It does matter.

It does matter: I must take exception to the central message of TJ and Sandar Larkin's recent CW article, "Mission Impossible: Increasing Employee Trust in Your CEO" [January-February 2006]: that CEO communication with employees is overrated and should be subsidiary to top dogs' contact with external stakeholders. They suggest "the difference is in the numbers," noting that CEOs can reach personally a substantially higher percentage of members of typically smaller outside groups than they can their own employees. The consultants conclude that a trusting relationship with "25 or 30 randomly selected employees among tens of thousands doesn't matter."

Oh, but it does matter. In fact, it matters a lot--for reasons that speak to the power of the CEO's role and the nature of how word spreads in an organization.

My contrariness springs from the research I and others conducted during the late '80s and '90s, most of which has appeared in journals, including CW, and my book Top Dog [McGraw-Hill, 1995]. Interestingly, the Larkins offer several reasons why I believe their argument falls short of convincing, but unfortunately they dismiss them out of hand. For instance, while acknowledging that CEOs rely on mass forms of communicating with employees, such as town hall meetings, site visits, voice mail, blogs and the like, they brush them aside as too "formal and public," and incapable of fostering trust with larger audiences. Really? That might be true if CEOs only read scripts mannequin-like. However, what a CEO says and how he or she says it, as well as how a medium is fitted to a leader's personality, can go a long way toward "simulating" personalized communication.

Additionally, there is considerable power in small numbers--if the numbers are chosen purposefully. What the Larkins discount is the potential influence certain employee-opinion leaders (not randomly chosen workers) can have on others who look to them for guidance. In research parlance, this is known as the "two-step flow theory of communication"; it suggests that the initial message goes to key influentials who then pass it

on, endorsing it, presumably, to the many. Today, this spillover effect is called buzz. We all know an organization's informal communication network (the ol' grapevine) moves information at the speed of light, and it never sleeps.

The Larkins and I do agree on one thing: The CEO's communication role should be selective, reserved for particular, significant topics/issues. Realistically, how can it be anything else? Where we differ, though, is that Mr. and Ms. Larkin again suggest it "doesn't matter [italics added] if employees trust" the CEO, only that they trust the organization will implement the CEO's plan, and besides, they say, it's impossible to increase CEO trust no matter what you do. My counterargument is that much, if not most, of employees' trust in their organization streams from their belief in the head honcho. To most workers (certainly in large organizations), the CEO is the organization--actually, perceptually and symbolically.

If you accept the assumptions that CEO communication with employees and employees' trust in the CEO don't matter, then your mission probably is "impossible." However, if you assume the influential nature of human behavior, then your mission, while never easy, will be optimistically "possible."

--J. David Pincus, Ph.D., APR 

Visiting professor and former MBA program director,

Sam M. Walton College of Business,

University of Arkansas, Fayetteville