For the better part of my professional career, I’ve worked in employee communications for high-tech companies like Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and then back to HP. These companies are so enormous, complex and rapidly changing that it takes people like me to help employees understand what in the world is going on and where the company is heading.
What’s most important about the job is trying to help employees connect the dots from the company’s strategy all the way back to their individual jobs. This helps them decide what their priorities should be and lets them see that what they’re doing on a daily basis is important, that they’re part of something that matters – something bigger than themselves.
One of the job’s responsibilities is to write the chief executive officer’s internal messages. This includes the company vision, quarterly results explanations, progress updates, slides, webcast talking points, video or podcast scripts, and all those organizational change memos that clog your electronic In Tray.
At HP, I wrote for Lew Platt and Carly Fiorina. When people ask me what I did, I often tell them I was the Memo Writer to the Stars.
In a job like mine, if you earn the trust of the CEO, you can have incredible access to the top decision-makers. And if the company truly believes in open and honest communication (I can count them on my toes), you can even tell the truth most of the time (with a small, humble “t”, of course). You never get to tell the complete, 24-karat kind of truth for obvious reasons – highest on the list is to avoid panicking the masses in hard times. At a place like Hewlett-Packard, there was a time when you could come close.
In fact, one day at HP, I did tell the unvarnished, raw-as-a-newborn-baby’s-butt truth. By the end of the next day, I was gone – figuratively at first, then, oh so literally. We’ll talk about it later.
In any job – depending on your personal values, your financial circumstances and your market value – you need to be willing to walk away if you’re asked to cross an ethical line. That’s what happened to me.
The best advice I’ve ever heard on the topic comes from Chuck House, a former HP leader who spent 30 years with the company before leaving to work with software start-ups. In a Fast Company article in the late 1990s, Chuck was asked the rhetorical question: Can you tell the truth without jeopardizing your career?
“My honest answer is, you never know until you try,” Chuck said. “Three decades ago, as a naïve your engineer at HP, I persisted in championing an idea despite opposition. I came away from the whole experience with a motto: Come to work each day willing to be fired.”
I whole-heartedly agree. You can only spend so much of your life standing on the bank watching the river flow by. Sometimes you have to close your eyes and jump in. And see where it takes you.
In my opinion, even on your worst day in the profession, employee communications is a far more honest place to work than the marketing department, which is where some companies relegate us. In marketing, the skills required are similar and the pay is better and everyone dresses a lot nicer.
But you have to be good at something I’m terrible at, which is – to be kind – always spinning the apple so that only the good side shows.
You never let anyone see the bruises or the discolorations when you’re in marketing. In good employee communications, you have faith in the overall intelligence of your audience and the strength of the company to show them the entire apple – with a complete explanation of how the soft spots got there, what the company is doing about them, and practical tips and guidance on how the individual can help.
When I managed a team – both at HP and then later at Hitachi -- I banned the folks who reported to me from ever using the word “spin.”
“We can go so far as to say position,” I told them, “but I never want to hear spin –- it implies that we’re lying and that’s something I refuse to do.”
Here’s a story about the difference between real life and marketing.
In April 2000, Carly Fiorina, then chief executive officer for Hewlett-Packard, and her marketing minions had an actual replica built of the garage where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started the company in 1938. They paid tens of thousands of dollars to build this ersatz garage on a grassy knoll on the grounds of the company’s Hanover Street headquarters in Palo Alto, California.
This is where they shot the commercials the company ran that year – you may have seen them – with Carly in her Armani suit, leaning against the garage and purring with that sexy voice of hers – the one that sounds like a Siamese cat after a lung-rattling hit of good Mexican dope.
On the same day the advertising agency had dozens of people scurrying around to shoot these commercials with Carly, a modest home stood on a quiet residential street less than a mile away. At 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, the real garage still stands – the place where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard began perhaps the greatest adventure in technology and enlightened management in history.
In 1989, to celebrate the company's 50th Anniversay of incorporation, Bill Hewlett was driven to the original home of HP where many employees had gathered to celebrate with music and an ice-cream social.
As the car crept up Addison Avenue, Bill looked out the window and asked the people with him, “Which one is it?”
While everyone paid all this fuss to honor the company’s icon -– the garage -– its co-founder had never been back and was never interested in going back. The only icons he cared about where hard work, creativity, treating your people with respect and beating the competition.
Although Bill and Dave never cared about the garage, Carly resurrected it and, while CEO, continually spun the founders’ legacy and mythology to suit her purposes. It may have been good marketing; it was lousy employee communications. And, in a truly karmic sense, it eventually came back to bite Carly in her Armani-clad behind.
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