An interview with Mike Klein, a 20-year internal communications veteran and principal and founder of Changing the Terms, who has recently joined Sparrow Connected as a Senior Strategic Advisor.
Let’s Begin with Mike Klein.
For more than 20 years, starting with research at London Business School in the late ‘90s, Mike has worked with organizations in the United States and Europe on pressing strategic communication challenges and has become a prolific writer and commentator on internal communication strategy topics.
In early 2021, Mike made it his personal mission to elevate the communications profession globally, which is why he founded #WeLeadComms, an initiative to recognize initiative, courage, and leadership across the communication profession.
Chris: We’re really excited to have you on our team, Mike. For the readers, one of the initiatives we’re working on together with Mike is a #WeLeadComms webinar series for internal communications professionals. Our first webinar is coming up in just over a week.
Mike: Thanks, Chris. I’m honored to be part of the team. And yes, our first webinar is on April 27th. It’s going to be an interesting conversation about the need for strategic communications. To all internal comms pros out there, you don’t want to miss this.
Register for the webinar on SparrowConnected.com
Chris: Thanks, Mike. Let's jump into today’s topic. In one of your articles “Informal influencers: actionable, not optional,” You wrote about why internal communication isn’t getting sufficient traction? Or why engagement scores are slipping despite a steady diet of snappy intranet articles and C-suite videos? Would you say the same for manufacturing?
Mike: The key thing about a manufacturing environment is how employees interact with each other - that needs to be taken into consideration. Usually, much of the "internal communication" manufacturing employees receive consists of short, formal briefings from their supervisors, at a fixed time. This can be early in a shift or at the end of the shift, often less than once a week. That’s about it.
But employees go about their jobs and then connect socially in all kinds of settings: canteens, pubs, churches, gyms, etc., and that's where the "real" communication tends to take place.
“In the absence of official stories or official explanations, unofficial stories and explanations proliferate.”
Most of the corporate communication in a manufacturing setting is very top-down, directive, and one-directional. There are some organizations that try to be too directional. But there's all this multi-directional peer-to-peer communication going on inside and outside the plant, that none of this formal stuff takes into consideration. And so, we need to take a much bigger view of how internal communication really works in the manufacturing world.
Chris: What is the biggest communication challenge in manufacturing?
Mike: The production environment in manufacturing is completely isolated from the management or the “connected environment” for lack of a better term. The production environment has the greatest potential for the rumor mill.
You have limited information. You have limited access to information. You have people who have plenty of time to talk about whatever it is that they are worried about. And you have people who are trying to position themselves as experts.
It’s the classic internal comms challenge - in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. That’s the biggest challenge in my opinion.
This is where social influence comes in.
Chris: I’ve heard about social influence and read many varying definitions about it. How do you define it?
Mike: Well, there is a definitive definition. Social influence is the informal conversations that take place between employees, and the individuals who drive those organizations, either through their activity or credibility.
Chris: I’ve heard about snowball analysis and organizational network analysis as ways to understand Social Influence. How practical is social analysis? Have you ever used it in a manufacturing environment?
Mike: Yes, I have used the snowball method where you ask a small group of people where they go for different types of support, advice, and knowledge. And then you ask the people who get mentioned and you keep asking until the same names keep coming up. It's one of two legitimate methods that get underneath the population to find out the influence patterns. The other is organizational network analysis (ONA).
One method that tends not to work is to take management's and HR's assumptions about who is influential and appoint those people as "champions" to try to agitate this conversation.
Generally, these people aren't as credible as the people selecting them think they are. They tend to be more "cooperative" than "influential."
Chris: Would you consider Social Influence as another communication channel in an omnichannel communications strategy??
Mike: I think looking at social influence as another channel from an omnichannel perspective makes a lot of sense because you have people who are on network and off-network. You need to make sure that you know what the connection is between the people who are on the network and those who are largely offline or "deskless."
An example could be the Secretary in the production or the operations department, who is always explaining stuff to people.
Chris: How can manufacturing make social influence part of their channel mix?
Mike: To use social influence as a channel, you need to create a communication approach that efficiently collects input from the unconnected, so that their views and needs are reflected in whatever communication is being sent in their direction. And, when there's a discussion, you make sure that the people who are driving this discussion have the information they need.
Chris: Do you have any advice for manufacturing companies looking to embrace social influence for communications?
Mike: Recognize that there is more to social influence and internal comms than meets the eye. It is challenging, but once you're conscious of it, you can use communication tools and approaches within your own platforms, and through external support and consultancy.
Chris: You mentioned communication platforms earlier. Let’s explore that a bit further. How can technology help support social influence in manufacturing environments?
Mike: The more people that engage with technology, the more technology can do the heavy lifting, particularly in terms of getting complete accurate information to people. The rumor mill hates technology and hates facts, and it hates the distribution effects through technology.
So, technology is a great answer to the rumor mill and finding social influence through the right use of technology or the snowball method can help further. Hence there is a strong need for support through technology and expertise that can help.
Chris: Thanks Mike, Welcome to the team once again.
What’s Next:
