Do's and Don'ts of Communicating Organizational Change

For the last few months, my organization has been changing. I have a new leader, I'll soon have some new employees. I've been through more org changes than I can count on my fingers, but this is my first as a leader, and the best one yet. I'm not steering the ship - I'm one of those org chart boxes in the middle - but I've learned a few things that I would like to pass on to other leaders and communicators.


When planning an organizational change:

Don't take the surprise party approach. It never works. Employees can smell change in the air, and they notice when certain leaders start having long meetings with Human Resources in conference rooms. It breeds suspicion and fear. Instead, be transparent: "We're looking at our team's structure to see if it's the best approach." Chances are, your employees have already noticed that your department might benefit from some shuffling, and they may have some useful feedback or suggestions.

Do make space to dream. When we first found out that we would be reporting to a new leader and that our roles would be changing, I started by having a lengthy conversation with my employees about our team's work. What was working well? What needed attention? What would they do completely differently if we could start from scratch? These conversations are inspiring and energizing. 

Do ask your people what they want. I manage a small team, and I feel like I know each of my employees well: their strengths, their interests, their career aspirations. We talk about these topics at annual reviews, at goal-setting sessions, and regularly at our 1:1s. However, an org change can stir up new ideas and interests. It's worth asking questions like "What do you most enjoy doing?" and "Where would you like to go next?" even if you think you know the answer.

Don't lie to people. I was once in a conference room, listening to a HR manager explain a new organizational structure. She said, "This is not a RIF" (our internal acronym for Reduction in Force). The problem was, the PowerPoint document on her screen - which was projected for everyone in the room to see - was titled with the name of our department and the acronym "RIF." My job was officially eliminated a few weeks later.


When announcing a decision:

Do tell the affected people as soon as possible. The people most affected by an org change are the ones who are getting new managers, new job titles, or new teammates. Or, of course, severance packages. Once a decision has been made, they should be the first to know. The rest of the "FYI" list can wait. There's nothing worse than finding out about your own career change through the office grapevine.

Do follow a communication plan with clear dates, time of day, and order of notifications. During a layoff at another company, the telecom team shut off voice mail and extensions for terminated employees before HR had the conversation with the affected people. Nobody knew why certain coworkers' extensions were showing as "vacant" - until an hour later, when everybody knew. Time of day matters.

Do bring people together as humans. Shortly after I found out I had a new leader, he invited me to lunch. A few days later, he invited our entire local team to a hockey game. These little gestures went a long way to alleviating my fear of the unknown. Nobody wants to report to an unfamiliar name on the org chart. If you're inheriting new employees, get to know them in a friendly, low-key setting as quickly as possible. If those employees are spread across different offices, invest in the travel if at all humanly possible.


When you don't know any more about what's going on than your employees do:

Don't be Chicken Little. Leaders set the tone. Don't tell everyone that the sky is falling or the department is crumbling, even if you sometimes fear that it is. Remind yourself and your employees: You're smart, you're skilled at what you do, and the best thing you can do each day is show up and shine your brightest and embrace the opportunities around the corner.

Don't make it all about yourself. A friend found out on a Thursday afternoon that half of her team was laid off. When she returned to work on Friday morning, her manager wasn't there. The manager still had a job, but she had spent the morning exercising with her personal trainer and getting a massage. She was so tense, she explained to her employees when she arrived two hours late. So were they, and the support and reassurance of their leader would have gone a long way.

Do acknowledge the emotions that it stirs up. Even a re-organization with no layoffs, no budget cuts, and great opportunities for everybody is still incredibly emotional. Your employees have been working for a boss they know, doing a familiar job, and suddenly everything is thrown into chaos. There's the uncertainty of adapting to a new leader and new coworkers, the merging of different teams' processes and cultures, and often an insecurity about where they will fit in the new world order. For some people, it's an exhilarating time of opportunity. For others, it's a terrifying loss of control. Often, it's both. Acknowledge this. Let your employees know that it's perfectly normal to grieve for the old way, and to be apprehensive about the new one. Soon, the new way will become familiar, and you'll wonder how you ever worked any differently.

Do embrace the positive. Change can be scary, but change can be wonderful. It's a catalyst for creativity. Things that were previously too difficult suddenly become possible. It can bring clarity and insight. It can bust you out of a rut and turn you into a better, braver version of yourself.

The best thing about change is that it always, always teaches us something. I'm here, excited, and ready to learn.

After the tone, please hang up and text me: Why I hate voicemail

"Woohoo, voicemail!"

Do you ever think that? I don't. I see the red light on my work phone and I feel like I've been sternly called into the boss's office.

Voicemail is among my least favorite forms of communication, somewhere between "barely legible Post-It note" and "swift kick to the shins." The good news is, I think it will soon go the way of the pager and the overhead projector, and here's why:

It's awkward. There is something disconcerting about hearing one side of a conversation. It's why hearing a stranger yammer on their cell phone is more annoying than hearing two people chatting nearby. Our brain perceives the gaps and longs to fill them with replies or questions. I'll sometimes say, "Wait, what was that?" while replaying a voicemail, but the person at the other end never pauses.

It's slow. My office phone won't let me delete a message until I've played it all the way through. This is annoying when our school district's auto-dialer leaves a 3-minute recording listing every after-school activity that's cancelled because of the truly awful weather. (All of them. They're all cancelled. Let's move on, please.)

Replying isn't always simple. When you receive an email, you can see who it's from and reply with a click. About once a month, I get a voicemail from an elderly woman who has mistaken my office phone number for that of her adult son or daughter. She begins with "Hi, it's your Mom" in heavily accented English, then switches into an unfamiliar Asian language for a 15-20 minute monologue which ends with "Call me, I miss you." I don't know how to tell her she has the wrong number. Meanwhile, her actual son or daughter is receiving bilingual guilt trips for never returning Mom's calls.*

It puts the burden on the receiver. Is leaving a long voicemail easier than sending an email message? Yes, for the person who's leaving the message. Email requires you to organize your thoughts. Texting requires you to pare down your message to its most essential components. A stream-of-consciousness voicemail is much easier to give than to receive.

It's mostly obsolete. Answering machines and voicemail filled a  gap before email or texting, when you needed to get a message to a person who wasn't available to take your call. Pagers and fax machines were handy, too, but we're doing fine without them.

It's the worst of both worlds. Talking on the phone has some huge advantages over written communication: You can hear tone of voice, express empathy, and engage in warmer dialogue than via email. But much of that warmth dissipates when you're leaving a soliloquy at the command of a disembodied robot voice.


I can think of two scenarios in which voicemail is the best tool available: 1. When you're driving (although, really, 99% of the time, it can wait) and 2. When you need to reach somebody, the only contact info you have is their phone number, and you're not sure if that number accepts texts.

If you can think of another scenario, let me know. Just don't leave me a voicemail.

* This is especially weird, because I also have an immigrant mother whom I don't call often enough. She leaves me sweet voicemails in Polish, in which she introduces herself as my Mom. I'm teaching her to email.

This wasn't in the course catalog: A lesson about feedback and failure

It was an embarrassment to the university, a sad omen for the future of corporate America. Those were perhaps the gentlest words that my professor used.

In the last year of my MBA program, I took a logistics seminar that felt easy. There were no quizzes or homework assignments. The lectures were loose and breezy, full of the professor's anecdotes about his consulting experiences. Our entire grade was based on two group projects, the first of which was to analyze a local company's supply chain.

My academic strategy involved waiting until the night before something was due, panicking, pulling an all-nighter, cranking out a few pages of stream-of-consciousness writing that I'd be too embarrassed to re-read later, and earning a B, or an A- if I was lucky.

My group included two guys like me: deadline driven (i.e., procrastinating), busy people with full-time jobs and a heavy courseload. One of them even had a kid. We split out the work: one guy would research shipping costs and times, I'd build a database to compare vendors and track the inventory, and our third teammate would work on our presentation. Divide and conquer. Easy. Done.

The day of our presentation, I arrived at class an hour early to meet my group, my data sheets still warm from the office printer, ready for that heroic feeling of delivering in the nick of time. My teammate said there was no PowerPoint, he had been busy, but he could wing it. He pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket. It was titled "Things to talk about" with a few messily scrawled bullet points below.

What followed was the longest class of my academic career. For 5 hours, we watched each group present their supply chain recommendations to the local business owners and the professor. Mostly, they were the type of lightweight, surface-skimming presentations I had seen at work, at conferences, and in other business classes. Only this time, instead of the polite acknowledgement I was used to, the professor ripped them to shreds. He asked detailed questions and watched the students falter. He told them their presentations were boring, shallow, obviously thrown together at the last minute.

We went last. I nervously rambled through my database, and it was obvious I didn't really understand the data. When my teammate produced "Things to talk about" and started rambling, the professor interrupted us.

"That was the stupidest thing I have ever heard," he said. "Sit down. Your paper had better be f*ing brilliant."

Paper? We were supposed to write a paper?

The professor apologized to the business owner for wasting her time, excused her, and delivered an impassioned, obscenity-laden admonishment to us. Several students, myself included, were in tears by the end. I jotted down every insult and swear word so I could prepare a letter to the dean the next morning.

My first reaction was outrage. How could he talk to his students like this? Where was his professionalism? If every group failed, then didn't he share some accountability? The assignment wasn't clearly written, there weren't enough checkpoints, and the lectures didn't tie to the project.

The other feeling, the one that took longer to surface, was my knowledge that he was right. We had blown off the assignment. As MBA students, we should have had the intelligence to dive deep into the subject matter, the discipline to produce high-quality work in a loosely structured course, and the leadership skills to collaborate and hold our teammates accountable.

He let us redo the assignment. I set aside the database and volunteered for the part of the project that aligned with my strengths: I wrote the paper. And I wrote the hell out of that thing. I compiled my teammates’ detailed research, I did multiple revisions, I sent it to my team a week before the due date, I even made my husband read it as an objective third party. He needed a glass of scotch to get through it - well-written or not, supply chain management just isn't that fun to read about.

On a Saturday morning, we took another shot at our presentation. We had collaborated on the slides and practiced beforehand. We stood in front of the class and confidently shared our knowledge. We answered the professor's tough questions. We got an A. We immediately got to work on our final project and got an A on that, too.

I don't remember much about logistics, but I remember exactly what it felt like to be called out for performing below my potential. It was humiliating and it was physically uncomfortable (I can pinpoint the spot in my abdomen where I felt the shame) and it motivated me to do and be better. If he had politely applauded our presentation and given us a B-, we might have turned up our effort a little bit for the final, but probably not by much.

My professor gave me a gift wrapped in a rough, ugly package. He showed me the power of honest, critical feedback.

The hardest part of receiving feedback is rising above our natural, defensive reaction to criticism. If the criticism is delivered poorly - as it was in my classroom - it's easy to demonize the person who delivered it and brush it off altogether. We frame it as an either/or proposition: He was rude, and therefore his criticism of me was unwarranted. More often, it's both/and: He was rude, and I did a poor job on the assignment.

I wish I could say that I never procrastinated another assignment, or that I became a maestro of group work and team projects. It's not true. My professor shined a harsh, glaring light on a piece of myself that I am still working on, 10 years later.

This, I learned: Applauding and accepting mediocre work perpetuates it. Giving honest feedback in a respectful way is a skill that every leader must hone. And, if a message is so hard to hear that it hits me in the stomach, I best sit up and pay attention – because there’s something valuable in there.

My LinkedIn Success Story

I achieved a career milestone yesterday, my first talk at a professional conference. It went well. I channeled my nervous energy into enthusiasm. I shared anecdotes and metaphors and slides with more pictures than words. I saw myself quoted on Twitter and even had a few people tell me mine was their favorite session of the day. You wouldn't have guessed I was a rookie, unless you saw me photographing my badge.

So, how did I achieve this milestone? Two words... Or maybe it's one. LinkedIn.

I started using LinkedIn in earnest five years ago, when I was looking for a job halfway across the country. I wrote a detailed profile, joined a few groups, and connected with some strangers whose interests aligned with mine. It was on LinkedIn that I first spotted the posting that I called "the big bank job."

Nowadays, pretty much everyone knows that LinkedIn is helpful for job hunters. What I didn't know is how valuable it can be when you're happily employed.

I work in Internal Communications. We're a small team at a big company, and it's easy to feel like outliers, writers among bankers. But every time I go to a conference, I remember that we're not unique. Every big company has people like us. We tend to be alike: English majors, ex-journalists, storytellers who found a creative outlet in a corporate landscape. On our best days, we help bank tellers and cube dwellers feel connected to the company's culture and values. We have strong opinions on Oxford commas, Sharepoint, and most-hated corporate buzzwords (yes, no, and utilize).

We're all trying to solve the same problems. Why shouldn't we learn from each other? It's a non-competitive space. Customers don't see our internal communications. Employees don't study our intranet, compare it to a competitor's, and then choose to take their talent to the company with the prettier corporate news page.

I started following LinkedIn groups because I wanted to know what other communicators were doing. I started posting in them because I saw a space to contribute.

That's how I met Jane, a French consultant researching digital workplaces. She asked interesting questions; I answered them. She asked to quote me in her report; I got the proper permissions from my employer and said Yes. She invited me to Washington, DC to speak at this conference with her.

Last night, sitting around a dinner table with Jane and a dozen like-minded professionals from around the world, I remembered that there's a unique energy to in-person networking, an honesty and connection that flows from a bottle of wine and a shared passion for the work you do. Those connections can take shape online. They start with openness, curiosity, and intellectual generosity.

I'm writing this blog so perhaps it will inspire someone else to put him or herself out there. If you ever feel isolated in your job, you're not. If you wonder whether you can grow your career without changing jobs, you can.

Here are my tips for finding authentic connections online: Show up. Join groups. Be more kind than necessary. Listen to people before you speak to them. Add value. If people around you are being self serving and dull, fill the space with what is needed and be the person you would like to meet. Always, always show gratitude for those who help you along the way.

I was almost too busy to write this blog.

I almost didn’t attend the presentation yesterday. It was a noontime talk about "Reflective Leadership," the sort of learning opportunity that tends to fall by the wayside when you're busy. Wednesday was looking like a protein-bar-at-my-desk kind of workday as deadlines converged, meetings loomed, and my inbox swelled over capacity.

At the last moment, I decided to make the time.

As often happens, the message I almost didn’t have time for was exactly what I needed to hear.

Joe Cavanaugh, the speaker, leads a local nonprofit called Youth Frontiers. They work with schools to teach children and teenagers about kindness, compassion, character, and values. They hold retreats that fight bullying by helping young people see and connect with one another as human beings. He had a similar message for the grownups in the room today.

As we were waiting for the presentation to begin, the atmosphere was typical of an event where most attendees don’t know each other: a few conversations were sprinkled about, but mostly people sat in their chairs, looked at their smartphones or flipped quietly through the handouts. I checked my iPhone and chimed in on a Facebook discussion with faraway friends. There were people sitting on either side of me in the conference room, but I didn’t notice them. As the presentation began I put away my phone, a little reluctantly, knowing that if I left it out I’d be unable to resist looking at it.

I love technology. My iPad is a constant companion. When something interesting happens to me, I start composing the status update or blog in my head. Many of my closest friends are people I met online. I’m an unapologetic optimist about social media’s ability to connect people, bridge distances, and build communities.


Joe told us to turn to the person next to us and talk for 30 seconds each about our favorite childhood toys. I had never met the gentleman next to me, but after a moment of awkwardness I felt instantly connected with his story of setting up army men in the backyard and staging elaborate scenarios. I recounted my own menagerie of stuffed animals and their fearless leader, the lion.


It’s amazing what happens when people stop, look at one another, and have a simple conversation about something that is personally meaningful. The room sparkled with positive energy. People laughed. My phone suddenly seemed a lot less interesting.


Joe brought us back to attention by saying “We just wasted one minute.” He told us of a few minutes he “wasted” looking at clouds with his daughter, and how those were the most important minutes of his summer.


I won’t attempt to paraphrase his talk, but I can share the message that resonated most with me:

Slow down. Reflect. Notice the people around you. Listen to them. Remember what is most important and remember who is most important.

Technology and social media can help us build communities and connect with people, but they can also isolate us from people in our physical presence.

I’m inspired to do a few things differently:

• I will make more of an effort to smile and greet the people in my presence: store clerks, coworkers in the hallway, the neighbors whose names I don’t know.

• I will think twice before pulling out the phone or iPad in those little moments when conversation is an option: waiting for a meeting to begin, for example.

• I will carve out time in each workday to be human with my coworkers – stepping away from the blinking instant meessages and clusters of email – and dedicating my full attention to a person on the phone or in my presence.

• As a leader, I’ll be extra cognizant of being present and appreciative with my team. No matter how busy I am, they deserve to hear “Good morning” from me and to know that I care about what’s important to them today.

• When I am online, whether at work or at home, I will remember that those friends and coworkers deserve my attention also. I’ll make time to sit down, read their posts, and thoughtfully respond to and acknowledge what they’re communicating. My online friends deserve more than a distracted “like” from me while I’m walking down the street or waiting for takeout, especially if I’m just using the phone as a crutch to avoid eye contact with strangers.



Attention is a precious gift that we can give to one another. It’s worth a lot more when it’s undivided.

I wasted another lunch hour writing this blog… but if someone else needed this message, it was the most productive hour of my day.

Notes From New York: Internal Social Media

Last week, I had the opportunity to represent U.S. Bank at a meeting of Social Media.org, a council of like-minded professionals from large companies. The topic of our meeting was internal social media, or how we use social tools to connect employees. While I can’t share the details of the people or companies who made these statements, here are some of my favorite nuggets of knowledge that I brought home:



Finding expertise – There are people who need information. There are people who have information. In a big company, they may not be aware of who each other are… until the right tool allows them to connect.

Knowledge is power – This isn’t new, but an internal social network turns old dynamics upside down. Sharing knowledge gives you visibility and influence; hoarding knowledge makes you a non-entity. Anyone, anywhere in the organization, can share knowledge and build credibility based on what they know and how well they communicate it.

Leadership support is critical - While social media is a great democratizer, the voices of leaders (especially executives) resonate loudest. You don’t need every leader to be on board right away, but you do need someone to shine the beacon.

Leaders care what employees are saying – Gather key messages and themes from your internal social network and present it to leaders in a format they can use for their Monday meeting.
Asking questions – Even if the answer is in a FAQ somewhere, there is something important and inherently personal about asking a question of an online community. Give people that opportunity: Let them feel heard, valued, and supported through the act of asking and receiving an answer.

Trust your employees – Give real answers from real experts. If an employee is complaining about a benefit change, have a HR leader post a straight explanation of the rationale for the change. People may not agree with every policy, but they respect honesty. Don’t force a communications rep to be a messenger of vague platitudes.

Participation – When setting your expectations for participation, remember the 90-9-1 rule of online communities: 1% of members contribute original content, 9% comment or respond to content, and 90% are lurkers.

Conversations happen - If you’re concerned about giving employees access to social media, because they might have off-topic conversations or share incorrect info… remember that those conversations happen anyway in office hallways or on Facebook. Putting them on an internal social network gives you transparency, insight, a safe environment, and a chance to be part of the dialogue.

Blog your best news – Using a blog lets you brag and share your team’s accomplishments without blasting a self-promoting email to 200 people.



And, a few "Don'ts" -

Don’t design tools for the people who never use them. Find the people who are hungry to use social tools, and design with them in mind. Don’t waste your energy trying to please the people who don’t get it. They’ll adopt the tools eventually, when they’re left with no choice.


Don’t promote the tool for its own sake. Tell true, detailed stories about how social networking will make work easier, will make employees more effective, will solve real problems that people are facing today.

Don’t send everyone through the same training. Technical training should be optional, self-paced, and delivered at the time of need. Policies should be taught through examples: Offer a “social media challenge of the week” and ask employees how they would respond to a realistic scenario. Don’t make everyone sit through a boring class or click through a web-based course that they’ll instantly forget.



I expect more ideas to form as I continue going through my conference notes and having follow-up conversations with the people I met in New York.

Most striking to me was the similarity of our experiences. Even though we were in different companies, across different industries, using different technology, we all faced the same challenges. The adoption curve is steep, culture change is slow, and enterprise technology isn’t always nimble. But learning from each other, talking through our problems, and sharing our suggestions convinced me how important this work is. People are natural collaborators. We’re never going to achieve our best results working in silos, isolated from one another. It’s true for the tireless champions of internal social media at companies around the world, and it’s true for the employees we’re working to connect.

5 New(ish) Communication Skills Leaders Need

“I’ll never use Facebook. Forget Linked In; that’s why I have a Rolodex. The symbol # is called pound, and it’s a button on my phone – which is plugged into my wall.”

If this sounds like you, I have some bad news and some good news.

The bad news is, social media isn’t a trend you’ll be able to wait out. In 10 years, Facebook may look as dated as a pair of acid wash jeans, but the concept of being in simultaneous conversation with just about everyone you know – that idea is significantly, permanently changing the way human beings relate to the world and one another. Leading employees in this world requires us to strengthen and practice a new set of communication skills.

The good news is, you can develop these skills without sending a single tweet.

1. Do dialogue well.

Meetings make us worse at dialogue. In a crowded meeting room, time is limited, and the ideas that prevail are the ones that get spoken aloud before moving to the next agenda topic. Traditional business meetings condition us to await our turn to speak, rather than to listen with an open mind.

Dialogue is fluid, collaborative, and open-ended. With online dialogue, there are no limits to how long your conversation can last and how many voices can be heard. You can comment on a blog written four years ago. In discussion forums, "off-topic" threads tend to be the most lively. Respect this openness and resist the urge to control every conversation or spin it back to a pre-formulated agenda. Creative ideas and surprising connections often come from unstructured conversations.


2. Make feedback a daily habit.

We live in a world where people are accustomed to giving and hearing immediate feedback on matters large and small. On Twitter, people constantly and instantly share their opinions about everything from Congressional decisions to new flavors of potato chips. On Facebook, we post a photo or status update and wait for the comments and “Likes” to roll in.

It’s unrealistic and unfair to expect our employees to only give and receive feedback about their jobs once a year. While annual reviews and surveys are useful tools, conversations about job performance and work environment need to be ongoing. Facebook asks its users “What’s on your mind?” every day. Your employees deserve the same courtesy from you.


3. Be succinct.

Twitter’s magic is brevity. Whether or not you tweet, practice distilling important messages into 140 characters for impact and clarity.


4. Respect communication styles and preferences.

Quick: Identify the introverts and extraverts on your team. Can you do it?

Introverts tend to develop their best ideas through quiet reflection, while extraverts draw energy from social interactions and prefer to “think aloud.” Some people straddle the middle ground, but most of us have a dominant style. If you're unfamiliar with introversion, listen to this TED talk for an insightful explanation.

Engage your team in a variety of ways to let the different styles shine. Use brainstorming meetings to engage extraverts, but send out the materials ahead of time or keep a discussion forum going afterward so that introverts have time to process and analyze the data before responding.


5. Know which tool to use for maximum impact.

Not every message is best expressed via email. I recently blogged about how to choose among the tools in our toolbox. As online communication evolves, we’re likely to see new tools added and refined.

Also, find out the preferred communication tool for each of your employees. Some people appreciate the speed and simplicity of instant messenger, while others find it intrusive. Some people love to talk on the phone, while others order their pizzas online. With more tools than ever, there are more ways to perfectly reach the people with whom you communicate.

Even if your phone is still plugged into a wall.