CRITICAL COMMUNICATIONS in the MOMENTS THAT MATTER

From childhood awareness to climate reality... why this moment demands more from all of us

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 16:35:25 GMT

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The First Realization

My first real awareness of humanity’s carelessness toward the planet came when I was about seven or eight years old.

Sitting at a restaurant called Golden Bear with my father, I learned that the California grizzly bear -- once a symbol of strength and still emblazoned on the California state flag -- had been hunted to extinction in the state after its habitat was steadily destroyed.

Even as a child, that felt…wrong.

When Carelessness Was Normal

I also remember learning about pollution -- and how casually people treated it.

There’s an iconic scene from Mad Men where Don Draper's family finishes a picnic and simply shakes their trash out onto the ground before driving away.

It’s jarring to watch today.

But it wasn’t fiction. It was normal.

People would never litter their own homes that way. Yet the natural world -- our shared home -- was treated as disposable.

What We Couldn’t See Was Worse

Litter was just what we could see on the surface.

Far more dangerous damage was happening out of sight:

The Love Canal disaster exposed families to toxic chemical waste buried beneath their homes
The case made famous by Erin Brockovich revealed groundwater contamination on a massive scale

Entire communities -- often marginalized -- were disproportionately impacted, giving rise to what we now call environmental racism

At the same time, we were confronting global threats:

Ozone layer depletion caused by CFCs

Acid rain driven by industrial emissions

And in those moments, something important happened:

We acted.

International agreements like the Montreal Protocol proved that when SCIENCE, POLICY, and the PUBLIC WILL for something better align, meaningful change is possible.

From Awareness to Action

As a young adult, I joined the Sierra Club.

I learned. I advocated. I believed -- like many still do -- that informed citizens could influence the direction of our future.

Because this is the only home we have. And many actions, once taken, cannot be undone.

Today’s Reality: A More Dangerous Chapter

Today, the stakes are higher.

Climate change is no longer theoretical -- it is visible, measurable, and accelerating.

From melting Arctic ice affecting polar bears to unstable Antarctic conditions impacting penguin populations, and virulent storms sweeping the landscape in between, the effects are being felt across the planet.

In recent years, large numbers of penguin chicks have died when sea ice broke apart too early -- before they developed waterproof feathers -- leaving them vulnerable to freezing and drowning.

These are not isolated incidents.

They are signals.

The Return of Doubt

And yet -- despite overwhelming scientific consensus -- we are seeing something disturbingly familiar.

A resurgence of DELIBERATELY ORGANIZED DOUBT.

The same playbook once used by the tobacco industry -- creating confusion, delaying action, undermining trust -- has resurfaced in the climate conversation.

It’s a strategy that was even reflected in Mad Men.

And it’s working.

It's providing confusion and cover while powerful economic forces continue to prioritize short-term gain over long-term sustainability:

Continued reliance on fossil fuels
Rapid expansion of energy-intensive technologies like AI infrastructure
Erosion of institutions designed to protect environmental standards

When It Feels Helpless

It’s enough to make anyone feel powerless.

But history -- and humanity -- tell a different story.

As Margaret Mead said:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

An Earth Day Invitation

So today, I’m asking you to do something simple.

Step outside. Look up at the sky. Breathe deeply.

Touch the petals of a flower. Sit quietly in the grass for a few minutes.

Reconnect with the extraordinary, fragile system that sustains us all.

What Happens Next Is Up to Us

And then -- when you return to your day -- pay attention.

When you hear about environmental issues:

Look beyond the headlines
Question the spin
Stay curious
Stay informed

Reach out to your representatives -- even if it feels like your voice is just one among millions.

Because it is.

And that’s exactly the point.

Final Thought

Together -- collectively, persistently -- we still have the ability to change direction.

To protect what remains.

To restore what we can.

To leave behind not just warnings…but a world still worth inheriting.

A Note to My Business Readers

You may be wondering why I chose such a personal -- and potentially provocative -- topic for this newsletter.

Because culture doesn’t stop at the walls of an organization.

Companies that lead with social purpose and a genuine sense of community don’t just build stronger cultures -- they earn trust, loyalty, and engagement from the very people they depend on most.

And this matters even more when you consider the future of the workforce.

By 2035, Generation Z will make up a significant share of employees -- and they are already deeply aware of the environmental challenges we face. They expect honesty. They expect action. And they are unlikely to stay silent in the face of denial or inaction.

This creates a clear opportunity for business leaders:

To step forward as credible voices. To align values with action. To lead in ways that resonate beyond the balance sheet.

In many organizations, that begins by embedding PURPOSE more visibly into the employee experience -- through thoughtful approaches to ESG, CSR, and community engagement that feel authentic, not performative.

When done well with input from your people, these efforts don’t just support the outside world -- they strengthen the inside of the organization, creating connection, meaning, and a shared sense of responsibility.

And believe me -- the organizations that get this right will be the ones that attract -- not just top talent -- but loyalty and belief.

As a communications and culture advisor, I help organizations design community engagement and ESG programs that reflect their brand and genuinely inspire their people - happy to connect if this sparks your curiosity.

~Linda

Weave strategy and culture pearls into your day-to-day messages for a more powerful and holistic employee experience.

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:53:28 GMT

Don't fill your channels with tactical messaging lacking relevant tie-ins to strategy & culture.

This past weekend, I watched a show that was a little out of character for me, featuring seasoned former generals and Pentagon strategists discussing how to win a war.

They pointed out the different layers of planning that need to take place to be the victors – chiefly tactical, operational, and strategic analysis and planning.

For example, say you want to gain mastery of a particular geographic region to gain unfettered access to crude oil. That type of planning is strategic because it outlines your big picture objectives and why they are important.

Successful planning should combine strategic considerations with operational and tactical activities.

To achieve this, you might decide to bombard a particular nation’s military installations with a magnitude of Tomahawk missiles, drawing down your supply. Bombing is tactical .

Now, let’s say that you need your Tomahawk missile supplies to remain at a steady inventory level to protect your allies and homeland security, and you had previously planned on building just two of these costly items in 2026. Now that you are accelerating the use of these vital munitions, you have decided to increase planned production from 2 to 1,000 in 2026. This requires budget (which you have already requisitioned from Congress), and rare earth minerals that are only available from China.

Unfortunately, you have been pursuing a tactic of systematically increasing tariffs on China for the last 14 months – but you have also given them access to highly sensitive computer chips needed for AI dominance – so hopefully you come out ahead and will still be able to obtain the rare minerals you need for your new Tomahawk order. These overlapping considerations are operational in nature.

Ideally, a business (or nation) analyzes and plans these goals and objectives in a specific order, taking into consideration first the Strategic, then aligning the Operational, before executing the Tactical in order to keep all efforts aligned and supporting your long-term highest order objectives – because executing too many tactical activities without supporting a big picture strategy can be costly and inefficient.

As I played around with what I had heard, I found this framework very useful for thinking through the business case for engaging a communications professional to drive internal communications strategy – even for small- and mid-sized businesses.

In fact, especially for small to mid-sized businesses. Here’s why.

Smaller businesses are often resource-constrained – unlike larger corporations, they cannot afford to be cavalier and wasteful in their communications efforts. One could argue that every communication should have maximum impact in smaller organizations that are still growing. Yet, these firms rarely have a communications professional on staff – when they do, they are usually almost exclusively focused on external marketing efforts. This leaves internal communications largely up to HR…and HR is already plenty busy doing HR things. Nor have they been trained as strategic communicators. As a result, internal communications tend to become tactical in nature.

However, in focusing exclusively on tactical communications (“we can’t afford a communications professional, so we’ll just make do with an HR generalist sending out all the messages deemed necessary”), the opportunity to simultaneously drop strategic and well-timed operational payloads with each tactical message is lost.

When the only messaging employees regularly receive is tactical, they are informed but rarely engaged, inspired, or aligned. They do not achieve the level of understanding needed to be fully empowered and to develop their own insights into how their work aligns with higher-order objectives.

But wait, you say, we do have all-hands town hall meetings where leaders share strategic objectives, and functional leaders do share operational goals with their teams.

But these one-time, top-down messages rarely help people connect the dots between the company’s top-level strategies, the desired culture, and the activities they see take place each day on the front line.

And consider that research indicates, on average, that people need to hear or see a message roughly seven times before it truly sinks in and drives action, a principle often known as the " rule of 7 ". This repetition builds familiarity, trust, and credibility, helping messages rise above noise and overcome short-term memory limitations. Companies that lack a communications strategy and a person to ensure it is achieved will never reach this 7X number and will never begin connecting the tactics they see here and now to the actual strategies in play.

Messaging at the tactical level, as when busy HR pros send out messages to drive attendance and adoption of specific events and programs as they arise, does little to help employees see the big picture and connect the dots in ways that drive higher-level performance.

Today HR announced a new benefit.

Tomorrow there is a community volunteer event.

Next week, a new strategy for a key product line prompts a broad reorganization of the sales, marketing, and operations teams. Two leaders are let go, and their teams are being reorganized to report to new leaders. Projects are being re-prioritized.

Effective communication should speak directly to the news at hand, but should also take advantage of the moment to link the message to the higher-level operational and Strategic objectives that are relevant.

The details surrounding the reorganization itself are the only things that get shared in the initial communications – nothing about the new marketing strategy it supports, and people feel the disruptive change like an earthquake shaking their sense of stability (when, in fact, the change has the potential to lead to greater company-wide success and new opportunities for the entire team).

Too many firms operate without a broader communications strategy that elevates messaging and ties tactical and operational efforts together to support the company’s broader strategic agenda in employees’ minds.

Mind you, short-sighted messaging is still effective at achieving the tactical objectives of benefits adoption, volunteer day attendance, and reporting to a new leader. But this approach leaves so much strategic meat off the table – and this keeps your employees feeling uninformed, somewhat disenfranchised, and hungry to understand what is really going on.

Let’s look at how a communications strategy adds breadth and depth to how we might communicate everyday occurrences, like reorganizations. For example, the messaging could reference the company’s plan to enter a new market in the context of their commitment to promoting from within and providing professional development opportunities for employees when the company experiences growth (thus maintaining psychological safety during an event that might otherwise seem scary) and weave in one of the company's values or cultural norms around collaboration, empowerment and enabling innovation, which the new organizational design will enable.

It is important to note that you should only weave in higher-order messages that align with and support the tactical message at hand.

Communication about the reorganization can also connect the dots between a new market strategy your leaders announced way back at the beginning of the year, so people begin to see it as real and tangible rather than just lofty words on paper.

Introducing the Message Map

One way to weave these higher-order communication themes into our straightforward reorg announcement is to build a message map.

Message Maps lay out messages like stepping stones, allowing the communicator to move from one strategic and operational theme to another, connecting the dots and driving greater alignment among seemingly unrelated goals, objectives, and tactics.

Communicated on their own, tactical announcements may seem capricious.

Enhanced message maps enable a communications professional to tie internal and external brand elements, cultural behaviors, and the marketing strategy at the heart of the reorganization into the org announcement, generating alignment, commitment, excitement, and greater psychological safety for employees across the company.

By reminding employees of the company’s strategy to enter a new market, you enable them to better understand that the new org design brings sales, marketing, and operations closer together to collaborate more effectively, share information, and drive the innovations needed to address the needs of this new market. Operations can redesign the manufacturing process to meet the new design specifications that marketing has built into the product at the request of the sales team, who are closest to the new customers.

The newly enhanced messaging also reinforces the desired cultural behaviors that are necessary to successfully navigate the change and meet the needs of the new customers: care, innovation, trust, and collaboration.

Strategic Communications helps you move from
Random Acts of Messaging to deliberately building Culture, Brand, and Engagement

By adding internal brand messaging, such as additional career opportunities and transparency, as well as external brand features, such as the company’s commitment to innovation and offering superior customer experience, a simple organizational announcement connects the dots across several aspects of the company’s identity.

With repetition, achieving 7X or more exposure to key strategic themes, these elements become central to employees’ core beliefs about the company and begin to form a meaningful employee value proposition as team members are repeatedly exposed to these themes over time.

With more frequent exposure to strategic themes, employees internalize these messages, developing a sense of belonging, pride, and a deeper belief in the company’s purpose, culture, and brand. As they come to relate more closely to these messages and align their understanding of their own work with the company-wide strategic themes, team members feel valued, as they engage more deeply with their colleagues and their work, understanding the role each plays in achieving company objectives.

Like an oyster building a pearl, by regularly depositing a deliberate layer of higher-order strategic messaging into organizational consciousness, strategic communications serve as a force multiplier, accelerating performance, building cultural integrity, and enabling strategic alignment. Leaders who see communications only as a cost center do so at their own risk.

Weaving a more strategic framework through your employee messaging enables each communication effort to work harder on your behalf, reinforcing themes that deliberately build a high-performance culture, shaping your employee value proposition and employment brand, aligning the organization around strategy, and driving up engagement, performance, and strategic execution.

If you’re navigating a major transition or growth phase, strategic communication can make a measurable difference in how your team navigates the change. I’d love to explore what’s on your horizon and discuss some techniques for keeping your people informed and engaged!

Click here to schedule a brief 15-minute chat.

Fighting about "Equal Acccess" is missing the point of how advancement actually works...and what leaders need to do differently

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:35:45 GMT

The case that's launched a thousand questions...

Years ago, I was a copywriter at a well-known Chicago catalog company. One of my colleagues, let’s call him Bob, began dating a bright young woman in the inside sales department. We’ll call her Shelly. Time went by, and eventually Bob and Shelly married, and within a year, they were on their way to raising a family. We all toasted to their happiness.

The day after Shelly gave birth, Bob was called into HR and given a 20% raise—recognizing his new role as a father and provider. When Shelly returned to work, she did not receive a similar increase.

If the question of fairness has not yet entered your mind, consider this: Bob had four colleagues – 3 female and one male – none of whom received this off-cycle wage increase.

Years later, Bob and Shelly moved on to other firms. Bob’s starting salary was higher because of the earnings level he’d already achieved, a wage disparity that never closed.

Ultimately, they divorced – and Bob paid child-support toward the care of the 3 children left in Shelly’s care.

With primary responsibility for raising 3 children, Shelly’s once-promising career never progressed into management, and the household standard of living remained lower than that of Bob’s second family until the children moved out and began careers of their own.

While such overt examples of pay inequity are much rarer today than they were a few decades ago, it is through the inequity lens that many a DEI program was born with an eye toward leveling the playing field and helping address structural gaps in career advancement that is often lost as women enter and embrace their child-bearing years.

That’s why programs designed to ‘level the playing field’ are now being challenged. Consider a recent EEOC case against a Coca-Cola bottler, which raises a provocative line of inquiry:

If a leadership opportunity is offered only to women, is that discrimination?

Legally, the answer may be yes.

But strategically, the question is far more complicated, because equal access to a program doesn’t necessarily mean equal access to opportunity.

Before we debate fairness, it’s worth looking at a few more real-world outcomes:

Women hold ~49% of entry-level roles -- but only 29% of C-suite positions
Only 93 women are promoted for every 100 men at the first critical step to manager
Women earn ~82% of what men earn overall, across all wage levels
Mothers earn closer to 74% of what fathers do
The motherhood penalty can exceed $500,000 over the course of a career
This puts women at risk of having less money available to cover their costs through their retirement years

Women don’t lack ambition or capability. They lack equal access to the conditions that drive advancement.

These are not small gaps. They are systemic patterns.

Which raises a critical question : If opportunity is equal between men and women, and remedial actions are unnecessary, why are real-world outcomes so consistently unequal?

THE COCA-COLA CASE

The EEOC lawsuit centers on a women-only leadership event that included company-funded travel, lodging, and development workshops. Approximately 250 women attended the event, and as the program content was developed to help women advance, men were excluded.

The claim: This women-only event denied men equal access to a career-advancing opportunity.

From a legal standpoint, that argument is straightforward -- but from an organizational perspective, it exposes something deeper.

HOW ADVANCEMENT ACTUALLY HAPPENS

In practice, advancement doesn’t happen primarily through formal programs. Those who advance to the C-Suite do so through sponsorship, visibility, informal access to decision-makers, and proximity to power.

Many of these ‘off the books’ opportunities often happen after hours, in small groups, and in conversations that are never formally documented. Advancement is often decided before the formal consideration process ever begins.

THE HIDDEN IMBALANCE

Now layer in reality:

Women are more likely to carry primary care-giving responsibilities within the family;
They are more likely to step out -- or step back -- at key career moments such as when others are receiving their first supervisory or management roles;
Women’s caregiver time commitments also mean that they are less likely to have time or access to informal “after-hours” networking environments.

This unequal access to informal opportunities isn’t about capability. It’s about care-giving constraints. The system rewards those who are more visible and present with continuous access, regardless of whether the recipients display greater or equal potential.

SO WE ARRIVE AT THE REAL ISSUE…

Which yields greater career dividends? Formal equality vs. practical access

The law asks: Was anyone excluded from a particular event or opportunity?
Reality asks: Who had benefited from regular, uninterrupted access to opportunities… all along?

The case scrutinizes access to a women’s conference aimed at leveling the playing field…while ignoring who has been included and had ongoing access to the conversations where career advancement opportunities are decided .

Leaders who employ high-performance women may find themselves wondering how this case and its implications are sitting with their team. You certainly do not want to create programs that put you in a compliance predicament – nor do you want to disadvantage women whose work may play a notable role in your company’s success.

Equality in access to programs does not correct inequality in access to opportunity.

WHAT SMART LEADERS SHOULD DO

Good leadership in the equity space does not need to be about choosing sides. It should be about designing better systems. That’s why high-performing organizations are shifting from developing one-off programs to designing more equitable advancement systems that provide ongoing structural access to opportunity.

What that looks like:

Transparent promotion pathways
Formal sponsorship programs (not just mentorship)
Leadership exposure built into roles – during the workday, not after hours
Deliberate multi-level networking that is inclusive by design -- not by default
Manager accountability for performance-based talent advancement
Re-balanced networking and relationship-building opportunities so they are accessible across schedules, roles, and responsibilities (rather than relying solely on after-hours or informal settings)

The goal of this new approach isn’t to advantage one group over another. It’s to remove the hidden barriers that have shaped advancement outcomes for too many years.

If we don’t address how advancement works -- through access, visibility, and sponsorship -- we’ll keep debating fairness while reproducing the same uneven outcomes.

And that’s not just a talent issue -- it’s a business performance issue.

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Communication Breakdowns During High-Pressure Change

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 20:36:33 GMT

how negative messaging can come out unplanned
and quickly erode trust, engagement, and performance

In this episode of Behavioral Profit, I spoke with Executive Behavioral Coach, Debbie Longo .

We discussed what makes communication break down during high-pressure change and how this can quickly erode trust, engagement, and performance.

In this episode, you’ll learn practical behaviors that can help protect psychological safety during mergers, reorganizations, layoffs, and major transitions -- without lowering performance standards.

This is a must-listen for leaders who want a stronger culture, clearer communication, and better results during disruption.

https://lnkd.in/gJ9pNtxh

When a sunrise doesn't feel like a new beginning...

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 23:03:42 GMT

When a mass layoff is internally branded “sunrise,”
it raises an uncomfortable question: sunrise for whom?

A recent headline-making layoff initiative affecting 16,000 workers was reportedly called “Sunrise.” The name was likely meant to signal renewal. But for those leaving, it underscored how easily corporate language can drift from human experience. Layoffs may sometimes be necessary. Treating them as purely operational events is a leadership failure. The way organizations downsize tells employees -- and the market -- exactly who they are.

Businesses -- like the broader economy -- move through natural cycles of expansion and contraction. Strategies that once looked bright and full of promise sometimes fail to deliver. Timing shifts. Competitors innovate faster. Markets evolve in ways forecasts didn’t anticipate. Products that once felt indispensable quietly reach the end of their lifecycle.

Despite our best planning, organizations must occasionally resize to remain healthy and sustainable. Most leaders understand this reality — and employees do too. Workforce adjustments are not new, nor are they inherently reckless. They are part of the rhythm of business.

What concerns me are not the routine, carefully managed corrections that occur in a disciplined organization, but the large-scale disruptions that arise when growth accelerates beyond what market intelligence, operational readiness, or long-term sustainability can support. In an environment that rewards speed, scale, and headline growth, the pressure to expand quickly can outpace the guardrails that normally protect both the business and the people who power it.

Employees join organizations in good faith. They step away from stable roles to invest their talent in a shared vision. They bring pride, energy, and trust to the work. That trust carries an implicit expectation: that leadership has weighed the risks responsibly and is building something meant to last.

Situational awareness, driven by market and industry intelligence and conservative business practices, helps minimize the risk of unnecessary downsizing. It’s on us to take care not to ramp a business up too quickly, beyond what is realistic, feasible, or sustainable, only to turn around and pull the plug when analysts weigh in on what our finance, and marketing teams should have warned us about before we hire thousands of people.

Because, as business leaders, the buck ultimately stops with us. If we have traded on our reputations as leaders and our top-tier brand identities to attract “top talent,” only to push a mass number of these same people back out into the street again, when a business concept fails, it risks being perceived as a breach of trust if we failed to do our homework before we drove the business to achieve scale.

Adding insult to injury is the dehumanizing treatment that too often surfaces in high-profile ramp-up situations, leading to mass layoffs. Ironically, the larger the societal impact in terms of net additions to the unemployment rolls, the greater the risk of treating people like numbers on a spreadsheet rather than as human beings. In the worst scenarios, executives go so far as to blame the thousands of people they are laying off for the failure of the business venture, which they were invited to be a part of.

As human being, we owe our colleagues recognition that we have all been doing our best to make the business succeed, a transparent explanation of what we believe has gone wrong in our forecasting, an attitude of humility and genuine regret when aspirational plans don’t pan out — or at the very least, an approach to downsizing that recognizes the life-altering experience they are about to face.

Compassionate layoffs aren’t about being “soft.” They are a strategic leadership discipline that protects brand trust, employee engagement, and long-term organizational credibility. When done well, downsizing becomes a test of culture -- and a signal to the market about who you are as an employer.

5-Point Messaging Framework for Protecting your Brand
and Maintaining Trust During Downsizing

1) Scale Up Sensibly. Manage the number of layoffs that may be needed if the business fails to meet specified growth targets over time.

2) Scale Down Strategically. Allow time for staff to apply for other internal roles. Redeploy top talent to other parts of the organization where they are well-positioned to make an impact.

3) Cushion the Blow. Provide the maximum severance available, offer meaningful outplacement programs to departing employees, and support them in securing competitive new roles. Partner with other industry or area firms who may be willing to participate in ‘job fairs’ when you know they may be looking to grow a division or fill viable opportunities you can help broker.

4) Stay Respectful and Humble – keep people ‘whole’. Leaders should never place blame for a business failure on the shoulders of the talent they are laying off. The buck always stops with leadership. If there were performance issues, they should have been addressed well before a mass layoff was even considered.

5) Maximize Psychological Safety. When you support the people who are leaving to the best of your ability, when you are transparent about the reasons for and necessity of the change, and when you remain respectful of everyone involved, a funny thing happens.

People being laid off accept that what is happening is necessary, and while they don’t love it, they are better prepared to move on, while people who remain behind still trust you to be the kind of leader they want to follow, the kind of culture that they still want to be a part of, and the kind of brand they can still take pride in.

Compassion isn’t accidental. It’s operational. It requires deliberate planning, messaging discipline, and leadership rehearsal.

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The Connection Between Internal and External Communications

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 18:52:43 GMT

between the yin and yang of these two disciples is where you'll find customer experience

Today I met with Alison Ver Halen to talk about the powerful synergies that exist between these two distinct functions when it comes to building powerful brands (external brands...employee brands) and exceptional customer experiences!

It's a lively conversation -- we hope you enjoy it --
please drop a note and let us know what it brings up for you!

VIEW THE EVENT RECORDING HERE.

Starting the year with STRATEGY

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 22:18:20 GMT

Focus on where rubber hits the road...
and try not to hit that stinkin' toad!

By almost all accounts, 2025 was a year of uncertainty. 2026 feels like it’s setting up to be more of the same. According to a December 2025 report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, more than 1.1 million layoffs occurred in 2025, while a January 1 Newsweek headline announced that dozens of household-name companies, including Amazon and FedEx, are set to lay off thousands of employees in January.

This isn’t a year for aspirational strategy decks — it’s a year for adaptive, market-aware strategy that can move at the speed of uncertainty.

Global economic and social unrest, paired with the unknowable impacts of shifting tariffs and AI, have had “ripple down” effects on the business environment, causing business-as-usual to slam on the brakes. For example, what was once a thriving mid-market M&A environment became a deal desert throughout all of 2025, as business leaders opted to stay put, neither buying or selling, hiring or reorganizing until things settle down and become more predictable.

If the military incursion into Venezuela on January 3 is any indication, that’s not happening anytime soon.

While small and mid-sized businesses may not have a regular cadence around reassessing and rebuilding their STRATEGY, I come from a long career in corporate America, so I am accustomed to the annual ritual of launching new strategies to address the demands of a changing marketplace. Unfortunately, because of the frequency of many strategy refresh exercises, people within the organization sometimes label these “flavor of the month” strategies, particularly when operating in a business environment where precious little has fundamentally changed.

THAT IS DECIDEDLY NOT what we experienced this past year.

With that in mind (pardon the obvious for you corporate folks), this is an excellent time to take a moment to assess your business performance over the past year, document the major shifts you have experienced, how you responded as well as what you learned, and develop a comprehensive plan for how you plan to move forward in 2026 -- a year that may just as well be labeled Planning for Uncertainty: Part Deux .

Strategy isn’t the plan -- it’s the set of informed choices you’re prepared to revisit as conditions change. Therefore, rather than expounding on how to create a strategic plan, I will take a moment to share how I approached my planning cycle for 2026.

First, Look Backwards – what assumptions did you make going into 2025 that proved wrong, what happened instead, and what did you do about it? Was your pivot successful? Why or why not? What else could you have done to adjust for the changes and uncertainty that dominated the business environment?

Remember, for every emerging opportunity that seemed dashed by uncertainty in 2025, new opportunities arose for the same reason. As business leaders, our job is not to be so in love with the opportunity and solution that might have been perfect if things had been different that we are unable to identify evolving opportunities and provide must-have solutions to help our customers meet their emerging needs.

Get out of your office and ask others what they think. Be sure to ask your leadership team for their perspective on last year’s experience as well, because they may have been making adjustments on the fly to adapt to the unexpected curves the market threw your way. You will want to document these shifts and pivots to ensure that they are financially sustainable (assuming they worked) and to document the lessons learned for future reference.

Conduct a SWOT Analysis on your own operations, considering the business environment you are currently experiencing, and deliberately invest time and money in strengthening the parts of your business that are not well-suited for current opportunities and conditions.

Set New, Market-Informed OKR Targets – and shorten the 5-, 3-, and 1-year horizon and checkpoint cycles to include a deeper dive into semi-annual and quarterly analysis, providing enough time for strategies and tactics to take hold while avoiding over-committing to initiatives that are not meeting the market where it’s headed.

Keep an eye on the space where rubber hits the road. With rear-view analytics and your most realistic forecast firmly in hand, establish the strategies and tactics you plan to invest in for the year ahead, considering both internal and external strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Allocate resources (money, time, staff) accordingly – and establish frequent milestones and checkpoints to track progress – considering not only your own operations, but the sustained viability of the objectives you’ve set and conditions on which they were based.

The risk in uncertain markets isn’t moving too slowly --
it’s committing too long to assumptions that no longer hold true.

According to a Jan 5 Axios newsletter, one of the most important themes to be mindful of in the year ahead is SITUATIONAL AWARENESS . Pay attention to what is happening, thoughtfully predict how it could impact the trajectory of your clients’ and your own operations, and adjust accordingly. Be curious! Explore emerging trends and opportunities.

Generally, this means adding a shorter-term lens to your planning and execution cycle, with two critical exceptions that could affect your future performance:

keep investing in people
continue to enable your business to innovate.

Extend your ‘inner circle’…

COMMUNICATE YOUR STRATEGY TO EVERYONE ON YOUR TEAM

Let more people into your headspace! As a business leader and strategist, you know why your current-year plan differs from how you usually roll…

shorter milestones
fewer initiatives
more frequent check-ins
far more performance-related questions
sudden pivots and pausing of projects

Your people will experience all of these changes first-hand – and, given human nature, they will assume their performance has something to do with why you are exerting more oversight and being more cautious. Your people’s fear, doubt, and uncertainty can derail their performance and undermine trust. To signal your continued faith in your team – and to continue building trust with them - approach your strategy roll-out and communications programs with ‘radical candor’ about your plan’s logic, and be transparent about what you do and do not know.

A more open and regular communication cadence can help your people align with the new market conditions and time horizon you are marching toward and prepare them for unexpected pivots and changes in marketplace demands. Your openness can ensure they are WITH YOU instead of AGAINST YOU as you make sharp turns and sudden stops along the way.

Add two-way communications and lots of opportunities for Q&A and dialogue into the communications mix, and this also sets your team up to become the extended set of eyes, ears, and feet on the street you need to pivot quickly as needed, identify opportunities as they emerge, and address marketplace shifts before they can adversely affect your business performance.

Thanks for taking the time to read my thoughts on how Strategy and Strategic Communications need to change in times of uncertainty.

___________________________________________

IN THE SPIRIT OF SHARING OUR WISDOM

Please comment on one thing you’ve shortened in your planning cycle this year.

If you’re wrestling with how to communicate strategy in motion, let’s talk.

INTERESTING CONVERSATION with Hedinn Sveinbjörnsson of Hanson Coaching

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 15:31:42 GMT

Exploring the second wave of integration: culture.

View the full episode here:
https://www.linkedin.com/events/7350485185647230979/

Making Culture Stick: The Long Game of Integration

In this episode of Inspiring Conversations, I’m joined by Linda Carlisle, Fractional Communications and Culture Leader with over two decades of experience guiding companies through mergers, acquisitions, and large-scale change.

We dive into the often-overlooked second wave of integration: culture. Linda explains why culture work doesn’t end with Day One announcements - and why organizations that neglect this long-term process often struggle with retention, morale, and performance.

From legacy culture audits to building new cultural behaviors, we explore how to make integration meaningful, participatory, and even… fun. If you’re navigating change - or planning for it - this conversation is a must.
hashtag#InspiringConversations hashtag#CultureChange hashtag#MergersAndAcquisitions
hasht a g#WorkplaceCulture hashtag#ChangeLeadership hashtag#InternalComms

INTERVIEW with famed Culture Coach, Wendy Brand

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 15:04:19 GMT

Your employment brand is a promise...

Watch the full interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUVy53kjOJ8&t=1507s

My spotlight with Freddy D of Business Superfans ICYMI

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 20:38:29 GMT

Enjoy this great conversation with Freddy D and me,, talking all things culture and Moments that Matter!

https://youtu.be/_UezFXgrcNk?si=6iHr1DZuSNbmmTbO

INTERVIEW : Wickedly Smart Women host Anjel B. Hartwell

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 21:00:50 GMT

Listen to the full episode here:

https://www.wickedlysmartwomen.com/episodes/linda-carlisle

HUMAN or HARDENED? Where do you fall on the Leadership Spectrum?

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 22:36:42 GMT

Do you Lead With Care - or Manage From a Distance?

Turns out, where you land on this Human vs Hardened Leadership Spectrum can make all the difference in Shaping your Company Culture, Trust, and Performance

In every organization, leaders fall somewhere on a spectrum between empathetic, people-centered leadership and distant, directive management. One fuels trust, engagement, and high performance; the other creates fear, confusion, and cultural drift. The difference isn’t philosophical - it’s operational. It shows up in how leaders communicate, how they make decisions, and how they handle the moments that matter most: layoffs, on-boarding, disruptive change, and strategic pivots. This article explores that spectrum, the behaviors that define each style, and the real business impact of choosing connection over command.

Read the current business headlines and you won't have to go far before you run across Fortune 100 companies whose leaders are falling into the Distant Director trap.

To better understand the difference between what these two leadership styles might look like, consider the following scenarios:

Empathetic Leaders anticipate the emotional impact of decisions. They know that many diverse viewpoints and perspectives can improve the quality of decision making and can help steer around 'blind spots' that can only be seen from the front line.

Empathetic leaders understand the true meaning of leadership. They know that in order to truly lead, their team must feel inspired to follow - and the more they can do to inspire purpose, vision, excitement, inclusion and trust in their people, the more enthusiastic this followership will be.

Even when delivering bad news, the empathetic leader leans into how the news they are delivering will make their people feel. As leaders, they own responsibility for the negative outcomes of their decisions, and take care to minimize the adverse impacts. Their goal is to maintain the psychological safety and trust within their organization, and they do not let their own personal pride get in the way of helping their people navigate a challenging disruption.

Even when delivering news of a layoff, they take care to support their people who are leaving to the best of their ability, and involve those who are staying in re-balancing workloads and re-calibrating priorities. They know that showing they care for their people - whether they are leaving or staying - and including those who remain in how the work will get done going forward can go a long way toward maintaining the trust that they have carefully built over months and years in the leadership role.

Leading as a Distant Director sometimes feels like the easier approach. You can swiftly deal with financial adversity (failed strategies, changing economic environments, etc.) without the vulnerability of admitting to human error. Your crystal ball may have failed to predict where your strategy needed to go - or perhaps your strategy failed to account for unexpected marketplace conditions. As a Distant Director, you don't owe these explanations to anyone. You just "right size your organization" without any further explanation than "because we can".

Unfortunately, by comparison leading as a Distant Director can be short-sighted. Even in the Age of AI, "The War for Talent" is cyclical, and taking this visibly hardened approach to people can have a lasting impact on the company's culture and employment brand -- even, depending on the size of your layoff, and the chilliness of the language used to explain it to the financial press, the company's reputation and overall go-to-market brand.

You may already have an instinctual preference for one approach over the other, for which I applaud you for your certainty. For those of you on the fence, I challenge you with these questions:

If you choose to lead as a Distant Director, where will your company be when the market turns and it once again matters to be an "employer of choice"?
Do you believe so strongly in the future of AI that you envision a future where people are immaterial to your business...?

Here are some of the Long-Term Pros and Cons of being an Empathetic Leader vs a Distant Director...

Even the most cynical business leaders do not envision AI as a post-apocalyptic version of the
"great replacement theory". While roles may change, it is generally recognized that AI will supercharge
the power of the people in your organization.

When organizations navigate layoffs, on-boarding, strategy shifts, or disruptive change, the difference between confusion and clarity often comes down to communication.

Busy leaders who want to build a high-performance culture that stands the test of time while steering their ship through rough waters can ensures their messages don't come across as harsh, reactive or fragmented, but intentionally aligned with the organization’s values, culture aspirations, and long-term goals by partnering with a skilled communications professional.

By shaping narratives that are transparent, empathetic, and consistent across every milestone, a communications partner helps leaders build Trust Equity - day after day, decision after decision. This strategic partnership doesn’t just steady teams during turbulence; it creates the positive momentum that fuels engagement, strengthens culture, and ultimately drives the high performance every great leader seeks.

In times of change, aligned communication isn’t a luxury -- It’s a competitive advantage. Partnering with a strategic communications & culture advisor turns complexity into clarity - and clarity into trust.

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HOW CULTURE FUELS ENGAGEMENT:

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 18:53:08 GMT

building a workplace people want to belong to...

The Engagement Crisis - and What’s Behind It

Across the American workforce, engagement has been quietly eroding. Gallup’s latest research shows that fewer than one in five employees feel strongly connected to their company’s mission or believe leadership genuinely values their contributions. Meanwhile, grievance and cynicism are creeping in: employees report higher stress, greater distrust in leadership, and growing fatigue from constant change.

When people lose sight of why their work matters, their motivation tends to decay. But when purpose is made clear – and reinforced through culture, communication, and care – energy returns. Purpose anchors people amid change. It transforms “just another job” into “something I’m part of” and “something I’m proud of.”

That’s where culture comes in. And it’s where employee engagement begins.

What Is Employee Engagement - and Why It Matters

Employee engagement isn’t about surface enthusiasm; it’s about a deeper connection. It reflects how emotionally and intellectually invested people are in their work, their teams, and the organization’s success.

Engaged employees:

Go beyond the minimum – they think, solve, and innovate.
Speak up with ideas and challenge respectfully.
Become ambassadors for the brand because they believe in it.

When engagement is low, even top talent mentally disengages before they physically leave. Productivity drops, collaboration weakens, and customer experience suffers.

Engagement predicts the outcome – but culture is the cause.

______________________________

The Cultural Elements That Matter Most

1. Purpose: A Reason to Believe

Purpose is the heartbeat of engagement. It gives employees a sense of pride, belonging, and clarity about why their work matters. When leaders tie everyday actions and communications back to a shared mission, purpose becomes a living, breathing force that unites teams.

2. Career Development, Rewards & Recognition

Company growth inspires trust in future opportunities and career potential. Recognition reinforces what’s valued. Together, they create a powerful feedback loop that turns positive behaviors into cultural norms. When people see that excellence and collaboration are rewarded, engagement compounds.

3. Managing Overwork and Change Saturation

Fast-growing mid-market firms often suffer from “change stacking.” Each new initiative – while important to the strategy – adds pressure to already-stretched teams. Sustained transformation without recovery periods leads to exhaustion – and disengagement.

To prevent burnout:

Sequence change and prioritize clearly.
Communicate what’s not changing.
Protect capacity by phasing initiatives.
Acknowledge fatigue and celebrate progress.

Change management is culture in motion – it reveals whether leaders view employees as human partners or simply as resources.

4. Health and Well-Being

Well-being is the new baseline for performance. A culture that promotes mental health, flexibility, and psychological safety signals that people are valued for who they are, not just what they produce. When employees feel safe, they contribute more openly and creatively.

5. Building Trust and Transparency

Trust is at the heart of engagement. It grows over time through consistent honesty, inclusion, empathy, and accountability. Empathy paired with transparent communication builds credibility even in tough times – and fosters collaboration and innovation in good ones.

6. Leadership That Listens

Listening is leadership in action. Creating a continuous “feedback flywheel” – where employees share, leaders act, and progress is communicated back – builds toward the psychological safety and trust that engagement depends on.

7. Recognition as a Culture-Shaping Tool

Recognition is culture’s most visible signal. It tells people, “This is what GOOD looks like here.” When tied to purpose and values, recognition doesn’t just applaud achievement – it shapes behavior. Over time, those moments accumulate into identity and pride.

__________________

Why These Elements Improve Engagement

Each cultural pillar fulfills a basic human need:

Purpose gives meaning.
Trust and inclusion create safety.
Growth and recognition provide motivation.
Well-being ensures sustainability.
Listening and transparency foster belonging.

When these needs are met, engagement naturally follows. It becomes less about measuring sentiment and more about cultivating connection and building something inspirational together.

______________

How to Start Building an Engagement-Driven Culture

Listen First | Start with genuine curiosity. Surveys, focus groups, and leader listening sessions reveal not only how people feel, but also why.
Clarify and Communicate Purpose | Embed purpose into daily storytelling, decisions, and communications. Help employees connect the dots between what they do and why it matters.
Connect Recognition to Values | Use recognition strategically to reinforce the culture you want to cultivate – one that values collaboration, empathy, innovation, and accountability.
Prioritize Well-Being | Model balance at the top. Normalize conversations about stress, mental health, and trade-offs in workload.
Close the Feedback Loop | When people offer feedback, act visibly and explain how the input led to the change. That cycle builds lasting trust.
Manage the Pace of Change | Treat change as a human experience, not a project plan. Sequence initiatives, communicate rationale for change, and build reflection time between sprints.
Measure Progress and Momentum | Track both hard data (engagement, retention, productivity) and soft signals (sentiment, connection, feedback, and trust).

______________

How Corporate Communications Enable All of This

Every cultural shift and engagement driver depends on one shared muscle: communication . Corporate communications translate leadership intent into language that connects, clarifies, and inspires people. It’s how strategy becomes a story – and a story becomes a shared purpose.

Strategic communications:

Activate purpose through consistent narratives and leader visibility.
Model transparency by framing change with honesty and empathy.
Create feedback loops via multi-channel listening and dialogue.
Reinforce recognition by amplifying stories of people living the company’s values.
Build trust through steady, coherent messaging in moments of uncertainty.

Without communication, culture stays aspirational. With it, culture becomes actionable.

Conclusion:
Engagement Predicts the Outcome, Culture Is the Cause

Culture and engagement aren’t separate – they’re symbiotic.

When communication connects people to purpose, when leaders listen and respond, and when well-being is prioritized alongside performance, engagement becomes self-sustaining.

Leaders who invest in culture don’t just see better engagement scores – they see stronger teams, deeper trust, the resilience to thrive through change – resulting in better outcomes.

Because engagement isn’t an initiative -- it’s daily lived expression of a culture that works.

When Storytelling Meets Strategy

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 18:40:56 GMT

REMEMBER MESSAGE STRATEGY
when preparing your 2026 Strategy (Re)Launch

A strategy can become a dry, lonely thing that lives its entire life in a file, only to be picked up, brushed off, and reconsidered at the one-, 3-, and 5-year mark.

But when combined with powerful storytelling, new Strategies come to life and can change the future of your organization.

When you share your strategy, again and again, to different groups of stakeholders, take care to tailor your presentation so that each function sees its role in bringing the vision to life.

Take time to explain the WIIFM to everyone who needs to contribute to your journey.

Define and celebrate progress at every step along the way.

Like any important change, a new strategy needs a coordinated communications plan designed to drive stakeholder engagement and positive outcomes throughout the entire strategic timeline.

Senior leaders need to show up! And advocate as visible, inspiring strategic sponsors – using plain speak to talk up why the new approach is powerful, meaningful, and how EVERYONE wins when the vision becomes a reality.

Unfortunately, leaders often spend so much time in the kitchen, ‘cooking up’ the new strategy, that they are a little bit tired of it and are already ready to move on, forgetting that most of the organization is still in the dark about the plan -- let alone getting excited about the potential it brings to the organization and everyone in it.

STRATEGY RELAUNCHES CALL FOR POWERFUL, ENGAGING COMMUNICATION CAMPAIGNS with a regular cadence of storytelling to bring them to life and engage the hearts and minds of stakeholders across the company.

What's your strategy relaunch plan?
Send us a note with our CONTACT form if you'd like to explore how storytelling can super-charge your 2026 Strategy Rollout.

Pardon my use of the "F-word"...

Fri, 16 May 2025 17:48:52 GMT

But communication failures are foolish when a little forethought would fix your formula for telling your acquisition and integration tale.

Use this Five-Part Framework for fabricating fool-proof M&A messaging.

------------------

PART 1 | Your Initial Integration Communication

During due diligence, your people will know "something is going on." No matter how cleverly you name your project, there will be strangers in the building, more closed-door meetings than usual, and sentences awkwardly cut off when the uninitiated walk into the room.

Before you know it, your employees' psychological safety has begun to erode.

THEN you announce the acquisition. Your instinct is to tell both 'your people' and the acquired company's people that they are 'safe.'

BUT ARE THEY?

Be careful what you say here. There are likely redundancies that must be addressed to maximize the deal's value.

COMMUNICATIONS FAILURE #1: Leaders who promise 'safety' then back down on their word not only see psychological safety evaporate, but they also have likely taken a mighty bite out of their own people's Trust.

INSTEAD TRY CAREFULLY CRAFTING A CULTURE-BASED COMMUNICATION PLAN

CULTURE-BASED COMMUNICATION PLANS consider all audiences (current and acquired employees, customers, partners, suppliers, the media, investors, and other interested stakeholders), balancing the desired transparency and not triggering each constituent's most closely held concerns and beliefs.

At a minimum, make sure your audience members know you understand that change is hard. While you cannot promise that there will not be changes, you are determined to be transparent about your decision-making and to do your best to minimize the adverse impacts on them and the business.

Assure your new employees that you desire to retain the value, the high performance, the brand reputation, and the cultures that made the two firms seem like such a good fit for each other -- and that to do so means to hold onto to critical aspects of both cultures and the people who make up both great teams, while still making the sometimes tricky business decisions that come with the fiduciary responsibility and stewardship of your role as a leader.

This will also be a good place to foreshadow the humanity of your general approach to mergers and the empathy baked into your governing philosophy on the topic of Right Sizing -- using language that reflects both cultures -- and staying true to the spirit of the cultures as well as their expressed spoken words .

PARTS 2, 3 and 4 | Right Sizing Done Right

Three distinct types of change are part of nearly every M&A integration, sure to put your people on edge. The associated communication failures include:

● FAILURE #2 - Leadership Changes without considering culture and connections

● FAILURE #3 - Roughshod Reorganizations and Team Integrations

● FAILURE #4—Workforce Reductions / 'Right Sizing' messages that imply someone was 'WRONG' and are delivered in a cold and impersonal way.

There is one word that can get you through the announcement of all three types of change without violating your values, culture and shared sense of community, undermining your people's trust and confidence, or squandering the goodwill your new employees are willing to extend to you -- and that word is EMPATHY .

As you make your selections of who will stay and who will go, remember that each decision will bring with it history, loyalty, and friendships that will directly impact the people who remain.

Your new employees will judge the kind of leader you are, how much you value people, and how they can expect you to treat them in your chosen words and actions. Their sense of psychological safety -- and their LOYALTY -- will remain strong (or plummet) depending on how you navigate these changes.

Make sure you've carefully considered your messaging regarding WHY you've made the leadership and staffing decisions you've made. In all instances, the decisions must be framed as being about the best long-term interest of the business—never about the people. Keep the dignity of those chosen for layoffs intact and do everything in your power to make the landing of those leaving you as soft as possible.

As the newly combined teams come together under new leaders, arm these leaders with tools and talking points to help them inspire confidence in the newly integrated company. Consider team-building tools like Everything DiSC, Strength Finders, or the Enneagram to fast-track team connection.

Train your leaders to articulate the company's growth strategy and how their team fits into the future vision. Your employees—both long-term and newly acquired—will assess their words and actions to determine if they can trust their leaders and whether they feel safe, secure, and optimistic about the newly integrated organization, where it is going, and their place within it.

PART 5 | Coming Together under a Common Culture

As the most challenging stages of post-acquisition change communications come to a close, you can heal some wounds that the change may have caused by executing a deliberately inclusive cultural integration effort that includes listening closely to your newly integrated team.

Culture is very personal for most people. Often, culture is a big reason why people come to an organization (it is the essence of the employee value proposition) -- and why they stay. You often hear that people leave organizations because of their leaders' behaviors...But what is culture, after all, but the sum of the behaviors that are encouraged and rewarded within the organization?

FAILURE #5 occurs when leaders fail to include their people in deliberately shaping their organization's culture.

----------------------

INTRODUCING THE POWER OF LISTENING—

One of the most powerful engagement tools is listening to your people as you strive to select the right behaviors to carry forward in your culture.

Proactive Employee Listening serves several purposes, such as:

● determining the level of engagement and trust in leadership as the hardest felt aspects of integration are past.

● understanding what was working well for people within the cultures of both organizations ...and what was missing.

● kicking the tires and assessing how new cultural behaviors you would like to instill are likely to be received.

By simply including your people in shaping the future culture of the organization, you signal that what they think, and feel is critically important to you as a leader.

With thoughtful input from your leadership team and employees across the company regarding the go-forward culture tenets that will help your company succeed, it is time to execute an extended Culture-based Communications Campaign to embed the new culture across the organization.

Reinforce your commitment to cultural behaviors by aligning performance metrics, leadership competencies, rewards, and recognition programs and engaging leaders to introduce the themes into their meetings and the stories they share with their teams. Employing tactics such as gamification can grab people's attention and encourage leaders to tell their personal stories broadly to help bring the new culture to life.

In addition to stand-alone cultural messaging, the campaign themes can also be embedded in other communications efforts that reinforce the message and demonstrate how the culture fits with other activities across the company. For example, messaging about 'valuing our people' can be embedded into annual benefits enrollment, literature promoting employee development programs, etc.

# # # # #

As I’ve said before, we all benefit from sharing stories of doing hard things and delivering tough messages in our business journeys. To navigate BIG CHANGE without losing your people's hearts and minds, you must be planful, strategic, and, most of all, empathic.

What mistakes have you seen leaders make when navigating a merger or acquisition?

How has it landed with the people? How long did it take for the culture to recover?

What might you do differently next time you’re involved in communicating this type of change?

Navigating Layoffs : Make Empathy your Super Power!

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 21:38:58 GMT

Workforce Reductions
the most critical of all Moments that Matter ™

I have GOT to get out of this place!” she said into the phone in a hoarse, tear-soaked whisper.

“They just called an all hands meeting to tell us there are going to be layoffs…and the people being laid off found out when their names were flashed up on the screen! I wasn’t up there – thank god! But can you imagine what that would feel like?”

Think I am making this up? Nope. Wish I were.

Unfortunately, layoffs happen every day in America – in good economies and bad. Most leaders feel just terrible about them – which sometimes brings out behaviors that reflect more of a desire to avoid an unpleasant experience than to reduce the pain, stress, insecurities and duress of the people being laid off – or those who will remain after the layoffs are done.

Some legendary ‘layoff crimes against humanity’ that you may have read about in the past include:

Long rambling email where the buried headline – “you’re being laid off” is not found until several paragraphs in
A prolonged wait between announcing layoffs and executing them, letting everyone wonder and stew over who it will be
Or…a prolonged layoff period where people are asked to leave in successive waves, each occurring just as the dust begins to settle
A zoom meeting for those being laid off – where the person speaking is off camera
Coming into the office to find bankers boxes stacked outside your door
Finding yourself locked out of email before you are called to a meeting
Finding out your pass card no longer lets you into the building, and learning you are laid off when you call in to find out what is going on
A long monotonous video explaining the complexities of the business and the pain the executives feel about having to let you go
A raging email calling those being laid off “dumb dolphins” who can’t escape the net or the faster swimming sharks (I swear – you can’t make this stuff up!)

What all these scenarios have in common is an arm’s length approach to delivering bad news, leaving the leaders looking at best cold, tone-deaf, impersonal and insensitive, and at worst, unfeeling and utterly inhumane.

Perhaps it would be easy to brush off the damage done if the only relationships being destroyed were with the individuals leaving the company. But as the opening quote indicates, the damaged relationships don’t stop there. Employees who have not been laid off are also impacted when a layoff is handled poorly. Their trust is eroded by any sign of insensitivity, which directly impacts employee engagement, performance, and quite likely retention of your top talent. Your brand reputation may even take a hit if your perceived callousness hits epic proportions. All of these are among the unintended consequences of a layoff that has not been well planned and executed.

There is a better way

People know and understand that company “right sizing” is a fact of life after a major financial setback or a strategy recalibration. While nobody is happy to see these circumstances occur, failing to take proactive steps to realign resources and manage budgets is bad for business. Sometimes you must do hard things to protect the business and the interests of everyone, in the long run.

The secret to layoffs that don’t permanently damage morale, reputation and the people you are letting go of can be summed up in one word – Empathy.

Deploying Empathy as a Strategy

When it comes to proactively building a positive culture that governs your organizational behaviors and builds high-performing teams capable of weathering even the most disruptive business storms, words like Empathy, Caring and Hope are very much a strategy.

Never is this more evident than when facing a potentially disruptive event such as a layoff. Your team is human, and your actions – even if they are “just business” -- need to be thoughtful, caring and humane. In the current job market, it can take a knowledge worker between 6-months to a year to find a role equivalent to what they are leaving – a fact that you can readily see in comments on LinkedIn, and which are woefully unreported by government statistics. So you must take care to avoid sounding flippant, cold or cavalier when communicating a downsizing. There is nothing trivial about what your released workers are about to experience.

When preparing for a layoff, I recommend leaders take a moment to print out the word EMPATHY in 2” letters and stand this up on their desk before starting to plan for a reduction.

Let this one word govern your planning for all your ACTIONS and your COMMUNICATIONS for each audience in your layoff plan.

As you think about the actions you will take and the explanations you owe to different constituents, ask yourself and your leadership team questions like:

“How can I help those I am laying off feel confident, whole,
and able to hit the ground running in their coming job search?”

How are you positioning the layoff? Are you taking care to ensure that your impacted people know how much their talents and contributions have been valued? While they will not have a tremendous amount of patience for hearing a long winding story about “why” this is happening, be sure to provide a brief assurance that the layoff is about the company’s market position and financial situation, and that it has nothing to do with them and their professional capabilities.

When it comes to helping with the search effort, are there other opportunities internally for which some might apply? Can you offer outplacement support? Are there other local firms that may be actively recruiting that you can bring in, as an informal “career fair”? What services do your local municipality, county and state offer to aid job searchers? Does your Employee Assistance Program (EAP) offer resume writing, career search, and counseling or self-care/stress management workshops? Can you offer schedule flexibility for interviewing during the time before individual release dates take effect? What is the best you can do from a severance pay perspective?

You will want to be prepared with a comprehensive FAQ document that answers every foreseeable question you can anticipate them asking. The goal is for them to feel satisfied that you were thoughtful and proactive in your approach to taking this unfortunate action, and that you have kept their best interests at heart throughout your planning process.

REMEMBER: They will be chatting with their colleagues who have not been laid off before the day is out.

“What should I tell employees who will remain, so they know why we’re taking this action, and that we are doing all we can to mitigate the impact?”

In your messaging, this audience can get a slightly deeper dive into why you have made the hard decision to let people go.

It is important that they not only trust YOU, but also that they understand that the firm remains financially healthy. You will want to assuage their fears that another shoe may be about to drop – and to the degree possible, assure them that there are no further layoffs coming. If there are critical financial goals that lie before the organization, this is a good time to ask for their assistance in pulling together as a team to achieve them.

You will also want to tell them everything you’re doing to help their former colleagues remain “whole” and land on solid ground. These are their friends and colleagues. In addition to caring about what happens to them, they may also be experiencing survivor’s guilt. Be sure to urge everyone to be supportive and understanding of their colleagues who have been impacted, as this is likely a very emotional and uneasy time for them. This will serve to reinforce the kind of culture that you want to maintain, despite the difficult financial decision that you have had to make as a leader.

As with those who were directly impacted by your layoff, you want to have a prepared FAQ document ready to answer every possible question you expect from this group of individuals. Your existing employees must have faith that you were thoughtful and proactive in your approach, and that you have kept their former colleague’s best interests at heart at every step, despite the financial need to take this serious action.

How should I let suppliers and customers who work with the impacted employees know what has happened without affecting their good opinion and trust in our financial health?”

You will want to let other stakeholders know of the organizational changes you are making once the impacted – and then the non-impacted – employees have been informed. Consider having the leader of the supply chain and sales teams reach out to major suppliers and customers, respectively, to let them know what has taken place. This might be a good time to introduce who will be their primary contact going forward. As with other groups, you will want a thoughtful FAQ document prepared, in anticipation of the tough questions that suppliers/customer may have.

When it comes to Communications, Form follows Function

Ask yourself first what you hope to achieve with each of your communications to every audience – and let the answer to this one question drive how, when, and in what order you plan to communicate the unhappy news. As a general rule, the harder the emotional impact of the news, the more intimate the setting should be when conveyed.

Your role as a leader

As the leader of an organization going through this difficult time, all eyes will be on you. Your role is to put your own defensiveness aside and lean into being vulnerable and human, and showing you care about the very real concerns that each of these constituencies is feeling. Put aside your excuses, your anxiety, your desire to move on and push past this horrible experience. In the end, the buck stops with you – and you must own this moment with both humility and humanity.

If you navigate this change successfully, demonstrating that you empathize and can appreciate their pain and concerns, your team – while sad -- will remain committed as you come through the other side of this difficult moment. If you fail to show your empathy and humanity in this most critical of all moments that matter™, it may take months or years before your teams’ commitment, cohesion and performance recover.

# # # # #

As I’ve said before, I believe we all benefit in our business journeys by sharing stories of overcoming hard things.

What mistakes have you seen leaders make when announcing a layoff at their organization? What might you do differently next time you’re involved in communicating a workforce reduction at your company?

SPEEDY WEBININI™ : The Myth of the One Great Leader

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 23:14:47 GMT

Leveraging culture to increase employee engagement

In this Speedy Webinini™, we will debunk the myth of the ONE GREAT LEADER's ability to single-handedly thwart workforce disengagement and explore how culture can be leveraged to drive engagement.

THE RISK : what is lost forever

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 19:41:19 GMT

“Good News! No one is being laid off”

Hearing this when your company is acquired can be the best six words you ever hear as an employee. But what happens when things change? Once leadership has time to truly evaluate and this statement is no longer true?

Transparency can be a double-edged sword

Transparency is an important ingredient for building #trust and creating a high-performing company culture that attracts top talent. Sharing information about company performance helps people feel valued and enables them to understand the reasoning behind decisions being made by leadership.

Stepping up to communicate life-changing news to your employees like a pending layoff can be as difficult as making the decision in the first place, especially if you are a caring leader of a company with a good culture. Knowing you are going to lay off good people is a difficult burden to carry, and your instinct may be to rip the band aid off and come clean about what you expect may be coming – even before you have all the facts at your disposal. But in the face of shocking news, people want certainty, so they know how to proceed. If you do not have all the answers, this may be one of those times where too deep a commitment to transparency can work against you and destroy morale.

When transparency backfires, trust may be lost forever.

A while back, I was brought in to help a local manufacturer that had recently acquired a smaller business that made and imported complimentary products to their original product lines. During our intake discussions, I learned that staff across both organizations were exhausted from the demands of keeping production on track while integrating two sets of business platforms and processes, coupled with the stress and uncertainty of working with new leaders and team members, no longer knowing who to go to for answers to their business process questions, and not having clarity and security in their new roles.

From a messaging standpoint, the newly combined leadership team had initially assured people at the acquired company that everyone was needed from both organizations, and that there was no need for anyone to be concerned about their jobs…each company manufactured something distinctly different, and there was very little production redundancy resulting from the acquisition. Unfortunately, despite this intention, several months after the companies began integrating, and well before the process was complete, the private equity investors and board of directors began asking tough questions about cost containment – and before the leaders knew it, they were being asked to conduct a workforce reduction.

Surprised by the board and investors’ expectations, the leadership team was misaligned around how best to communicate this turn of events. One of the leaders, in the spirit of “full transparency” – announced that there were to be layoffs early the next year. Knowing where they were in the integration process, IT and operations leaders and their human resource partners knew they would not be able to share meaningful information about the size of the workforce reduction for several months until a significant percentage of the systems integration work could be completed. The resulting 5-month silence left the full 3,800 person staff from both companies living with heightened uncertainty on top of their overwork and growing burnout from the changes they participated in, each convinced that the cuts would be deep and that they would be among the casualties. Morale sank so low that leaders had to offer retention bonuses to key staff to ensure that those needed to complete the transition would not leave prematurely and harm the integration timeline.

The people from both organizations felt betrayed because their leaders had assured them that the acquisition had been about extending the breadth of the product line and adding new product categories, not gaining personnel efficiency. Workers who had been asked to come together as newly formed teams looked at each other with suspicion, wondering which of them would survive the impending layoffs. And although the initial communication about layoffs was made in the name of transparency, the lack of timely follow-up further eroded trust. The employees were convinced that leadership simply did not care about the discomfort they were experiencing with a proverbial axe hanging over their heads.

What disengagement drivers were in play in this troubling scenario?

I began working with company leaders shortly after the layoff took place. Anecdotal feedback I received from speaking with the more vocal of the remaining staff was validated by the dismal feedback received through an initial engagement survey (which received an exceptionally low response rates – a classic byproduct of low trust and disengagement).

Remaining employees from both companies at all levels indicated experiencing:

A Lack of Trust, and Transparent Communications: The employees were unable to overcome their mistrust in messaging from senior leadership who had started their acquisition with promises of no workforce reductions.

Low Faith in Future Career Growth Opportunities: While some people did received advancements because of the workforce reduction, they felt that they had profited on the backs of their friends and colleagues; people no longer had faith that the company was flourishing and would be able to offer them a promising career.

Chronic Overwork and Burnout; Lack of Recognition and Support: The staff already felt burned out from the prolonged effort to keep manufacturing production levels steady without a hitch while undergoing new systems and business process integrations. Now they would be carrying the company’s production load forward with fewer colleagues.

Lack of Autonomy and Empowerment: Having life altering changes thrust upon them without their having any say undermined the sense of autonomy, empowerment, and control at all levels.

Poor or Uninspiring Organizational Culture: The company culture – already unclear and destabilized because two companies were in the process of merging together – seemed fractured and to many, beyond redemption.

Stepping in to assist leaders in the aftermath of the layoffs, I helped them develop a communications plan to regain the lost faith in leadership and reestablish a positive high-performance culture for the now-integrated organization. It took a year to develop and execute a plan to regain trust, enthusiasm, and psychological safety -- and to get people working better together as a strong, cohesive team that was meeting and exceeding performance targets.

There isn't a simple "undo" button in business, and the deep work this organization did to right the ship wasn't easy. While leadership had done what they thought was best by being transparent, they now realized that even transparency should be used strategically, with the goal always being to build and maintain their people’s trust. Because reengaging their people was important to the leadership team and they worked hard to align around a meaningful message strategy and commit to a cadence for communicating and connecting with their people going forward.

We all get it – sometimes we must make incredibly tough decisions to keep our businesses on track to even have a future. But it is also important to remember that your people are human beings – they have hopes and fears and career aspirations and insecurities – and families and mortgages and college tuition to pay for just like you. Sometimes when you lose the faith of your best people you never do get a chance to win it back. That is why it is so important to learn how to be thoughtful and caring with the degree of transparency you put into your communications.

I believe we all benefit in our business journeys by sharing stories of overcoming hard things.

What is something you can take back to your own organization to make strategic use of transparent communications in your business?

The Myth of the One Great Leader

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 19:25:10 GMT

Combatting the disengagement epidemic

When it comes to employee engagement, many leaders feel they are immune because they are fun, charismatic, and gosh darn it, their people love them! But, to paraphrase a scene from one of my favorite classic '80s movies, “Most leaders think they don’t have an engagement problem, yet over two-thirds of American employees are disengaged…so you do the math.”

Undoubtedly, there are many amazing leaders who excel at engaging with their teams – I have worked for them myself! I once worked with a leader who had the entire corporate office laughing and joking with him during all-hands meetings, was on first name basis with frontline manufacturing workers when he walked the floor of the plants, and who was playfully teased with friendly memes via company-wide email whenever a Clemson Tigers vs Carolina Gamecocks rivalry game came up in the NCAA lineup.

Let me tell you -- while there may have been a few outliers, people loved this guy (even if they did not like his jerseys or his jokes)! Yet you might be surprised to learn that despite the outsized pull of this one highly charismatic leader, employee engagement levels, when measured across the company, followed the disappointing nationwide curve we explored last week...(see Disengagement Epidemic pt 1 - issue here ).

Unfortunately, the impact of one highly engaging leader rarely guarantees high engagement across the entire organization. At the end of the day, people still leave their jobs because of the behaviors of their direct managers and the culture within their team, the manageability of their own workload, and their own development and growth opportunities. Believing that one individual, no matter how visible, can single-handedly sustain employee engagement company-wide not only piles an immense amount of pressure on that one leader – but it is unrealistic – and bound to fail. In fact, the only way to combat the dismal employee engagement epidemic that is sweeping the American workforce is to build a company culture that encourages and rewards desirable behaviors, company-wide, including how equitably workload, development, growth, rewards, and recognition are distributed.

This does not stop high EQ leaders with great employee engagement skills from thinking that ‘it’s easy’ and that everyone can build employee engagement as easily as they do. These leaders may mistakenly believe that how their people feel about the company mirrors how they feel about them, personally – as the company leader. Based on their many positive personal interactions with staff, these leaders may not always prioritize employee engagement and proactive culture building – assuming culture will naturally evolve according to their vision. Until they start experiencing ‘regrettable turnover’ – and by then it may be too late to hold onto their top talent.

Indeed, they are partially correct. Culture does have a way of shaping itself when left to its own devices. However, leaders may be surprised to discover the cultural elements that actually DO evolve without deliberate design or intentional messaging about the desired organizational culture. When leaders fail to actively communicate their aspirational company culture to managers and employees across the company, and to reinforce the desired behaviors that are needed to make it a reality, the actively disengaged (Remember them? These are the 17% of employees who are “quiet quitters”, expending their discretionary energy searching for new job opportunities while simultaneously spreading negativity among their peers) will gladly fill the communications void.

Enterprise-wide Systems beat Superstars when it comes to Culture Building

So, what’s the solution? How can you create an enterprise-wide culture that effectively addresses the drivers of employee engagement? Instead of relying solely on the charisma of one individual to engage the entire workforce, consider a systemic approach—one that engages people during critical moments throughout the employee lifecycle.

I often advise my clients to start with listening (BTW - this works just as well at home!). You’d be surprised how much you can learn by doing a little research to understand how people are feeling and where there are gaps between what you, as a leadership team, believe the culture should be and what is going on in the trenches. The cultural expectations of today’s workforce are vastly different than in the past, and the most direct way to understand these new beliefs is to ask – and listen to what your people tell you.

Then meet as a leadership team to develop a culture framework that captures how you would like managers and employees across the organization to behave. Be sure to discuss how people should treat each other, how they should go about fulfilling their roles within the company, and which leadership and individual contributor behaviors and competencies are necessary for continued growth, innovation, and an exceptional customer experience.

Once you have a conceptual culture framework in place, finish your design process just as you started – by introducing it to your people, and listening to their feedback…adjusting the framework based on what you learn.

Communicating the Culture You have Envisioned

Once you have a cultural design in hand, it is time to communicate it company-wide. I encourage clients to develop a creative and engaging communications plan that extends out over a year-long period of time, giving their people lots of distinctive opportunities to encounter messages about the culture in different settings and formats – including direct contact with leaders and volunteer culture champions who can put real-life context to the cultural concepts being introduced. Adding fun interactive events and ‘gamification’ to the rollout can help ensure your people stop and take notice, looking forward to events that might otherwise feel sterile and ‘educational.’

Even once the introductory roll-out campaign has run its course, my most successful clients take care to continue talking about and demonstrating this new cultural framework at all the critical moments that matter™ throughout the employee’s lifecycle, including:

Onboarding New Team Members: When new employees join your firm, their initial experiences shape their perception of the organization and its culture for the rest of their time with your firm. This honeymoon period with your new hire is the MOST open and receptive they will ever be – which means to make the most of this new resource, you need to immerse them in your desired company culture, your employment brand, connect them with quality contacts, motivate them with your mission, invite them to embrace your values, and bolster their career with you by bestowing them with a sense of belonging.

Navigating Change: During times of change, such as mergers, acquisitions, strategy rollout, introducing new leadership, restructuring or process improvement, it is impossible to over-communicate. Invest the time and energy to communicate clearly, transparently, and often enough to ensure that everyone – from your early adopters to your questioners and doubters – is on board and ready to transform together. Remember – asking questions is a form of engagement. It is when your people become silent that you need to worry.

Applauding Outstanding Culture Champions and recognizing their Achievements: Recognize and celebrate outstanding cultural and business contributions made by individuals or teams. These moments reinforce cultural messaging, reinforce desired behaviors, and build greater alignment – while also helping your people feel valued and engaged.

Building a successful culture that engages your team and helps your company thrive and grow is an evolutionary process. People change, client needs evolve, and your company’s requirements will need to change accordingly as you continue to grow. Fortunately, this listen-design-launch process for adjusting your culture according to where you are at any point in time is a step-and-repeat strategy that can help you keep your top performing talent longer and stay on top of your strategic goals.

EMPLOYEE DISENGAGEMENT Causes and Solutions

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 19:15:51 GMT

What lies beneath the alarming employee disengagement statistics? And what can an individual business do to beat the odds and help employees feel more excited and engaged with their work? The answer lies in you business culture...

Unmasking the Disengagement Epidemic -- Do these nation-wide statistics reflect the sentiments of your team?

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 19:45:26 GMT

Now, I don’t mean to alarm you, but the state of the American workforce is not so good. According to Gallup, the keeper of all engagement-related data, only 30% of employees in the American workforce are currently engaged – down from 33% in 2023. (For context, “ engaged employees” are those who willingly invest their discretionary energy into their work – they approach their work with enthusiasm, are intrigued by the business challenges they face, and look forward to the lessons they will learn along the way. Their positive energy is contagious!)

Unfortunately, this downward trend in nationwide employee engagement persists, with a increasing number of employees crossing over from engaged to disengaged with each passing quarter.

But hold on – these statistics are at the national level.
How do you think your own workforce stacks up?

According to the Forbes Human Resource Council, symptoms you can look for to identify whether employees are disengaged include withdrawal, poor communication, breaks from routine, silence, apathy where once there was excitement, absenteeism, complacency, a decline in work quality, missed deadlines, exhaustion, cynicism, inefficiency, lack of participation, naysaying and even rudeness – and ultimately, if unaddressed, regrettable turnover.

If the notion that two-thirds of our American workforce is disengaged isn’t alarming enough, consider this: Gallup also reports that 17% of employees fall into the actively disengaged category (otherwise known as ‘quiet quitting’). These individuals expend their discretionary energy searching for new job opportunities while simultaneously spreading negativity among their peers. It’s no wonder that disengagement is often seen as contagious and toxic for company culture.

Moreover, employees who attribute their disengagement to burnout and chronic overwork are twice as likely to encourage their colleagues to resign. Shockingly, a recent study by the American Psychological Association reveals that up to 50% of managers — yes, managers! — experience burnout.

What lies beneath these depressing statistics?

When dealing with disengagement, I find individual employees are rarely to blame. In my work, I have found the strongest contributors to disengagement include:

Lack of Inclusion, Trust, and Transparent Communications : When employees feel excluded or unheard, their engagement suffers. Transparent communication fosters trust and a sense of belonging.
Insufficient Development and Advancement Opportunities : Without clear paths for growth, employees become disenchanted. Organizations must invest in their employees’ professional development.
Lack of Recognition and Support : Recognition fuels motivation. Employees who feel undervalued are more likely to disengage.
Overwork and Burnout : The relentless pursuit of productivity can lead to burnout. Striking a balance is crucial.
Lack of Autonomy and Empowerment : Micromanagement stifles engagement. Empowering employees to make decisions enhances their commitment.
Poor or Uninspiring Organizational Culture : Culture shapes behavior. A positive, purpose-driven culture encourages engagement.

Not surprisingly, most of the drivers of disengagement can be traced back to organizational culture. This realization prompted the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) to declare that a company’s culture is not only an asset but also a top governance imperative. Regardless of company size or sector, business leaders should actively monitor and measure culture using objective metrics such as unwanted attrition, employee net promoter scores, referrals, hotline reports, productivity, inclusion, diversity, engagement scores, and the strength of the employment brand.

What can you do?
I see these three factors as a starting point to beat the statistics above:

Don’t assume you know what your people are thinking. Trying to remedy a situation without fully understanding what is going on is likely to result in wasted efforts. Different people in different roles are certainly going to be having different experiences – experiences that are different from your own. Which leads us to the next suggestion…
Listen to your people. Let your team members tell you how they are feeling about their work environment and their jobs. I often conduct focus groups, spot surveys and broader employee engagement surveys with my clients' teams to get a sense of their engagement and understand what some of the key issues are. We use survey data to broadly understand how people are feeling – and follow up with focus groups in specific areas to get a more nuanced feeling for what changes would improve engagement and morale. NOTE: If trust is an issue, sometimes an impartial moderator can get people to open up about how they are feeling.
Communicate. Communicate. Communicate. No matter how high or low your team’s engagement is, improving communications is always a good idea. Communication improves people’s sense of inclusion, helping them to better understand the business and where it is going, allowing them to align their work with the business strategy and see how their efforts are directly tied to business results. This in turn helps them have a greater sense of belonging and trust – two feelings that are directly tied to employee engagement.

PUBLICITY helps you find good people (& helps them find you)

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 21:41:24 GMT

Recruiting and Sales are tough – fortunately, you’re an expert.

Oh, not necessarily at recruiting or sales – but perhaps in your industry, or in a related functional business area that has helped you to excel. Your expertise may be very wide – or it could be very targeted and narrow. It matters not – with a little publicity and ongoing PR strategy, expertise will find its niche. Trust that there are people out there who are seeking to know more about precisely what you know so well, and what distinguishes you from so many of the others who share your knowledge is your willingness to share your expertise with others who are coming up in the world.

You see, fortunately, it also happens that you’re a good person. You’re smart, kind, authentic, empathetic and thoughtful. You think a lot about what’s going on in the world – culturally, socially, economically or in the world of work – and you have ideas about what could make the world a better, more ‘functional’ place. You have thoughts and philosophies to share regarding how people treat each other, how leaders can really lead their people, how to add real value in a business relationship, and even a thought or two about how the market works.

Congratulations –Your knowledge paired with your good nature and creative ideas sets you up to be a fantastic content creator – and a great candidate for using publicity to your business’s advantage.

Believe it or not, the world is hungry to connect with good people who care about making the world of work a better place to spend the lion’s share of our day. We want to work with and for these people, and we want to do business with them. News headlines often lead us to believe that the rapacious pillagers of the business world always win the day, but the truth is that while we may watch and read about their misadventures with a mix of fascination, disbelief and perhaps even a bit of disgust and horror, none of us want to go to the office and work elbow to elbow with them. We want to work with folks like you. But the question is, how do we find you?

The simple answer is establishing a PR strategy to build long-term executive visibility and community engagement for your company, and to employ a cadence of quick and easy publicity tactics to put you and your company out into the limelight with the audiences (be they customers or your future employees) that matter most to you.

Publicity can be used to shine a light on you and by extension your organization in a moment that matters such as when you need to attract great people to come and work for you – or attract new clients to come to an event and learn why they might want to buy from you.

To get a publicity engine running start by thinking of all the ways you might share your expertise and thoughts.

For example, you can:

Start a blog
Participate on a podcast (or start your own!)
Speak before a local business or trade group
Start a newsletter on an emerging business topic
Host a webinar – advertise it to targeted audiences on social media
Regularly post information on serious social media platforms like LinkedIn.
Participate on a panel at an industry event, or an event at a college
Team up with an influencer who writes about a topic you are passionate about
Appear as a guest speaker in a college class, teaming up with a professor who teaches your subject
Conduct research on something that might benefit your business – then publish a report and promote it in the press

Try to employ a mix of owned (self-published), earned (your expertise recognized by an outside entity) and paid (ads, and influencer engagement) techniques to build awareness with those you wish to engage. Content-wise, aim to blend your area of expertise with your beliefs about leadership, culture, and what makes for an engaging and fulfilling work environment. For your prospective clients, this not only shows you character, but it gives a peek inside the culture within your firm. Employees who are engaged and fulfilled also deliver the best customer experiences. Your soon-to-be-clients will not only be inspired, but they will also feel more comfortable doing business with you.

I know what you are thinking at this point – it all makes sense and you see how publicity can help you grow your staff and your business. But you’re a busy professional and you’re not a writer or a marketer – where will you find the time? That’s where employing a firm like Comm.ext comes into play. As a fractional communications partner, we can come in and help you get your publicity campaign planned, and even do some media outreach or writing for you to get your campaign underway. You remain in the driver’s seat. With an outside communications partner there is no ongoing salary and benefits to justify – you can bring us in as often as you need to ensure you have a good cadence of appearances to create the awareness you want and need with your target audience.

Not sure how to get started? Comm-ext can help. Drop us a line at info@comm-ext.com to chat about how we can help get your PR and executive visibility efforts underway.

Why invest in internal communications?

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 23:13:22 GMT

Disengaged Employee -
n. someone who is unhappy and unproductive at work
who is liable to spread negativity to coworkers.

Disengaged employees cost American businesses between $450-550 billion in lost productivity. Low engagement reduces quality and innovation, increases employee turnover and degrades the customer experience resulting in fewer referrals, reduced share of wallet, and customer turnover. ...and it's contagious, resulting in a vicious cycle that can devastate your productivity and profitability.

Among the leading causes of disengagement:
• Poor internal communications
• Toxic work culture
• Unhealthy work/life balance
• Limited opportunities for professional development

Where to start?
Try listening to your employees. Conduct a quick engagement pulse survey to determine how you're doing in regard to this vital cultural metric.

Then open up the lines of communication with your people.

If you're not sure where to begin we can help! Comm.ext specializes in internal communications to inform, engage, excite and align your people in the moments that matter. We're fast, efficient and affordable.

Particularly when you consider the cost of doing nothing.

Download FREE Disengagement and Turnover Calculator Now...

#internalcommunications

#employeeengagement

#employeeturnover

#employeelistening

#disengagement

Source: Gallup's State of the Global Workplace Report

CRITICAL COMMUNICATIONS in the MOMENTS THAT MATTER

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 21:41:43 GMT

Whether your firm employs 50 or 50,000 people, providing
critical communications in the moments that matter are essential
to inspire, align, inform and engage your team to deliver on strategy!

Employees today have a higher standard for how they want to FEEL when they are at work.

To address these elevated expectations, business leaders must be deliberate in delivering
CRITICAL COMMUNICATIONS in the Moments that Matter™.

These include...

your employment brand messages used in recruiting (they make a promise -- are you keeping it?)
your on-boarding experience (are you welcoming them & helping them feel they belong ?)
how well you communicate your strategy to your people

(are you giving them what they need to be a high-performing member of the tribe?)

do you help people feel secure and informed during periods of change ?
are you creating a culture that inspires your team to deliver on strategy ?
do your leaders 'walk the walk', 'talk the talk' and reinforce the critical linkages
between your employee value proposition , culture messaging and strategic priorities ?

To create an engaging employee experience that attracts and retains top talent, you should develop a deliberate and purposeful communications plan that delivers a regular cadence of communications that address these key communications objectives.

How engaging is your company's employment experience?
CRITICAL COMMUNICATIONS MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE.

In the months ahead, we will explore each of the Moments that Matter TM , and the targeted communications that can help inform, align, excite and engage your people -- even through the most disruptive of changes. We welcome your questions, suggestions and input!

CRITICAL COMMUNICATIONS in the MOMENTS THAT MATTER

From childhood awareness to climate reality... why this moment demands more from all of us

This is a subtitle for your new post

The First Realization

When Carelessness Was Normal

What We Couldn’t See Was Worse

From Awareness to Action

Today’s Reality: A More Dangerous Chapter

The Return of Doubt

When It Feels Helpless

An Earth Day Invitation

What Happens Next Is Up to Us

Final Thought

A Note to My Business Readers

Weave strategy and culture pearls into your day-to-day messages for a more powerful and holistic employee experience.

Don't fill your channels with tactical messaging lacking relevant tie-ins to strategy & culture. ﻿

Fighting about "Equal Acccess" is missing the point of how advancement actually works...and what leaders need to do differently

The case that's launched a thousand questions...

Legally, the answer may be yes.

THE COCA-COLA CASE

HOW ADVANCEMENT ACTUALLY HAPPENS

THE HIDDEN IMBALANCE

SO WE ARRIVE AT THE REAL ISSUE…

WHAT SMART LEADERS SHOULD DO

Communication Breakdowns During High-Pressure Change

how negative messaging can come out unplanned and quickly erode trust, engagement, and performance

When a sunrise doesn't feel like a new beginning...

When a mass layoff is internally branded “sunrise,” it raises an uncomfortable question: sunrise for whom?

5-Point Messaging Framework for Protecting your Brand and Maintaining Trust During Downsizing

The Connection Between Internal and External Communications

between the yin and yang of these two disciples is where you'll find customer experience

Starting the year with STRATEGY

Focus on where rubber hits the road... and try not to hit that stinkin' toad!

THAT IS DECIDEDLY NOT what we experienced this past year.

Extend your ‘inner circle’…

COMMUNICATE YOUR STRATEGY TO EVERYONE ON YOUR TEAM

IN THE SPIRIT OF SHARING OUR WISDOM

INTERESTING CONVERSATION with Hedinn Sveinbjörnsson of Hanson Coaching

Exploring the second wave of integration: culture.

INTERVIEW with famed Culture Coach, Wendy Brand

Your employment brand is a promise... ﻿

My spotlight with Freddy D of Business Superfans ICYMI

INTERVIEW : Wickedly Smart Women host Anjel B. Hartwell

Listen to the full episode here:

https://www.wickedlysmartwomen.com/episodes/linda-carlisle

HUMAN or HARDENED? Where do you fall on the Leadership Spectrum?

Do you Lead With Care - or Manage From a Distance?

Here are some of the Long-Term Pros and Cons of being an Empathetic Leader vs a Distant Director... ﻿

HOW CULTURE FUELS ENGAGEMENT:

building a workplace people want to belong to...

The Engagement Crisis - and What’s Behind It

The Cultural Elements That Matter Most

1. Purpose: A Reason to Believe

2. Career Development, Rewards & Recognition

3. Managing Overwork and Change Saturation

4. Health and Well-Being

5. Building Trust and Transparency

6. Leadership That Listens

7. Recognition as a Culture-Shaping Tool

Why These Elements Improve Engagement

How to Start Building an Engagement-Driven Culture

How Corporate Communications Enable All of This

Strategic communications:

Conclusion: Engagement Predicts the Outcome, Culture Is the Cause

When Storytelling Meets Strategy

REMEMBER MESSAGE STRATEGY when preparing your 2026 Strategy (Re)Launch

Pardon my use of the "F-word"...

PART 1 | Your Initial Integration Communication

PARTS 2, 3 and 4 | Right Sizing Done Right

PART 5 | Coming Together under a Common Culture

INTRODUCING THE POWER OF LISTENING—

Navigating Layoffs : Make Empathy your Super Power!

Workforce Reductions the most critical of all Moments that Matter ™

There is a better way

Deploying Empathy as a Strategy

“How can I help those I am laying off feel confident, whole, and able to hit the ground running in their coming job search?”

“What should I tell employees who will remain, so they know why we’re taking this action, and that we are doing all we can to mitigate the impact?”

﻿

How should I let suppliers and customers who work with the impacted employees know what has happened without affecting their good opinion and trust in our financial health?”

When it comes to Communications, Form follows Function

Don't fill your channels with tactical messaging lacking relevant tie-ins to strategy & culture.

how negative messaging can come out unplanned
and quickly erode trust, engagement, and performance

When a mass layoff is internally branded “sunrise,”
it raises an uncomfortable question: sunrise for whom?

5-Point Messaging Framework for Protecting your Brand
and Maintaining Trust During Downsizing

Focus on where rubber hits the road...
and try not to hit that stinkin' toad!

Your employment brand is a promise...

Here are some of the Long-Term Pros and Cons of being an Empathetic Leader vs a Distant Director...

Conclusion:
Engagement Predicts the Outcome, Culture Is the Cause

REMEMBER MESSAGE STRATEGY
when preparing your 2026 Strategy (Re)Launch

Workforce Reductions
the most critical of all Moments that Matter ™

“How can I help those I am laying off feel confident, whole,
and able to hit the ground running in their coming job search?”

But hold on – these statistics are at the national level.
How do you think your own workforce stacks up?

What can you do?
I see these three factors as a starting point to beat the statistics above:

Disengaged Employee -
n. someone who is unhappy and unproductive at work
who is liable to spread negativity to coworkers.

Whether your firm employs 50 or 50,000 people, providing
critical communications in the moments that matter are essential
to inspire, align, inform and engage your team to deliver on strategy!