Battle Plan Overview

Gavin-Hodges Black Swan Battle Plan for Workforce Communicators—Pat Your Head, Rub Your Tummy and Whistle Through the Leadership Graveyard guides current and future workforce communicators through how to become organizational change agents and gain the credibility needed to counsel operating management away from high-level dumb messaging. They effectively learn to ‘war’ against remaining pigeon-holed by operating management that devalues them merely as internal writers and editors who transmit management-ordered messages. They are prepared to meet the internal skirmishes that redefine their roles into communication management process counselors who lead the process of focusing internal organizational messaging on what operating management needs workers “to do” instead of their  often-prevailing practice of merely wanting employees “to know” information. Specifically, workforce communicators learn to lead organizational management away from “telling employees” non-actionable information and into the practice of pre-thinking and pre-defining messaging about exactly what it wants workers to do, not to do, or to accept as a result of specific management decisions. Workforce communication professionals are presented not only with how to be smarter than their leaders about workforce communication management but also with how to be brave when they offer, their likely doubting operating managers, a break-through workforce communication management decision process for pre-defining operations-focused, employee behavior-influencing messaging. The process is The Values/Communication Actions Matrix and The Adverse  Consequences Evaluation model.

The values-anchored communication decision Matrix process initially was developed and used to transform groups of  hourly workers into their respective manufacturing location’s employee communicator. The process specifically anchors to an organization’s stated values and management’s operating needs. It has been presented to hundreds of communication practitioners and operating management teams across the U.S., Canada and in Australia. 

Long before Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s popular book, The Black Swan: The impact of the highly improbable, the battle plan author himself was serendipitously transformed into a Black Swan workforce communication practitioner who shifted in his job from telling to influencing. Whether he had been as green as Kermit the Frog, instead of African-American, his personal professional workforce communication transformation still could have matched Taleb’s future criteria for a black swan event. He was rare and unexpected. And it was even more improbable that he would become an international workforce communication management trainer-consultant. He wants readers to believe that his unexpected success is not improbable for themselves. 

The book’s voice is that of a personal coach with a sense of humor that ranges from gentle, to in-your-face, to laugh-out-loud, as it urges workforce communicators to learn to help organizational leaders understand workforce communication as a management process. 

The ‘battle plan’ encourages those deploying it to not be afraid to grasp Taleb’s rational thinking about the “impact of the highly improbable.”  

In addition to the decision Matrix, the book defines specific readiness requirements that workforce communicators need to gain sustainable credibility among operating managers who “get their hands dirty” in the trenches with employees. 

Those readiness requirements include organizational strategic knowledge, management leadership ability and communication management operational know-how. The book’s strategic and leadership readiness coaching prepares the workforce communicator to boldly activate a personal black swan battle plan, to stay alert and carefully use The Adverse Consequences Evaluation model. They also are coached how to maintain professional bravery when they come under fire from a graveyard of inexperienced, disbelieving operating managers. They learn,  when necessary, to silently, mentally invoke the multidextrous kindergarten game of ‘pat-rub-whistle.’

In tandem with strategic readiness, workforce communicators are coached to be personally responsible for deciding whether their organization’s workforce communication management process needs to morph into a more desirable state. They learn that the decision to move their organization’s internal communication process forward means learning to give pitch-perfect counsel with analytical tools and to say: “No, but…” to all management levels. 

 Although the book is specifically designed to provide workforce communication practitioners with how-to rationale ammunition to lead the organizational communication management process and be brave enough to go toe-to-toe with traditional fixed-belief operating managers, it also is designed to offer a value-adding perspective of workforce communication management for organizational leaders at all levels and disabuse them of any beliefs that workforce communication is merely a low, value-adding internal public relations activity. 

The book also offers C-suite managers specific expectations of “good communication with workers” as they “unfreeze the middle” and push down operations command-and-control to frontline managers.

 No organization, of any size, can pretend to have real, value-adding communication with its workforce unless there is a message exchange process anchored to its core values that is practiced by all organizational leaders from the C-suite down to first-line supervisors.

The Values/Communication Actions Matrix and The Adverse  Consequences Evaluation model process will be of special interest to organizations that are trying to “unfreeze the middle” and push down operations command-and-control to frontline managers from the C-suite, where the philosophy and belief in workforce communication is espoused and professed whether understood, or not, as value adding.

The final section presents workforce communicators with Prequel: A Black Swan Communicator Flightpath. It includes “war stories” from some of the author’s personal career bumps and bruises along the way to success. They may be “hand-holding” instructive for practitioners in transition.