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Announcing a Change in Direction |Dodging Landmines

Have you been giving the task of announcing a sudden change in direction to the rest of the company? Ed Muzio, CEO of Group Harmonics, urges you to gather as much information about the rationale behind the decision before making your announcement. This enables you to provide up to date information to employees and presents a strong and unified image of upper management.

Speaker: Ed Muzio, CEO, Group Harmonics

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Tags: Dodging Landmines, downturn, business, manager, employees, team, company, direction, goals

 

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Announcing a Change in Direction |Dodging Landmines

Have you been giving the task of announcing a sudden change in direction to the rest of the company? Ed Muzio, CEO of Group Harmonics, urges you to gather as much information about the rationale behind the decision before making your announcement. This enables you to provide up to date information to employees and presents a strong and unified image of upper management.

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Speaker: I have just come out of a meeting with management, and all of a sudden they're changing course. They're going in a different direction. And now I find out that I'm on the hot seat. I've been tapped to tell everybody else about this. How do I communicate this effectively?

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Ed: You don't want to be the messenger who gets killed.

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Speaker: I absolutely want to run out the door.

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Ed: That's a bad job. So you want to prepare. And the way you want to prepare is to get as much information as you can, not only about the decision you have to communicate, but about the rationale. Why was this decided? Talk to the managers if you have to, do research, anything you can do so that you can share the reasons behind the decision.

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Speaker: Ed, I'm really uncomfortable about this, though. Why can't I just say, "Okay, the orders have come down. This is what we have to do, so let's just do it?"

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Ed: What you want to do instead is you want to present a positive, unified decision. Here's what was observed. Here's what was decided. Here's where we will go next. It creates a lot less stress because it gives a sense that the direction and the facts and everything are all in alignment.

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Speaker: What should I avoid?

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Ed: Well, you want to avoid doing that very natural thing of saying, "They decided this, and now we have to do it." There's two problems with that. First of all, that sets up "they," the decision makers, as not knowing what's going on. You're basically telling me the people deciding my future don't know what's going on. That's stressful. The second thing is if you talk about "them," "they," when they're not here, how do I know you're not going to talk about me when I'm not here. So you're actually damaging trust between us. Instead what you want to do is stay very focused on one group together. We know this going on. We are gonna do this.

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Speaker: In summary?

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Ed: In summary, get educated about the reasons for the decision. Share the decision and its rationale. Help people catch up with why it was decided. And stay focused on a unified, single voice of management so that you're saying, "We're all going here together."

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Techologies ====