Do your actions match your words?

Communication is one of the most powerful tools a manager has to indicate what's important to her team.  However, what we often miss is that communication takes several forms.  We communicate to those around us with our words of course, but also with our body language, where we spend our time, what we emphasize and what we ignore.  We also communicate through the ways we compensate, motivate and measure the people who work for us.

My beef today is with managers and senior executives who say a certain topic or initiative is "important" but then don't support that assertion by changing the way they work, where they spend their time or how they compensate the people around them.  What got me started on this was a survey we conducted of our Getting Things Done Outlook Add-In customers.  In the survey we asked questions about the Add-In, and also gathered some information about innovation initiatives.

We received over 667 responses, and those responses represented a wide range of users throughout the US and over 30 countries.  What was confirmed in our survey based on other data we'd seen is that most firms are beginning to place a real verbal emphasis on innovation.  Over 90% of our respondents felt that innovation was important in their industry and necessary for their firm's long term success.

Here's the kicker though - only 38% of the respondents indicated that their firm had metrics around innovation, and only 25% of the respondents indicated that their firm had standard processes and procedures to sustain innovation.  So, while the executives are talking about the importance of innovation, they aren't measuring how well the firm is doing by building specific goals and metrics, and they aren't moving very quickly to put standard processes and procedures in place.  There's a very significant gap between the firms that think innovation is critical to success and those that have actually started measuring and managing their innovation initiatives.

People within those businesses understand what's happening.  In many businesses, the executives are paying "lip service" to innovation without changing the culture, the compensation or the processes internal to the business.  Individuals within those businesses will very quickly understand that no real change will occur in the business to sponsor innovation, and will go back to doing their everyday jobs.

Whether it's an innovation initiative or just trying to make your team more productive, do your actions match your words?  In any team, you can change behavior more by the way you compensate people and the way you spend your time than you can through verbal communication.  To truly change the culture, you should use all of these tools at your disposal, and use them consistently over time.