In Melcrum's report on How to communicate business strategy to employees, communication and strategy expert Bill Quirke talks about the importance of distilling complex business strategies into simple concepts that employees can understand and act on.

The problem with lengthy and complex strategies, says Quirke, is that as they cascade down the organization confusion sets in. "Employees don't want 71 slides when you can encapsulate information in 30 seconds."

To rectify the problem, Quirke works with groups of senior leaders and managers to develop their "Elevator Speech". He starts the stopwatch, giving them 30 seconds to tell their strategy story in a more simple and direct way, in relation to their business line or division.

To aid leaders with this, his team will help them break it down and think about the strategy in terms of its relationship to employees. In small groups, the leaders work together to deconstruct the strategy, pulling the written document apart and rebuilding it in a much shorter, more useful, verbal form.

• Assessing the state of the strategy. "We start by identifying where they are trying to get people to go, where they are now, and what they need to say to employees to get them to close that gap," Quirke says. Middle managers, with critical knowledge of their team and their ongoing needs in the field, are ideal in this role.
  
  
• Summarizing in 30 seconds. The groups must then re-write the strategy so it can be told in 30 seconds. This forces them to boil the concepts into a compact, succinct idea. Throughout the process, they're talking the strategy through, chatting about it in their group, finding different ways of phrasing an idea, and spotting those concepts that are difficult to explain.
  
  
• Rebuilding essential elements. The next step is to begin to rebuild the strategy for the purpose of the speech, identifying three relevant perspectives of the strategy. Quirke asks the groups to identify just three bullets in each category:
  
  1) The Three Whys: Why are we doing what we're doing?
  2) The Three Whats: What are we doing?
  3) The Three So-Whats: The impact of what we are doing.
  
  
• Delivering the strategy. Groups are given a time limit to work on the speech, but the critical time factor is the length of the speech. One member from each group delivers their version of the strategy to the rest of the large group. A contest is held for the person closest to 30 seconds.

In large multinational organizations, the biggest communication bottleneck, Quirke says, is managers at the senior level of business lines. As they funnel information through from the board room level into their areas, they often lose the opportunity to transform it into meaningful messages for their unit.

"Strategy can be tedious," Quirke says. "It is part of internal communication's role to equip middle managers to do the job, giving them templates and tools to make the translations themselves for their area."

I hope you enjoy the rest of this issue. And if you're planning to take advantage of the 35% discount on all Melcrum reports, don't forget the sale ends this week.

See you next week.

Mandy Thatcher

Editor
mandy.thatcher@melcrum.com

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How ITV increased the CEO's visibility in his first 100 days
Interview with Penny Lawson, Melcrum Podcast, November 22, 2007

Penny Lawson, director of internal communication at ITV, describes the techniques used to maximize visibility of the TV channel's new CEO, Michael Grade, during his first 100 days.

Listen now 

How should your online staff forum be moderated?
Melcrum's Social Media Newsletter November 26, 2007

Moderation – the process of keeping in check the various comment threads, online forums, bulletin boards and blogs your organization provides – can be a difficult and time-consuming task. But good moderation is vital to the success of these platforms. How can you ensure it's handled correctly?

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The Source for Communicators is a free resource for corporate communicators from Melcrum Publishing.
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