The Contented Cow Blog

Building Workplaces That Work

At about 8:45 AM I eased into a booth at Dick Clark’s Grill at the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport in search of breakfast.Though the day was still relatively young and nothing particularly bad had happened, I was annoyed.

Getting to the airport had first involved navigating to the omnibus rental car facility, a place that is not especially well marked on surface streets. Navigation was made more difficult by road construction in the area, but I made it, with only a couple of wrong turns. Having once before boarded the wrong bus from this facility to the airport, I knew that the buses don’t circulate to all terminals as they do at most domestic airports. So, as I exited the building I looked for the signs to tell me where the bus to Terminal 3 (my departure terminal) would be - not readily apparent. Thank goodness, an employee was standing by to serve as a human signpost. Once at the airport, signage for rest rooms and other essential ports of call was similarly weak. In fact, in my search for the nearest rest room, were it not for the pleasant, purple-jacketed guide at the top of the escalator, I might have gone from annoyed to well, uh, forgive the expression… pissed.

Don’t get me wrong. I very much like the Phoenix area. The people are great, there’s lots to do, and the weather is great about nine months out of the year. But I think I’ve figured out why the area is growing so fast, and it has nothing to do with the aforementioned factors. People simply get there and then, like a Las Vegas casino, can’t find their way back out of town.

I had lunch the other day with a handful of mid-level managers whose annoyance was a lot more acute than what I experienced this morning, but emanated from the very same cause. No, they hadn’t gotten lost at Sky Harbor. Rather, they are lost and confused within their own organization, where, to hear them talk, they get a fairly steady diet of the “mushroom treatment.” In other words, the “signage”, or visability into the organization’s strategies and plans is severely limited, and thus compromises their ability to do their jobs. One of them in fact remarked that she feels personally diminished by the fact that, when the boulders of change roll off the highest level of the org chart and land in the organization below, she is often ridiculed by her people for not preparing them for changes that she, too, is completely unaware of. As a result, she not only has the change to deal with, but first, she must contend with a workforce that believes that their boss is either lying about her lack of foreknowledge, inept, or asleep at the switch.

Despite burgeoning corporate communications budgets and the availability of more communications methods, modes, gear, and doodads than the mind can comprehend, we probably do a poorer job of communicating in the workplace than at any time in history. Communicating, as in making meaning. A few thoughts:

1. As managers, we get paid to think. To a degree, we also get paid to rock the boat a bit. If needed information about your organization’s plans and strategies is lacking, don’t be ignorant, and don’t be a victim. Go search it out. You can start by chatting up your boss, your peers, and your own network. but if that fails, don’t be bashful about going to someone who ought to know, someone higher in the food chain perhaps. Make it clear that you’re not whining about not having been told, but don’t be timid about asking for information or insight that you need in order to run your part of the business. In all likelihood they will thank you for the question and your interest. In the unlikely event that they react adversely, well, that tells you something too.

2. Use a simple test to determine whether or not your own people are getting the sort of information they need to do their best work. Ask a representative sample of your team members to jot down and share with you what they believe to be the organization’s top 3 priorities. To the degree that their answers are either inconsistent or off the mark, you’ve got atherosclerosis in your own area. Get busy.

3. Finally, we would do well to remember the advice of Jan Carlzon, former head of SAS, the Scandinavian airline, who maintained that, “An individual without information cannot take responsibility. An individual with information cannot help but take responsibility.”"

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