On Message: Communication for CIOs

Computerworld - "Most leaders are unaware of how bad they are," says John Hamm. "If they were doctors, people would die. If they were chefs, no one would eat the food."

In this month's Harvard Business Review, Hamm, a partner at VSP Capital in San Francisco and author of the article "Why Entrepreneurs Don't Scale," boils down this leadership malaise to the inability to communicate five essential messages. He talked with Computerworld's Kathleen Melymuka about what those messages are and what they mean to your IT organization.

John Hamm, a partner at VSP Capital

You highlight five areas in which you say clear communication can wield extraordinary influence on organizations. The first is organizational structure. What message does a leader need to give about an impending reorganization? Most leaders allow the organization to speculate on an impending reorganization for way too long. The more time people have to know about a reorganization and speculate, the more the leader lets it become about politics instead of organizational resources.

The key is to depoliticize and depersonalize it into a mechanical reorganization of skills. It's about what the organization needs. It's about sets of resources with skills that need to be arranged. Do it quickly, concisely, impersonally and apolitically. People should have a day to hear about it and then get the information. Specifically address the organization's inclination to make it personal. Say, "Do not allow yourselves the luxury of interpreting this politically. I do not intend it that way."

Results is another loaded area. How should a leader communicate results? Results, whether financial or operating results, are about the achievement of promised goals. The inclination for organizations is to interpret them as who wins and who loses. CIOs who issue a lot of blame cause people to cover up things they believe they will be personally blamed for. The medicine for that is to separate individual performance from the analysis of results around operating goals. Look at operating goals more diagnostically -- what went wrong, as opposed to who did something.