4 Questions on Communication

How does The Way Forward help with internal communication?

The Way Forward (TWF) creates structural designs for companies to help with transparency through policies that advocate for candor, systematics, and innovation. As Bennis et al. (p. 41, 2008) argues, "Before an organization can develop a culture of candor, it must examine the cultural rules that currently govern it."

As Bennis et al. (2008) contend, TWF deliberately designed a policy for our last client to improve internal and external communications, providing a structural and cultural design framework. First, we divided the company into domains to ensure everyone understood who was responsible and accountable for those domains horizontally and vertically. Within the accountability of each domain, we used the RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Coordinate, Inform) format to clearly define what communication needed to occur when an action (system) crossed from one domain to another. 

TWF is also keen to ensure everyone understood how to coordinate actions that transcended beyond the CEO's domain. 

What roles do leaders play in engaging internal audiences?

The RACI policy also addressed how each domain, which was assigned a responsible agent per the RACI model, was to communicate to ensure crosstalk and transparency of action and intent. 

RACI helps to organize a company by developing a cultural communication style that formalizes the need to communicate. Specifically, when giving an employee an action, the employee needs to understand the project's goal or intent. Understanding is derived from clearly visualizing and describing the leader's desired outcome and intent (Richardson & Hinton, 2015).

Why does effective communication with internal stakeholders enhance workplace satisfaction and productivity?

Trust is foundational to workplace satisfaction and productivity; without trust, an organization only runs on the force of will or personality within its leadership. Trust is the connective tissue that enables the workforce to improve productivity, take the initiative, and innovate constantly; without it, they merely carry out a task with little or no vested interest in the outcome. For the workforce to have trust, they must be considered more than the workforce; they are a vital component of the stakeholder collective. They are the internal stakeholders and must be treated as such; this trust factor is developed and improved by constant, honest communications, and feedback (Tugend, 2023).

What are the benefits of open communication with organizational volunteers?

Open communication triggers the why in the workforce and leads to their buy-in. Specifically, open communication helps the team, including volunteers, understand why we are doing what we are doing and how it benefits the employee and others (Anderson, 2019). The why helps volunteers to align their motivations to the goal/vision of the company. Leaders who are willing to share "the why" find that it counters the old autocratic trigger of feeling disrespected when someone tells you to do something because; "I told you so," "I am your boss," "I am your teacher," and so on. When leadership is willing to be vulnerable and communicate the why with their workforce, it forces the leadership to truly understand the why before they direct others to execute it. This is why adaptive leadership is popular now; the idea that the leader systemizes as much as possible to enable them to get on the balcony and see the big picture helps them better understand and explain the why and, eventually, the how. The more systemized the organization becomes, the more leaders can get on the balcony and see the why (opportunities or pending challenges); this is the greatest communication form (Heifetz, 1995). Always give the why, and people will respond and work better if they understand the why; they can see beyond the current and prepare for the future.

References

Anderson, G. (2019). Mastering collaboration (First edition ed.). O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Bennis, W., Goleman, D., O'Toole, J., & Biederman, P. W. (2008). Transparency (1. Aufl. ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Heifetz, R. A. (1995). Leadership without easy answers (4. print. ed.). Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press. 10.2307/j.ctv1pncrt0

Richardson, K. B., & Hinton, M. (2015). Applied public relations: Cases in stakeholder management. Routledge.

Tugend, A. (2023, Jan 30,). Why is assessing job satisfaction so hard? New York Times (Online) https://search.proquest.com/docview/2770590044