One reason why I blog is that it helps me to make sense of the world. For those of you that have everything figured out, I am envious. I do not. As to what sensemaking is, head on over to Wikipedia for citations and further research.
It is not an approach that I thought was relevant to work. Too touchy-feely. However, Joe’s recent post on Narrating Your Work inspired me to describe a recently implemented practice of targeted, strategic communications. It is blogging in a management reporting context, and shared with my core IT team as a means to help develop their leadership skills. In describing what I do, I will touch on themes of one on one communications, feedback, writing skills, and professional development.
To set the context, I have at most 30 minutes per month at our senior staff meeting to communicate on Information Technology projects and strategy. My normal approach had been to cram as much as I could into 10-15 PowerPoint slides, lay out the 3 or 4 major decisions that need input, and then thank everyone for their time.
This single PowerPoint deck was the only regular strategic “artifact” that I was sure that everyone would see (captive audience...). 
For those of you in management, or who must suffer through staff meetings, a question. On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate the value/relevance/quality of presentations at your company? How about the IT presentation? I thought so. It is clear to me that a pure focus on quantitative analysis enclosed in a PowerPoint deck just doesn’t cut it. It is not really helpful to anyone. And yet, we keep doing it to ourselves.
In August 2010 a trusted colleague (someone who reports to me, actually) gave me feedback that my monthly PowerPoint dog and pony show at the senior staff meeting was boring, ineffective, and mostly irrelevant to my peers and customers. Actually, he didn’t use those words exactly, but that’s what he meant.
The process of one on ones and feedback are critical to good management, and they are rare. Rarest of all is real feedback given from employee to manager. When I get this feedback, I try to take it to heart. For more on the whole process of feedback, one on ones, and good management in general, I strongly recommend Manager Tools.
After some deep thinking and brainstorming with my team, we came up with the idea that I need to make targeted communications to key peers and internal customers. These are department heads, as well as factory managers and general managers. My approach is simple. During the first week of each month, I write a personalized update. Each update should about one page, a little more if graphics are required. We work on many projects, so one common approach is to discuss same project from multiple perspectives, depending on my audience:
- Finance leadership wants to know about costs/expenditures, and perhaps issues like how a new ERP system will affect our product costing methodologies.
- The project sponsor needs a general overview and an update on any blocking issues.
- Sales leadership may only care about how a new system will impact our ability to implement a new pricing strategy.
What this means in practice is that I have a lot of writing to do. For October, I wrote 11 strategic updates. It takes about 8-10hrs over the course of 3 business days to do the writing. Total word count is approximately 5,900 and that comes to about 18 pages in an MS Word document with all of the images/tables included.
Again, a lot of content is the same but it’s written from slightly different points of view depending on the target. While I wish that I could write one 500 word update for everyone, or do just one single PowerPoint presentation, that style didn’t work. So I changed, based on feedback. And it was the right move.
One huge benefit for me is starting to see the work of my group from the point of view of our colleagues outside of IT. It’s one way that I am becoming more customer-centric. Writing for someone forces the writer to think about the perspective of the reader. The feedback so far is mostly positive. Someone asked me if I had taken some high powered leadership training class or something. Not quite. But I know that my colleagues read these messages because I get follow-up questions from everyone that gets a message from me. And hey, it’s email everyone. I’m sorry, but that’s how they get distributed. And at the staff meetings, we spend time on strategy, and sidebar conversations are all about followups on the updates sent earlier in the month. It has been effective.
Here is where the professional development and blogging aspects enter the picture. One of my individual development plan goals for 2011 is to become a more effective communicator through developing closer relationships with my peers. Next, it is important for me that I do my work in a way that is observable to my team so that they learn the job of an IT Director as well as see strategic IT priorities from the perspective of our senior leadership team.
My targeted updates and associated follow-ups help to accomplish my development plan goal. I develop my team by consolidating all updates and posting them as a blog entry to our management workspace. This private workspace allows my team to get exposure to my job responsibilities, professional relationships, strategic commitments…and by extension they can better align their respective organizations’ activities with the overall strategy of the company. While I go offline to do these communications, I put it online for my “community of trust” and link it into our workflow.
In closing, if you are in an internal service organization (like IT), you really need to consider making targeted strategic updates to your peer leaders and major internal customers. You need to tell them in your own words what you are doing for them, and by when. It helps you to make sense of your own world, and helps them answer the “what’s in it for me?” question. I learned the hard way that 30 minutes of PowerPoint per month isn’t helpful at best, and harmful at worst. Use email if you must (I do), but if you can share that communications process with your core team, it can be great professional development opportunity.