THE SIX VITAL PRINCIPLES OF INTERNAL COMMUNICATION

In any modern organisation, the power relationship of the executive and management team vis vis the rest of the company has changed radically in recent years.

Many people argue that that the primary responsibility of the boss or bosses is to shareholders and owners.

And that job is important, no doubt. But if a happy and productive group of employees is the best possible way to ensure a viable and growing return on investment, then an executive's first priority, logically, must be to create the environment that will deliver that type of workforce.

"How?" is the question.

RE-THINKING THE BOSS'S ROLE

It is a clich to point out that just as any chain is only as strong as its weakest link, so any organisation is only as strong as the motivation and skills of its entire range of employees.

So in smart organisations today, executives are not appointed to "rule the roost", but to guide and advise those around them and that means looking both up and down the corporate ladder.

Today, executives are making decisions and taking actions, in effect, as "ruling delegates" of the company's entire staff - on their behalf, and in pursuit of greater harmony, efficiency and productivity.

If one accepts that this is a healthy and effective model of modern corporate leadership, then it also follows that staff have an innate right - a need, in fact - to understand the activities of the executive, and in detail if they so desire.

THE PRINCIPLE OF TRANSPARENCY

To achieve this, executives must thoroughly adopt a mindset that a matter is available to all to know, unless there are strong reasons of legality or personal confidence why that should not be so.

This inevitably produces a markedly different result to the alternative mindset, which is, of course, that everything is innately confidential unless an argument is made that it should be public.

This extends to matters that appear that they should be confidential, but in reality need not be.

Many matters are held tightly to the chest when in reality good things would result from them being made public at an early stage, and more thoroughly. The free flow of ideas, suggestions, warnings and information is enhanced by a reduction in confidentiality.

That is why democracies, for all their faults, operate more efficiently that totalitarian states, and are inevitably more stable in the long term.

But the assumption that no-one

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