What CEOs Can Learn About Employee Communications From the U.S. Army Band “Pershing’s Own”

November 14, 2009

I just returned from a joyous concert by the U.S. Army’s “Pershing” Band, as it is known, that was in town for its annual concert at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall.   As I sat there with friends tapping my feet and applauding every brassy patriotic song, I thought what a great lesson I was learning about communications.  And that’s this:  when you communicate with joy, you turn an audience into your biggest fans.

And there was no doubt the musicians were having as much fun as the audience.  At the end, the Band played the anthem for each of the service branches and one by one young and grizzled veterans stood proudly while the audience cheered wildly.

I thought:  let’s pretend the bandleader is a company CEO.  He’s leading his musicians with infectious joy.  Wow, it’s great to work for this company.  Is there any employee who won’t want to follow?  How about making it a point to write to employees whenever there is some good news to report – big or small.  Don’t let every communiqué be about the next layoff or we’ve all got to tighten our belts again.  Your employees know that things may be rough in the company, unless they’ve got their heads in the sand, which is doubtful.

This is the truth:  bad news spreads via the grapevine faster than good news.  Fire just one person and before you know it the grapevine has translated that to more layoffs.  So, if you’re the CEO, make sure you feed the grapevine and your normal communications channels with all the good news you can.  It will make you feel better and your employees will become your loyal fans.

Related posts:

1. Internal Communications Strategies for Web-Savvy Employees
2. CEO as Chief Communications Officer
3. Employee Communications: Internal Branding = External Success
4. Adding dividends with a culture of two-way communications
5. 11 Tips to Improve Employee Motivation, Employee Satisfaction & Employee Retention

Comments

• Try Different — Seth Godin

  The usual mantra is to 'try harder'. Trying harder is impossible when you're already trying as hard as you can.

  But you can always try different.

  Years ago, I was creating trivia questions for a product we built for Prodigy. We had a 99% accuracy rate in doing the questions. Which was great, except there were 1800 questions in a batch, which meant 18 wrong each time, which was totally and completely unacceptable. These were honest mistakes, made by smart people working as hard as they could.

  No matter how hard we tried, we couldn't do better than 99%. So we switched our system completely and did it in a totally different way. Same number of people, same number of hours, 100% accuracy.

  If it's not working, harder might not be the answer.

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