„‚ CONDITIONS THAT HINDER EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION

perspective, and she wanted both managerial and nonmanagerial employees to provide
clients with a more integrated set of services.
In a series of meetings with employees, Karen began espousing the organization’s
mission and her strategies for achieving that mission. These meetings were well received
and useful. But later, in subsequent meetings and interactions, Karen found that many
employees were still thinking and working in the old ways.
Survey Development
We began to work with Karen to develop a survey that would clarify how people were
interpreting the mission statement and translating it into action. Our first task was to
identify activities that were general enough to be relevant to most employees, but
specific enough to be easily identified and related to everyday work experience. We
used information from our previous interviews with employees to generate a
representative sample of activities.
Then we worked with Karen to revise and refine the list. We made an effort to
include activities that varied in their consistency with and support of Karen’s strategies.
Some activities represented behaviors that Karen wanted to see more widely adopted,
while other activities represented older practices that Karen wished to deemphasize.
We decided that respondents would be asked two questions with regard to each
activity:
■ How is the activity currently valued in the organization?
■ How should the activity be valued in the organization?
Survey Administration
We had asked Karen to complete the survey first, as we intended to use her value scores
for comparison to those of other groups and levels in the organization.
Subsequently, everyone in the organization was given an opportunity to complete
the survey. Participation was voluntary, and responses were kept confidential. The
response rate was close to 90 percent.
After the surveys were completed, we were able to show Karen how well (or how
poorly) her message was getting across. We broke out the data according to levels of the
organization and departments. What we discovered was that, not surprisingly, the
managers who reported directly to Karen were more in alignment with her values than
were front-line employees. However, we also found several important activities for
which there were dramatic differences between Karen’s value scores and those of her
top managers. As a result of our analysis, Karen knew which parts of her message she
needed to emphasize and with which groups.
As can be seen in Table 1, Karen placed very little value on consistency with past
practices and methods, whereas her managers placed somewhat greater value on
consistency and the staff (nonmanagerial employees) highly valued consistency. Karen
showed that she highly valued risk taking, whereas her managers and staff were far more
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