When we think of leadership communication most organizations focus on information tools. These include intranet sites, staff magazines, CEO blog, Town Hall meetings and so on. Whilst all these employee communication methods are to be applauded, they inform employees about what is going on. To truly engage employees in the process of change, for instance, a merger or acquisition, a re-organization, financial results or corporate social responsibility, leadership communication methods need to be designed to actively engage employees.

Employee engagement should always result in some positive change of behaviour which will then lead to the achievement of organizational goals. Just distributing information by any of the above methods will not achieve the change in employee behaviour and organizational outcomes you are looking for.

These following 5 tips illustrate how you can ensure leadership communication will achieve desired business outcomes.

1. The first tip is to establish whether the tools and methods you are currently using as a leader to communicate with employees are engagement strategies or information tools. So gather all the tools used and identify all the methods used, their frequency, intended audience, whether they are one way or two way communication vehicles and review the key messages.

2. The second tip is important because your ultimate aim as a leader has to be to create the “Aha Moment” for employees. The “Aha Moment” is based on information that challenges the employee’s belief about an aspect of the business. The information that suddenly helps employees say, “Now it makes sense”, “Now I understand”, “Now I can do something about it”. Once you know what the “Aha Moment” is this will form your key message and the basis of your design of your employee communication strategy.

3. Step three is all about how we find out what will create the “Aha!” moment for employees. This step is all about research and the best research to use is focus groups. What focus groups allow you to do is to lead discussion on a particular issue and probe to find out exactly what employees think about a particular topic. It helps if you have a particular issue so you ask what employees may think that clients or customers of your products or services think and then you tell them what your customer research has actually found. This helps change the paradigm in employees thinking and also gives you a measure how extensive your transformational leadership approach needs to be.

The use of focus groups is useful as they allow issues to be discussed further and often they reveal issues or ideas which you would not have considered prior to the group session. I recommend that focus groups are generally held for one and a half hours duration and in groups with no more than 8 – 10 participants. The role of the facilitator is to lead the discussion but leave the actual dialogue to the participants, and then to steer them back to the main issue if employees have gone off on a tangent or to ensure that all the topics that you need to cover within the allocated timeframe are covered. The benefits of a well facilitated focus group are that they will identify the key messages for your leadership communication strategies as they relate to a particular business issue.

4. In this fourth step you gather the information sourced from the focus group feedback. The key data you are looking for is what the opinions are of employees about a particular topic or issue that directly relates to the business issue at hand. Then if it is based on false information or assumptions you find the factual data to refute this and then present it in such a way that employees are engaged and understand the basis for change.

5. The fifth step is to take the key information that you have gathered from the focus groups and then identify a business issue that you feel certain your transformational leadership strategies can impact. The advantage is that by making use of that information you are then able to create a personalized leadership communication approach that will be measured against business results.

The outcome is that with all this information you are then in a position to design leadership communication strategies that will engage employees around the one key business message. Most of these employee engagement strategies will mean that employees will be actively involved in some aspect of change through direct participation. As always with all change management strategies these engagement techniques will then be supported by communication information tools.

For more information make sure you obtain our excellent free report on how to design transformational leadership communication strategies.