The Cart and the Horse: Engaging Leadership Support

Will Kenny, Best Training Practices

To promote key messages and crucial best practices that ensure success for your company, you are probably working to get the management visibly involved in your training activities, whether through some kind of public endorsement or by actually participating in the delivery of information.

This can be a powerful boost to the impact of your employee communication and training efforts, but not just because of how statements from top management affect employees and how they do their jobs.

Public statements about “how we do things around here” can have an equally powerful impact on the managers making the statements, and how they do their jobs!

The common practice is to build support with management, to work on them until you are confident they are committed to the training message and then have them come in and display that commitment in front of the employees. We tend to look down our noses at executives who make appearances only because it is expected of them, who may work in ways, within their own functions, day to day, that are inconsistent with what they say in public.

That may be getting the cart before the horse. Get the executives in front of your audience, with the right message, and worry about their personal commitment to the cause later. You are likely to find that as time goes on repeated utterances in favor of a policy or best practice will evolve into supporting it with actions.

A recent article in The Economist (Aug. 30) focused on turnaround specialist Greg Brenneman, most recently credited with bringing the fast-food chain Quiznos back from the brink. One of his practices was to send out a voicemail to all franchise holders every Friday morning, updating them on what was happening in the business.

Naturally, the primary purpose was to improve communications with franchisees, as relations had been rather toxic (including lawsuits) before he took over. But he pointed out another benefit to this practice.

Brenneman said, “If someone gets on a voicemail and promises something to thousands of people, that person will do it.” In other words, whatever his level of commitment to follow through on a given behavior before the massive public statement, afterwards he pretty much had to live up to his words.

And I’ve worked the same “trick” among my own clients. In one instance, what was then a large regional bank (now grown into one of the largest banks in the country) had some core training to spread the best practices they wanted applied consistently in every state where they did business. The regional managers in those states, on the other hand, liked to do things their own ways.

That presented the usual problem all trainers have encountered: The official message delivered at training got undermined went employees when back to their desks in their own locations. In their own states and regions, the senior managers were willing to deliver the approved message to employees, perhaps knowing that it wouldn’t matter what they said, since they could greatly influence how employees worked afterwards.

The solution? Company-wide conferences, where all the state-by-state managers appeared together to deliver the training message. Having publicly supported the corporate best practices in front of their peers (and their own bosses), they found it much more difficult to veer away from those practices in their own operations.

In other words, don’t wait for corporate leaders to believe what they are saying before you engage them in your training events. Get them on the broadest, most public platform you can devise. The more publicly they say the right things, the more likely they are to do the right things privately, in their own fiefdoms.