There have been many, many research studies that all seem to point out that the meaning and relevance of communication is in the eye of the receiver, not the sender.  In my experience, most business communicators are too focused on sending – their message – not the factors that influence and distort the reception of that message.  In particular, they seem to have a problem with dealing in feelings and emotions.

 I have found that the primary factor influencing the reception of messages is trust.  Is the sender seen as creditable?  Is the message congruent with the way the receiver perceives the environment?  Is there too much cognative dissidence (is the message framed and delivered in a way that fits the receiver’s experience)? 

 If there is one thing I would advise communication professionals in this regard it would be to help mangers understand the value of direct, clear, and emotionally laden communication.  By emotionally laden, I mean that many organizations are afraid to deal in feelings and emotions and end up with sanitized, politically correct, platitudes that don’t help employees.  Said differently, if employees are angry, fearful, and anxious – which most are these days – mangers need to have the skills to acknowledge their feelings.  If they can’t do that, employees shut down and no communication happens.

 The primary factor that blocks organizations from authentic communication is an institutional fear of emotions and a norm of being objective and factual in all communication.  Until organizations realize that employees in pain and anger first need their emotions acknowledged before they are ready to hear “facts and figures,” no true communication will happen.

One result of the current economic environment is that organization development consultants (internal and external) are using the disequilibrium in organizations as a stimulus to help change organizational cultures.  Much of this is positive, as in making lemonade out of lemons, but some consultants are using metaphysical labels such as organizational transformation or organizational transmutation that devalue their efforts and turn off line managers.  

 I’m leery about fuzzy labels with no behavioral or operational anchors.  About 30 years ago there was a buzz in OD circles concerning organizational “transformation.”  This involved morphing from one state to another with some degree of facilitation by OD professionals.  It kind of fizzled for lack of clarity and any real pre and post behavioral anchors or measurement criteria. 

 Transmutation sounds like another one of those terms.  In some ways it sounds a bit like the old concept of re-engineering.  The big difference is that re-engineering had a basis in hard data and involved changing measurable sub-processes and, unfortunately, triggering people reductions.  

 I think terms like transmutation and transformation can lead to misunderstanding and, at times, devaluing OD and we need to be careful about using them.  Clear behavioral and operational criteria for even such common OD terms as “culture change” are really important.  Management in today’s economic environment tend to scoff at fuzzy terms and, intriguing though they may be, we need the discipline to apply behavioral measurement criteria to what we do and need to language our profession in terms that line managers can understand.

The difference between those organizations that make it in the new millennium and those that don’t will be leaders with the ability to facilitate transitions:  their own, the organization’s and those of their fellow employees.  What follows are ten very specific and prescriptive activities that will facilitate the development of these essential skills.

• Get involved in the leadership of a volunteer organization.  Pick one that does not receive funding or support from your organization.  Helping manage a volunteer organization is a powerful feedback and developmental experience.  It removes you from your positional power base and allows you to assess your true impact. 
• Take evening courses or sign up for special programs that teach helping skills..  The macro-leadership competency of the future will be the ability to help yourself, your organization, and your employees facilitate change and transition  Management will is a helping profession and managers  need the same kind of helping skills as other professionals in the field. 
• Complete a professional 360-degree feedback instrument.  By professional, I mean that you should use an instrument that has a history, validity standards, and norms.  Have the results interpreted by someone trained in helping you understand what it means and dosen’t mean.  Some organizations have their own 360-degree instruments and others use instrument licensed and certified by external vendors.  There are also some excellent external organizations you can hire to administer such instruments. 
• Attend a professional leadership training program.  This type of training is different from a program on marketing, quality, or performance management.  It should focus on intra-personal insight, inter-personal skills, and the systems perspective necessary to develop a culture that leads to organizational learning.  There are some very good in-house programs and many excellent external offerings.
• Find a Truth Teller.  It is particularly important for top managers to cultivate and use truth tellers.  A truth teller is someone in the organization you can rely on to, as is said in baseball “call them they way they see them.”  Truth tellers provide unfiltered feedback. 
• Attend Laboratory Training.  These sessions used to be called T-groups. Yes, this is sensitivity training, and yes, it is “feely” – but it probably won’t be “touchy.”  The bottom line is that this kind of laboratory training is a very powerful way to get the depth of feedback that will lead to self-awareness. 
• Become familiar with future search technology.  There is a movement out there, using labels such as “future search,” and speaking of “getting the whole system in a room.”  These large system-change processes go for the jugular in stimulating the learning organization.  If you want to jump-start your understanding of learning in the colle3ctive, you need to get on the bandwagon; the technology is growing faster than it can be codified.
• Learn how to have a dialogue.  A dialogue is different from a discussion, an argument, a debate, or a business meeting.  The dialogue process is very important in developing learning organizations and is central to collective learning.  There are seminars and workshops.  You can also find some consultants who can teach you and your organization dialogue skills.
• Get active in your professional association.  Don’t just attend the national meeting – become a worker, serve on committees, pass out the literature, do time in the information booth, set up the chairs!  The higher up you are, the more the value of the grunt work.  It forces you to see an organizational system from a different perspective and helps you rethink your own skills and assumptions as to what constitutes value-added.
• Set up an intensive personal feedback project.  One option involves retaining an external consultant to nearly overwhelm you with feedback from a wide range of data points.  This is a very powerful process.  You can’t escape valid data, and a skilled consultant will help you understand it and do something about it.

Most managers got where they are by excelling in the classical managerial “ings” of planning, organizing, controlling, evaluating, and directing. The overwhelming consensus of research is that today’s organizations are populated by employees exhibiting the symptoms of layoff survivor sickness: a toxic combination of anger, fear, anxiety, and frustration.  They don’t work harder because they feel lucky to have a job; they hunker down in the trenches and respond with much lowered productivity. They don’t automatically snap back.  They need help, and that help does not take the form of increased control, direction, or evaluation.  In over a quarter century of working with organizations attempting to rebound from layoff survivor sickness, I have yet to hear an employee describe her or his best boss as being the best director, controller, or evaluator.  In times of organizational stress and turmoil, the best bosses are described as those who are good listeners, have the ability to form empathetic relationships, and possess coaching skills.  

Training line managers in basic helping skills – empathetic listening, non-judgmental reflection of feelings, and coaching – is enormously beneficial in facilitating a return to productivity. It has a dual benefit: it equips managers with the tools necessary to authentically communicate and re-recruit their employees, and it helps them deal with their own layoff survivor symptoms.   There are four conditions that will insure this training reaches its potential:

• Trainers need to make a strong link between the application of helping skills and an increase in productivity. This insures managerial motivation.
• Role plays and cases should be specific to the organization, its products, and culture.  Managers have a low tolerance for artificiality in today’s environment.  
• Although the workshop is intended to give managers skills to apply to their employees, managers will concurrently be dealing with their own survivor issues. Trainers should expect and be skilled at processing emotions and venting. If this does not happen, it is a sign that something is not working.
• Video taping individual role plays is exceptionally powerful. Processing individual tapes in a group environment provides rich learning and builds positive norms. 

I had an article published in the “Soapbox” column of the higher educational section of the Financial Times recently.  It is a little long, but I think it is important that business schools teach the right stuff to help employees and organizations to survive the trauma of layoffs and heal the wounds.  Here are excerpts of that article:    

 Management as a profession of scientific, clear, and antiseptic methodology was a myth in the early days of Fredrick Taylor’s “Scientific Management,” and is totally irrelevant to the needs of today’s organizations.   Many new managers, particularly newly minted, inexperienced MBA’s and undergraduate business majors come to the business world with the expectation that it is a place of rationality, subject to objective analysis and thoughtful, quantitatively based decision making.  This is somewhat a result of their own naiveté, but more from being subjected to quantitatively biased curriculum and the teaching of management professors who have spent their entire lives in classrooms – from grade school through graduate school, then into the role of teacher – and have never actually worked in a business.  Those business professors who have industry experience, too often gained it during the “good old days” when things were more predictable and people were seen as long term assets to be nurtured and developed over a career as opposed to the current paradigm of people as costs to be reduced.  Here are three things business schools need to do in order to be relevant to today’s business organizations.

• Move beyond the traditional – usually fragmented and disliked – organizational behavior course, into actually teaching the two core competencies increasingly valued in today’s business environment: self-awareness and interpersonal skills. Faculty must have the ability to help students examine their motivational patterns, reduce their blind spots, and develop and practice coaching, and transition facilitation skills. This requires getting past academic turf issues and partnering with disciplines such as psychology and sociology as well as a much more experiential pedagogy including internships and practicums. 
• Rectify the lopsided imbalance of head skills with an equal dose of heart skills.  As safe and sterile as it may seem, managers can’t analyze people out of their pain.  They need to connect with them at the heart and not the head. When employees are in the midst of a crisis of identity and purpose, they are not interested in strategic analysis, demand curves, or decision trees.  They need “high touch, low tech.”
• Find faculty who have the ability and desire to understand and deal with the real issues faced by organizations. Business organizations are struggling to come to grips with a new, short term, provisional, psychological employment contract. Unfortunately, tenured, research oriented, quantitatively focused, business school faculty members are often unable to generate the necessary empathy and requisite transition facilitation skills to be of much help to students who will face this “real world.” 

              If business schools are to avoid the fate of dinosaurs and automobile manufactures, they need to equip their students with the skills and perspectives that will be of value to today’s business organizations. The untenable alternative is to keep their insular, tenured, quantitatively orientated, analytical heads in the sand, and not even have the visibility to see the world passing them by. 

A recent client went into a mini-tirade in a meeting.  He was “sick of all this soft, touchy-feely stuff” and implored his colleagues to “suck it up and get back to business.”  His outburst was a legacy of the old paradigm when there was a reaction to anything that was deemed “soft.” This included feelings, relationships, empathy, and anything that was “touchy-feely.” If you think about it, this is a strange norm, because being alive and human involves relationships, feelings, and connecting with others. However, the value was facts and figures—“hard” stuff! Even though such rock-ribbed disciplines as physics now report that facts are relative, the bias continues. Organizations still talk about human resources and training as the “soft” side of management. But not only are people issues as real as financial and production figures, they require just as much skill and strength. In addition, they require authenticity and the risk of self-disclosure. This is much “harder” than hiding behind a memo, a stack of figures, or a quantitative decision matrix. 

The most effective leaders in today’s era of downsizing are those who have the skills to authentically relate to their employees and engaging in a helping relationship.  So, I think that “touchy-feely” is, in fact, the currency of the realm for effective leadership

Today’s organizations are populated by angry, demoralized, and risk averse layoff survivors. The skills it takes to re-recruit and help these wounded survivors move back into productivity and help them focus on customer needs instead of their own survivor symptoms are not the traditional planning, directing, and organizing skills of the past. In order to be relevant to the needs of layoff survivors, managers need to move beyond the analytical and quantitative skills they learned in MBA programs and become proficient in helping skills.  Facilitating the acquisition of “soft” skills represents both an exciting opportunity and a significant challenge to training and development professionals.  The opportunity is that by helping managers develop intra-personal insight (self-awareness) and inter-personal competence (the ability to coach and form empathetic relationships), training professionals can directly contribute to organizational recovery and individual productivity.  The challenge is that moving managers into helping relationship in tough times is an against-the-grain activity with some significant cultural barriers.  Here are the top four.

Barrier of Macho, Controlling Cultures.    In many organizations, “real” (non-staff, line managers) did not reflect feelings, deal in empathetic dialogue, or ask for feedback. They made decisions, analyzed, and controlled. This was particularly true in financial service and marketing oriented organizations during the past boom.  Some – not all – HR and training specialist were culturally sanctioned and adept at using helping skills.  Even though these skills were clearly valuable, they were the tools of “staff types” and not found on the tickets that needed to be punched on the way to the top.

 Trainers need to make a direct connection between helping employees overcome layoff survivor symptoms and the bottom line. That perspective is supported by a growing body of research.  They then need to make a connection between managerial helping skills and the alleviation of survivor symptoms. I have found that once managers make this connection they embrace a skill set that will help move the organization forward.  

The Barrier of Left-Brain Bias  The right side of the brain controls our emotional and intuitive perceptions and behaviors. The left brain is involved in analytical, rational thought. In the United States and most other Western cultures, organizations have a strong left-brain bias that results in an overemphasis on formal logic, analysis, and rationality.  In most organizations, even with the increasing evidence of the utility of emotional intelligence, IQ trumps EQ and helping skills are much less valued than controlling and analyzing skills.

 Training interventions that help develop intra-personal insight are very helpful.  Whether it be a workshop built around an EQ or a 360 instrument or a refresher in basic helping skills, once managers understand that they can improve their effectiveness by changing their behavior, they are willing to move out of their comfort zone.  Training professionals can greatly reinforce these efforts by ongoing coaching and feedback. 

The Barrier of Management Science  This is not scientific management as defined by Frederick Taylor (people can be taught to work systematically and can be factored into the production equation similar to machines). Rather, it has to do with the inferiority complex felt by business schools and management training institutions in relation to scientists and their subsequent overreaction as they tried to be “scientific”  There was, and unfortunately still is in many institutions, the idea that you can study humans the same way you study rocks. Anything that was intuitive, feeling, or smacked of our unique human spirit was driven out of business education for fear that it would look weak and not seem scientific.

 In an era of downsizing, corporate training functions need to focus on equipping managers with helping, not controlling or evaluating skills.  Although it may smack of “bait and switch,” one very successful program that teaches helping skills is not labeled that way; it is called “performance improvement.”  The training director found that it attracted more participants and once they got there, they found the skills exceptionally valuable.   

The Barrier of Fear of Softness  At the zenith of the old paradigm there was a reaction to anything that was deemed “soft.” This included feelings, relationships, empathy, and anything that was “touchy-feely.” If you think about it, this is a strange norm, because being alive and human involves relationships, feelings, and connecting with others. However, the value was facts and figures—“hard” stuff! Even though such rock-ribbed disciplines as physics now report that facts are relative, the bias continues. Organizations still talk about human resources and training as the “soft” side of management. But not only are people issues as real as financial and production figures, they require just as much skill and strength. In addition, they require authenticity and the risk of self-disclosure. This is much “harder” than hiding behind a memo, a stack of figures, or a quantitative decision matrix.  

The current economic environment is helping with the realization that “soft” is “hard.”  The most effective managers are those who have the ability to engage in authentic helping relationships with their employees. This is not unnoticed by their peers and training professionals can reinforce the message both by their course offerings and their encouragement.

 Even though there are significant barriers, the pain is defiantly worth the gain.  By helping managers develop the “right stuff” to deal with alienated survivors, training professionals can directly influence organizational recovery and individual productivity.  This is a double win.  The organization improves and, in a time of belt-tightening;  the training function demonstrates its relevance.

The difference between those organizations that will survive the global pandemic of layoffs and downsizing and those that won’t will be leaders with the ability to facilitate transitions:  their own, the organization’s and those of their fellow employees. The acquisition of these skills is not emphasized nearly enough in executive development activities and leaders need to take personal responsibility for their acquisition if they want to be relevant to the future needs of their organizations.  What follows are ten very specific and prescriptive activities that will facilitate the development of these essential skills.

• Get involved in the leadership of a volunteer organization.  Pick one that does not receive funding or support from your organization.  Helping manage a volunteer organization is a powerful feedback and developmental experience.  It removes you from your positional power base and allows you to assess your true impact.  It is very different when people don’t have to listen to you or tell you what you want to hear.  Many volunteer organizations are fractionated, political, and made up of conflicting special interest groups, yet they have to accomplish something.  What better way to learn how to manage single interests into the collective good.
• Take evening courses or sign up for special programs that teach helping skills..  The macro-leadership competency of the future will be the ability to help yourself, your organization, and your employees facilitate change and transition.  The so called soft-skills are really the hard-skills, and certainly the relevant skills!  Management will become a helping profession and managers will need the same kind of helping skills as other professionals in the field.  The bad news, at least for the validity of their curricula, is that these kinds of offerings are not often found in business schools.  The good news is that they can be found in other schools and departments such as psychology, sociology, counseling, organization development, and educational psychology.  There are also one-time seminars and special programs put on by universities and consulting organizations.
• Complete a professional 360-degree feedback instrument.  By professional, I mean that you should use an instrument that has a history, validity standards, and norms.  Have the results interpreted by someone trained in helping you understand what it means and doesn’t mean.  Some organizations have their own 360-degree instruments and others use instrument licensed and certified by external vendors.  There are also some excellent external organizations you can hire to administer such instruments. 
• Attend a professional leadership training program.  This type of training is different from a program on marketing, quality, or performance management.  It should focus on intra-personal insight, inter-personal skills, and the systems perspective necessary to develop a culture that leads to organizational learning.  There are some very good in-house programs and many excellent external offerings.
• Find a Truth Teller.  It is particularly important for top managers to cultivate and use truth tellers.  A truth teller is someone in the organization you can rely on to, as is said in baseball “call them they way they see them.”  Truth tellers provide unfiltered feedback.  They have three characteristics: they are tuned in to what is going on at all levels of the organization; they are secure and have no personal ax to grind; and you trust them.
• Attend Laboratory Training.  These sessions used to be called T-groups. Yes, this is sensitivity training, and yes, it is “feely” – but it probably won’t be “touchy.”  The bottom line is that this kind of laboratory training is a very powerful way to get the depth of feedback that will lead to self-awareness.  It is important to assure yourself that the facilitators are professional and the organization sponsoring the session has a track record with organizational managers.
• Become familiar with future search technology.  There is a whole new movement out there, using labels such as “future search,” and speaking of “getting the whole system in a room.”  These large system-change processes go for the jugular in stimulating the learning organization.  If you want to jump-start your understanding of learning in the collective, you need to get on the bandwagon;  the technology is growing faster than it can be codified.
• Learn how to have a dialogue.  A dialogue is different from a discussion, an argument, a debate, or a business meeting.  The dialogue process is very important in developing learning organizations and is central to collective learning.  There are seminars and workshops.  You can also find some consultants who can teach you and your organization dialogue skills.
• Get active in your professional association.  Don’t just attend the national meeting – become a worker, serve on committees, pass out the literature, do time in the information booth, set up the chairs!  The higher up you are, the more the value of the grunt work.  It forces you to see an organizational system from a different perspective and helps you rethink your own skills and assumptions as to what constitutes value-added.
• Set up an intensive personal feedback project.  One option involves retaining an external consultant to nearly overwhelm you with feedback from a wide range of data points.  This is a very powerful process.  You can’t escape valid data, and a skilled consultant will help you understand it and do something about it.