Undercover Boss is the first in a series of documentaries about CEOs who want to know what their employees really think about them and their company.  In the first segment, a beard and workers’ protective suit allows Stephen Martin, the 43-year-old CEO of the Clugston Group, to live on the front lines for ten days.  It was produced by Channel 4 in the UK, a commercially funded public broadcaster.

I found out about the series through a great article by Stefan Stern in Financial Times.  Mr. Stern describes a key dilemma faced by many chief executives: “Employee attitude surveys, brown bag lunches, focus groups, informal chats: managers try quite hard to find out what their staff are thinking. But the results are mixed at best. What are your staff thinking? Admit it – you don’t really know.” 

You can add town hall meetings where questions are often planted and staging is more reminiscent of a rock-star spectacle than a genuine dialogue.  And let’s not forget emails from the CEO. The readership of those decreases as you move down the organization.  Yes, the rate of opening the email may be 96 percent but that statistic is as meaningless as the number of hits on your website. Remember when MBWA (Management By Walking Around) was all the rage?  Nice, but they often look like a royal family walkabout.  A walkabout also happens to be a purported Australian aboriginal ritual of manhood. You may argue that all of these attempts at a dialogue are better than nothing and I would have agreed with you three years ago.  Today, they remind me more of a definition of insanity – doing the same stuff over and over, expecting different results.

Mr. Martin, the undercover boss, learned a few interesting things. According to Personneltoday.com, “Martin said he was able to get an ‘unfiltered view’ of how his staff saw the company and the issues they were concerned about, identifying real problems with communication and skills.”  And it gets better, or worse, if you’re doing executive communications for Mr. Martin. One of the biggest problems he identified was “his regular e-mail communication and notices to staff about developments within the business were not getting through to many of those working on the construction sites.”

“I thought I was getting my message out there about what we were doing, but it became clear that workers on site were not getting that message because we were not talking to them in a format or language they wanted,” Mr. Martin said.

According to Personneltoday.com, Martin is trying to overcome these problems by setting up teams consisting of labourers, supervisors and managers who meet frequently to discuss developments in the workplace.

The solution, by mixing different layers of organization, is bound to improve the exchange of ideas.  But it’s tough. Mr. Martin and other CEOs are trying to overcome barriers to communications erected by a command-and-control management and communications structure we’ve had for 150 years, originally patterned on the old Prussian army.  The attempt may get rid of some of the filters that exist between each layer, but will not provide that “unfiltered view” acquired by going undercover.  Mr. Martin may also want to consider adding another tool – social media. This would be a more interactive and personal way to communicate with his organization compared to traditional broadcast tools like email.

Channel 4 will broadcast Undercover Boss in two weeks.  CBS is planning to broadcast “the new reality series” later this year.

©2012 AlfadogPR Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

I am not one of those people who think that PR can do just about anything for a company’s reputation. Even when a business client is thrust into a death spiral, you’re far more productive spinning yarn than coming up with countless euphemisms for lay-offs, restructuring and re-whatever. But, I have been fascinated by (and how can I put this mildly) an appalling lack of common sense demonstrated by the pretty unusual PR contortions of some companies recently while begging for taxpayers’ money.

According to a Bloomberg story this week, Citigroup Inc. may spend about $10 million (US) on new offices for Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit and his lieutenants, after the U.S. government injected $45 billion of cash into the bank.  You may remember another story on ABC News about the CEOs of the three biggest US car manufacturers arriving in Washington in executive jets to plead for public funds. “Rick Wagoner flew in GM’s $36 million luxury aircraft to tell members of Congress that the company is burning through cash, asking for $10-12 billion for GM alone.”

Let’s get this part right. I don’t know if the PR people at Citigroup or the Big Three warned their CEOs that they are about to do something they shouldn’t. If they did or didn’t, the outcome was exactly the same. Which brings me to this conclusion: there is something terribly wrong with the executive communications function these days. 

I’ve worked with many CEOs and found that they come in two varieties. The first is a CEO that is acutely aware that he or she needs the advice and expertise of PR professionals to prep them for interactions with the media and the public. If they pick the right PR professionals they can help foresee the unthinkable and avoid minefields beyond anybody’s control. How? Because they know what leads to a negative story, they know when executives are taking steps that will lead to a terrible outcome. The second variety is a CEO as a command-and-control guy. My mentor gave me this advice about the latter kind: “Remember that when he is appointed he thinks he sits on the right side of god. Six months later, he thinks he’s god.”

Unfortunately, this led to the creation of two kinds of executive communications help. The first was the ultimate professional, capable of influencing decisions that prevented disasters. The second was the maître d’ kind, always agreeing with the boss, because god was always right.

The unbelievable period of growth from the early 1950s to last September was likely the major culprit in devaluating the executive communications function.  When the going is good, it’s hard to go wrong. Many executives began to treat communications the same way as day traders played the market in the early part of the tech bubble – any stock pick was a winner – it didn’t take any experience or intelligence to make the right choice.

Now, everything has changed. Chief executives and their boards need to take a fresh look at whom they need to hire into the executive communications function to help them pull through this recession. They have to hire professionals that will guide them through the minefields of the new world, because it doesn’t look like the recession will be over any time soon and they never had taxpayers as their major shareholders.

©2012 AlfadogPR Inc.. All Rights Reserved.