By Tony Samson
Big crowds filling up the stadium, the din of rhythmic chanting, and the sheer enthusiasm of urging a team to victory make up the cheering factor in an event, be it a competition or a rock concert. Can companies use cheering to help the team achieve targets like claiming back market share, raising customer care indices, and bringing up the bottom line numbers?
Can the organization raise its adrenaline level with a cheer rally?
The town hall meeting aims to achieve this feat of exhorting the troops to charge. It bonds the management team with its employees to achieve targets and crush the competition.
Employees are gathered together, in a big office conference room rather than an off-site venue which can be too expensive even with an exchange deal. The chief or a hired consultant, maybe foreign, leads the cheer rally. An evangelical kind of fervor can be employed to get the team behind a new initiative, say announcing a new management team — argh… here are your new saviors.
The pep rally is an approach borrowed from college sports. All the cheering and jeering effort hopes to inspire the team to do better when it hears people shouting and screaming at goals made, leads diminished, and opportunities missed by bad officiating. This faith in the fans’ role may be misplaced but does not seem to be challenged by the charged-up supporters who truly believe they make a difference in the outcome. Even the players thank their fans after a win.
This same conviction drives the urge for a corporate pep talk. It’s micro version is the personal pat on the back, the loyalty award, and even the warm greeting at the elevator — Hey, how’re you doing? The cheering effect rests on the conviction that the company is one team, and even the lowly employee has a stake in a successful corporate initiative about to be implemented, even if this was made without his inputs. (Yes, don’t we all love to fill up daily time sheets?)
This process of inclusion is called a buy-in. It’s an emotional investment in corporate goals by all the peasants in a big tent where they can even ask questions. The corporate town hall meeting is gaining popularity, even if it disrupts everyone’s schedule. While it’s a bit awkward to include actual cheers to get the adrenaline pumping, it is acceptable to invest the effort with a nice catchy slogan. A downsizing exercise can be promoted as “small is beautiful.”
It’s a challenge to convince CEOs to use the pep talk as a motivational tool. They prefer sending out e-mails which dispenses with the need to serve pizzas. With an e-mail blast, the sender does not need to see the audience’s body language or, worse, encounter a wave of coughing and washroom disappearances which are the equivalent of booing at unpleasant news and the one delivering it.
Difficult topics like bad numbers requiring the organization to redefine its priorities and scale back its operations are best sent out as e-mails which have the added advantage of not needing to have a quorum. In the never-off corporate culture, even those out of the office get to feel the ripples of anxiety wherever they are.
The pep rally has its variations. Not every meeting, after all, involves a corporate crisis. Sometimes there is good news to share like the company winning an award or the numbers breaking records. A small get-together, sometimes called coffee with the president, can be more acceptable to a CEO who prefers to speak softly, bringing along an associate he feels comfortable with to fill up the silences with comic relief when the conversation hits an air pocket. A small audience can also be pre-selected on the basis of its high obsequiousness index. The whiners who routinely question corporate directions need not be invited.
Should the position of Chief Cheering Officer (CCO) be established? Her functions will include organizing events and finding things to cheer about within a prescribed budget.
Or is cheering already part of the CEO’s functions? Being at the top of the pyramid gives the leader a unique perspective of where the company is going and what needs to be done to achieve its mission statement. On the other hand, having too much information can hold back his enthusiasm. After all, the CEO may need cheering up himself.
Tony Samson is Chairman and CEO, TOUCH xda.
