Engagement or agent provocateur?

 

Storytelling has the power to inspire, influence and persuade. Any arguments out there? Hopefully not. If so, please step away right now and mind the gap. 

In Employee Engagement, in the right hands, it has the power to challenge the cultural assumptions and fundamentally change the normal thought processes and modus operandi, which is the key lubricant in freeing up any organisation's innovation inertia and engagement levels.

Internal communications for me is primarily about looking at ways of delivering stories, not just to engage and inspire change but to make anyone think,' What if I….??'

The best stories are the ones with the slight twist, the ones that have the ah-hah moment as opposed to the ha-ha moment. There is only an 'h' difference but that 'h' is a mighty big letter.

I was in a meeting at an NHS establishment a few weeks ago. An organisation that is redefining the concept  'change management'. 'Revolution management' would be more apt. This brainstorming session was focussing on just one of myriad new process rapidly turned into a therapy session for one of the participants. He suddenly woke up to the fact that the reason he was so unhappy at work, why he was so stressed and the reason why he couldn’t keep on top of the basics was that he kept passing the responsibility for the decision onto other people. Justifying this to himself with a laudable desire for building inclusiveness; instead of just simply doing it.  The resut was that all decisions and any subsequent actions just got mud-logged.

I remember talking to another group about a time I had had to make some not insignificant changes to the intranet web site copy. The group in question, who were working in that organisation, asked how I had got through the mass of approvals they would normally have to go through? I told them I just did it. I didn't ask. By the time the permissions had worked their way down through the mass of emails and cc’s (continuity cock-ups) the opportunity to address the immediate issue would have disappeared. And the chance to make a salient point, improve something with a simple yes or no decision had evaporated. I hate wasted (good) ideas. So I just did it and hoped that my naive enthusiatic approach and the reason for my indiscipline in the ranks would allow me to escape the headmaster’s wrath.

The result was really interesting. Firstly, the powers to be didn’t even notice, and then, when I did mention it in passing because I was feeling a little guilty towards the person who should have been at the head of the approval food chain, they were not only supportive but began a process to shortcut the process in future. She is, not unusually, continually stacked up with e-mails and appreciated that making no decision is worse than the wrong decision, in virtually every situation.
Waiting for approval for stuff when they pay you to use your judgement and experience to produce is just nuts. Frustrations with poor communications and irrelevant controls are sited as the major reason that employees leave companies and the atmoshere employee disenagement.

Another interesting point. Ask your boss and they will say they feel exactly the same. Our bosses feel the exact same frustrations believe me.

So, if you do find a renegade in the ranks, don’t build walls around them or fire them; nurture them, culture them, and then activley help them get them to spread the word. To tell their story. Then stand back and see what happens.