Listening from the front

…”I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”

Ernest Hemingway

Veronica Apostolico is director of internal communication at medical devices company Smith & Nephew and recently gave some great advice on how to run events at which senior leaders meet people in their organisations.

“The important thing is to strike a balance between what senior leaders want to say and employees want to hear,” she says.

There are a number of golden rules that communicators need to follow in setting up such events.

Find out what employees want to know?
Conduct research before the event to prepare the leaders
Stories – not fact dumping
Solicit questions beforehand
Undertake personal preparation for the leader

Remarkably I have found that in many leaders fail to engage with their people and in particular fail to listen. Some years ago I worked with a Managing Director of an electricity distribution company. He agreed for me to organise a twelve month tour to every location in his company set in his diary and thus allowing him to meet virtually every employee within that time. The sessions were structured so that I arrived first to run a preparation session gaining the thoughts of the group and so enabling him to arrive and pick up the questions and listen to the people.

All questions were followed up after and used to inform company direction and strategy. It was a very powerful exercise and the bullet points from Veronica are a good guide.

If you are not doing this in your organisation you should be and I am happy to point you in the right direction for you to find out more how you can. You can also read the article at: Melcrum’s Communicators’ Network reached through my linked in professional profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/nicktaylor1