Creating the right attitude

No process works well unless people ‘own’ it. There is a Chinese saying:

Tell me and I forget

Show me and I remember

Involve me and I understand

and BP Oil involved management in the process.

The dialogue had already started with upward feedback by staff to management and regular staff appraisals, all part of BP’s culture change. Next step for BP Oil was to hold a communication workshop for its most senior managers. This was not, it has to be said, an immediate and unqualified success.

The workshop had one simple aim: to enable management to accept that communication is part of leadership. At a time when they were having to make very difficult cost-cutting decisions they knew would involve the pain of making many people redundant, this was the last thing they wanted to hear. Yet the preliminary research before the workshop into how communication was rated by staff in their areas, the vigorous debate during the workshop sessions and the incontrovertible truth of the basic leadership message, did in the end help management recognize that communication is an issue they must manage because it affects the bottom line.

Its importance had been symbolized by moving communication from what had been seen as a ‘soft issues’ department to strategy and planning and hence directly to management.

The expertise of BP Oil’s professional communicators was then harnessed to help managers deliver communication in a way that they could own for themselves. While head office provided the framework, the umbrella, they, the local line managers were doing the communication, not head office. Here are some of the methods that helped.