In an article in Melcrum's top 50 internal communication case studies, Bill Quirke, managing director of Synopsis Communication Consulting, argues that trying to fix the problems of line management communication by only focusing on managers and their skills is a cosmetic solution. For the root causes, you need to go higher up the organization.

"It's often the cascade from senior management that's most to blame for poor line manager communication," he says. "Cascades are leaky things, with meaning seeping out at every stage. Their message might have made sense in the boardroom, but by the time it gets down to a team briefing, no one understands why they’re being told it any more.

"The end result is that, because no one can frame it for them, staff get annoyed. They don't see why they're being fed this corporate nonsense. The phrase we've used for so many years – 'What's in it for me?' – is suddenly less pertinent for staff in briefing sessions than: 'What the hell is it?'"

Less information at manager team briefings
And even if the right context is given to the manager, Quirke sees another common organizational problem with manager team briefings: too much information. "Again, that's a cultural problem at the top. People from all levels of leadership will say to managers, 'Oh, while you've got the team together, can you tell them about this new initiative?'

I worked with one organization where teams had weekly, 30-minute briefings and we calculated that managers were being given 18 hours of information to deliver in them. Your company might want to engage people in delivering the strategy. But they're given so much information that managers end up saying to staff, 'Please don't interrupt me while I'm going through the slides.' That's a root communication problem that needs solving at senior level. Unless you do that, all your skills training won't help a bit."

Treating team meetings like radio programs with allotted "air time"
One tactic he suggests is to pitch team meetings as being like radio programs, and business units are allotted a specific "air time."

"The global center can have 5 minutes, for example, regional HQ can have 10, and the rest is for local news. You'll suddenly find these units apply much more rigor when producing materials for a defined slot of air time."

Framing the message so it has meaning at each stage of the cascade
Ultimately though, the key is to forge meaning at each stage of the cascade – with people at each step asking what the message is, why it's being passed on, and what it means for them. "Managers will then no longer deal with other business unit news and then say, 'Now that's out of the way, let's talk about the stuff that's important to us.' They'll be delivering each business unit message and connecting it to employees’ agendas and the agenda of the organization."

This article, originally published in Making managers better communicators, has been extracted for a new compilation of Melcrum's top 50 internal communication case studies.

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