Name of column: The CEO is dead, long live the CEO

Contributor: Ian Buckingham, founder of www.by2w.co.uk and former MD of Interbrand Inside 

"We’ve reached a critical point of inflection in the war for talent and it’s now time for a paradigm shift if we’re to dominate the moral high ground”

(OD director, UK Financial Services)

I met the person who came out with this sentence a couple of years ago. To spare his blushes, let’s call him Babel. He proudly wore the label head of organization development and worked for a web-based financial services firm which had a reputation for a radical working environment and funky marketing.
 
He represented a truly maverick brand, much heralded for its iconoclastic, irreverent approach.Unfortunately, they also had an alternative financial performance record. I would show you a copy of their 'strategy on a single page' if I could, but suffice to say, looking at it for the first time was rather like being a Victorian explorer faced with a hieroglyphic carving on a stone tablet. This A4 tablet was packed with symbols which might as well have been runes and had so many mixed metaphors that it looked like it had been chiseled by an army of schizophrenic stonemasons.

He talked proudly of their collaborations with a series of specialist management gurus – although the 'tablet' did most of the speaking for him. His team had absorbed key thinking indiscriminately and were feverishly attempting to align their passionate but rather confused employees behind their chaotic OD strategy. In the meantime, they were wrestling with their senior leaders, puzzled by the absence of early-adopters in the top team.

In this column last week I talked about how culture is simply: 'the way things are done around here'. I also talked about the importance of developing an appropriate culture attuned to the goal of the business and the needs and abilities of internal stakeholders. Well the communication culture within this organization had become the biggest inhibitor of effective communication. It was complex cloaked as clever and little understood. 

Sadly, Babel-speak, as it came to be known, became so infamous that the employees (usually a 'gung-ho' and pretty lively bunch) had invented a game which they came to call BS Bingo. An enterprising cultural guerilla had created a spreadsheet populated by the most infamous and prevalent metaphors being perpetuated by Mr Babel and his team. 

On the increasingly popular internal communication black market, he offered a financial incentive for his contemporaries to seek out, site and mark off those metaphors appearing in officially sanctioned communication within a given period of time. The first to spot and report back a 'full house' of BS metaphors within that period was awarded the BS Bingo prize. Needless to say, you were at a distinct advantage if you were a middle manager and attended the Babel-sanctioned conferences and engagement events.

Two years later, the guerillas won the unofficial culture war and Babel left to start up his own consultancy. This has since folded. His former company has just been sold by its parents after years of underperformance and the OD and communication team was severely 'right-sized' a year ago. Powerful stuff this culture – especially when you underestimate the line managers (or ceos) who have to act as the interpreters, translators and ultimate implementers of the change strategy.

It didn’t have to be that way as the enthusiastic innovators within the organization had some very good ideas. Passionate as they were, they were seduced, however, by compulsive creativity. They took for granted or obfuscated the obvious and forgot to deliver the basics consistently well. They lost their audience in 'push' communication masquerading as engagement cloaked in a mist of purple and inauthentic prose. It will come as little surprise that external customer satisfaction statistics suffered during Babel’s tenure. 

I’ve seen few more compelling arguments for the power of language and the prevailing communication culture and the impact both of these soft skills areas ultimately have on the brand and the bottom line. This one didn’t have a happy ending for everyone concerned but join me next week to hear about a couple of chief engagement officers who are heroes to their peers and examples to us all (really!).

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If you’re interested in learning more about Ian’s thoughts and reflections on employee engagement, brand development and culture change watch this space and take a look at his book: Brand Engagement – How Employees Make or Break Brands.

Be one of the first to read a chapter Ian has written for professor Phillip Kitchen’s latest book, due out this August - Marketing: Metaphors and Metamorphosis