Our senior leaders held a town hall session with several staff sections, including ours (we actually go to all the town hall sessions, regardless of audience).
The other attendees probably thought the commander planted questions with our team in the audience. We set up opportunities for our senior leaders to reinforce their priorities and values … which are incidentally our own priorities and values.
Here’s the thing: Our prompts and the follow-on discussions were not planted or even coordinated ahead of time. They were simply on-message, because everything we do is on-message.
It has to be.
You’re the organization’s chief communicator. You’d better always be messaging, too.
Your bucket of responses is your lifeline … fill it up with on-message topics, goals and concerns. Every now and then, dump it out and take stock of its contents’ messaging value: are they still relevant? Stale? Is it time for an update?
Here’s how our team makes sure one another is always messaging:
- We don’t just talk about “what’s in the news” like it’s yesterday’s gossip: we add value by discussing the headlines’ implications for our organization; what our team or senior PAOs are doing in response to the latest news; why it’s important to pay attention to the international media environment; or we redirect to the news items our members ought to be paying attention to.
- When we walk by or sit next to a fellow American, we don’t say we’re doing “oh, fine” or anything else staff guys say. We get fired up, genuinely talking up the great things we get to be part of, the quality people we’re surrounded by, the upcoming engagement we’re looking forward to, or the hard problem we’re trying to solve. Everybody gets tired, but nobody wants to hear about it; we can sleep when we’re dead.
- We welcome all of our office visitors — whether they stop by through chance or arrangement — with a smile and a cup of coffee, because we want people to share opportunities and accept our assistance.
- We’re deep into our organization’s aspirational culture–we know how we, and our senior leaders–want our organization’s members to be seen and understood. We pay attention for positive examples of team members’ focus and actions, and find opportunities to make those vignettes public.
As you can see, when I say “messaging,” I’m not talking about false motivation or empty talking points. Real messages have substance and add value.
The purpose of each engagement is to drive action. Make sure you’re driving the right actions for your organization.
Talk about something important.
(Photo by Lance Cpl. Cody J. Ohira, DVIDS)
