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Dealing with the Communications Black Hole
Kai Miller
5 min read
Connecting leadership with the rest of the organisation is a natural function of the chief of staff, who is usually the only person who can successfully address a lack of engagement in ‘the middle’.
'Even if the communicators and chief executive communicate down, there may be some middle management or even lower tier that don't really care about what the purpose is. They're just there to collect the paycheck on a day-to-day basis. So it's kind of our purpose as chiefs of staff to think about how we can help communicate the purpose, make a difference, feel to actually integrate and really collaborate in that community to get everyone in the company on board with the purpose.'
Most established organisations, whether in the private or public sectors, have professional communications departments, although sometimes the internal (employee) communications function overlaps with HR. The chief of staff’s role in communications, therefore, tends not to be a part of the formal communications strategy – unless they are working in a start-up, where roles are usually more fluid and changeable.
Most of the conversations about communication coalesced around the problem of ‘the middle’ – middle managers and those a few layers down from leadership in the hierarchy. This was described as a ‘black hole’ by participants: the level in the organisation that drains inspiration and engagement from leadership communications.
'I work for a sports team. My accounting manager doesn't care about the performance of the team: she comes in, she does her job and she leaves. She's a provider for her family.'
Does this matter? If the accounting manager does her job, would the organisation be expecting too much if it wanted her additionally to be emotionally committed to her work to the point that she makes a discretionary effort, working overtime and demonstrating an ‘above and beyond’ level of enthusiasm?
Participants were sympathetic to the fact that people in the middle may just want to do their jobs. They are likely to be under the greatest pressure in the organisation to deliver, and have the least amount of time and willingness to respond to relentless positive internal communications messages. However, this is where and how parts of the organisation become disconnected and misaligned. There is an urgent need always to connect the people in the middle with the purpose and thus keep them aligned.
'You’re going to burn out at some point if you don't believe in the purpose of your organisation, and maybe it's our job as chief of staff to connect with those people to make sure that they're engaged in a way where they stay motivated and productive.'
The way to do this is via communication at a personal level: to navigate amongst the different viewpoints and motivations within the organisation; to understand why people see the same thing in different ways and how that affects their priorities and challenges; and to communicate, explain, and nudge people so that they are all on the same page.
And the only person who can do this effectively is the chief of staff, because they move everywhere within the organisation, and ‘there is nowhere you can't go and nowhere you will not be welcomed’.
Having said that, participants were highly aware that virtual and hybrid working creates barriers to that type of communication. Where once they could perch on someone’s desk to have an informal conversation or take the temperature of the organisation, now they are more often than not having these conversations via Teams or Zoom. And this, as some participants observed, can make it more difficult to build trust.
'How do you have trust in a virtual environment? Having been in the military you build trust through situations that bring you closer together, like a dynamic issue. In most companies, unless there's some type of dramatic situation, how do you build trust? Even if you have trust between you and your principal, you’ve still got to build trust with the rest of organisation and if there's not anything dynamic that happens, how do you really build authentic trust?'