Roland L. Draughon

Gavin-Hodges Associates
Workforce Communication Process Trainer-Consultant
www.RolandDraughonCommunicator.com

Roland’s 40-year career spans each side of Y2K and has included work with professional workforce communicators, manufacturing management teams as well as non-professional manufacturing “site workforce communicator draftees.”

 He has worked across the U.S., Canada and in Australia. The International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) awarded him a Gold Quill of Excellence for Workforce Communication Training and named him an IABC “Designated Speaker.” His memberships have included IABC, Council of Workforce Communication Management, American Society for Training and Development and the American Management Association.

After a career start as a reporter/features writer for The Associated Press, he served more than 15 years on U.S. corporate employee communication staffs, including a 12-year stint with Scott Paper Company, at that time a 30,000-employee consumer products manufacturer in the U.S. and 22 foreign countries. Without making on-the-job noise, he maneuvered some managements into workforce messaging to influence desired employee behaviors and away from their habit of  messaging “so that everybody knows.”

His book, Black Swan Battle Plan for Workforce Communicators—Pat Your Head, Rub Your Tummy and Whistle Through the Leadership Graveyard paces current and future professional workforce communicators through discovery of a non-fatal career change path. It offers a way to escape the traditional, devalued role assigned to them by operating management. It dares them to change their organizational profile in the undeclared “war” with management, reinvent themselves as change agents and insert themselves into operating management. They are coached in how to upgrade their organizational strategic, leadership and operational knowledge. Additionally, they are encouraged to embrace a healthy disregard for the impossible as they change themselves into communication management process thinkers and counselors. At the same time, his book offers today’s forward-thinking operating managers a break-through communication decision process that they can use with their communication professionals to pre-define operations-anchored, employee behavior-influencing, bottom-line impacting message exchanges. The communication decision process is The Values/Communication Actions Matrix and The Adverse Consequences Evaluation model.

Roland’s book tags Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s popular book, The Black Swan: The impact of the highly improbable” merely as a reference for readers. Although Taleb was interested in the impacts of random, difficult-to-predict events, Roland point his readers to Taleb’s improbability factor and dares long-ignored staff workforce communicators to prepare themselves to specifically link their expertise to the managerial levels who “get their hands dirty” and help those managers reinvent their  historically low-valued assumptions about the bottom-line benefit of communicating with employees. His book sets the premise that staff workforce communication professionals must learn to be smarter than their leaders about workforce communication management.

His highly rated international conference presentations have included:

“How to rope and ride the three-legged career monster that never sleeps”

“Piano lessons for 1,000-pound gorillas: how to help your managers tap internal workforce communication’s bottom-line value”

“Contracting a murder of anti-champions: designing workforce communication strategies that steer organizational direction” and,

“Pat Your Head, Rub Your Tummy and Whistle Through the Leadership Graveyard.” 

“Workforce communicators across the world,” he says, “gripe with the same woe-unto-me complaint about the challenges of not being asked or heard by operating management. My book provides them with the ammunition to defend the advice and counsel that they want to give to their leaders and operating management teams.

“Many, if not most, workforce communication practitioners in the U.S. are female,” he adds. “Few in the U.S. are people of color. Those professional demographics generate an additional assertiveness challenge in navigating and surviving in the role.”