Alice: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
Cheshire Cat: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
Alice: “I don't much care where.”
Cheshire Cat: “Then it doesn't much matter which way you go.”
The problem is that Alice is not aware of the purpose of her journey, so she’s not emotionally invested in the outcome. It is the same in businesses where employee engagement is low. People turn up to do their daily work but do not much care about the broader outcome.
Some say that this is a failure of communication, and it is. But we can be more specific. The real failure lies in mistaking information for persuasion. Leaders and managers all know they should inform their staff when change is in the air. But do not realise that information on its own will rarely produce the response they desire.
A decade ago, commercial advertising was genuinely persuasive. Nearly two centuries’ experience had produced a key learning: you cannot persuade someone you do not understand. But modern advertising is largely memetic; a process of transferring short messages from person to person without any pause for interpretation. So, it is far less memorable or persuasive.
In employee communication, we face a similar problem. We try to convey our strategy in complicated corporate language that does not make sense to people who have not been part of the prior discussion. True, an employee might take a passing interest in a vision statement. She would probably focus more on a mission statement, particularly one linked to her KPIs. But when it comes to company values, she is often a bit lost. How should she use them to make the right choices in her daily work?
Alice concludes her conversation with the Cheshire Cat by saying it probably does not matter which way she goes as long as she gets somewhere. The Cat replies: “Oh, you're sure to do that if only you walk long enough.”
Chris Harrison leads The Brand Inside
www.thebrandinside.com
