OVERCOMING EXECUTIVE BLAH BLAH
November 2001
If I am asked to waste one more minute of my time being herded into a large meeting hall to hear our senior management tell us that we have to change and it’s time to work smarter, I’m going to explode. I wonder if they
would find anything lacking or insulting in the same message back at them.
IT Director of a Fortune 200 company
Last year, the leadership of one Fortune 500 company spent 3 days off-site with 200 of their top people nationally to charge them with working differently in critical ways to achieve better results. One year after issuing the call to action, the leadership saw no positive return on their sizeable announcement investment. And no tangible evidence of a change.
This is a depressingly common phenomenon. As reported by Mourier and Smith in their 2001 study of organizational change, corporations and government institutions currently pour millions of dollars annually into change efforts. And the failure rate across industries and companies is now estimated to be about 75%.
Given that change is our proverbial constant these days and the rate of change is only accelerating, we need to break the code. And therein lies one important clue. Having sat through hundreds of “we’re going to change’ meetings and shifted through reams of ‘here are our new priorities/initiatives/values/competencies’ presentations and documents, I can assure you that our investigation should start at the executive message formulation stage.
The best executives in today’s marketplace lead change. They incite people to move from ‘here’ to ‘there’. To be successful, then, executives must say what they mean and mean what they say. They have to define both “here” and “there ” in ways that we can see ourselves. And unless we’re talking about launching brand new initiatives with all new hires sporting empty calendars, leaders have to say, with clarity, precision, and conviction, “Do THIS, not THAT.”
Most calls to action don’t work at the outset because leaders fail to spell out what needs to be different in a way that is actionable. The messages may be inspiring, but they don’t guide action back at work.
TALK THE TALK
Before anyone can walk the new talk, executives need to do a better job of talking the talk. This is where ‘executive blah blah’ comes into play, a phrase that I’ve used for years in consulting and each time, have been met with nodding heads. But, for the
