This actually happened and it’s so dumb you’re going to find it hard to believe.
I want you to imagine a business that turns over around three and a half million a year. It employs 30 managers and about 200 staff. They have some 400 customers.
On the board of directors there’s a non-executive director who happens to run his own consumer research business.
The company decided to survey their staff and clients to find out what they thought about how the company was doing. A questionnaire was drawn up under the direction of the marketing manager and sent out.
A high response may be significant for other reasons
The first point to note is that there was a very high rate of return – nearly eighty percent return rate.
The marketing manager compiled the results into tables and constructed a PowerPoint presentation. She showed the presentation to the management team.
The management team watched the presentation and thanked the marketing manager.
Proud of her neat presentation the marketing manager suggested it be shown to the staff and to customers. The management team agreed.
When the staff saw the presentation they were concerned by the results. At the end a single voice asked: “What is being done about the issues raised by the research?”
The marketing manager replied for the management team: “that is not the purpose of this meeting. We simply wanted to show you the results of the survey.”
The voice persisted, “thank you, but what action is being taken about some of the serious issues which have been revealed?”
Zero action leads to disillusion
There was no answer and the meeting ended. The staff left feeling disillusioned.
The voice sent an e-mail to the non-executive director whose company had compiled the questionnaire in which she expressed the concerns she had raised in the meeting.
The non-executive director did not reply.
All of this begs the question, “why bother to do the research if you’re not committed to learning from and acting upon the feedback you get?”
This is a classic example of a total absence of participative leadership. The senior managers are not engaged with the rest of the business. They are occupying some sort of superior position from which they do not deign to mess with the ordinary people.
You may find this story shocking. Indeed, it is shocking, but, having spent over forty years in business I have to say that it is not that unusual.
The points are that often managers do not know how to react to information they find unpalatable so they do nothing. In other instances they choose not to believe the evidence they have caused to be generated.
History shows that those organisations that do not analyse valuable information fed back to them, learn from that information and change their ways often get into difficulties.
That is why the fifth step of The Communication Cycle stresses the need to analyse feedback, learn and change.
If you have been following the series of articles I’ve written about The Communication Cycle you will by now have noticed that they lock together to form a whole. No one section of the cycle is more important or less important than any other section.
To become a transformational leader you need to master every step of the cycle. That may seem like a lot of work when you start, but as you think about and use each step so it will become your habitual behaviour and using it will become easier and more natural to you.
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