For about 15 years now TJ Larkin has been travelling the world, writing books and lecturing at conferences offering business communicators the key message that “CEO communication to employees is fundamentally worthless”.
Now, when I first heard TJ enunciate this hypothesis many years ago, I had three insurmountable problems with it:
§ All the field research I’d done with employee groups as a communications consultant consistently showed employees nominating that they preferred to obtain information from immediate supervisors and CEOs somewhere in their top three preferences.
§ Any student of situational behaviour will tell you that where people prefer to source information will very much depend on the circumstances they’re in.
§ Hard and fast rules like “CEO communication to employees is fundamentally worthless” are themselves worthless since they deny the role of an overarching strategic approach to employee communications which, in itself, will have many different components.
A year ago, when he heard TJ Larkin speak at a conference in the US and TJ once again expounded on the worthlessness of CEO communications, American employee communications guru Shel Holtz decided enough was enough.
The entertaining – and important - sequel is on Shel’s web log. Begin with the original reaction here (remember, it’s a blog, so start at the bottom). Then move on to the next page of debate here.
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