The more I talk about the communication role of senior leaders during times of organizational change, the more supporting evidence I get. Take, for instance, the following excerpt from a book called “Organizational Surveys” (1996, Jossey-Bass). William A. Schiemann penned Chapter 4, “Driving Change Through Surveys: Aligning Employees, Customers, and Other Key Stakeholders.” He wrote,

From my familiarity with many firms who have conducted linkage studies, i have found that one of the best predictors of financial and operating performance is employee rating of management capability, followed closely by employee perceptions of supervisory support and capability. Over the years, I have come to believe that if I could measure only one dimension, it would be employee ratings of management. Those ratings often account for the most variance in customer and financial performance.

The italics are Schiemann’s, not mine. The excerpt appeared in my fax machine courtesy of Angela Sinickas, one of the leading thinkers in terms of employee communication measurement. Angela appended the paragraph with this note: “And employees can’t rate leaders highly, or even at all, if there’s no communication between them.”

To underscore the point, Angela also sent along the results of some research she conducted for a client. In the study, Angela reported, “The greatest predictor of (the client’s) employees’ overall satisfaction with communication is how they feel about senior leaders’ communication behaviors, accounting for over one-third of the satisfaction.” Supervisors’ communication behavior and employees’ level of information each accounted for just over 20% of the variations in overall satisfaction.

In this study, Angela recommended that senior leaders focus on the communication behaviors with the highest inerpretational weights that were rated low by employees responding to the survey. These included…

• Senior leaders explain the reasons behind decisions
• Senior leaders clearlly explain the direction the company is heading
• Senior leaders keep employees informed about things we need to know

One other question was included in the study—“Senior leaders provide information that is believable.” In this case, employees were reasonably positive. The point, though, is that these behaviors are important to employees, despite assertions that senior executive communication is irrelevant, boring, and a waste of time as far as most front-line employees are concerned. Clearly, from the Towers Perrin research to Schiemann’s body of research to individual in-house studies, that’s simply not the case. When communicating to employees during change, supervisors are important but nothing is more important than the communication behaviors of senior leadership.

I’m open to more research, if you care to share it. And thanks to Angela for this round of evidence.