KG Charles-Harris, CEO of Emanio, shared a great resource when he turned me on to Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge, (I told you the best stuff was sent to me!)—specifically an article entitled Corporate Values and Employee Cynicism—that played directly to our effort of developing an unambiguous description of KG’s cultural vision. The article is a “must read.”

Articulating the values they want in the culture is a relatively simple matter for a CEO or company owner—after all, they know what they believe! But as Sandra Cha and Amy Edmondson point out, the same words mean different things to different people, so what the CEO says, and what the people hear may, have little in common, creating tensions and negative reactions.

Simply stated, the way to avoid misunderstandings is through the clarity of communication. But it’s not enough to “spell it out” if you’re spelling it in Latin and your people hear in Russian, Finnish, Kligon, whatever.

One of the unspoken joys of management is that understandable communications are your responsibility.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 10:56 pm and is filed under Business info, Culture, Motivation, Retention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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