When your current CEO plans to leave, or when a new CEO comes onboard, your internal communications efforts should include three critical components: swiftness, openness and directness.
While employees don't necessarily have a right to know about CEO changes as quickly as we might suggest, they do hold a lot of immeasurable power in the marketplace. In fact, they have a right to leave the company; they have a right to speak less than fondly of your company; and they have a right to be less productive (albeit with consequences).
Despite the reason for a CEO leaving - controversy, retirement, career change - succession communication is best done as part of the business process rather than as a clean-up measure or a separate communications effort that's not in sync with the new CEO's management style or the company's history and reputation.
CEOs are coming and going at a pace almost unrivaled in the past few decades. Part of that can be attributed to the fact that nearly a quarter of the 500 companies in the Standard & Poor index have CEOs who are 63 or older (according to Business Week) - and who are looking toward retirement.
It all comes down to doing your homework and careful planning. And it means realizing that you need to fine-tune messages for various audiences so that when and what you tell the press and your shareholders is aligned with when and what you tell those on your payroll.
You should also rely on an ongoing tracking of whether you're meeting employees' needs as a CEO change is rolled out, according to Angela Sinickas, senior communications consultant with William M. Mercer, San Francisco.
That probe should include determining the gap between what employees' current information sources (concerning the change) are and what their preferences are; and finding out what they're interested in learning compared to how well-informed they believe they are.
The New CEO Chapter
Proof that CEO transitions/successions have saturated the business marketplace is everywhere:
A Voice From the Top
"You must always communicate the unknown and the known," says Tom Bell, president and CEO of Burson-Marsteller and the principal who spearheaded the company's new client-practice structure. "If you're going to err, you want to err on the side of over communicating."
Bell should know: years ago, he left BM for an 18-month stint at Gulf Stream Aerospace Corp. and then rejoined BM's ranks. But before he returned, those in the upper echelons of the company knew how important it was for them to communicate to employees - not only to the media and other constituent audiences - why Bell was chosen.
To ensure that the message was credible, BM's Chairman of the Board Peter A. Georgescu made the announcement. But what happened next was key to how the transition was handled at the worldwide organization which employs 23,000: within 24 hours of the announcement being made, an e-mail message from Bell was sent out to staffers, and it was communication that ended up being more than a promotional vignette.
In the message, Bell invited employees to e-mail any questions or concerns they had and to pass along ideas.
|
Delta's CEO Communications Blueprint
Source: PR NEWS |
Using that as a benchmark, a 30-minute video addressing those queries was produced and shown at various sites. "I'm not one who believes in the grand tour," Bell mused. "But I know avenues like these help you accomplish your objectives at a time like this because the first 100 days is critical."
The Rockwell Way
Some companies, however, have the benefit of promoting someone from inside, which eases the process. Rockwell - the multibillion-dollar company that has been keenly focused, in recent years, on reinventing itself - is one of those.
Rockwell sold its aerospace/defense businesses to Boeing and completes the spin-off of its automotive businesses to Meritor Automotive Inc. on Oct. 1 of this year.
But for Rockwell, that date also signals a new chapter for the company: Don Davis, now COO at Rockwell, will become Rockwell's new CEO, replacing Don Beall who occupied the CEO spot for a decade and has opted for early retirement.
To make sure that employees were kept abreast of the changes, internal communicators used several routes to reach Rockwell's 44,000 employees at its 110 locations worldwide.
On the morning that the announcement was made at its monthly board meeting in July, word went out to the 300-plus staffers at corporate headquarters in Seal Beach, Calif. At other sites, a mix of avenues was used, including its Target Vision in-house video system; print memos hung on bulletin boards; and information that was placed on its intranet and Web site, http://www.rockwell.com.
But there's another issue to consider and it's one you can't escape if you're running a business today: the legal implications.
Execs at Comsat, a re-emerging satellite company that employs 1,500 in Bethesda, Md., knew that aligning their messages to the press and to their employees about new CEO Betty Alewine was necessary because of SEC regulations, according to Janet Dewar, VP of corporate communications. They made sure that employees were given the news when it was released to Dow.
(Burson Marsteller, Tom Bell, 212/614-4209; Angela Sinickas, 415/393-5529; Rockwell, Scott Nelson, 562/797-5031; Comsat, Janet Dewar, 301/214-3800)