We’ve done all the groundwork, but now we have to start building it and preparing our people. They developed the Smart Plan Forward, a five-year journey with a clear destination: creating a smarter airport. They said they were going to enable, empower and equip their people to innovate and collaborate in the name of change, and that was why they were taking a customer-first approach in everything they did.

It took the original narrative—“We’re building this airport, leading the aviation industry and creating economic growth for the region”—and said, “Now we’re going to do this part of it,” while staying true to the original narrative. The new terminal had a very powerful and successful opening last November. It was fun to watch the airport develop, launch and then update the narrative as part of an overall change in its positioning within the aviation industry.

Shel Holtz: It’s interesting that you bring up change as a catalyst for evolving a narrative. My research indicated that most strategic narratives are actually developed during a time of change, as part of a change communication effort. If we’re going to explain the change, we need to tell the story of where we came from, where we are today and why we’re making this change now. So let’s establish that narrative.

For organizations going through some sort of change—which is everybody—I think it’s a good reason to start.

Mark Dollins: Everybody is going through change. You’re right. The big issue most organizations miss in the narrative—and I didn’t give the whole narrative in this example—is the burning platform. Why the hell are we going through this change? What’s at stake?

There’s a way to engage people in the work they’re doing and the mission, but especially around change, there has to be a reason. What happens to us as a team, institution or organization if we don’t make this change or pivot? What’s at risk? On the other side, what’s the opportunity? How do we position ourselves in a much better, more competitive way?

These are clear things that have to be part of the narrative, and they’re often missing. People love telling stories, but the stories are so independent. They’re proof points of a hierarchical narrative that explains the bigger picture.

Shel Holtz: Absolutely. Something else is that the narrative needs to be packaged, and maybe repackaged, in multiple ways so it’s useful to different people. I think a lot of these are developed with executives in mind, so that when a CEO, CFO or executive vice president communicates with stakeholders, everybody is on the same page and tells the story from the same foundation. But managers need to be able to tell those stories in ways that work for them. If it’s just a polished speech, it isn’t going to work.

Mark Dollins: You’re raising a good point about litmus-testing it—not just with managers, but with the front line, because those employees are going to be your toughest sell. It will pass the sniff test or it won’t. They’ll say, “That’s just BS. It doesn’t match my experience. I don’t believe it. I don’t trust it.”

We’ve worked with clients who did exactly that. They pressure-tested the narrative by asking, “Do you see yourselves in this, and do you believe what we’re saying?” When you go to frontline employees and they say, “That’s it. That makes me want to come to work and reminds me why I go through all the stuff I have to deal with in my job. I’m all in,” you know you’ve got it right.

It does happen when you hit the right tone, words and framing, and frontline employees can say, “I see myself.” You’ve got a winner, as long as you use it in the right ways. But you’re right: It has to pass the sniff test not just for senior executives, but for everybody.

Shel Holtz: It has to pass the sniff test, for sure, but it also has to be adaptable so everybody can use it. Right now, for example, we have employee advocacy programs. We’re asking employees to go out and tout the company to their communities. If they’re telling a different story from the one the talent acquisition team is telling, people can detect that.

Mark Dollins: Right. There’s an opportunity for internal communicators not just to develop the narrative, but to help the organization use it. Usually, when I’m working with clients, step two is getting people in a room and talking about what the narrative is, why we use it and how they can use it in their ongoing communications.

Let’s work through some examples. Let’s look at a presentation you’re making or an email you’re writing. There’s language we want you to use that is consistent with the narrative and helps you position the issue of the day, the priority of the quarter or the strategy of the year within it.

Otherwise, the narrative is left as words on a page: “How nice. I get it. I’m like everybody else.” But you’re not telling people how to engage with and use it. It’s a critical opportunity for employee communicators to say, “Hold on. It’s not just about developing and releasing the story. It’s about making sure people know how to use it.”

Shel Holtz: Exactly, whether you’re a senior executive or a frontline individual contributor. That’s an important point: How does an individual contributor use this, beyond making sure they’re not out of step when posting on a social network?

I think one answer is that they’re going to understand where they fit in the big picture and in the context of where everybody else fits. A good strategic narrative should let you see where you are in the story. If you can see yourself, you can probably also see the vendors you work with, the suppliers, customers and other stakeholders. It should make it easier to relate to their experiences with the organization, too.

Mark Dollins: When I was at DuPont, we were in the process of doing this megamerger with Dow—a $130 billion deal. The plan was to bring together two major companies in the industry, divide the assets and then launch three brand-new companies. It took two years, so we had to develop a really clear master narrative about what we called DowDuPont: Why are we bringing these two together?

Very quickly, to your point, Shel, we had to launch narratives for each of the new spinoff companies so employees could see themselves in what was then DowDuPont, but more importantly, in one or more of the spin companies. People in corporate groups, especially, didn’t know which company they would be spun off to because everybody was working for everybody while the companies were being brought together.

The real point is that you have to be able to see yourself in the narrative. That was one of the questions we asked as an ongoing metric: “Do you see yourself in one of the future companies?” It was a way of assessing engagement during a period of change and transition with a lot of unknowns: “I don’t know which of the three companies I’ll be assigned to, and I have to keep working, but I’m excited about all three—or at least one or two of them—because the vision for why we’re doing this, where it can go and the opportunities for employees are pretty darn exciting.”

It was a critical element and something we measured. It contributed to an important ongoing metric for assessing how engaged our employees were and how communication was helping us.

Shel Holtz: Right. The fact that a strategic narrative encompasses both internal and external stakeholders means that, as an internal communicator, you may think there isn’t one when somebody in marketing has actually created one. It may not be publicly available. It may just be something they’re using.

Mark Dollins: Or somebody has created one without you—or without the company—which happens. That’s what a narrative is. Somebody takes the facts and applies their own interpretation to them. If no one in your company is doing it, trust me, someone else is. It may not be to your liking.

Shel Holtz: Before you set about creating one, ask around to see whether one already exists. I happen to believe it should be right there on the intranet, or whatever platform you’re using to make things accessible to employees. They should have access to it. I think it should be addressed in new-hire orientation so everybody knows what it is, where to find it and when to reference it.

Mark Dollins: This might sound obvious, but communicators also need to be trained to use that narrative. It’s shocking how often communicators don’t know their organization has one or don’t know how to use it because nobody has ever talked to them about it.

That’s another opportunity for internal communication professionals: What does our own function know about how to use this narrative continuously in ways that advance the organization’s cause? There are lots of opportunities beyond the narrative itself for communicators to help their colleagues and the organization use the story.

Shel Holtz: It’s also important to make sure you’re treating this as something strategic, not tactical. Some of what I’ve seen positioned as strategic narratives is really just guidance for message consistency—and that’s not this, right?

Mark Dollins: No, you’re absolutely right. This is foundational. I look at it as the base of any communication strategy you’re building: What is your story, and how does everything you do after that connect to it? Without it, you have an unstable base from which to communicate. Nobody wants that.

Shel Holtz: We’d love to hear about listeners’ experiences with strategic narratives. If you have one, we’d love to see what you’ve got.

I was fascinated when, before getting into the nitty-gritty of our strategic narrative, I spent some time talking with the person on Workday’s communications team who was responsible for developing its strategic narrative. The CEO unveiled it at the company’s big show—its version of Salesforce’s Dreamforce. This was the European edition. I think he said there were 8,000 or 10,000 people in the audience when the CEO said, “This is our strategic narrative.” There was some real investment by the organization.

Mark Dollins: How did it go over? I’m fascinated by that because I always think launching it to everybody is a critical decision. What happened beforehand? Was there alignment with senior leadership? I’m always interested in knowing what took place before a big event with a cast of thousands at which you’re unveiling your story—and, importantly, what happened immediately afterward. I’d love to hear more.

Shel Holtz: I don’t recall what happened immediately afterward, but senior leadership was involved in developing the narrative, so he worked closely with them. He also reached out to rank-and-file employees to make sure it worked.

It’s almost like a vision or mission statement. If you create it in a vacuum, in the rarefied air of senior leadership, and then tell everybody else, “This is our mission,” only to have employees look at it and say, “No, it’s not,” that’s a problem.

Mark Dollins: Right: “What company is that? It’s not mine.”

It sounds like he did a good job of pressure-testing it. I’d love to know more about how it was rolled out beyond that. The hardest work is done beforehand. It’s about getting alignment and making sure you’ve got something that feels right to the organization. Then the question becomes: How do you sustain this effort and make sure people know how to use it?

Think about recruiting. How do you deliver that message to potential employees? How do you onboard them and make sure it’s part of the process? What happens afterward? How is the narrative used in town halls with your CEO or senior executive team? How do you keep it alive and sustain it? Otherwise, like values, it becomes words on a page. Until it’s applied—and applied regularly—the meaning begins to fade.

Shel Holtz: Absolutely. It’s a matter of introducing it well so everybody understands what it’s for and how to use it, and then maintaining it through an ongoing communication cadence.

Mark Dollins: Right. It’s not just an event. Events are fine for introducing it, but the hard work really comes afterward.

Shel Holtz: Absolutely. Thanks, Mark. I look forward to talking with you next time.

Mark Dollins: Thank you, Shel. Always a pleasure.

The post OTSP #7: No Story? No Strategy. appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Communicating news to employees used to be a straightforward proposition: Publish the company newspaper or magazine, and give everyone the same information at the same time. Today, communicators can target news by audience, location, channel, source, and relevance. But the greater challenge is deciding what qualifies as news and what you hope employees will think, feel, or do after receiving it. In this episode of “On The Same Page,” Shel Holtz and Mark Dollins discuss why employee news cannot be one-size-fits-all — or a one-and-done — and explore the importance of timing, sequencing, trusted voices, employee influence networks, and planning for what happens after the announcement.

Raw transcript:

Shel Holtz: So, Mark, I don’t know about you, but when I got into this business, communicating news to employees was what employee communication was all about. Was that true for you?

Mark Dollins: Yes, exactly right. Often, it was one size fits all: Hit that button, and now everybody knows. It was really simple.

Shel Holtz: My first job was with an energy company, ARCO, which doesn’t exist anymore. It was acquired by British Petroleum after I left.

An interesting story: One of the people I knew who was still there—Dave Orman, who ran the department—said someone at BP who had been with another company it acquired asked whether he knew how to pronounce his company’s name. I think it was Amoco. Dave said, “No, how do you pronounce it?” He replied, “BP. The Amoco is silent.”

Mark Dollins: Clever. I like it.

Shel Holtz: Just to give you a heads-up about what it was going to be like.

We had a newspaper. Sometimes it was eight pages; sometimes it was 16. Every Friday, it was delivered to all 55,000 employees in the company. Everybody got the news, and everybody got the same news.

Today, there are organizations doing internal communication that don’t actually have a news vehicle. They don’t communicate the news. They’ve shifted entirely to a proactive, strategic approach to communication.

Mark Dollins: We may have been separated at birth, because my first corporate job was also with an energy company. Our communication to employees was a monthly magazine—anywhere from 32 to 38 pages. To your point, everybody got exactly the same news and information at the same time.

There really wasn’t a sense of urgency. Communicating news meant communicating what we decided was news employees needed to know, when we decided they needed to know it.

Things have changed considerably with the advent of social media and immediate communication. Of course, there also used to be a wall between internal and external communication. You could get away with some things. That’s not possible anymore. That wall is invisible.

Shel Holtz: I remember when I was at ARCO, Dave brought Roger D’Aprix in to speak to us. I believe he was with Xerox at the time. Roger was pushing this whole notion of proactive communication: You communicate to prepare employees for what’s coming, ensure they are aligned, and make sure they know what they need to know to understand and support whatever is about to happen.

Everybody on the ARCO staff, with the exception of the graphic designers, had a daily newspaper background. We were all newspaper reporters. That was what they wanted—people who could report the news.

There was pushback against what Roger said: “You mean we’re not going to report when the Trans-Alaska Pipeline terminus station blows up and kills three employees?”

You do need to report that, but you also need to be proactive. Today, though, let’s talk about news.

Mark Dollins: Indeed. How we communicate news today is critical. While one size doesn’t fit all in communicating news, I believe it is important to apply a strategic filter when deciding how to report it.

Shel Holtz: Do you want to report absolutely everything that goes on? Even in public journalism, you don’t report everything that happens. There are editorial decisions. What is news?

Mark Dollins: That’s the most basic question: What is news? What makes people interested? What is going to produce an “Aha!” rather than a “Ho-hum, I’m not interested”?

Shel Holtz: Of course, news in an organizational or internal communication context is not necessarily defined the same way it would be at the Los Angeles Times or The Wall Street Journal.

Mark Dollins: Remember all the filters you were supposed to apply in journalism school—proximity, timeliness, relevance, and so forth? Some are applicable here, and some less so.

For global companies, proximity may not be geographic. The connection may be that my company’s name is involved. That gives it some relevance.

Shel Holtz: But what’s relevant to an employee in Paris working in sales is not necessarily relevant to an employee in Peoria working in a manufacturing facility.

When we started—with your monthly magazine and my weekly newspaper—the technology limited what we could do to tailor the news to different audiences. Today, that is drop-dead easy.

Mark Dollins: Exactly. We can repackage and repurpose it for the channel we choose.

Shel Holtz: You can deliver news to the people who will be interested in it or whose jobs will be affected by it, without bothering somebody who is going to look at it and say, “Why are they sending this to me? This has nothing to do with me.”

Mark Dollins: When you’re faced with a “news item” for your organization, what filters do you run it through? How do you decide whether and how to treat it strategically?

Shel Holtz: We have established employee profiles. I had wanted to create profiles forever, but we didn’t have the resources or time to do it right.

Then I attended a conference where Andrea Greenhous was speaking. I think you were at the same conference—the PRSA Internal Communications Conference in Atlanta.

Andrea talked about three profiles she uses: hard to convince, hard to reach, and everyone else. I expanded on that. I think we have five profiles based on those three.

That’s one filter we use: Is this someone we really need to convince, or someone who merely needs to be aware?

Another filter is what the news reinforces. We tell stories that reinforce our core values. We have six core values, which I think I could actually name if I were pressed. We have a strategic plan with four planks, and we have a purpose statement that expresses our higher calling.

Through our storytelling and news reporting, we try to reinforce those things. We tell stories demonstrating that we are true to our values and that we are making decisions consistent with the planks of the strategic plan.

Mark Dollins: And consistent with your earlier point, your purpose.

That’s where many organizations miss the boat. Even when they have legitimate good news—“We’re launching a new product” or “We’re acquiring this company”—they explain the mechanics of how it will work but miss the opportunity to say, “This is how it supports our purpose, our whole reason for being.”

If it connects to a specific strategy, explain that: “We’ve said we’re going to expand into these adjacencies as a strategic priority for the next three or four years. Look at how this action accomplishes that.”

Sometimes, when you dig just below the news, you wonder why anybody would care, because no connection has been made to the organization’s purpose, mission, or strategy. As internal communicators, we have to think about the application and relevance to stakeholders.

Shel Holtz: Obviously, there will be news stories without a clear connection to one of those things, but they’re so big that you must communicate them anyway.

Before we started recording, we were talking about announcing a new CEO. That may happen because your succession plan has kicked in and the existing CEO is retiring. It could also happen because the CEO dropped dead of a heart attack or was removed by the board under questionable circumstances.

Mark Dollins: This ties to what we discussed on our last podcast about change and change management. The way we treat news cannot be one and done. We have to consider the impacts: What’s the aftermath?

A new CEO could signal an entirely new direction for the executive leadership team and other high-priority areas of the company. If you’re going to announce the news, you need to think about whether something else should follow immediately or fairly quickly.

“How do we communicate the news?” is the easy question, in my opinion. You decide whether it is news and then determine how to get it to the appropriate internal stakeholders.

But if we’re not asking, “And then what?” we’re going to miss a significant opportunity, especially with bigger news items such as a new CEO, a major acquisition, or something signaling a seismic change in the direction of the company or industry.

It isn’t simply, “How do we communicate the news?” It’s, “How do we communicate the news, and what happens afterward?”

Shel Holtz: Exactly. This is one of the challenges with hiring newspaper reporters to become internal communicators.

In public journalism, you communicate something because it happened and is relevant to people who live in the area. That doesn’t fly in internal communication. You have to consider what you want from employees after they become aware of the news.

Ed Robertson at FedEx developed a model with a horrible name: the Pyramid of Communication Quality.

Mark Dollins: Rolls off the tongue.

Shel Holtz: It sounds like something from a 1940s textbook, but it’s based loosely on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

He said most executives—and the communicators they hire—think they can start at the top of the pyramid: “What do you want me to do as a result of reading this?”

But you have to move through several steps first. The communication must satisfy logistical requirements. A good example of a logistical failure would be: “Yes, we sent you the news. The news was about a change in benefits providers, and we got it to you a week after the benefits-enrollment deadline.”

Mark Dollins: Gee, thanks.

Shel Holtz: After satisfying the logistical requirements, the communication has to capture your attention. What captures the attention of someone who goes down into a mine will differ from what captures the attention of someone sitting in a boardroom.

Once it has your attention, you ask, “What does this have to do with me? Why should I pay attention? Do things improve for me as a result?”

Only after satisfying those requirements can you get to, “What do you want me to think, believe, or do?”

Mark Dollins: Your example of communicating benefits changes after they’ve already been implemented also raises the issue of timing and sequencing. Sometimes there are advantages to carefully sequencing how you communicate news.

I recently had a conversation with a dear friend about a major symphony orchestra in this country that decided earlier this year not to renew its conductor’s contract. The board of directors and CEO certainly have the right and responsibility to make that decision.

But it appears the news wasn’t communicated to internal stakeholders—namely, the orchestra’s musicians—with much thought. The musicians learned their conductor would not be returning at the same time the press release went out to everybody else.

The problem was that the musicians liked this person. They got behind him and mounted a campaign to save his job. When I saw them recently, they were wearing red carnations. I asked what that was about, and my friend explained the situation.

They are all members of the musicians’ union, so they can organize and communicate in a coordinated way. It also appears insufficient thought was given to what the outgoing conductor could say or do. He took advantage of that and communicated some things on his own.

When internal communicators are brought to the table, we may receive the press release, but we need to ask about the implications for internal stakeholders.

What are the rules of engagement for the outgoing conductor regarding what and how he can communicate? When is the announcement going out? Who is being notified, and when? What can we offer to help make the process go more smoothly for everyone, including the musicians who clearly care about this person?

Communicating the news is a simple concept. But if we don’t consider the aftermath and its impact, we may create our own problems.

Shel Holtz: They didn’t do the incoming conductor any favors either, did they?

Mark Dollins: Good luck finding someone who wants to walk into that situation. That’s going to be a challenge.

Shel Holtz: This gets to the argument I keep hearing that there is no longer a distinction between internal and external communication because the lines have blurred.

The argument goes: You send out the press release, it gets published, and everybody reads the same thing. Why do we need to communicate separately?

The musicians’ response speaks directly to that. This is exactly why you do need to communicate separately. Roger D’Aprix refers to employees as “informed insiders,” and that’s why you need to treat them differently.

Mark Dollins: We’ve seen the rise of employee activism. Employees get behind an issue or topic—rightly so in many cases—and suddenly they aren’t merely complaining to their bosses. You may have a shareholder proposal authored by employee activists.

Thinking about the aftermath of news and how we communicate it isn’t merely a nice thing to do. It’s a central and important responsibility.

Shel Holtz: Or you could have 20,000 employees walk out. That’s another possibility.

Mark Dollins: There’s that. There is also talk of a strike in the situation I mentioned.

Shel Holtz: Really?

There was certainly the case of Wayfair, which was selling furniture to ICE detention facilities. That led employees to revolt. Then there was Google, where 20,000 employees walked out in a coordinated labor action.

Google fired the communicator who helped organize all of that. She now has a book about the experience.

Mark Dollins: I’m guessing she’s making more money from that than she did in her former job.

Shel Holtz: That may be true, but I’m not sure firing her had the positive impact Google thought it would.

Mark Dollins: We should also think about whether there are champions we need to engage or pre-engage to help communicate the news. That’s a change-management concept.

It isn’t just about the press release or the announcement in the internal house organ. If this is big or significant news, let’s give it appropriate attention and equip the right people to help deliver the message in ways a digital or printed document can’t.

That includes providing context, conveying emotion, and engaging people. It’s a far more effective way of showing that we care about how the organization responds to and engages with the news than simply saying, “Here it is. Talk to you later.”

Shel Holtz: I know organizations that have mapped their influence networks and tap into the appropriate network for each type of communication.

Mark Dollins: Smart. And don’t forget the derailers. We need to know both ends of the spectrum: Who is going to help us, and who is likely to become the voice of the opposition? Perhaps we can bring those opponents around to a different way of thinking.

Shel Holtz: Another drawback of the transition from newspaper reporter to internal communicator is the tendency to think every article—and all the news we share—must be a work of journalism. That was all there was for us before.

It doesn’t have to be that way anymore. We have multiple channels and multiple ways to distribute information.

Mark Dollins: Those channels are designed to handle information differently. Some can accommodate a boatload of material. Others give you only a limited number of characters, with the option to dive deeper elsewhere.

That’s the beauty of much of the digital communication we do. It isn’t one size fits all in terms of either the end user or the channels we use to reach them.

Shel Holtz: Some of it can be visual. I can tell a story with a photo and a caption and not need anything else, if the story can be contained there.

The other question is: Who is telling the story?

I recently saw data—it may have been from Gallagher or Poppulo—indicating that people decide which news they’ll pay attention to based on who sent it.

Was it the CEO? Was it their manager? Was it the internal communication team? When you advise clients, is the source of the news a consideration?

Mark Dollins: Of course. Whose voice matters?

If you’re going to use the CEO’s voice, it ought to be a pretty important piece of news. Otherwise, you misuse the CEO’s voice, and over time nobody pays attention because it has been overleveraged.

In other cases, a subject-matter expert with credibility—or even a third party—may be a great way to get people to pay attention. Employees may think, “I haven’t heard from this person in a while,” “This is a pretty senior person,” or “This person has a great deal of expertise in this area, so I’m going to pay more attention.”

Again, it’s situational. It requires us to think—that’s what we’re paid to do. We must consider whose voice matters and how stakeholders will react.

That’s still not one size fits all. One voice may work well in one part of the organization or for a particular type of message. In other circumstances, a second or even third voice can add credibility and acceptance.

For relatively minor news, one voice may be plenty. But for something bigger, perhaps you have analysts discuss the power of combining your company with another company. Now you’re adding credibility based on the voices you choose to help share the news and the story surrounding it.

Shel Holtz: I know organizations that overcompensate for this, too. Back in my consulting days, I had a client that never wrote a news article. It didn’t have a vehicle for communicating news. Everything came from an executive, and the communication team ghostwrote all of it.

I asked, “Really? You don’t have a voice of the company you can use to share basic, ground-level news?” No. Everything came from an executive.

Mark Dollins: That’s unfortunate. We talk about brand personality and all the components that make a company a brand and a brand a company. Those are opportunities to leverage the company’s voice without necessarily attaching a human being to it.

Again, it’s situational. We have to be thoughtful about it.

Shel Holtz: I want to return to targeting for a minute.

Not only can we get relevant news into the hands of the people for whom it matters, but we can also get hyperlocal with it.

I’m a big fan of Jeff Jarvis. I read his book about what the news industry needs to do to become relevant and profitable, and I think he’s spot-on.

He says that if you want the news to be relevant to me, don’t tell me only what’s happening in my city. Tell me what’s happening on my block.

I want to know whether there is a road closure that will keep me from getting to work. I live about two miles from the Concord Pavilion, a large performing-arts venue. Our main thoroughfare, Ygnacio Valley Road, is frequently backed up because of concerts. Tell me that this road, which is two-and-a-half blocks from my house, will be backed up from 1 p.m. until midnight.

Mark Dollins: Exactly. I may need a loaf of bread and some milk, and I don’t want to spend an hour and a half getting them. Do your part as a good community neighbor and tell me the news that affects me.

Shel Holtz: We have the ability to extract that information. AI can help us automate the process to some extent and get local information to the people who need it.

We could talk about news all day, but we’ve been at this for a while, so let’s wrap it up. Any last thoughts, Mark?

Mark Dollins: Being strategic in how we communicate news is a critical component of any employee communicator’s role.

It isn’t one size fits all. We should use the tools available to make news hyperlocal, present it in the right voice, think about sequencing, and—most importantly—consider the aftermath. Those are the critical elements we need to address.

Shel Holtz: Perhaps another time we can talk about measuring the impact of the news we communicate.

Mark Dollins: Yes. You know my favorite topic is outcomes versus outputs.

Shel Holtz: We’re only guessing that we’re having an impact if we don’t measure whether we achieved the result we wanted.

Talk to you in a couple of weeks, Mark.

Mark Dollins: Amen, brother. Sounds great, Shel. Have a good one.

The post OTSP #6: One Size Fits Nobody — A Better Way to Communicate Employee News appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Veteran communications leader Mark Dollins joins “On The Same Page” as co-host. Mark and Shel address the “voice” leadership applies internally, as opposed to (or consistent with) the voice they employ with external stakeholders. Should it be the same? How different? What considerations drive the inside-the-company voice? And why does it matter?

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Learn more about Mark at his LinkedIn profile and at the website of his consulting firm, Northstar Communications.

Links from this episode:

Raw transcript:

Shel Holtz: So, Mark, an executive’s voice. I’m curious: In your experience, do you find that executives use the same voice with internal stakeholders as they do with external stakeholders?

Mark Dollins: I think in most cases, they do not, and that’s actually a great point for us to talk about—why that is. Because when an executive uses one voice on the outside and changes it on the inside, people know, and they want to know why. It sounds incongruous to them.

So I don’t think executives do it all the time. Sometimes it happens naturally, and sometimes I think it’s intentional, so we should talk about that.

Shel: When I’m talking to my wife, it’s a different tone of voice than when I’m talking to, say, my accountant. Is it inappropriate to talk differently to investors than to employees?

Mark: Is it inappropriate? Probably not. But you have to really think about the nuance of the tone, because people know when they’re being “messaged,” and internal stakeholders don’t want to feel like they’re being messaged. They also want it straight.

They’re going to hear a lot of the financial implications from the external stakeholder version of the story. What I find is that often those things aren’t included in the internal communication. There’s almost an assumption that internal stakeholders aren’t listening to or aware of what’s happening externally. That’s a problem.

Shel: Hi, everybody, and welcome to Episode 5 of On The Same Page. I am Shel Holtz. I’m Senior Director of Communications at Webcor. We’re a commercial general contractor operating in California and headquartered in San Francisco.

And I would like to introduce you all to the new co-host of On The Same Page, Mark Dollins. Mark, it is awesome to have you here.

Mark: Shel, thank you. I feel like there should be confetti and a marching band, but thank you for that introduction. I am honored to co-host this with you. I’m really excited about it.

Shel: I think we’re going to have a great time and cover a lot.

I want people to get to know you a bit before we jump into this topic of finding your leader’s voice—and, in fact, even your own voice—for internal stakeholders.

You and I met—I can’t remember how long ago this was—but it was in Chicago at what was then Quaker, which was owned by Pepsi. You were VP of internal communications at Pepsi. That’s where we got to know each other. It was through Sharon McIntosh, who brought me in at the time.

But tell people about yourself. What has been your career trajectory?

Mark: The big picture is that I started as a journalist. I worked for ABC News in Washington and then went to the Midwest as a newspaper reporter for a couple of years. I couldn’t make enough of a living to support myself, so that’s what brought me to the world of corporate communications.

I spent 10 years in gas and electric utilities—a lot of fires, gas explosions, power outages. After all that, it was a lot more fun talking about Cap’n Crunch and Rice-A-Roni, so that’s what brought me to the world of consumer packaged goods, with Quaker Oats Company in Chicago.

I loved working at Quaker. Quaker became part of PepsiCo in 2001, and I did a couple of stints back and forth. I ended up being their chief communication officer for food, so Frito-Lay in addition to all the Quaker and other food products in the portfolio. Then I was their chief communication officer for the beverage division as well.

From there, I began my consultancy. I got pulled back into the corporate world and ran executive and global employee communications for DuPont as it went through a $130 billion merger with Dow in 2017.

So there was a lot of change communication, which we’ll talk about at some point in this series. Then I went back to consulting. Now I’m doing work in employee and change communications, and employee engagement is really where I’ve found my sweet spot. I have a great love, passion, and expertise in this area, and there’s nobody better than you to partner with to talk about it.

Shel: It’s going to be great. You’ve also written a book that I really enjoyed.

Mark: You mean these?

Shel: Yeah, the ones on the wall behind you.

Mark: Yes. I partnered with John Stemmle at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. I’m an adjunct there as well these days and have been teaching a class based on this book, Engaging Employees Through Strategic Communication.

The first edition came out in 2021, and the second edition just came out a few months ago this year. I’m really excited to have added new case studies and a few new chapters, including one on artificial intelligence and how employee communicators are beginning to use it in lots of different ways, and another new chapter on crisis communication.

So there are lots of new things. It’s constantly evolving, and I think we’ll be doing a third edition before you know it.

Shel: And I know that you also do a survey on the use of AI for internal communications.

Mark: We’re about to release our fourth consecutive annual study on AI and communications, specifically looking at it through the lens of employee communicators: how we’re using it both for productivity and for more strategic applications, and what our attitudes are toward it.

There have been lots of changes in four years, as you might imagine, so I’m excited to talk a little bit about that at some point as well.

Shel: In fact, for listeners to this podcast who also listen to For Immediate Release, Mark is going to be talking about that survey on an FIR interview coming up in, I think, just a couple of weeks.

Mark: I think we’re recording it next week, Shel, so I can’t wait to talk about it.

Shel: I know Neville and I are both looking forward to that as well.

One more thing about you personally before we start talking business. In your personal life, I know that you’re into wrestling.

Mark: I am. They have Masters tennis and Masters swimming, and they actually have Masters wrestling as well. I’ve been active in that space for about the last 10 years or so. I wrestled in high school and college. I coach. I also just got my Gold Level certification from USA Wrestling.

It’s their highest level of coaching certification. I went with the Under-23 national team to the Pan American Championships a couple of months ago, and then helped run a development camp at the Olympic Training Center for under-18-year-olds.

So my coaching journey continues, as does my athletic and competition journey in wrestling. I love it. It’s a lot of fun.

Shel: Great. People should get to know you better as we carry on with this podcast over the months.

But let’s talk about this idea of voice. In my framework, I think it fits very nicely in a couple of places. One is consultation, as we work with executives to help them become better communicators. I also think it fits really well with the channels we use. If executives are a channel for communicating, they have to do that effectively, and we need to manage that channel.

Mark: And we need to help other communicators. If you work in executive communications, there are ways now to accelerate your drafting process and put content more into a comfortable voice that works both for you as the counselor and coach, and for your executive, who needs to find his or her voice and stick to it.

I’ve spent some time working with CEO types on how to do exactly that. Anything we can do to help our colleagues advance their productivity, become more efficient, and get better at supporting their executives—while still preserving their role as coach—I think would be helpful.

Shel: I went looking for examples of an executive employing a great voice with internal stakeholders and then an example of executives not doing it so well.

The positive example I found is Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb. This is not an obscure example.

This was around a layoff in 2020. It was really awful news that he was delivering. They were eliminating nearly 2,000 jobs, about 25 percent of the company.

His May 5 employee message was very human. It didn’t sound like somebody had crafted it. He explained what the business circumstances were. He talked about the uncomfortable truths concerning the future of travel. This was just as COVID was sending people home.

He explained how the company decided which jobs they were going to eliminate. He laid out the principles that guided the cuts, and then he gave an extraordinary amount of detail about severance, equity, healthcare, and job assistance.

And he was willing to say that he felt real emotion—a real connection to the people with whom they were having to part ways.

That could have sounded mawkish in some other CEO’s remarks. But in the context of their culture and everything else in the message, it sounded like him. It was very authentic.

Authenticity, I think, matters a lot in how an executive talks to employees.

Mark: I agree, Shel. The thing is, a lot of executives don’t have that authenticity naturally when they’re communicating to large audiences.

If you’re talking to them one-on-one, they’re as authentic as they can be. But you put a couple more people in front of them, or they’re talking in front of thousands, and all of a sudden—if they’re shy or struggle to find a tone that fits the situation—it becomes more than apparent. You think, “Okay, this person is either not telling the truth, or they’re just a crappy communicator.”

That’s where the role of an executive communications coach comes in. We’re the ones helping them by saying, “Gosh, that feels a little stiff. Let’s use this technique to help you come across more naturally.”

There’s the tone—making sure it’s transparent—and then there’s the content, to your point. Are we actually moving the needle with content that’s believable and transparent?

Or are we sugarcoating it? Are we telling one thing to shareholders—“Hey, we’re taking a $130 million charge. We’re going to cut 13,000 jobs,” or whatever it’s going to be—and then the internal message is, “We’re going to try to save as many jobs as possible”?

It’s incongruous, and employees pick up on that very quickly. That’s not transparent. It’s just bad practice.

Shel: It’s funny. I met somebody who was in a room with Hillary Clinton—just a small group of three or four people and Hillary Clinton—and this person said she was absolutely shocked at what a great communicator she was, how warm she was, how conversational and authentic.

She said, “I’ve seen her speak so many times. I was expecting this distant, cold, on-message sort of person.” But that’s not what she was like in person.

So it is important to work with executives so that they can convey what they’re like in front of one person or a small group when they’re talking to hundreds or thousands.

Mark: Yes. And I’ll tell you someplace where I see this popping up more. There are examples where that authenticity and care for internal stakeholders are brought into an external environment.

You and I both know that employees today are getting information from their companies and their leaders on channels like LinkedIn as much as they are on their internal channels. They’re watching. They’re listening. They’re reading that kind of stuff.

A couple of examples: I’ve been working with Pittsburgh International Airport. Their CEO makes it a point, every time she’s talking about what’s happening at the airport, to acknowledge the hard work of her team members and internal teams. They just built and opened a beautiful $1.8 billion terminal there, but every time she’s out talking to stakeholders, she acknowledges the hard work her team members have done to make that happen.

Another example is Signet Jewelers. They own Jared, Kay, and Zales. Their CEO, J.K. Symancyk, when he’s doing quarterly earnings, talking to CNBC, or doing something on LinkedIn, invariably talks about the contributions of their team members.

That’s authentic. Our job in helping and coaching executives is to say, “Make sure you don’t forget that,” because in the heat of the moment—maybe it’s live broadcast TV—putting a little note or even a sticky note that says “team members” is a great way to help them bring that authentic voice forward so it doesn’t come across as scripted and unbelievable.

It sends a huge message of authenticity to internal stakeholders: “Yeah, you had a great quarter. Yay, shareholders. But don’t forget who actually made that happen. That’s us—the people behind the scenes doing the work.”

So I’m a big believer in not forgetting the channels that cross over, and in providing that kind of coaching to an executive leader to ensure his or her voice comes across as appreciative of the hard work of the company—but more importantly, the people behind it.

Shel: Do you remember Jacques Nasser by any chance?

He was with Ford Motor Company, and he would send an email to employees—I think it was monthly. I read about this in a Fortune magazine article. It had to be 20 or 25 years ago.

He would not let anybody review it. Not his communicators, not his lawyers, not HR. He said, “I want this to be me, unfiltered, straight to the employees. I don’t care if there are typos. I don’t care if I say something you don’t want me to say. I’m willing to risk that in order to be completely unfiltered and authentic.”

They told a story about one of these emails where he said, “I know there’s a lot going on in the company, and I should be talking about what’s happening at work. My daughter is graduating from high school this afternoon, and that’s all I can think about. So I want to tell you all about my daughter and everything she’s done in her school career.”

He got notes of congratulations from union shop stewards.

But I think he is an exception to the rule. I don’t think being unfiltered and being authentic are necessarily the same thing.

I think executive voice is disciplined authenticity.

Mark: I agree.

I’m going to jump a little bit to a different topic: how you find that voice.

I worked with the CEO of a major company in the last 12 months who couldn’t really describe his voice. I said, “Tell me what you think your voice is.”

I went through a lot of things that were publicly available, and I ran them through some reviews using what we’ll call artificial intelligence. It was able to help me identify things like tone, pacing, timbre, word choice, and things like that.

Then I was able to go back to the CEO and say, “Is this how you would describe your voice? Does that feel right?” And I had specific examples pulled forward.

“Yeah, that sounds like me. That sounds like me. That doesn’t really sound like me.”

So it was interesting to arrive at a definition of what that voice was.

The purpose was, first, to get alignment with him, but also to help the executive communications professionals working with him. They were having a really tough time getting him a first draft that was close to his voice.

The content was roughly okay, but the voice was all wrong.

So there are ways of doing this. It’s about helping executives recognize and reflect on what their voice is and what works for them. Then sometimes you have to say, “Yeah, it might work for you in some cases, but it’s not so great in others. You’re pretty stiff, so let’s come up with some agreements about how we can fix this.”

You still retain what works for them and their voice, but add some nuances that let you polish it and make it work for other stakeholders.

Shel: One of the problems is that we tend to try to label an executive’s voice with adjectives, right?

“You’re approachable. You’re conversational.”

I think you need to get more detailed than that. You need to ask questions like: Does this executive explain why before saying what? Do they use stories or evidence? Do they acknowledge uncertainty? Are they funny or self-deprecating? How do they sound when they’re taking responsibility for things?

Mark: How often do they say “team”?

Shel: Exactly. What would they never say?

Then you bring all of that together and ask, “Is this your voice?”

If you’re going to use AI to help with this, those are the kinds of things you have to feed it. These are words they use all the time. These are words they never use. These are the approaches they take to supporting a point they’re making.

Mark: And the world is changing constantly.

It could be a new CEO who comes from outside the company. It could be a very senior-level person who has moved into a CEO role and needs to refine that voice because maybe what worked in the previous role doesn’t work as a CEO.

We have to keep those things in mind as we provide that counsel and coaching: “Okay, you have a great voice for this, but you know what? You’ve got a whole new world here that you have to work with. Let’s talk about how we can refine that and make it work for all the stakeholders, including internal employees, whom we have to reach and who have to believe in us.”

Shel: One thought before we wrap this episode up: It doesn’t matter what the executive’s voice is if what they say does not align with what they do.

They can be heartfelt, and they can get choked up when they’re talking to employees. But if their behavior is inconsistent with that, that is a failure of integrity.

That creates a say-do gap.

Mark: We’ve seen examples of that, right? People who want you to believe, “I’m open, transparent, and a decent human being,” and yet they do conference calls or send out a blanket email to fire 35,000 people at once.

I’m not really seeing the connection there.

You’re right. Their actions have to be consistent with how they want to be seen.

Shel: By the way, you mentioned bad layoffs. I had said I found an example of an executive doing this badly.

Vishal Garg, with Better.com, laid off 900 people at the same time. He invited them all to a Zoom call—this was in December 2021—and told them they were part of the unlucky group whose employment was being terminated.

Then he accused some of the terminated employees of stealing from the company by being unproductive.

There was considerable backlash, so much so that he had to apologize for failing to show respect and appreciation. The board actually announced a leadership and cultural assessment as a result.

That’s what executive voice looks like when it goes badly wrong.

Mark: Not a lot of love shown there.

I think a lot of people are familiar with that story, but it’s good to be reminded that this is real stuff that happens. It makes you wonder: Was there an internal or executive communication person even there in the room?

And if so, was he or she ignored?

There’s a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking about that stuff, but you just wonder: How the heck does that happen?

Shel: You have to believe either there was no communications perspective in the room or it wasn’t listened to.

This is why I think we have to talk about the “seat at the table,” even though I get really sick of that conversation.

Mark: Me too, Shel. We definitely have to talk about that.

AI is a great example of where people are saying, “Yeah, we never get a seat at the table.”

And I’m thinking, “You have no idea the opportunity that is in front of you right now, this very second.”

Shel: We’ll definitely do an episode on that.

But that’ll do it for this episode. I hope listeners will send us your comments and questions. Just head over to firpodcastnetwork.com and find the show. You’ll get all the information on how to comment.

And until next time, Mark, this has been great. I’m really looking forward to continuing this.

Mark: I’m loving it. What a great partner. Thanks, y’all. I look forward to continuing this journey with you.

The post OTSP #5: Finding Your Leader’s Voice for Internal Stakeholders appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Most companies have corporate values. Most companies get them wrong. In episode 4 of “On the Same Page,” Shel and Steve look at what works, what doesn’t, and why, with examples and tales from their own experiences.

Transcript:

Steve Crescenzo

Hey Shel.

Shel Holtz

Steve, how you doing?

Steve Crescenzo

Doing good, doing good. We’re doing this on a record I’m doing this on a Saturday, which is fun. well, I mean it’s it’s what else am I gonna do? It’s too early to drink, so what yeah, this is this is good time spent. but I’m really glad I’m excited about our topic. More importantly this this week. we decided to talk about values, corporate values. And I think there’s there’s two camps of people when it comes to values. There’s people that really believe they can drive the culture and affect how people feel at work and how they work and how they treat each other and

Shel Holtz

Yeah, is it?

Steve Crescenzo

All that good stuff. you know, and there are companies where that happens. I I’m not gonna say there’s none. Second camp is people who just think they’re completely worthless and they just are posters on a wall and nobody pays attention to them, nobody can name what they are. And I’m in the third camp. I think they do some damage at some a lot of companies for two reasons. Number one, they’re they’re too generic. You look at it, I could pull up any and it’s it’s integrity, respect, excellence, agility. Teamwork, putting people for you it’s all the same crap. So it’s so generic that everyone just agrees with them, and of course who’s not gonna agree with that? the second thing though is that if you don’t live your values, if it’s I I go into so many corporate communications departments at companies where one of the values is innovation, and their intranet looks like it’s from nineteen ninety five. they’re not innovative. they’re in a you know, so agility, no no. Transparency, absolutely not. Not so you gotta poster on a wall with this list of stupid words, and everybody sees what’s in front of them and says, That’s not us. That’s not us. So I think they actually might do more harm than good.

Shel Holtz

Well l let me read you some corporate values. these are from one company, these are their values integrity, respect, excellence, and teamwork.

Steve Crescenzo

For the swords I said. Who’s it?

Shel Holtz

Yeah. Yeah. You see anything wrong with those, other than the fact that they’re generic?

Steve Crescenzo

I I think that’s great. I’m glad they operate that way. That’s great. you making

Shel Holtz

Yeah, well that’s Enron. Yeah, it is. Liv they were literally Enron’s values. excellence and teamwork.

Steve Crescenzo

teamwork. That’s classic. Yeah, that’s that’s my experience too. I I’m I’m with that I’m with I’m with that example.

Shel Holtz

Well, we will talk about that. We will talk about your other issues too, because I think they’re spot on. But I do believe that when it’s done well and done right, they can really rock an organization.

Steve Crescenzo

Not gonna disagree with that, but let’s talk about it.

Shel Holtz

So before we jump into the values discussion, I did want to share one comment we got over on LinkedIn where I shared the last episode where we talked about employee voice. This is from Vincent Bruneau, who is commenting pretty regularly on our show and also on my other podcast for immediate release. and he’s always got he’s he’s he’s got great stuff. I I I want to know more about him. but he says in terms of employee voice, the most effective employee listening strategies don’t start with asking more questions. They start with demonstrating that previous feedback led to meaningful change. When people can see the connection between their input and organizational decisions, participation becomes much easier to sustain. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

Absolutely. That’s why that’s the point you made, is that we don’t have a survey fatigue. We have a nothing happens when we take a survey fatigue.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, the way I heard it at a conference was it’s it’s not survey fatigue, it’s bullshit fatigue. yak because if we if we survey you and then don’t tell you what the survey results were or how things are changing as a result of that, that’s bullshit.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, you know, Cindy does probably, you know, she’s she’s our measurement arm of Crescent Communications. She does, you know, fifty surveys a year. And her first question is, Why are you asking that question if you don’t if you if you it’s ac if you don’t have the power to change something? And they do it. They load the survey up with a j a wish list of things and they can’t change any of it. And they still ask and nothing happens and then they do it again the next year.

Shel Holtz

And nobody wants to take that survey. Right. Yeah. All right. So let’s jump into values. And I think a good place to start is what are corporate values supposed to be? And the way I see it, the way I’ve always heard that values are supposed to be presented to employees, is these are the underlying beliefs that drive decisions and behavior in the company. These are the things that we believe. And how do you get to that? I I I think, you know, first of all.

Steve Crescenzo

Right, exactly.

Shel Holtz

It has to be shared between the leaders and the employees. Nothing is going to turn employees off more than leadership coming to them and saying, hey, everybody, these are our values. And employees look at it and say, well, first of all, I don’t see those values reflected in decisions or behaviors. And second of all, they’re not my values. I worked for an organization once and I left them in 1993. They have changed owners a couple of times. I don’t think anybody is there. Who was there when I was there? So I’m going to go ahead and name them. It was Allergan, a pharmaceutical company. where yeah, they came up with the values and and I wasn’t involved. I was director of communications, but this was like the executive committee. And they came to me and said, we’ve decided these are the corporate values, go communicate these. And I looked at them and I I said, do we have employee buy-in on these? And they almost literally said, Employee buy-in, hey, this is my way or the highway. If they don’t like these, they can go work somewhere else.

Steve Crescenzo

I remember that. Yeah. my God. Shell, so we’ve done this kind of work with five or six companies over the years, mission, vision, and values. And you know, our we they they hired us to help them write these statements in these words. And our thing was we always said, we’re not gonna do it unless we can talk to employees first. We’re gonna do focus groups. So this company sent us to London, Paris, Singapore. We did focus groups globally to get to the mission, vision values, what people really believed, what was in their core, what brought them to work every day. You know, we did. Cindy led the focus groups and she’s good at that, and we got such great stuff. Then it came time to present it to the C suite. This was a big company. And here’s why everything ends up sucking so bad. It’s all written by committee. Like we we gave them three great examples pulled from their own employees that were unique. You couldn’t pull them out and give them to any other company. They were, they were good. And by the time we walked out of that half day session, they had been watered down. Because yeah, you had eight eight guys in there, eight guys and two women, and they all had their own ideas and they all just wanted to be safe. Well, safe. Yeah, they all always default to safety. Like, let’s just be safe. That’s why you get integrity. Who’s gonna argue with integrity? Transparency, who’s gonna argue with that? Well, by the time I d I don’t even know what they ended up with, but I know that they watered it way down from what we gave them. And our communications people loved it. Our clients loved us. We worked with them again and again and again. But when you’re up against that C suite in that that lemming like thing like to not take a chance to just be safe and you know and they wanna be kinda corporate and we gotta be serious and that’s where it all falls apart. It’s writing by committee. You wanna have values. I mean it just it’s really hard.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, and another place this falls apart is what you mentioned at the outset, which is that the behaviors don’t match the values. I’ll tell you, I was doing a focus group with employees of a technology company. It was in their Los Angeles office. They’re headquartered up here in Silicon Valley, but this was in their LA office. And their values were printed on the back of the security badge that they all wore on lanyards around their necks. And I said, What do you think about those? And they laughed. I literally laughed out loud. And I said, Okay, tell me about that. And one of them turned his badge around and he read off the values. He says, You see all of these? There was a guy who was just promoted to executive vice president and he violated every single one of these. He he he got the car and the stock options and the huge bonus potential. And he violated every one of these, but he blew his numbers away. So

Steve Crescenzo

Ha ha.

Shel Holtz

Every employee in this company knows that we can do what these things say or we can do what gets us ahead based on what we see actually happen in the organization. And that’s where values become a source of incredible cynicism and derision.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, yeah, I I I can I I can tell three or four different clients that we’ve had. One of the one of the values was transparency. no, I’m sorry, one of the values was innovation. I have a transparency story too. was innovation and ri risk taking. You know, that was the that was in the values, that was in the then we did focus groups with employees and they’re like, You’re they’re out of their mind. If you make a mistake around here, you’re punished. Like I and you’re not gonna you’re you’re not allowed to fail forward. You’re not allowed to try things. I mean, you’re you supposedly are. But you’re gonna spend time and money doing something, you’re gonna go after what you know is gonna work. You’re where they’re not being innovative. So it’s it’s preached up here at the top, and it’s not happening down there. The other one is transparency, right? Everyone’s got that one lately. I was working for a big oil company, and transparency was one of the values, and I was doing focus groups, and everyone kept saying it I we just don’t feel leadership is transparent. We don’t think they’re transparent. Transparent, we don’t think it kept coming up. The number one theme out of like fifteen focus groups. So I go to give my report to the communicator and he loves it. Then we got to take it to the next level to a bit one of the leaders, not yet the big guy. And he looks and he goes, stops me like six slides in and says, You’ve already mentioned lack of transparency three times, and that’s not the case. I said, Well, that that’s what I heard. I mean, I I did fifteen talking, I talked to 110 people or whatever. And he goes, No, that’s not the case though. They’re they just don’t understand what we’re telling We we are very transparent. I’m like, all right, I can see exactly how much good this audit’s gonna do. And it’s just it’s it’s so it just doesn’t happen up there often enough to make a difference down here where people are doing the work.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, and you know, when you’re sharing things transparently, and I this is a bit of a digression. It also needs to be relevant. I did work with a media company whose name everybody listening or watching this podcast would recognize in a heartbeat. And I was interviewing their CEO, who’s very famous, and he said, we actually don’t need employee communications. He says, you know, the cachet of working here. Is is all we really need because people go out at night and say, I’ll tell you when we stop recording. But I went out and did the focus groups and I heard the same thing i i in every focus group. and what they were saying was they keep talking to us about our international expansion. And I am a producer on a US-based show.

Steve Crescenzo

Well now I I don’t know who it is.

Shel Holtz

International expansion doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m not going to be involved in that. There are other things I want them to be transparent about. I don’t ever hear about that. And then what they said was every year we’re told what our financial goals are. And from January to October, everything is great. Everything is rosy. we get these all company updates where they tell us how wonderful everything is. Then in October, we’re far behind budget and we have to

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah.

Shel Holtz

Take measures to to to fix things. And I asked this of the CEO when I had my follow-up call with him. And he said, Well, if we told employees what was going on earlier in the year, in 10 minutes it would be on the related blogs and all of this stuff would be out in public and it would affect our share price. And I said, Okay, so your employees don’t trust you. And you don’t trust your employees, but you don’t need employee communications. Yeah, it was that was a I I went in there thinking that was going to be a fun gig and it it it ended up being really, really challenging. But anyway, another problem with values is a lot of leaders make them aspirational. You know, so employees in the focus group say they’re not transparent. And leadership says, No, that’s what we’re working toward. That’s not values, right? That’s a maybe a strategic plan.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah. No, no, no, no. That’s that could be a vision. That could be yeah, something else, but it’s not values are how what we do every day right now. What are our values?

Shel Holtz

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What are the what are the beliefs that underscore everything that we do, every decision, the way we behave, the way we treat each other? You mentioned innovation. Innovation is one of the values at my company, but it’s real. Nobody doubts this. We do very complex, yeah, we yeah, we do very complex things that other, you know, some of our competitors turn down these projects, saying that can’t be done.

Steve Crescenzo

no, that’s what yeah.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, we we did one it was a hotel in San Francisco that we built and the footprint was ridiculous. There was no place for staging. you had a building right abutting where the back was and two abutting where the side was like a vacant lot between two high rises and the building on the street behind it, right there. no place to put a crane. I mean, all kinds of issues and we innovated ways. To do I’ll tell you one great innovation story if I can digress a little on this. We we built the California Academy of Sciences, and there were two things in that building that were challenging. And one of them was that we needed fire suppression systems in a not a vacuum-sealed room, but you know, an airtight room. And this ended up being a challenge. And somebody said, Well, you know, who lives in that kind of environment is people on submarines. So we went to a submarine manufacturer to find out how they did it. the other one was in this simulated rainforest. Yeah, the other one was the rainforest it in this dome had this sort of curving walkway that you could it it started at the top and winds its way down. And you see, there’s no stairs that do this. What does it? And somebody looked at the design and said, you know what it looks like?

Steve Crescenzo

That’s that’s that’s cool. That’s a great story. That yeah, I’m

Shel Holtz

It looks like a roller coaster. So we worked with a roller coaster company on this walk. So this is things other people go, we you can’t do that. And that’s innovation. And you know I that’s relevant to the people in the organization. And yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

That’s cool. Yeah. Yeah, you know so we we were lucky enough to do work with Sandia Labs. and you remember any old days Dan Dan Baum? He wrote he wrote like a funny corporate column in the in the in the Sandia Lab News. And he was like a Mike Roykko level comic columnist. But anyway, I digress. He’s retired. But we went on there innovation’s one of their values, and of course Sandia Labs. They’re they’re making weapons and and they’re

Shel Holtz

I did some work with Seth. They’re great. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

They have to be innovative, right? So innovation’s all over the place and it’s a value and it’s it’s really driven into the DNA. But then what w if you had to guess in the United States, what’s the most innovative healthcare organization in the in the United States?

Shel Holtz

Mayo clinic would would come to the top of my mind. Mayo clinic. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

If you think Mail Client? Yeah, exactly. That’s one of our clients. And there’s a one he’s retired now, I think, but think he retired just last year. Hoy Cinemore was one of the best corporate editors in in my in in that I’ve ever stated him. He was a brilliant writer, brilliant editor. And he go and he and he measured everything. Every article he would measure the you know, everything. How long they stayed in the page, metro opens, clicks, w everything. He goes, Steve, if I ever want to guarantee that nobody reads a story that I write. somebody else writes, I’ll put the word innovation in the headline. It’s just so beaten to death. It’s beaten to death. And Mail Clinics as innovative as anybody gets, but they don’t talk about it all the time. They they just tell stories. They they would tell that story. And they might say the word innovation in there, but they don’t constantly talk about how innovative we are because

Shel Holtz

No, no, no. You can’t beat people over the head with this stuff. in our internal comms department, we have a test. What value or values does this article reinforce? Doesn’t mean we put the value in the headline or even in the story. But it has to align with at least one of in some way. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

I love it. Shut up. And I have seen companies in the in the employee on the internet, back when back in print even, that have a little icon for each value and they would just stick the icon next to it. So it wasn’t in the headline, it wasn’t like that, but it it was a way to kind of reinforce that, you know, these things matter. This is th this is this is what we’re saying and this is how we’re working and that’s how they blend together.

Shel Holtz

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the other thing that I like about where I work is that I know because I’ve been in the room a few times, that the executive leadership tests decisions against the values. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

That’s awesome. So that’s a g that’s great. I mean, if that more people did that, they wouldn’t be so either useless or harmful. When I was doing the focus when Sydney was doing the focus troops for that large company globally, one of the things she would ask was now we’re gonna talk about now I want to talk about values. We talk about mission, vision, values, but you know, corporate values is a very strange concept, she would say, because there’s fifty thousand people in this company. How can they possibly all have the same values? Now think about your personal values. Which what are your values, Shell? I know yours. You’re you’re kind, you’re a deadhead, you take care of people, you mentor people, you’re generous. Those are your values. Always have been, always will. not everybody has those values. I would argue that certain politicians today certainly do not have those values. So a value should I why what do I a value is valuable when it forces choices. You know what I mean? Like it’s gotta force choices.

Shel Holtz

Exactly.

Steve Crescenzo

If you’re if one of your values is transparency, there are going to be some leaders that don’t agree with that and they may want to go work somewhere else. If one of your values is speed and agility, and you’ve got a worker who is precise and he came from a Swiss watch company and he’s not the kind of worker that likes to go move fast and break things, as all the tech bros say. Like they should values should force people to make decisions. Like, is this the kind of company I want to work with?

Shel Holtz

Well, it should force leadership. It should force leadership to make decisions too. And there’s there’s a great example one you know, one of the archetypal crisis communication examples, case studies, is the Tylenol tampering. It was right there in Chicago where you live. and yeah, you know, it’s taught in every business school. we look at that through rose colored glasses. I was talking to somebody who was there at Johnson and Johnson

Steve Crescenzo

Right. Well yeah, that’s the main thing. god, yeah. on there, yeah.

Shel Holtz

At the time that happened. And yeah, it was was saying, you know, everybody says this was this immediate thing that the board decided, that the executive team decided. It actually took three days and it took a lot of harping from I can’t remember his name, but he ran PR back then in the company. But what he kept telling them was, you know, because they they only wanted to pull the product in Chicago. You pull it nationwide, that’s a real hit to earnings. that’s going to affect the shareholders, and that’s bad.

Steve Crescenzo

really?

Shel Holtz

and his point, well, he had two points. One was if there’s an incident outside of Chicago, it’ll kill us if we leave the product on the shelves. But the other thing is, if you look at our credo, they called it a credo, but it was their values, it was their beliefs, was that our patients come first, our employees come second, the communities in which we operate come third, and shareholders come last. And if we pull

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah.

Shel Holtz

product only in Chicago and leave it up when there’s a risk in the rest of the country, that’s not what we say our values are. We’re putting the shareholders first. So they ended up agreeing. They pulled the product nationwide. They took a huge hit to their bottom line, but they innovated the safety seal. They reintroduced the product with a safety seal. No other pain reliever had this. Not only did they get their own customers back, but they got a bunch of customers who had been buying competitor

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, good.

Shel Holtz

Products because the competitors didn’t have safety seals. Shareholders made out like bandits. Take care of your customers, take care of your employees, and the bottom line will take care of itself, you know. but you have to live your values. And I think this is why crisis tabletop exercises at least twice a year are so important because it builds the muscle memory when you’re in the midst of a crisis and have to make decisions really fast. You have to test them against your values. Right? I mean value should cost something.

Steve Crescenzo

without a doubt. Values should cost something. Like I I don’t know what Target’s values are. but I’m sure I’m I’m sure they’re I’m sure somewhere in there I’m sure they violated them when they didn’t speak up what was happening in Min Minneapolis. I’m quite sure that they value they they violated seven or six six or seven of their values. you know what you know who actually get another copy that gets it right, Shell is right in your neighborhood and you might not like because they, you know, they’re utility and nobody really likes the utilities. And they they yeah, PG and E. We’re doing a lot of work with them right now. through with Brad Whitworth over there and and the rest of the team. And we went out there and we gave a speech to 600 of their managers. And Patty Poppy is the CEO, and she led off. And then I fought we follow Cindy and I followed her, and she was just fantastic. I I I’ve been blown away by some really special CEOs in my life. mostly I’m disgusted by them, to be honest. but this one she blew me away. She was so transparent.

Shel Holtz

P G and E.

Steve Crescenzo

And real and authentic. And the 600 managers, you could just tell the that the culture in that room was vibrant and it was there. And you know, they they have values, and their values are their values are very actually very unique. They’re what was it? I forgot curiosity. There there were good values. but they also have you you talked a little bit about values being aspirational. So they have their values, which are cool, curious. all sorts of i I’ll remember later. but then they have what they call their stands. That’s this is what we’re gonna we’re gonna where we’re gonna take a stand, what we’re gonna make a stand on. And their stands are everyone and everything is always safe. If everyone you work for utility, well Shell, you’re in construction. Everything is safety, right?

Shel Holtz

yeah. S yeah, second most dangerous occupation in the country is is construction. Oil and gas.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, I don’t with the first. well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So everyone and everything is always safe. Aspirational, right? Catastrophic wildfires shall stop. It’s almost like biblical. Is it it is enjoyable to work with and for PG and E. Clean and resilient energy for all. Our work shall create prosperity for our customers and investors. You know what? I would look at that if you didn’t know I didn’t know the backstory there and who she is and what she does. I’d be like, that’s they’re full, that’s just words, words. But they’re not with her. They’re not. They they she

Shel Holtz

Yeah. But they’re also not values. They’re they’re not trying to convince people this is what we this these underscore our behavior and activity today. They’re they’re aspirational and they’re separating those from their values. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

Exactly. And that’s that’s why I love it. And then but then the the values come into play and then the the strategic initiatives are tied to those two things and it’s all very mapped out and and smart and it makes makes a difference. I mean the the employees feel c connected. And you know what’s funny is when Patty Poppy came on board there, you know, they were losing money, they were they were in dire straits, they had gone through some I think lawsuits or whatever, I don’t even know. but she goes, If you came here for me just to turn the books around, I’m not your girl. I’m not your I’m not your person. I’m here to change the culture of this company. And she did. And that’s why I feel bad saying all values suck, because when they’re right, like Southwest Airlines used to get it right. I’m not sure if they still do. When they used to get it right, I remember having dinner with Ginger Hard, she just passed away recently. Did you hear that?

Shel Holtz

I didn’t know that. I’m sorry to hear that.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, I saw it on LinkedIn. She was a wonderful woman. She headed up all of employee communications for Southwest Airlines. And I had dinner with her once. And I said, What is it about you guys with this weirdo Kool-Aid drinking culture? Why are your people so nice on the flights? Why do people seem to love working here? And she gave it, went back to Herb Kellerher, of the CEO, the founder. And they said, because Herb always said, every other company says the customer’s always right. We’ve always said our employees are right, and then we trust them to take care of the customer.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, she was.

Steve Crescenzo

And that was a value and employees got that. And I mean y it can make a difference if it’s community if it makes something to begin with that came from employees and it’s communicated properly, it can make a world of difference.

Shel Holtz

I I I heard a story. I I don’t know if this is apocryphal or if it really happened, but there was a marketing team brought into Southwest. They did the dog and pony show for their their marketing slogan, and you know, they had the the big reveal and Herb Callaher and the board is there, and Callaher’s kind of looking at it, and he’s grimacing and and he says, You guys don’t get it. Here’s here’s our slogan: smiles on faces, butts in seats, money in the bank.

Steve Crescenzo

Now that’s real. That’s cold. I love that.

Shel Holtz

Yeah. Yeah. Hey Steve, I got one more thing I wanna talk about with values, but before we do, I wanna let everyone know that this episode of On the Same Page is sponsored by the strategy studio. Why don’t you tell us about that?

Steve Crescenzo

Just a couple of seconds, not an ad necessarily, but we started the str Crescenso Communications. My wife Cindy, myself, and Zach started the strategy studio. Our son, Zach. Start we started it about a year and a half ago. And it is a private community paid, but a drop in the bucket compared to going to even one conference or one one webinar, even. we got about 140 people in there now, and we share ideas in there. We do weekly live sessions. So we we just did one, we just interviewed Mary Lou Panzano. On her new book out, Cementing Change. She’s a board member of the studio. So we talked to her for an hour. We do live interviews. We do a lot of trainings on things like AI and content creation and measurement and strategy and planning and weekly live sessions. You know, they’re 20 minutes, they’re 25 minutes, micro trainings, so you can do it over lunch. And then we have we have the water cooler thread in there where people just go out there and say, It just happened last week. Someone goes, Hey, I’m thinking about proposing these changes to my employee newsletter. My boss is gonna be a little skeptical. Any advice? 20 people get out there and say, Yeah, do this, do this. And they’re just like sharing stuff all the time. So would love to have anybody listening join the studio. And here it is. Constrategy studio dot com.

Shel Holtz

Higher, higher, higher up. There it is, yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

All right. Check it out. Check out our check out our website, crescendo dot com, and if you wanna you can get there from there too. So yes, we’re so proud to sponsor this because you’re my mentor. Not everybody gets a chance to talk to their mentor twice a month. That’s really cool. So thank you for having me again.

Shel Holtz

Out. Yeah. my pleasure, and you’re my mentor too. you mentioned you mentioned AI. So now I have two things to talk about before we wrap this up. Yeah. Well, this is this will be pretty quick, but AI is really the values test right now. You know, I mean there are companies that are laying people off and claiming it’s AI. How do you message that? are you disclosing what is machine generated? These are all, you know, values decisions in disguise, aren’t they?

Steve Crescenzo

Haha Well I knew and I should have got you off out of God damn it. Absolutely. Yeah, I d absolutely. I think companies are really gonna struggle with it. I really do. And here’s another ethical AI thing that has to do with values. You have all employees are equal, right? All associates are equal, all partner, whatever you wanna call your employees. Well we’re seeing with a lot of our clients is the only AI they’re allowed to use at work is Copilot, right?

Shel Holtz

yeah, because they were already Microsoft Office three sixty five customers. Yeah, yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So they can only use copilot, but there’s two versions of copilot. There’s a standard version that comes with it and everybody gets that kinda. But then they have Microsoft copilot enterprise, which costs money. And that’s where you get the stored memory, that’s when you can train it, that’s where AI gets powerful.

Shel Holtz

It’s it it it it maintains all the inputs from your queries. It doesn’t share that, yeah. So

Steve Crescenzo

Absolutely. So it’s a whole d it’s two two different tools. and we have communication teams that we’re working right now where two of them have the enterprise version and five of them don’t. it’s gonna create a a have and have not world here because they gotta pay for each individual ticket. So it’s like Willie Wonka’s golden ticket. So how can you tell values, get back to values, how can you tell your employees they’re all valued equally and everyone’s great and we respect diversity, blah blah blah. And then you’re giving two people a professional advantage.

Shel Holtz

Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

And you can’t afford to give the I mean, that’s gonna be a big deal. Come on, why mark my words?

Shel Holtz

absolutely. The only way you can get away with that is if you say we’re piloting it right now and we have a a group of pilot testers. Yeah, there’s another one that tests the values here, and that’s where you say the only thing you’re allowed to use is co-pilot, and then you hear that the CEO is using Claude and the the the president is using Chat GPT. Yeah, so that that’s another one. The the the other thing I wanted to mention though is the importance of values in recruiting, because people who are looking for a job, especially coming out of college, but pretty much anybody looking for a job.

Steve Crescenzo

Right, yeah, right.

Shel Holtz

is looking for a company whose values align with theirs. We’ve we’ve had people join us coming from some of our competitors. Why are they coming? culture. And what drives culture? Values.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah. No, you’re right. I think it is a dis a d a dis distinctive thing. I think it can set a company apart. I mean, especially nowadays, people are just more into their own values. It’s like we’re not that’s fifties or sixties where we just went to a company, you worked fifty years, you got your watch, and you went home. People are jumping and around and moving around and taking different and they they can go to I don’t know how long it’s gonna last, but they put values values matter to them. They don’t want to work for a company they don’t believe in.

Shel Holtz

No, they really don’t. So for everybody out there working on their values, let us know how you’re approaching this.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, we’d love to hear. If you have values that are actually working and that means something, please let us know. I I’m always looking for a great case study to teach in the strategy studio. So I’d love to hear from anybody.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, send an email to FIR comments at gmail.com. You’ll see that we’ll post this when it goes live online on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on on threads, and on Blue Sky, whichever one you’re on. Leave a comment there. Let us know how you’re approaching values or what kind of challenges or struggles you’re facing or what kind of success you’ve had. we want to hear it all. So share it. By the way, you can send us an audio comment. That would be awesome if we could play an audio comment or even a video comment would be great too.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, those are fun. That would be even more fun.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, we’ll see you in a couple of weeks on the next episode of On the Same Page. See you later, Steve.

Steve Crescenzo

All right. Take care, Shel.

The post Episode 4: Are Corporate Values Useless, Harmful, or Necessary appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Are employees suffering from survey fatigue?

The question is asked often, frequently because someone high up in the organization doesn’t want to hear what employees think. But if employees see change as a result of someone taking their feedback to heart, you can survey them all day long. If you’re sending emails, publishing articles, and posting videos, but not asking employees for their perspectives, you’re not communicating.

You’re just messaging.

In this episode of On The Same Page, Steve and Shel discuss how to ensure employees’ voices are heard in meaningful ways to drive engagement and business success — and to avoid crises, since employees’ voices can serve as the organization’s smoke alarm.

Links from this episode:

Transcript:

Steve Crescenzo: Hey Shel, how are you?

Shel Holtz: I’m great, Steve. How’s everything with you?

Steve: Awesome. Friday, sunny. Got the boat this weekend. We’re heading out on the boat, so everything is good. We’re about an hour away from happy hour.

Shel: Anything to keep your mind off what’s going on with the Cubs, huh?

Steve: All right, enough is enough. Dodgers fan. Nothing’s worse than Dodgers fans with all your money. anyway, but you know, before we start, I know we’re gonna talk about the employee voice today and the importance of giving employees a voice. And before we start, you know, I’ve heard you talk about this, I’ve read what you’ve written about this, and I know in your communication model, which I really respect, you’ve got it as one of the four drivers of employee engagement, along with strategic narrative, engaging managers, which we talked about on our first podcast, employee voice and integrity. And I don’t argue with any of that. I agree with ninety five percent of everything you’ve ever written about this or said about this. Employee voice matters, I get that. Employees should be you know, communication should be a conversation, not a broadcast. Employees should be treated as part of the solution, not part of the problem. You know, all of that I get. No argument for me. But do you think maybe employees are getting tired of being asked about shit? And here’s why I ask. I mean, think about it. Surveys, pulse surveys, engagement surveys, stay interviews, focus groups, listening tours, town halls. The average employee’s been asked for their opinion so many times they’re ready to send the company an invoice. I mean, these employees have completed enough surveys to qualify for a minor in organizational psychology. And after all that voicing and talking, employees will still say in every company we work for, nobody listens. Which makes me wonder if we’re solving the wrong problem. Maybe companies don’t have a problem with employee voice. Maybe they have a leadership listening problem. I think most companies, I think, have plenty of ways for employees to speak up. It’s not whether they have a microphone; it’s that nobody on the other end is paying attention. So employees end up feeling like, you know, they’re yelling into a well. Which is why most face to face town halls when there’s Q&A time, nobody says anything. So the question is: Is it about giving employees a voice, or is it more about coaching leaders to listen? And that’s what I’d like to talk about.

Shel: Yeah, I would frame that just a little differently. I agree with you a hundred percent. The way I usually talk about this is saying that you know, we constantly hear about survey fatigue. Employees have survey fatigue. And my answer to that is there’s no such thing as survey fatigue. What there is is bullshit fatigue. And that’s being asked for your opinion and then finding that nothing is being done with it once you share it. I once had a senior VP of HR, I reported to him. This was on the client side many years ago. And I wanted to do an environmental survey, find out what employees thought about the environment in which they worked. And he said no. And I said, But Rick, you wrote a book about employee surveys. Why don’t you want to do one? He says, Well, if you read my book, you’ll find that the only time you should do a survey is when the leadership has an appetite to make changes based on what they hear. And the leadership here has no appetite to make changes based on what employees say. So there’s no point in doing a survey. And I think that other companies should take that to heart.

Steve: Ha ha. Bingo. You’re exactly right. Once again, I can’t disagree with you, Shel. I think the reason there is survey fatigue I think there is survey fatigue, but it’s not because they hate filling out surveys, it’s because nothing ever happens. Why waste your time?

Shel: Right. I think employees will fill out surveys all day long if every time they do they hear about what’s changing as a result of that.

Steve: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Shel: Sure

Steve: So before we dive back into that, and I can’t wait for that conversation, I got a nice comment from a Carrie Knight on Substack, believe it or not. She put it on my Substack, which I didn’t even post this podcast on my Substack, but I’m going start doing that. It’s about episode two when we talked about this mythical knights of the round table, get-a-seat-at-the-table. And she said, Currently midway through listening to On the Same Page, second episode: There is no table. And she quotes us and says, There’s no table, it’s musical chairs up there. She said, Brilliant. I’ve been on the side of earning a seat at the table, but this conversation is shifting my perspective from what I thought that meant to what I actually believe in real time. Then she quotes us again and says, We don’t need a seat. You know what we need? We need influence. We need access and we need respect. And how do you get those? You earn it. And she says, Carrie says, I don’t disagree with this at all. Perhaps it’s this concept of a table that’s broken. Leaders show up at every level of a business, which I love that line. Leaders show up at every level of a business. That’s brilliant, Carrie. In my honest opinion, leading from within is the biggest flex over having a seat or job title that demands leadership. And then she quotes us again and says, You do it by speaking truth to power, by letting leadership know that you can provide counsel. She said such an insightful episode that expands into the disconnect between leaders and employees’ cons and channel choices. And she closes it with another one of our quotes Leaders choose channels based on convenience, and employees choose channels based on trust. Fabulous episode. Thanks, Steve Crescenzo and Shel Holtz. Keep coming. And we sure will, Carrie. Thanks for the comment. love to hear feedback from our listeners.

Shel: Absolutely, Carrie. Thanks for listening. We had a number of comments come in through LinkedIn as well.  one of them from Vincent Bruneau saying the seat at the table conversation has always been a proxy for the real question are you actually shaping decisions or just being informed of them afterwards? Consequential is the better word, and it’s available to more than one person at a time. referencing that notion that only one communicator in a company can have that seat at the table,  regardless of how many. Communicators work there. Louise Thompson said, Hmm, not sure I’m with you guys. Moaning about it? Agree, that needs to stop. We know what we need to do and how, but as someone who has been in the room and out of it, there is no doubt that being an active participant around that table, and yes, it does exist, is going to lead to better outcomes for the organization. And yeah.

Steve: Right. I think that I don’t think we should read any comments that disagree with us.

Shel: That’s not a good idea, Steve. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That’s true. We’re gonna listen. Communication is a two-way activity. And yeah, I understand what Louise is saying, but again, you know, there are organizations with hundreds of communicators, there are organizations with dozens, there are organizations like mine with a handful. But if there is a communicator at that table, it’s only one.

Steve: That’s what most companies do. That’s what today’s all about. Employee voice. Our employee We are gonna listen.

Shel: So for every communicator to say, I want that seat at the table, that doesn’t fly. But any communicator can start to wield influence and have consequence. So I think that was our point. Janet Hitchen said, Halle-flippin’-lujah. That was her comment. Love that. Kathleen, yeah, Kathleen Bell said, Ha, so 1990, totally agree. And then Jared Brough, you know Jared, in New Orleans.

Steve: Love in Jared Brodkin.

Shel: Yeah, he said, I remember that discussion. My response is if you wait for an invitation it never comes. You get your seat by walking in the room and taking it.

Steve: I think he sa I think I actually had drinks with him in Orleans and he said, No, you don’t you know you know you kick down the doors, I think is what he said to me, which I was I always remember that.

Shel: Yeah. But you have to have built that influence and have developed that consequence or they’re just gonna throw you out of the room or have you escorted out of the room and away from the table.

Steve: Exactly. Or you’ll be or you’ll be a token. You’ll they’ll they’ll give you a seat, but you won’t have any influ I mean having a seat doesn’t give you influence. Influence being respected as a counselor gives you influence. You could have a seat at the table. I have a seat at my dinner table and I it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t no nobody listens to me. You can have a seat, but it doesn’t mean they’re gonna listen to you.

Shel: Well, you have mostly cats in the house, so they don’t listen to anybody.

Steve: Right, that’s true. That’s true.

Shel: So today we’re talking about the employee voice,  which is, as you mentioned at the outset, one of the four enablers of engagement. you know, there are people out there who dismiss employee engagement in general, but I’ve I’ve made it one of the four inner circles of of my framework for internal communication. I do yeah if if you just do the Gallup survey and try to get to that final number, then it’s nonsense. But

Steve: Yeah, I

Shel: If you’re looking at the elements that contribute to engagement and take action b on each of those based on the results of the survey, then it can have a real positive impact.

Steve: I think that’s I’m not a I’m not a big engagement guy because of the way it’s practiced with the Gallup stuff and the best friend at work stuff and all that nonsense. Employee engagement’s a very real thing, but it’s sh always shifting, right? If you could be fully engaged on Tuesday, you get a new boss on Wednesday and you’re disengaged. I mean it just shifts. It’s almost a it’s like nailing jelly to a wall, but go ahead.

Shel: There’s an organization out of the UK called Engage for Success. It’s a chartered organization by the government or the Crown or whoever does the chartering in the UK. And they say that the employee voice is the smoke alarm in the organization. I kinda like that characterization. that works real well for me. But yeah, bottom line is the communication is a is a two-way thing. if y communication is the act of sharing.

Steve: That’s cool.

Shel: Knowledge and information. So it’s a two-way street. And a lot of organizational communication is not. It’s one way. We’re sending information to employees. We’re not listening to them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s messaging. That’s not communication. It has to be two way to fulfill that definition of communication. So finding the mechanisms to give employees that voice, I think, is important.

Steve: Yeah, I do agree with that, but I don’t think it’s a channel thing. I don’t think it’s a mechanism thing. I think it’s an ego thing more than anything else. I really I think these leaders get into a position of leadership and they think that they’re more plugged in, they think that they’re more knowledgeable, they think that they’re smarter probably, they think that there’s a reason there’s a leader, they’re supposed to lead, they weren’t put in this place to let the employees lead. So you could have town halls and suggestion boxes electronically and slack and w you know, whatever. You can have all the employee voice channels in the world. If leadership has too much ego to listen to it, I mean you think they’d be smart enough to realize that guess what? The people closest to the work might have a good idea on how to improve things. The people closest to the clients, the customers, the products, the people that are creating all those things, you think they might have good advice about the company? Well, of course they do. But I think most leaders are either afraid to listen to employees because they think they’re just gonna bitch, or B, don’t respect their ideas. So I don’t think it’s a matter of setting up the channels as much. I mean, you have to do that, I agree, show. But I think you also have to work closely with leadership to say, you gotta listen to people. You gotta listen to your employees. These people are way closer to the work than you. You may be up here in the stratosphere driving strategy and dealing with Wall Street and numbers and EBITDA and all the other crap that they do, which they’re very good at. But these people are down here doing the work. And A, they might be able to help the company. And B, if you want them to be engaged and have a good culture, then it has to be a two-way street. And I think unfortunately, a lot of especially the older leaders don’t let don’t have don’t don’t let that happen. I think a lot of younger leaders coming up today that grew up with social media, digital natives, so to speak, I think they’re I think things are gonna get better in this area. I think people are gonna start paying attention more to employees. I hope. I mean that’s my not my hope. But I agree. Set up the channels, but work the other end of it as well. Work the leadership end of it because a lot of those people just don’t listen.

Shel: Yeah, I think getting them attuned to paying attention to what employees are saying is one thing, but I think where communicators have a role to play here is in presenting what employees are saying in a way that is digestible and understandable for the leader. So they’re not getting hit by messaging of different types from all sides and not understanding what they’re supposed to do with it. I think if we can give them here’s the daily summary or the weekly summary of what we have heard. And put it in categories and make it something that they can actually get through and make decisions based on or factor into discussions that they’re going to have.  that makes it easier for them to do exactly what you’re talking about. But if we’re not there coordinating this as an activity, then it’s just overload for them.

Steve: Yeah, yeah. I no, I agree. You know, I in some of my workshops I show a model that says, you know, it’s up to leadership with the help of communications to communicate the what and the why down to employees. And you do it very clearly. Here’s what we’re gonna do, here’s the initiative, here’s what it is, here’s why it’s very important to both us and the company, and then communicate the how up. And you do that through helping managers get the how and you c opening up these channels. Most companies just aren’t willing to do it. They’re more than willing to do the what and the why down and then forget about the how. And that’s the problem. But if you can tap into that how at that work level, at that employee level, I mean you’re unleashing a dragon there. I mean, you are unleashing a lot of power. But let me ask you a question, Shel. And you kind of alluded to this with your HR story to start the podcast. What’s worse? Not asking employees their opinion at all, or asking them and not doing anything about it?

Shel: I think asking and not doing anything about it is going to create tremendous cynicism and dissatisfaction. I think if employees understand that the culture is one where leadership makes the decision and you just do your job, I don’t like it. I wouldn’t want to work in that organization. And there may be people who decide that they’re not going to work in that organization, but at least they understand what the deal is.

Steve: Yeah.

Shel: But to have that say do gap, right? We are interested in your opinion and we’re going to ignore it. I mean, there’s a great example of this. I’m trying to remember the company that did this. I think it might have been Amazon Web Services. it may have been JP Morgan Chase, but they had an employee feedback mechanism. And when they told employees that they had to come back from COVID after telling everybody it was okay to work remote, they shut off. The mechanism that allowed employees to share their opinion. When they said 99% of employees agree that coming back to the office is a good thing, they got a massive petition signed by a huge number of employees saying that’s nonsense. That’s just not true. So there are organizations that say we want to hear from you, and then when they hear from employees, they shut off the channel, they ignore what they’re hearing. It’s not good.

Steve: Yeah, no, no, no. No, I agree. I agree. And no th that l that leads me to another thing I was I was thinking about when I was thinking about this topic. You know, there’s an old theory out there that out of a hundred percent employees, you have you have the ten percent of the Kool-Aid drinkers, right? They’re the ones that wear the company windbreaker and the company hat and they love everything about the company.  they love where they’re working, everything’s great. Then you have the ten percent of, you know, the lunatic fringe I call that are very, very discontent. They’re just unhappy.

Shel: Cheerleaders.

Steve: You they’re just unhappy in mind, no matter what you do. They’re unhappy in life. They’re alcoholics, they go home and kick the dog at night. They’re just not happy people. And the eighty percent is the people we need to communicate to. I do you think that there’s a factor that le with leaders that they’re worried that when they open it up for conversation in a town hall, a Slack, online channel, they’re only gonna hear from the ten percent because the other eighty percent are, you know, they’re fine, they’re just going along doing their job, they’re fine. The ten percent

Shel: No matter what.

Steve: I love where they’re working, so they’re pr they’re probably not gonna go out there and say how much I love where they work. They’re just happy. So you’re gonna hear from the cry babies, the people that are unhappy, and it’s gonna give make the whole place look naked. Do you think that’s a thing or?

Shel: I think that’s a cultural thing. I think there are organizations where the 80% feel just fine about sharing their ideas or their opinions because they’re taken seriously. There’s a history in the organization of listening to those things. I think it’s the organizations that don’t give that shrift to those 80%, where they just shrug and say, What’s the point?

Steve: Yeah, yeah.

Shel: You know, and the ten percent at the bottom, yeah, they’re the ones who are gonnare gonna whine and that’s why these leaders don’t want to engage with employees at all.

Steve: Yep, I agree. I agree, unfortunately. And let me a let me ask

Shel: But I mean if you yeah, if if you look at organizations that have made a point of soliciting the employee voice, you get a sense of what you can get out of that. I mean, you know, look at look at Microsoft. When Steve Ballmer left, Satya Nadella was anointed the CEO. he inherited this culture of siloed departments waging internal political battles. Microsoft was falling behind on some pretty important Categories, mobile, gaming, social. And the turnaround was built on employee voice. He solicited honest feedback through surveys and meetings. He made an open show of being ready to listen. He bypassed hierarchy so low-level employees could be heard. He invited junior staff to meetings, brainstorming meetings that previously only senior people went to. And the mechanisms that they implemented, they were they were concrete, they were they were comms adjacent. they created employee hackathons to generate employee input on the culture change. Yeah, you remember that? even the leadership framework of model coach care was developed over two years using employee feedback surveys. And the outcome was improved sentiment scores, better, better customer feedback. And of course the market cap story everybody knows.  it wasn’t a soft initiative running alongside their strategy. I mean, it was the strategy at Microsoft, yeah.

Steve: I heard about those, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was as strategic right. Well, you know, let me let me let it brings me to another topic, not another topic, another angle on this thing. Do you do employees really want a voice? And here’s why I ask.  just in the last couple of years, Cindy and I worked for a large, very large healthcare institution, and they were going through hell. They were going through hell. They were losing money after COVID, they were ha gonna have to downsize, they were gonna have to cut funds, they were gonna have to cut funding to certain programs that people loved, people were being shifted into different positions. I mean it was like a you know the big Chop consultants got involved the at the at the big level it’s the business consultants and it was ugly. But they had a fantastic CEO and when he brought us in we got it we h we had him start doing town halls, right? And they were not regular town halls. We said we outlawed PowerPoint. We worked with him and his executive team there was four of them that sat up there as a panel for the town hall And we said it’s gonna be 30 minutes of you guys having a conversation,  talking about what’s happening, what’s what’s being decided, what’s you know, all the good stuff, and then 30 minutes of Q&A, guaranteed. And the town halls were fantastic. And the people that were there and the chat, which I don’t know if they would have the nerve to stand up live and do this. That’s why I love virtual town halls. I don’t even want to do live town halls anymore because virtual, they get to that chat and you can vote questions up and down, and so. We would run that chat and we would feed the leaders the questions and it was a fantastic system. We did two a month for four months. And even then, with all the change that was happening, with all the turmoil, with all the angst, with all the fear, we still got like thirty-five to forty percent of people to show up to these town halls. And it was it wasn’t mandatory, obviously, but anybody could come. All you had to do was log in. Now Granted, it’s healthcare, so a lot of people are working. But even the recordings weren’t weren’t that great. I mean, what do you do when you’re doing everything right and you’re opening up the channels and they did everything right? They begged for the employee voice. They took their they hard dealt with hard questions. They  you know, all they did everything right. And they still had a minority of the people showing up to participate. I mean, what’s that all about?

Shel: Well, yeah, I mean I don’t know. my answer would be to ask, to go out to employees and say, hey, you know, we’re giving you this opportunity. Why aren’t you taking advantage of it? And you know, find out. Are they too busy?  are they intimidated? do they not care? there is data that shows that employees increasingly don’t want to be involved in, say, extracurricular stuff at work. I mean, there have always been employees who don’t care, right? They just want to come in. Do their work, get paid and go home. They’re not going to get involved in volunteering for a task force or a committee.  they’re not going to do volunteer activities after work. They’re not going to go out with people for a beer after work. they just they just wanna do their job for eight hours, pull their lever for eight hours and then and then go home. which is fine. You have to respect those people and what they want out of work. But a lot of people, you know, work is their purpose.

Steve: Yeah.

Shel: Work is what gets them up in the morning. And that’s frankly the majority, from everything I’ve seen. I have seen data that says the number of people who don’t want to do things that are extracurricular is growing. And I don’t know what is behind that. But it I’ll find that. I have that report somewhere saved. But yeah, you have to ask. And again, that’s giving employees a voice, right? Asking them why.

Steve: Really, I’d love I’d love to see I’d love to see that.

Shel: Don’t you want to take advantage of these opportunities to share your voice? One thing that we do where I work, when there’s going to be a town hall, is about a month before the town hall, because they’re quarterly,  we’ll open up an anonymous comment line. Yeah, it’s it we use a tool, it’s on the web called Free Suggestion Box. It’s absolutely anonymous. It’s a third party thing. So Employees know that it’s anonymous and we’ll get questions through that from people. Maybe they know that they can’t be there at that meeting, but they still want their question asked and they can watch the video later or read the transcript. maybe they’re just not wanting to share their name with the question that they’re asking. But I mean, even having a card on the seat, if people are coming into an actual room that says, write your question down, no need to put your name on it, we’ll collect these.

Steve: Yeah, we’d I’ve done that. I’ve done that.

Shel: Right. I mean that takes a lot of the intimidation out of asking a question of the senior leaders. I mean, a smaller company, most employees know the leaders. in a bigger company, I mean, you know, if Jamie Dimon is your is your CEO and he’s doing a town hall standing up and asking him a tough question, I th that can intimidate a lot of frontline workers, you know.

Steve: Yeah it sure could. It sure could. You know, one of the other things is I think a lot of I think a lot of leaders confuse voice with venting. they think that employees are only going to complain. If we if we open up the channels, they’re gonna complain because employees complain about a lot of stuff. how do I’ve always struggled with this. How do we coach leaders into understanding that voice isn’t e i Well, it’s a venting. I mean some people might vent. Sure, there’s always gonna be people who vent. But voice is more about constructive conversations. And I think if leaders could understand that, that yes, there’s gonna be some venting, don’t let it kill ya. I mean that case study I was talking about, you should have heard some of the questions that came in through the chat. It was pure out venting. Leadership of this company has never demanded accountability from leadership, and that’s why we have a bad culture. I that kind of stuff came in and we fed it to the leaders and they answered it. So there was venting. But I would say 85% of the comments were A, I really appreciate you taking the time to communicate to us this way. And B, here’s what we need to do about this and that and the other thing. Here’s my suggestion. I mean, it was mostly positive. And I think the leaders in that organization, I don’t know if they expected that, but I know they got we got resistance about allowing people to just ask questions like that. So I think leaders are always afraid.

Shel: Yeah. I think it’s a I think it’s a matter of tying this to a strategy. rather than, you know, we’re just gonna have this free for all where people can s say whatever they want through these channels that we’ve set up. But yeah, I think there’s a number of ways to approach this. First of all, there are initiatives. You know, we are going to be developing this program, we’re gonna be developing this process. We would like your input to make sure we’re doing something that is going to meet your needs. satisfy your expectations. Please participate in this. There is feedback on things that have been said and done. I mean this is as simple as having a comment section on your intranet for every article that gets posted, things like that. then there’s just the ongoing stuff. I mean there are companies that have had these, companies like Volkswagen for example and Boeing, where you know they said these are channels where you can tell us what’s going on,  so that we can be aware. And then employees at Volkswagen said, Well, you know, this debt on the diesel emissions is not right. This is going to cause problems. Boeing, people said, you know, the safety culture here is really deteriorating. There are problems down here. We need to address these. I think it was Boeing.  I’m not sure, but one of them actually had a process for finding a way. To get rid of these employees. You know, monitor the ones who are raising these concerns. And you know, if we see them coming in two minutes late, we have cause to to terminate them. Yeah. So I mean, you know,  but companies that want to take this seriously can have these mechanisms, and like Engage for Success says, this becomes a smoke alarm for something that could cause you real grief down the line. I mean, look at what happened to Boeing, look at what happened to Volkswagen when

Steve: And look and look at Boeing now. Yeah.

Shel: The arrogance at the senior level saying this is what we’re doing and yeah. Yeah. I mean, a Boeing, it was all about profit. It was the people who came in and said, you know, we have to cut costs so that we can return greater amounts of money to shareholders. At Volkswagen, it was, well, our emission numbers have to look good, so we’re gonna we’re gonna game those numbers. this if they had listened to what the issues were, they might have taken action and prevented

Steve: Right, ego goes back to that.

Shel: The consequences of those things. And I and I think this is what we counsel them on. Yeah, there are going to be people who whine. Why don’t we have a larger share in our 401k plan coming from the company match? thing things like that. But I think counseling them to say, look, there are some real issues that might surface that you’re not aware of, or a decision that you made is backfiring. And you need to know that. as the communicator who is going to help you process this two way communication, we’ll we’ll filter all that and give you summaries. Yeah, we if twenty employees are saying the same thing, we’re not gonna make you read twenty comments. We’re gonna give you a summary of what they’re what they’re saying. Make this all something that you can manage. Yeah.

Steve: Yeah, we’ll help. And you know what, Shely? You just you stole my idea like you often do because you’re smarter than me. that’s the key, what you just said. Structured voice, structured feedback. You don’t have to open it up and say, Here, if you want to complain that your coworker has body odor, this is the place to do it. If you want to complain that you have to work on Fridays or you gotta come back and then No, you structure the input, you structure the feedback around certain initiatives and that’s A great way, we’ve done that at companies where they didn’t have any feedback, you weren’t allowed to comment on articles on the intranet. The way to kind of break the ice a little bit with leaders who are either you know s suspect or they’re just suspicious about the whole idea of listening to employees, you structure it by tying it to initiatives. Here’s what we’re doing, it’s incredibly important that we do this right, and we’d love to hear your feedback on on this on this particular initiative or this particular project or this particular something. And if you tie it to actual things in the workforce and not just open it up to say, hey, it’s the wild west, say whatever you want about anybody you want and whatever, it’s in you know, I don’t know where you stand on this, but I don’t like anonymous comments on intranets. I love having your anonymous suggestion box. That’s perfect. And you can filter out the nut cases and the nut jobs and everything else and take the real ones. But when you allow anonymous comments on the intranet, not sure how you stand, I think it opens up it’s a bad it’s a bad I think it sets a bad precedent.

Shel: Yeah, I agree with a caveat. my general view is you should have the strength of your conviction when you say something. And if you’re not going to stand behind it and be identified, don’t say it. in organizations where there where the culture has been one where people are not comfortable sharing and you’re trying to change that culture, I think having an anonymous intranet input.

Steve: Right.

Shel: Functionality can be a temporary benefit to the organization. People say, look, they listened to that comment. maybe next time I’ll put my name on it. So yeah, I think as a transition thing, it might be helpful. Yeah, but generally, no, I agree with you. I don’t I don’t like it. I think people should stand behind their you know, the interesting thing is that Zoom, if you’re doing your webinars or your feedback sessions on Zoom, there is the ability to share a

Steve: Yeah, could be, could be.

Shel: A question anonymously if you if you’ve got the q and i’m pretty sure it’s the default i may be wrong about that but i notice a lot of employees are anonymous and i don’t think they mean to be it’s just the way it’s set up but let me share two stories with you real quick you know the first one this was when i was consulting i had a client it was a big company in the consumer package goods space

Steve: Is it really? I didn’t know that.

Shel: And they brought me in because employees weren’t paying any attention to the intranet. Their analytics sucked. And I took a look at their intranet before I came out and met with them. And you know, by God, the intranet was great. I mean, this was a great intranet. The articles were short and concise and relevant and useful and aligned with strategy and values. They did a lot of short videos that were very consumable. I was really impressed. So why weren’t employees paying attention to this? I really wanted to know. And we started off by interviewing the executives and they said, the intranet is great. We really want employees paying attention to it. This is the official source of truth in the organization. And then we did focus groups. And the focus groups from the middle managers and the focus groups from the frontline employees told us the same thing. The frontline employees say, I can’t be looking at the intranet. My boss is gonna see me doing that and give me a hard time. And the middle managers say if my employees are looking at a video on the intranet, they don’t have enough work to do. So that’s where the problem was. And you know, if you didn’t go out and surface that employee voice, the leaders would have never known that middle managers were undermining their approach to getting the word out to employees. Yeah. But where I work,  we have an annual survey. This is nothing that my department

Steve: Yeah, I heard that. Happens all the time. Happens all the time.

Shel: Is responsible for. We do the communication on it, but this comes out of HR. And it’s a leadership survey. And you will get the survey specifically, will identify the leader you’re being asked to evaluate. It’s the person who runs your project or your department or your team. We’re not talking about the senior leadership unless you report to somebody in senior leadership. And every leader gets the results of that survey and has a meeting with an HR business partner to develop a plan. To make things better based on the results of the survey. And I did an article for the intranet with one of those people who was the subject of the survey. And he said, were one of the lowest rated projects last year. My light went off. We were one of the Lowest rated projects last year. did the survey. I got the results. I made some changes. This year were the top-rated project. So employees notice this when they give feedback and things change. You know, they do notice that. And I think that leads that leads to engagement, that leads to commitment, that leads to all good things from employees in the organization.

Steve: Yeah, without a doubt. I couldn’t agree more. I just don’t think it happens very often where leaders actually listen. My close would be: I think you need three things. And I think very few companies have all three things. One, you have to have the channels and the mechanisms to listen. you have to have those set up. Two, you have to have leaders who actually give a damn, who will actually listen to constructive feedback. And three, you have to have employees who feel enough trust in leadership that they feel trusted enough to speak up and they feel engaged enough to speak up. So if you have engaged, responsible, professional employees, leadership who can check the ego at the door and actually listen to those employees, and the communications people have set up easy to manage channels, it would be nirvana. But getting all three of those things lined up is very, very hard.

Shel: And that’s where our counsel comes in. I think we need to explain to leaders and we share examples, right? And if you can share examples from the same industry that you’re in, so much the better of what happens when leaders listen to employees, what happens when they don’t. And you know, take baby steps. try something that is not that consequential initially.

Steve: Exactly. Yep, yep. Yep, try to hook it to an initiative. Yeah. Yeah, I’m a big fan of taking baby steps. They need the baby steps. They’re not gonna run into this thing. So start small, let it build, let it but realize that, my God, the sky’s not falling because we let people talk and offer opinions and ideas and surface problems. The sky didn’t fall. And once they realize that then it can kind of build and build and then you get to the kind of culture where people feel empowered to use a really bad buzzword. They feel confident that they can be heard and they will speak up.

Shel: And then we get two way communication.

Steve: Which is the end goal.

Shel: Yeah, praise be. See you next time, Steve.

Steve: All right, Shel, I’m off to happy hour.

The post Episode 3: If It’s Not Two-Way, It’s Not Communication appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Communicators long for “a seat at the table.” In this episode of “On the Same Page,” the internal communications podcast, Shel and Steve share their perspectives on this age-old aspiration and discuss the real ways to be consequential and wield influence with senior executives.

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Raw Transcript

Shel Holtz: So Steve, I have a request. This is something that really rubs me the wrong way. I want the internal communications community to stop asking for the seat at the freaking table.

Steve Crescenzo: Hey, preach, brother, preach.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, you know what they sound like? They sound like the older kids at Thanksgiving. You know, the 13-year-old who says, “Why do I have to sit at the kids’ table? I want to sit at the grown-up table.” You know what? There is no table. There’s never been a table. There’s no one in the C-suite sitting around this polished mahogany slab thinking, “You know what would really make this strategic discussion complete? Having the person who runs the intranet here.” The table has become a metaphor for a participation trophy, and chasing it has made us sound needier than an MBA candidate at a networking happy hour. What we should be asking for isn’t proximity to power, it’s consequence. It’s doing work that’s so useful that the leaders come find you because they can’t make the decision without getting your input first. That’s more important than a seat in a chair that, let’s face it, isn’t all that comfortable and that can be taken away as quickly as it was given to you.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. You know, this table, they treat it like it’s the Knights of the Round Table and Camelot, King Arthur. There’s no table, it’s musical chairs up there. Everyone’s yanking chairs out for everybody. It just bothers me so much, Shel. And you’re right, it makes us sound pathetic—whiny, little, needy people, like we sit here in the basement and write our newsletters and ask why we can’t get up there and sit at the big table. We don’t need a table. We don’t need a seat. You know what we need? We need influence. We need access and we need respect. And you know how you get those? You earn it. You don’t earn it by doing a good newsletter, even. You don’t do it by having great tactics. You do it by speaking truth to power, by letting leadership know that you can provide counsel—that you can tell them their baby’s ugly. “You know what? Your blog is too stiff, it’s too formal, your messages aren’t landing. Why are you doing a nine-minute video when nobody’s watching a nine-minute video?” That’s how you get respect and access and influence. You don’t do it by whining for it or mooching around for it. So yeah, let’s be done with the table.

Shel Holtz: So, Steve, today we’re going to look at how communicators can become consequential and influential. This fits neatly in the consultation segment of the outer ring of the On the Same Page framework. The items in the outer ring are the things that we do every day, all the time, and providing counsel is one of those things. We can provide counsel to departments, to teams, to business units. I have great examples of all of these things, but today let’s hone in on providing counsel to the company’s leadership, the C-suite.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, well, you know, Shel, that’s how you get a seat at the table—just kidding. But it is how you can get influence and access and all the stuff we’re talking about. Be a counselor, which means it’s hard work, Shel. Everyone thinks it’s easy, but it means telling people hard truths sometimes. It means being a reality check for leaders, which they don’t always like. They don’t always like being told stuff, but that’s what we have to be if we want to have that respect.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I mean, helping CEOs and leaders build trust should be at the top of the list that we’re counseling them about. Here’s a data point. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found 70% of respondents saying that CEOs are obligated to help bridge trust divides, but only 44% actually do it well. That’s a 29-point leadership credibility gap. And according to a leadership presence report from Ketchum, executives are two and a half times more likely than frontline employees to trust their CEO to tell the truth about what’s happening within their organizations. So Steve, how do you counsel a CEO who wants to build trust? And how do you counsel a CEO who doesn’t think he needs to?

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, you know what, Shel, it’s a great topic, and I’m glad we’re talking about it. I think one of the biggest mistakes communicators and leadership make is assuming trust is a communications problem. Most trust problems are behavior problems, right? There are very few CEOs—or any kind of leader—who are being as transparent as possible, acting ethically, treating employees the right way, telling them the truth all the time, and explaining why when they can’t say something, and doing all the right things, and still have a trust problem because they sent the wrong email or because their blog isn’t that interesting. If they don’t have trust, it usually comes down to missteps or something that’s happened. So I would say to leaders, and I would say to communicators: where is the trust issue coming from? If the CEO or the leadership are building a culture and paying attention to their values and doing everything they should be doing, trust will flow naturally. If they’re not, it doesn’t matter how much you communicate. You’re just yelling into a well. So I would look back at behaviors—maybe do some focus groups with employees. Not a survey; I think focus groups would be much more effective. Find out where this lack of trust is coming from. It usually doesn’t come down to communication issues. It comes down to missteps, to things they’ve done in the past. It comes down to: you put out these values and this mission statement, and then everything doesn’t align with what you’re doing. You’re not walking the talk, to use a bad cliché. I just don’t think you can communicate your way out of a credibility problem.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I think one of those data points that really provides some insight into where trust might come from is the fact that executives trust the leaders in the C-suite more than the front line does. And yeah, if you think about the executives in a company, they have more visibility with those leaders. They’re meeting with them all the time. They’re seeing them in the C-suite, which is a physical place where the leadership sits. There are a lot of leaders who don’t get out and meet face-to-face with employees very often. I remember—this was years and years ago, maybe 35 or 40 years ago—it was a Ragan conference at the Fairmont in Chicago, where they all used to be in those days. They had, I think it was the CEO of Avon, the cosmetics company, as one of the keynote speakers. And he said—

Steve Crescenzo: Those were a time. I remember this.

Shel Holtz: You remember him? Yeah, he said that he used to get out to the factory floor at least once a month to remind himself that these folks were all grown-ups. He would chat with them, and, you know, somebody operating a film machine was also the scoutmaster of a Boy Scout troop, or ran a side business with his spouse, or was the treasurer for the local Elks organization, or whatever it might be. These are smart people, and you didn’t need to treat them like children, which was a habit executives got into. He didn’t mention this, but at the same time, employees were seeing him come out there and talk to them. You’re bound to trust somebody that you see more often than somebody who’s just up there in the C-suite, maybe doing a quarterly video or something like that. That visibility is really important.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, I think—a tale of two leaders, I can do that. We worked about 20 years ago for a huge defense company, maybe the largest, for one of their divisions. And I interviewed all their executives for the audit, and they were all on the seventh floor, in what the employees called “rug row.” And they never left the seventh floor. Their food was up there; they never left. And employees hated them—no trust, never saw them. Saw them maybe at a town hall once a quarter or once a year, I forget what it was. And morale, we did focus groups, was in the toilet—no trust, bad culture, all that stuff. The other tale is Schreiber Foods up in Wisconsin. It’s the biggest company nobody’s ever heard of. They’re a dairy company. They make all the cheese for McDonald’s and Burger King. They are global. They’ve got manufacturing plants everywhere. The CEO there was such a fantastic guy. He was on the same floor that we were meeting with the communicators on. And every time I walked out to go to the bathroom, he was never at his desk or in his office. He was sitting at somebody else’s desk talking to them. He knew everybody. And he said to me when I interviewed him, “I try not to answer any work emails till I get home at seven o’clock. My time here in the office should be spent talking to my people. I’ve got to be in meetings, I’ve got to do strategic work, I’ve got to do all that.” But communication wasn’t an effort for him. It wasn’t a checklist item; it was just a constant part of his job. To him, the CEO not worrying about communication was like a CEO saying, “I’m not going to worry about finances.” And it made a huge difference. End of the story, Shel: we took an Uber to the airport, and the Uber driver was a retired former Schreiber employee. He talked about the CEO and how much he liked him. We get into this little airport in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and we go up to the bar, of course, because that’s what we do. And the bartender’s this 60-year-old woman who’s a Schreiber retiree. We say who we’re working with, and she goes, “Mike! Mike’s my buddy. How’s my buddy doing?” First of all, she worked at Schreiber. Secondly, every time the CEO walked through the airport, he made a point of going to the airport bar to say hi to her. I don’t know if that’s inbred, if you have that skill or not. But even if you don’t, even if you’re an introvert, you’ve got to find the middle ground somewhere. You’ve got to be out there meeting with your employees, talking to them a little bit at least.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, there are definitely introvert CEOs out there. I’ve met a CEO who said his worst nightmare is having to work a room. But you’ve got to work a room. And if you just can’t—if that just terrifies you—then your number two should be somebody who can do that in your place. I remember I did some work, this has to be 20 years ago, for the International Monetary Fund. So nobody who was in leadership at that time is still there; the directors are all appointed.

Steve Crescenzo: Exactly. Yeah.

Shel Holtz: And they never came down and met with employees. The employees really resented this and had a very cynical view of the leadership—except for one, who ate in the lunchroom with everyone else. I was talking to a group at lunch and they were explaining this to me, and they said, “except him,” and they pointed at the guy with his tray. He was at the cashier, chatting with her. And they said, “Not only is he chatting with her, but he knows her by name. And he’ll come here and just sit down with a random group of people who work here and chat with them. Everyone in this organization would follow him into battle. The rest of them? Nah, forget it.”

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, I think most leaders think communication is something they do. Employees think communication is something leaders are. They see real people. They don’t say, “My God, he’s a great communicator.” They see him and say, “What a great guy. What a great woman.” And I’m seeing the same thing with our work with PG&E—Patti Poppe’s the CEO there. Same way: just accessible, transparent as all get-out, honest, and people would run through fire for her. And I don’t think you have to be Johnny Carson. I don’t think you have to be a huge extrovert. Be yourself, whoever that is, and make an effort to get out a little bit.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, find your strength and leverage it. I mean, PwC’s Trust in US Business Survey found 53% of business executives say they trust the senior leadership team to a great extent. Only 38% of entry-level staff say the same. Entry-level staff don’t know the leadership. I’ll tell you a great story. This was at Mattel, somewhere between 1985 and 1986, when I was doing communication there. The CEO at the time led sort of a town hall. It was in the cafeteria, but the cafeteria wasn’t big enough to accommodate everyone at headquarters, so it was manager-and-above who came to this meeting. Everyone else was excluded. And I kept pushing. I said, “We need to get everybody in. I know it’s not big enough, so let’s just do two of them and invite half the people to one and half to the other.” Finally they decided to do this, but he said, “We’re not just going to make it half and half. We’re going to have managers and above at one and everybody below at the other.” So we held the one with everybody below. The CEO gets up, makes his remarks, they do the presentations, and afterwards a group of admins comes up to him. He says, “So what did you all think?” And they said, “This was wonderful. It was great hearing what’s going on. It explains so much of the work that we’re doing that we didn’t understand. We just have one question: who are you?” He didn’t introduce himself. He just assumed that everybody knew who he was. He was the CEO, but they had no clue at that level.

Steve Crescenzo: That’s fantastic. That is great. What I would tell executives is that a lot of them say they have no time for visibility—no time to be out there. But visibility doesn’t mean being everywhere. It just means being somewhere consistently. Employees don’t expect omnipresence. What they do expect is evidence that this guy’s around, this woman’s around, that they care about us—that he’s not sitting up in a suite somewhere making decisions that are unrelated to what we do down here, where we’re doing all the work. They just want evidence of that. They don’t expect him to be at all places at all times, and they don’t expect him to be Mike from Green Bay, going through the airport asking about people’s vacations. The fact that that guy did it was fantastic. But that’s not what they expect.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. John Chambers, who used to be the CEO at Cisco, did a couple of things. First of all, they wanted him to do a CEO blog on the intranet. He was dyslexic, and writing was torture for him. You may remember that Cisco acquired the Flip cam—that little camera that had the USB that flipped out of it. You’d shoot your video and then just plug the camera right in.

Steve Crescenzo: I remember I used to use that little Flip cam, yeah.

Shel Holtz: Because they acquired that company, he would take that Flip cam and do selfie videos before the word “selfie” was even out there. Anything that popped into his mind—it was unscripted, top of his head—he would put on his blog. And people loved it. It was like he was looking them in the eye and talking about what was on his mind, what he was hoping they would do, what he was looking for feedback on. The other thing he did was everybody having a birthday that month would get together—I can’t remember if it was breakfast or lunch—with him. He would just wander around and chat with everybody. He couldn’t do this worldwide, but still the stories got around about him doing this.

Steve Crescenzo: That’s funny. You know, Shel, the more things change, the more they stay the same. We’re counseling all of our executives right now to do selfies with an iPhone, just like this. Thirty seconds, check in. And I always counsel them to just have one point—say one thing. It’s 45 seconds, it’s a minute, stick to one thing, do it once a week, once a month, twice a month, twice a week—whatever you’re comfortable with. But we don’t need a film crew, we don’t need a script, we don’t need a teleprompter, we don’t need lighting, we don’t need any of that. We just need a little bit of effort.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I think the authenticity of doing that is a big deal. And, you know, the 45-second, the 60-second clip—we know the younger audience is going to look at that. On my other podcast, For Immediate Release, we talked about the clipping economy and the fact that all of these clips people are doing are what people are watching, not the full-length video. So I’ve started doing clips of this podcast. If you want to reach that younger audience, do those 45-second videos.

Steve Crescenzo: Without a doubt. My son Zach, the third partner of Crescenzo Communications, just did a half-hour presentation in our master class about the younger generation. All that data is there. They’re a TikTok generation. They do reels, they do clips—30 seconds, 45 seconds.

Shel Holtz: Clips, yeah. YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and TikToks.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. And that takes some coaching, though, Shel, if we’re being honest. That’s way out of people’s comfort zones. They’re used to a script, they’re used to perfect lighting, perfect everything. You know what? If there’s no evidence that an actual human being was involved, they’d rather hear the guy stutter and say, “Well, I don’t know about that—let me get back to you.” They want a human being, and that’s becoming more and more important than any kind of polish or corporateness or formality or slickness.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. Now, if you talk to executives, they’ll tell you that the number one thing they want from internal communications—the reason they fund internal communications—is alignment. They’re looking for alignment between employees and executives, between the employee population and the company’s business plan, its strategic plan, its goals, its values. Yet Axios did an annual report and found only 27% of leaders think their staff are entirely aligned with the business goals. And worse, only 9% of employees agree that they’re aligned. Eighty percent of leaders think their internal communications are helpful and relevant and provide the context teams need to do their jobs. Only 53% of employees agree. And that’s because executives are saying, “Here’s what you need to tell employees,” and nobody’s asking employees, “What do we need to know? What do we need to hear? What do we need to be exposed to in order to be aligned with what the organization’s doing?”

Steve Crescenzo: Well, first of all, I’ve got to ask you, Shel—as the buzzword hunter—when did “alignment” become the dominant buzzword of corporate communications and leadership communications?

Shel Holtz: I can’t pick a timeline for that, but I know that Zora Artis and Wayne Aspland out of Australia have done a ton of research on this. There’s a body of research from them that’s pretty good.

Steve Crescenzo: Is it really? I’ll have to take a look at that. I just taught a workshop out on the East Coast, a live writing workshop. When I do my writing workshops, I get all their data, all their information—newsletters, executive comms—and I thought I was at a chiropractors’ convention. Everything was about alignment: getting aligned, aligned, aligned, alignment. At some point, when you beat a word to death like that, it loses all power and it starts to just mean everything. So let me ask you, Shel—you’re the smartest guy I know—does alignment mean agreement? Is that the same thing?

Shel Holtz: I think it means that we’re in sync, that we’re working toward the goals that you’ve established.

Steve Crescenzo: So you could say, “I understand exactly where we’re going. I may not agree with it, but I understand it and I’ll help make it happen.” That’s the difference. You’re not going to get everybody in agreement, but you can get them aligned on the direction of the business. I think there’s a misunderstanding between alignment and agreement, and that’s something we need to discuss.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and I think that’s important. I’ve always said it’s not our job to make employees happy. I’ll tell you a great CEO-counsel story—another experience that I had. I won’t name the company, because this guy’s still kicking around and I don’t want to hear from him. I’ll tell you when we’re done recording. He was the president of the company, and the company was laying off 10% of its headquarters staff. If you look at layoffs today, by and large they’re done pretty horribly, but they’re not sprung on employees. It’s not that employees wake up, go to work, and suddenly there’s a layoff. The companies are signaling this—a week in advance, two weeks in advance. “We’re going to be cutting…” Even Zuckerberg and Facebook will signal that they’re going to cut 10% of their staff at the beginning of the fall, or whatever. But this guy didn’t want to tell anybody. He just wanted everybody to show up, and somebody would come to the desk of the affected employee, take them to HR, explain what was happening, and then have them escorted out of the building. And the employees sitting next to them—they’re friends, they’ve been colleagues for all these years—they’d be watching and wondering what’s going on, and this person wouldn’t come back. What would that do to morale? And what would that do to trust? Everybody would be waiting for the other shoe to drop: “When’s this going to happen to me?” Productivity would tank after that. So I made the case that we needed to explain to employees what was coming. He didn’t want to do that. He said, “If we do that, it’s going to get into the press.” And I said, “Well, this is a Fortune 500 company in a metropolitan area. You think this is going to escape the notice of the press somehow?” So we finally convinced him to do a desk-drop memo. This was before email, before employees had computers on their desks, so it was printed in the print shop and distributed desk to desk. It was waiting for employees when they came in that morning, so at least everybody knew what was about to come down in the next few minutes. And of course, the local newspaper got their hands on it and ran a story. The president came into my office, slammed the newspaper down on my desk, and said, “I told you this was going to get into the press.” I said, “I told you I knew it was going to, but look what it says in the lead. It says what we said in that memo. If we hadn’t distributed that, if the press hadn’t had that, they would have called somebody who’d been laid off, or they would have called the CEO who retired three years ago, or the senior VP who’s now running a turquoise shop in a strip mall. It’s not like they’re going to say, ‘We don’t have an official announcement from the president of the company, so we won’t write about this.’ Information abhors a vacuum. They’re going to go after those secondary and tertiary sources of information and write the story.”

Steve Crescenzo: They’re going to get their information, and they’re going to be right. It’s just a lack of common sense. It really is. It’s a fear of the story getting out. You know, “Don’t communicate anything that you don’t want to see on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.” That phrase has done more damage to employee communications, I think, than almost any other phrase. It’s going to get out, especially with social media now. Things are going to happen.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, you can’t control the narrative. Press releases were this fantasy that we were controlling the narrative, as though the reporters weren’t going to get their hands on the press release and write whatever they wanted to.

Steve Crescenzo: God, yeah. You know, is it just me, Shel, or has there just been a rash of horrible, horrible layoff announcements lately? What was the one that was done accidentally—somebody in HR sent it out before she was supposed to? That was just recently in the news. Nike’s message was just awful. I’m seeing layoffs happen everywhere. Layoffs are a part of life. Get out in front of them, communicate them well, and whatever story does come out won’t make you look bad. But when you communicate it horribly—people hear about an email that morning and everyone’s out the door by noon—it just makes the company look bad.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, transparency is just a given these days. The fact that the leaders of the organization aren’t saying something, or they say something that makes employees roll their eyes—what do they do? They go to Reddit, they go to Glassdoor, they talk to their fellow employees on Slack or Teams. If the job of communication used to be crafting the message, today it’s really pressure-testing whether the message is going to survive contact with employees’ actual day-to-day experiences.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. I think the old job was crafting messages. The new job is sort of helping leaders survive contact with reality. One of our clients is doing a fun thing: before every major announcement, they try to assign somebody to play Reddit. Somebody’s going to play Reddit. “You’re an employee on Reddit right now. Here’s the message. What are they going to be talking about out there?” Or Facebook, or whatever—pick your social media channel. Somebody should be playing the employee on social media. We spend so much time asking, “How should we say this?” instead of, “Should we say it at all? Does it need to be said? Who does it need to be said to?” We’re so worried about crafting the perfect message. You know what? You can’t dodge it anymore. You can’t dodge reality. People are going to take it, they might misconstrue it, they’re still going to talk about it. That’s the way of life these days.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, there are a lot of other things we can talk about when it comes to counseling leadership. One that I want to cover before we wrap up here is the channels that they use to communicate, because there are a number of studies that find executives gravitate to the channels they feel comfortable with or think are efficient for them. They’ll do email blasts or all-staff memos, or the really polished, scripted, rehearsed town halls. But employees, especially frontline employees, want something more human. Executives tend to default to email, the intranet article their internal comms people write for them. Employees want face-to-face. They want those short, unpolished videos we were talking about. Anything two-way—an ask-me-anything, or text if they prefer it—would work really well.

Steve Crescenzo: Yep, absolutely. You know what? I’ve always found that leaders choose channels based on convenience, and employees choose channels based on trust. It’s easy for a leader to have the communicator craft an email, have it come from his office, approve it, and hit send. It’s the old saying, Shel: the biggest danger of communication is the illusion that it happened, right? These leaders need to be told that. Just because you’re the CEO and you hit send on an email because it’s convenient for you doesn’t mean you’ve communicated. Don’t pick the most convenient channel. Pick the channel that employees will respond to the most, that they’ll trust the most.

Shel Holtz: Pick the one that works. There’s a thought. So, Steve, when you walk into a CEO’s office to provide counsel to them for a client, what’s the one thing you’ve found they’re most resistant to hearing about their own communication style? And how do you get them past that?

Steve Crescenzo: Well, that’s a great question, Shel. I think the thing they’re most resistant to is, unfortunately, adjusting to the fact that times have changed. And this is more true with older leaders, but attention spans have changed. Expectations of leadership have changed. This is not 1960 or 1970, where you went to work, you worked 50 years, you got a gold watch, and you went home. People want more information; they want more transparency. The good side of that is they want less corporate polish. Nobody’s ever said, “You know, I wish our CEO communicated less often but with better lighting,” or, “I wish she used a teleprompter.” The hardest part is getting them to understand that authenticity and being human matter more than being scripted and polished. We were working with a client—I won’t say the name because he’s still there—and this was a guy you’d sit in the room with and he was fantastic. Then he’d do his video and it was like he got paralyzed somehow. So we videotaped him one way with a script and a teleprompter, and the other way just talking, with the ums and the ahs and the stutters and the imperfections. And I said, “Which one do you like better?” And he goes, “Go with yours. Go with that one.” And he did, and it was a huge success. So it’s hard to get them to understand that they don’t have to be perfect. Employees don’t want perfect. They want human. Nobody’s perfect. Imperfection is perfection—I guess that’s one way to say it. I just made that up.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, they shouldn’t be perfect. So, like I say, there are all kinds of other things we can provide counsel on. We touched on some of them at the beginning. If they’re telling you to communicate something, don’t just go out and communicate it. Tell them, “This is not going to land with employees. I don’t know why you made this decision, but no one’s going to get behind this.”

Steve Crescenzo: That’s what I said in the beginning—that’s why communicators don’t have that seat at the table: because they don’t speak truth to power enough. They take the message from the CEO and they don’t go in there and say, “This is not going to land.” What we should be is their pipeline into the workforce, and we should be willing to bring harsh truths back to them. “Hey, that last town hall: too much PowerPoint, not enough dialogue. People didn’t get their questions answered.” “Hey, that last email you sent out—wow, you took three paragraphs to get to the point.” We need to be the pipeline, and we need to be an ongoing focus group for leadership into the workforce, so that we can constantly give them good advice. And not enough communicators do that, in my opinion.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. The listening element is in the outer ring of the framework model. But the point of listening isn’t just so you know—you have to do something with that. Mark Schumann used to run this great program when he was at Sabre, the software company that does the ticket reservation system. He called it the Culture Club. He had hundreds of volunteers around the company, around the world, and once a month—I think it was once a month—he would pull them together in a focus group, usually over Zoom, because it was a global company, but occasionally in person in Texas, where it was headquartered. He would pick one element of the culture and talk to them about it, and then he would record about a three-minute audio file summarizing what he heard and send that to the executive team. So on a regular basis, all they had to do was click play, and in three minutes—sometimes what they heard made them very uncomfortable.

Steve Crescenzo: That is a brilliant idea. Of course, Schumann is brilliant. Love Mark Schumann. Schumann is great.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, he definitely is. But that listening—and feeding back what you’ve heard from employees to leaders so they know how their decisions are going to land—I think is vital.

Steve Crescenzo: Exactly. That is exactly what a communicator should be doing. But you know what? That takes guts, and it takes work, and you just have to do it. Could it be, Shel—sort of a closing thought—that maybe leadership communication isn’t really that complicated? Less performance, more presence. Less messaging, more conversation. Less talking, more listening. Less acting like a CEO and more acting like a human being. I don’t think employees want perfect leaders. They want believable leaders. And that takes some coaching, because these people are hardwired to think they have to be perfect and have all the answers, because otherwise they’ll lose confidence and credibility. No—you have credibility when you admit you don’t have all the answers and when you’re a human being about it.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and trust employees to act like adults. If you treat people like adults, they tend to act like it. If you treat them like children, they’ll act like that. So we would love to hear from you, listeners—any examples you have of providing counsel to leadership, or your effort to get that seat at the table. Whatever you want to share with us, share with us.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, a hundred percent, Shel.

Shel Holtz: Send email to [email protected]. Leave a comment in the show notes on the FIR Podcast Network website, or on LinkedIn or Facebook, or wherever you found out about this podcast. Send us a note. Tell us how counseling executives in your organization has been going, or any great stories you have to share. We’ll share those on the next episode.

Steve Crescenzo: Shel, I always feel a little bit smarter after talking to you.

Shel Holtz: I feel the same way after talking to you, Steve. Look forward to the next one.

Steve Crescenzo: All right, well, I’m off to happy hour. My God, it’s 2:36 my time. I’m late.

Shel Holtz: It’s wine time now. Okay, I’ll talk to you next time.

Steve Crescenzo: All right, talk to you, Shel.

The post Episode #2: There Is No Table appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

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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