There are three key pieces that make up leadership communications – engagement, empowerment and clearing roadblocks. Employees need to feel engaged by their leaders in tangible ways they can see, believe and trust.  These interactions must empower employees to work together, and any roadblocks to success need to be recognized and mitigated. 

Your CEO just put it out there for all to hear.  “The pace of change in our markets continues to grow, and we just aren’t keeping up.  We need to be more agile to change.”

You feel like you have been kicked in the gut.  You just received news that your project is being cut by the client.  Despite your hard work and consistently high performance, your job is at risk.  Management tells you to immediately stop work on the project and temporarily reassigns you to a team of people you have never met.

When leading project communications, it is easy to jump to conclusions.  As the project winds up, one stakeholder group may catch your attention more than others.  They are the loudest of our audiences, and appear to be the most important.

But are they?

Your key stakeholders want to know how you plan to make sure your training program works for your organizational change initiative.  They want to know, “what’s your plan to evaluate the current training in place and the future needs?”

The letters "ADDIE" are to instructional designers what the term "waterfall" is to project managers.  It represents the framework for completing an instructional design project using a specific set of steps.

In 1953 Norm Larsen’s small company was hard at work, attempting to invent an industrial liquid that displaced water to prevent rust and degrease surfaces for the aerospace industry.  They tried and failed 39 times before finally developing the perfect formula.

“Why do we eat our own?” This was the question posed by the department lead to all of her direct reports. Her teams recently went through organizational change, and team members had become very quick to turn on each other.  It was hard to watch the teams she developed and treated like family become so hard on each other.

Congratulations!  You’ve landed an organizational change project for an initiative that is hiring a large number of FTEs in the very near future.  It should be a piece of cake to bring people onboard and get them up and running, right?

If you have ever walked into an office and thought to yourself, “this feels really different,” you are familiar with the diversity of corporate cultures. Dr. Fons Trompenaars brought us a great model for quickly describing and categorizing these differences in his “Four Types of Corporate Culture” model.