From showing up to framing the message effectively, there’s plenty we can learn from the leaders who have got it right. When Kevin Gaskell mounted a scaffold platform to address 1,300 staff in one of the warehouses of Fairline Boats, he probably wasn’t expecting a warm reception. Even so, he might not have been prepared for the level of animosity in the room.
The meeting “very quickly got pretty hostile”, he recalls – so much so that Gaskell, who cuts a commanding figure at 6ft 3in, told his (6ft 4in) manufacturing director to stand next to him, “‘because we’re going to get slapped before we get out of here’”.
Gaskell, the newly appointed CEO, had taken the helm during a difficult period for the luxury yacht builder. Several consecutive years of losses had led to sweeping redundancies. Two years previously, in 2011, the business had been purchased by investment company Better Capital, together with Royal Bank of Scotland, after Fairline’s previous owner had written down its value to zero.
Pent up frustration about the perceived lack of leadership, seeming intractability of Fairline’s problems, and from the toll of living with the looming threat of job cuts, “came pouring out at me at four o'clock one afternoon”, Gaskell says.
If the business’s finances were in rocky straits, it was clear that he also had a formidable task on his hands in winning over employee sentiment.
In fact, according to Gaskell – who has led a string of turnarounds, beginning with Porsche in the 1990s – transformational change is “80 per cent about the people”.
The remaining 20 per cent is “about reorganising the company, finances, or whatever it may be on an operational level, but if you can't engage the team, then the transformation is not going to work”.
While that first impromptu town hall must have been a singularly uncomfortable experience, it nonetheless gave Gaskell the opportunity to set the tone for his leadership. “You will see me walking around the factory a lot,” he told the assembled Fairline employees, “and I don't want you to be afraid to stop me and talk to me”.
The golden rule of internal comms
Being visible like this is one aspect of what John Colley, professor of practice in strategy and leadership and associate dean at Warwick Business School, identifies as the ‘golden rule’ of internal comms: you need to show up on the frontline where change is happening, and in doing so, show personal commitment to that change.
One of the key issues with major transformation projects, he says, is that they “usually end up failing – and as a consequence, senior leaders don't like to attach themselves to the project too much”.
“Typically,” he continues, “they all roll out for the launch ceremony and then stay as far away from it as possible and delegate it down to either consultants or middle management to drive forward”.
Yet, this behaviour only compounds the chance of a project foundering, he suggests, because in the face of (inevitable) internal barriers and opposition, you need the weight of senior leadership to overcome obstacles and keep people motivated.
The opposite approach – ‘managing by walking around’ – has a following among savvy leaders.
Greggs’ former chief executive Roger Whiteside told Management Today he spent two days a week away from the company’s HQ visiting stores around the UK, while Admiral founder and former CEO, Henry Engelhardt, habitually toured each floor of the car insurer's office. Over time, he told MT, the purpose of these perambulations evolved: initially it was about information gathering and being the “grease in the wheels” by facilitating communication between different departments. Later, when the company had more structures in place for information gathering, it became more about checking in with people, “showing them that I am approachable, available and that I care”.
In 2017, Engelhardt, who had stepped down as Admiral CEO the previous year after two and a half decades at the helm, briefly came out of (semi-)retirement to lead the group’s US business Elephant. Here he put the same principle into practice: “The distance from the lift to my desk [when arriving at work] could be covered in 10 seconds,” he writes in his book, Be a Better Boss. “But if I went through a different set of doors from the lift lobby, it’d take me three minutes. And all along the way I’d be greeting people, saying hello, asking how they were doing, what they were up to, commenting on the weather…What a valuable use of two minutes, 50 seconds.”
Get the message right
In the past two decades running executive communication coaching company Simply Speaking, former BBC presenter Helen Sewell has helped many CEOs hoping to achieve greater impact with their internal comms.
In her experience, the thing that leaders struggle the most with is being able to frame a message effectively.
“CEOs often talk as if they are the company, and as if everybody else is also part of, in air quotes, the company, but actually the employees are…all individuals and while they may love the company, they're all on a ‘what's in it for me?’ wavelength.”
Nobody likes change, Sewell says, and when you don’t tell people what’s in it for them, “employees can end up feeling as though they're being forced into the change”; the CEOs who frame the message well on the other hand – couching it in personal rather than company terms – will be those “who the employees want to follow”.
There is a more radical approach, of course – albeit one leaders would be advised to use with caution, according to Colley.
Last year, Rolls-Royce’s newly annointed chief Tufan Erginbilgic described the engineering group as a ‘burning platform’ in a global address to staff.
This kind of bruisingly frank wake up call – also deployed by Nokia’s former CEO Stephen Elop – can be effective, Colley says, but “you can’t cry wolf with it”.
“If the business is seriously haemorrhaging market share, by all means tell them [your employees] i.e., 'we're not going to be here unless we do something about this'.”
However, judge the moment or situation wrong, he warns, and you can destroy morale.
Be authentic (but remember everyone’s watching)
The most carefully crafted message can only get you so far, however. The best leaders are “influencers in the true sense of the word”, says Sewell. And this power to get others to follow them resides not just in rational argument and logic, but “the gut feeling that the CEO creates within…[people].”
Coming across as authentic, then, is fundamental, she says – people need to know that their leaders are human.
"‘Ted Talks’ have their place,” adds Colley, but he agrees that people value leaders coming across as honest, clear and straightforward over highly polished communications.
That’s not to say you don’t need to think about how you’re presenting yourself. “Being a senior manager – and I would tell all managers – when you get near the office it’s curtain up. You’re on,” says Engelhardt. “And that doesn’t mean it’s an ego game, ‘okay, I’m on, I’m the star.’ Not at all. It means people are looking at you. People will listen to you.”
“I used to tell them [Admiral managers] – and tell myself – ‘you can’t always remember how important you are to the people you manage, but you must try’.”
Communication is a two-way street
When Gaskell took to the scaffold as Fairline’s new CEO, his experience of the boating industry was by his own admission limited. On top of which, “people didn't know me,” he says.
Establishing a dialogue with his workers, then, and leveraging their knowledge – of building boats and of the business – was a key facet of his strategy.
First he held workshops with the leadership team. “I painted some plywood white and lent it up against the wall [on one side of the room]. That was the ‘winge wall’... On the other side of the room, I had a mirror, which was the ‘ideas wall’.”
There’s the inevitable initial reticence, Gaskell says, then you get one, two people coming forward to write something, and the floodgates open. Those ideas and discussions, he claims, formed the basis of the plan to turn around the business.
Shining a light into the spaces where negative sentiment or bad practices might be festering is a key part of the role of any leader.
In Admiral’s case, a problem that had persisted for months without effective action being taken to address it prompted Engelhardt to create an email address called ‘Stupid Things We Do’, where staff could flag anything they thought was “odd, stupid or shameful”.
To a similar end, he set up online chats where he would field questions from hundreds of staff. Some were serious, some were frivolous, he says, but he would answer them all.
There’s a liberally misquoted saying from Woody Allen that nonetheless offers a glimmer of insight when it comes to internal comms: “80 per cent of success,” the storied filmmaker is reported to have said, “is showing up.”
Gaskell is undoubtedly correct when he asserts that more communication will only reduce the fear in a business, not increase it.
Being seen, then heard, walking the factory floor, lending an ear (or fielding flippant queries about pets in the office) is perhaps the biggest part of the battle.
A version of this article was first published on Management Today
Photos: PixeloneStocker/Monty Rakusen/dogayusufdokdok/Penpak Ngamsathain/Getty Images