Blogging and Leadership - Plus Other Communication Issues

As a communicator and speechwriter for two IT executives, I often find myself wondering about the best way to communicate with employees. When a colleague indicates he or she has no idea about the newest campaign in our department, it makes me think twice about the way we attempt to disseminate information. Because our department is made up of over 10,000 people, we struggle with several communication barriers. One is that our employees tend to engage in selective perception. The weekly online newsletter we send out has so much information in it, employees cannot help but filter through the messages and only pay attention to what they think involves them. I also believe that some of our employees do not know our executives very well and therefore disregard most messages sent from them, indicating a lack of source familiarity or credibility. Additionally, as an IT organization, we tend to use acronyms. AIAOT (An Insane Amount of Them). This jargon means something to part of our department, but for the non-techie folks, the message falls flat when it uses a lot of these semantics.

All of these barriers seem to lead back to the fact that employees are trying to deal with information overload - the idea that there is simply too much out there to know. Verbal communication to everyone from executives is just out of the question; when the executives try to disseminate messages through mid-level management, the message seems to get lost. Which brings me back to my original concern: How do we get the important messages to the employees in a way that they will pay attention? Last year we began experimenting with blogs. We have a monthly post from one of our top three IT executives on the most relevant topic to everyone in the department at that time. Employees can comment on the blog and occasionally, the executives will respond to certain comments. While we do see good readership numbers with these blogs, I don't think we're necessarily using them to the extent of their capabilities. 

Northern Trust CEO Rick Waddell is an example of a leader who takes advantage of his internal blog. Waddell started his blog in 2007 at the behest of his communication team, who did a survey and found out employees wanted to hear more from senior leaders. Waddell posts twice a month and addresses important issues such as what happens at the company's board meetings and the company's diversity. He even used the blog to announce a change in benefits. Employees are allowed to post comments - and Waddell responds personally. The blog is well-received internally, and Northern's Trust company culture has no doubt played a part in 2007 fourth-quarter results that were better than expected in light of the banking crisis.

Effective employee communication can also help during times of change. Although blogging is perhaps the most fashionable way to get the message to employees these days, internal memos and documents have done the trick in the past. When Microsoft was facing the threat of falling behind the industry in web technology, CEO Bill Gates sent a memo assigning the Internet the "highest level of priority" at the company. Gates created a vision for change and then communicated that change in a way that showed the transition was supported directly by him and other senior leaders, a key element of ensuring the change resonates with employees.

At my company, we are undergoing a lot of organizational change, including ones related to technology, hiring, and a change in consumer base. The more our leaders are called upon to communicate about this, the more we need to seriously consider the best way to get the message across to all employees. What methods would you suggest if you were in my position?

Traci Finch

Eliminating “Silos” in Toyota – Culturally Feasible?

Because I drive a Toyota (a cute blue Corolla, if you must know), I followed the Toyota safety scandal pretty closely last year. I love my little car, and I was concerned that at some point I would need to trade it in or even change to a different company. Thankfully, my model didn’t have any recalls and it seemed like Toyota fixed their issues – everyone moved on.

But a report that came out last week indicated otherwise. According to a panel Toyota asked to evaluate the company’s actions after the safety crisis, several elements need to be reassessed, including ways decisions are made, its overall culture, and leadership models within the company.

The idea of changing Toyota’s leadership model struck me as quite the challenge. This is, after all, a nearly 80-year-old company that recently overtook GM as the world’s largest automaker. It seems as though they have a pretty successful operation on inside their headquarters. But Toyota’s “top-down management style,” in part, led to the 2010 acceleration scare.

The panel suggests the company eliminate the “silos” between its North American executives, who all head different divisions of the company, by appointing one person in charge of operations. Another suggestion included giving “regional managers more autonomy.” Toyota’s hierarchical leadership model apparently hinders anyone but senior leadership to feel comfortable speaking up – and even that seems like it is against company culture. This seems contradictory to an intra-company philosophy known as the Toyota Production System, which encourages workers to speak up and even stop production on the manufacturing floor when they notice something isn’t right.

However, as Bauer and Erdogan (2009) describe in their case study of Toyota, “it is not uncommon that individuals feel reluctant to pass bad news up the chain within a family company… No Toyota executive in the United States is authorized to issue a recall” (p. 346). Obviously, the panel was correct in its suggestion of giving more authority to North American executives and regional managers.

But while focusing on removing silos will help remove communication barriers between the North American operations, I wonder how much this would work for Toyota. Without having read the entire 60-page report myself, I’m not sure if panel members took Toyota’s culture into account when considering its existing leadership model.

Culture is something that can’t be discounted. Toyota is headquartered in Japan, where characteristics such as masculinity, collectivism, and low uncertainty avoidance are regarded highly. Indeed, Toyota’s board of directors “is composed of 29 Japanese men, all of whom are Toyota insiders” (Bauer & Erdogan, p. 346, 2009). Highly favoring masculinity means also highly favoring competitiveness, achievement, and making money above most other elements, which could have factored into someone not speaking up about a safety issue. A collectivist culture tends to value the group over themselves as individuals, and this extreme loyalty to Toyota may also have led to a reluctance to bring up any issues that would cause unfavorable views of the company. And low uncertainty avoidance, specifically in Japan, can mean that people try extremely hard to keep their jobs. Revealing a problem in the manufacturing of automobiles may be looked down upon by the Toyota culture. Bauer and Erdogan point out that Toyota’s flow of information is one-way – from managers to executives in Japan, where they make the decisions: “Authority is not generally delegated within the company; all U.S. executives are assigned a Japanese boss to mentor them” (p. 346).

And how does that mix with its North American counterparts? Is the culture the same in both countries (probably not), or is that part of the problem? I haven’t researched Toyota in-depth before, so I’m not sure. But I’d be interested in your thoughts. What do you think Toyota could have done differently in the safety crisis? Do you think the company should reassess its leadership model or focus on another element the panel suggested?

Traci Finch