Leadership And Team Dynamics: How To Cascade Messages via Managers To Teams

One of the common mistakes people make when designing a change program is assuming that if a person is a team leader, supervisor or senior manager they should naturally know how to communicate face to face with their teams. However communication skills are rarely one of the key competencies that is taught or measured by organizations. There is however a very easy way to ensure that there is structure and content that make it very easy for managers at all levels to follow.

Leadership communication is all about structure and key messages and the easiest way this can be managed is through team briefing. This is a formalised tool that ensures all leaders and managers communicate the key messages and provides feeback about what employees what to know more about. There are three levels of messages that are cascaded through the organization.

1. At the first level the Company President will brief his direct reports about the key issues for that week that he wants communicated to all employees. 2. This information is then distributed to all the executive team members who then are required to communicate those topics to their teams together with what they consider the top 5 issues for their division and then the top 5 topics for their respective team. 3. It is only the last section of a team brief that changes as this is directly related to how the corporate and divisional issues for the week relate to specific team issues. This section of the team briefing will always change depending on what the team is working on.

Leadership communication is a difficult consistent behaviour to create as part of an organizational culture but is is essential for transformational leadership to be successful. With team briefing there is a formalised approach to employee communication and team dynamics that ensures everyone knows what is happening in the organization at the same time.

And most importantly it is constant as the CEO has his Executive team meeting dates set for the entire year and this ensures that everyone from the Executive team to the frontline know what is happening in the organization.

The key factor to the success of team briefings is that they are driven by the CEO. Whenever your CEO talks with managers and employees he should ask whether they had in fact attended a team briefing and how regularly they occured. This way if they are not he can say to his direct reports, "I am conducting my team brief with you now so there is no excuse for you not to do the same with your team members".

So these are the keys to making Team Briefings work.

1. Make sure that you put in place a simple process 2. Make sure that the CEO drives it and that his direct reports understand the importance to the CEO - not you. Afterall you are not their boss, he is. 3. Ensure that the topics are the type of content that management are comfortable and knowledgeable about 4. Provide a feedback loop, again this is part of the process, if there is a question that management do not know the answer to, there must be a formal easy process for them to follow to quickly obtain the answer and respond to the employee. 5. Team briefings should only take 15 minutes, they can also be incorporated into regular weekly meetings.

When it comes to cascading information in a face to face format via management remember that as with anything, there will be some topics that employees want to hear directly from the CEO and other topics they are happy to hear from their manager. Generally when it comes to significant issues such as retrenchments, closure of offices and mergers or acquisitions employees generally want to hear this from the person at the top. Day to day, week by week and month by month operational issues they are comfortable in hearing from their manager who manages their daily work.

Article Source: http://articleshouse.info

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