COMMUNICATE IN GOOD TIMES (AND THREE TIMES AS OFTEN IN BAD TIMES)

Typically, when things are going well, leaders send out voice mails and e-mails, and communicate frequently. Everybody in the organization knows what is going on. Then a problem arises. Things aren't going so well. Suddenly, communication stops. People wonder what happened, because not a word is coming from the leaders. The atmosphere in the cubicles can get mighty cynical in times like these.

As we'll discuss in more depth in Chapter Eleven on crisis management, whenever an issue arises, people need to be told what the leaders know, what they do not know, and how soon the leaders will get back to them on the unknowns. Sometimes leaders say that although they would like to communicate more during a crisis, they do not have enough information. The danger of this approach, however, is that if you do not communicate during a crisis, the problem will be perceived as being much worse than it is. Once panic sets in, it's all downhill.

It bears repeating: simply tell people what you know, what you do not know, and when you will get back to them with an update. This may sound like commonsense advice, but leaders do not follow it often enough.

My rule is that my team should know everything that I know. Whenever I learn new information, I think about everybody I am interacting with to whom this information will be useful. Then I let them know immediately. I practiced this as a first-level manager with five people reporting to me who were working on an analysis. If I had to present their work to the vice president, in most cases I would try to bring the team into the meeting with me. When this wasn't possible, as soon as I left the meeting I would get the group together and download what happened. If possible I would tell them face-to-face.

When I was a division president, I had a distribution list of the other eight division presidents in my group. Within an hour of a meeting with a group president, I would send a note to every division president to let him or her know that I met with a group president and here's what I learned. There was nothing I knew that they would not know. When I was in the international division at Baxter, there were times I would be on a conference call with the team in a particular region, such as Australia, and the country manager would relate that a competitor was launching a new product. Immediately after the call, I would send a voice mail to all the country presidents around the world, telling them what the president of Baxter Australia had said about the competitor launching a new product and letting them know there was a high probability of the same thing happening in their markets.

Without effective communication, a values-based organization cannot function. The bigger the organization, the tougher it can be to communicate effectively. But you cannot let the size of the organization inhibit you from finding ways to get your message across.