The OPPORTUNITY is Now.

How many communication professionals will tell you, in a moment of candor, that when it comes to their senior management team they feel like the family wallflower?

"Aren't they the folks who put out the employee newsletter?" is an all-too-typical response by senior managers when asked what their communication department does.

"How can I get more respect and acknowledgment than that?" one might ask, "To say nothing of plying a more central role in the company? Especially when communication seems to be the last thing on the CEO's mind! Right?"

Actually, that's quite wrong.

Jim Shaffer, a principal of Towers Perrin, reports that his firm's studies of company communication practices repeatedly show that CEOs are placing increasing importance on communication. Indeed, in a sense they want the same thing their communication professionals do: for the company to have a dynamic, robust communication culture.

"I want to take communication off the table as a barrier to company performance," remarked one CEO in a recent Towers Perrin study. Another had a specific communication challenge: "I need help getting my leadership team on the same page." A third had a wide-open charter for the company communication department: "I want them coming to me and suggesting new ideas for improving people performance -- helping me get people on board and committed. I'm not looking for a media solution. I'm looking for a systematic, integrated communication approach that will drive results."

"There are many, many opportunities for communication professionals to step up and become major players in their organizations," concludes Shaffer. "The door is wide open right now."

The problem -- indeed, the irony -- is that despite the importance CEOs place on communication in their organizations, they don't think their communication people are equipped to solve them.

They were quite blunt about this deficiency in the Towers Perrin survey: "They don't understand our business," said one CEO. "They don't worry about what I worry about," said another. "Why would I go to them for advice when our interests are so different?"

The CEO who wanted help getting his leadership team on the same page said his communication people "don't seem qualified to help me with this." The one who wanted to take communication off the table as a barrier to performance was more blunt. "They wouldn't have the slightest idea how to help me with that. My guess is that they'd want to start another intranet or newsletter." What about the one with the wide-open charter for his communication people? "When I've tried to tell them what I want, I just get vacant stares. They act like deer caught in headlights."

Are the CEOs being too harsh? Data from the same group of studies appear to back them up. One survey rated each typical internal communication effort -- such as employee publications, videos, electronic communication, employee feedback systems, and so forth (15 in all) -- in two areas: importance to the organization and effectiveness in getting its message across.

On a scale of one to five, not one of the 15 managed to score high (four or better) in both categories. The few communication efforts that rated high in importance -- like employee education and training or senior management communication -- rated low in effectiveness. Conversely, the efforts that were rated high in effectiveness, such as bulletin board materials, were not considered very important. One word seems to sum up all these efforts: irrelevant.

The picture that emerges of communication functions in companies today is this: A big role is waiting for them in their organizations, but they must recast themselves if they want to play it.

Cast in the Role

How can communication professionals equip themselves to play a big role?

The problem, very often, is that communicators come not from a business background, but from a media or journalism, or perhaps public relations, background. As a result, they've learned to view their roles as providers of media technology to others in the organization who have a message to get out. They ask, what is the best way to convey someone's idea?

Instead they should be asking, which ideas should be disseminated, and to whom? They should, in other words, accept the blunt-spoken CEO's implicit challenge -- to start worrying about what he worries about. Communication managers may feel they're not up to the task, either by temperament or training. But that's not necessarily the case.

Learn the Background

Certainly you don't need an MBA to be a skilled, strategic business thinker -- as Bill Gates, Herb Kelleher, Michael Dell, Jack Welch and a host of other great CEOs all attest. Indeed, one respected management pundit, Henry Mintzberg, thinks there's a negative correlation between MBA training and executive skill.

To create a more strategic outlook, Shaffer recommends that you put less emphasis on your professional communication reading and start reading books and articles on business management (a short list is included at the end of this article). Start with the basics. Learn to read the company financial statements: the balance sheet, the income statement, and the cash flow statement. You don't need a fat, dry textbook to learn this. I've gotten two fliers in the mail in the last couple of weeks -- one from the local university's business school and the other from Dun & Bradstreet -- advertising one- and two-day courses on how to read and interpret a company's financials.

Or you can always just pick up a thin, to-the-point book on the subject. If your company is publicly traded, try "One Up on Wall Street" by legendary investor Peter Lynch. If you really want to know what your CEO thinks is important, find out what a great and influential investor thinks is important! It's a fast and easy read and includes a couple of chapters on understanding the financials.

Even more important, start educating yourself on your particular company's strategy and operations. Start with its annual reports, quarterly reports, proxy statements and other investor relations material -- many of which you may have helped prepare! Study these not for style or presentation, but for substance. Read what the investment community and analysts are saying about your firm. Then immerse yourself in the strategy and performance issues occupying senior management.

Ask and start answering questions such as, what are we trying to do as a business? What are our two or three most important goals right now? How do we expect to achieve them? What measures are we using to judge this? And as you go along, start thinking less about deadlines and "getting the message out" and more about what you can do to help the company achieve its strategic and performance goals.

High Performance Practices Reap the Rewards

If you're concerned that after all the boning up you do on management and strategy, you'll find that communication is irrelevant or peripheral to your company s performance, rest assured -- nothing could be further from the truth.

Here's why.

The million-dollar question for any business can more or less be boiled down to this: What actions must we take to create the strategic and financial results we want?

Forests of trees and seas of ink have been spent trying to answer that question over the years. Much of it wasted, but there have been some breakthroughs. One of the most important, and this occurred in just the last eight or nine years or so, has been the studies of the so-called "High Performance" or "High Commitment" work place.

Many of these studies have been quite rigorous, well designed and well controlled. And they've shown that time and again, in industry after industry from high-tech to mid-tech to low, instilling high performance work practices has a substantial effect on company performance -- improving it in the range of 30 to 40 percent and more. (A superb summary of these studies is contained in chapter two of Jeffrey Pfeffer's book "The Human Equation.")

Performance improvements occur across a wide array of measures as well, from product quality to revenue to productivity to profit margins and even stock price. One famous study of automobile manufacturing, for example, found that plants that adopt high performance work practices have more than 40 percent higher productivity and almost 50 percent better productivity. Another in the semiconductor industry found that the three critical indicators of performance of chip fabrication (defect density, line yield and cycle time) all improved radically -- from 36 to 50 percent -- in plants that adopted high performance work practices.

A well-designed, multi-industry analysis of the financial effect of high commitment work practices by Mark Huselid of Rutgers University shows an average increase of U.S. $27,000 in firm sales per employee, $3,800 in profit per employee, and $18,600 in firm market value per employee.

Thus the effect of high performance work practices on company performance is increasingly clear. What exactly are these practices, and what do they have to do with communication?

Communication and the High Performance Workplace

High performance organizations are distinguished by several factors, such as selective hiring practices, self-managed teams, decentralized organizations, generous compensation based on organizational performance and reduced status distinctions.

In my own book, "Mavericks in the Workplace," I point out that high performance workplaces reflect the freedom and dynamism of U.S. society and are therefore able to spawn the same economic creativity and entrepreneurism that society at large does so well.

Of the factors generally recognized as essential to these organizations, two directly involve communication. High performance workplaces:

* emphasize training and education of employees

* have extensive sharing of financial and performance information throughout the organization.

Take time to read up on these and you'll gain substantial insight for accepting your CEO's challenge to take a more strategic view of your organization. And you'll also have two important areas you can address in which your efforts to help improve company performance.

Expand Your Role

Now that you have both the background to be a strategist for your organization and you know the elements required to become a high performing one, further expand your role. Following are some suggestions and examples of how other communicators did it.

* Educate Your Staff

You've educated yourself on management and strategy. Now educate your staff.

This is what communication leaders at Mayo Clinic did recently, prompted by disruptions in the health care industry (even with its gold-plated reputation, the Mayo Clinic is subject to the same forces that disrupt other organizations).

The turmoil in the industry was being felt in the Mayo communication office, where an unsettling string of resignations led to a review of its mission and function. The review uncovered significant disconnections between the clinic's communication activities and its overall strategy.

Mayo's communication office needed to recast its role in the clinic, as Chris Gade, a team leader in the office, explains. "We needed to change our role from one of providing traditional media production to one that focused on helping the clinic improve its services."

This effort included substantial education of communication team members in "the business of the clinic." Experts within the clinic were brought in to give presentations on strategic issues. Outside experts were also brought in to discuss industry issues. The staff began reading books, joining associations and attending conferences -- all designed to give them greater insight into the strategic and operational challenges confronting the clinic.

"Increasingly," says Gade, "we look at ourselves as consultants, business problem solvers, and facilitators of internal relationships. Ultimately, we're here to further the mission of the clinic."

* Outsource like Crazy

"Being internal consultants sounds great in theory," you might say, "but where do we find the time for all this? We still have newsletters to get out, videos to put together, speeches and annual reports to write."

The answer is to outsource like crazy. Steve Biederman, Motorola's VP of communication, outsources a number of traditional communication functions, including writing and video production, to free up his staff to concentrate on strategic activities.

For every communication effort, ask, how relevant is this to helping employees contribute to business performance? Are we presenting them information that's "interesting" in some ill-defined sense, or just fashionable? Or are we showing people how to do their jobs better today and tomorrow?

The best pure example of strategic communication is the "huddle" CEO Jack Stack leads at Springfield Remanufacturing Company (SRC) every week. Stack, his senior management team, and perhaps 40 to 50 managers, supervisors and team leaders from throughout the company go over company financials.

Stack will start with a brief overview of which numbers are critical. Then he engages in a substantive, detailed discussion with people around the room on what is to be done to improve the numbers, resulting in a clear action plan for people to walk out of the room with. That's communication!

* Now Educate the Organization

The fact that such a broad array of managers and team leaders at SRC can discuss the financials with their CEO is a remarkable achievement in itself -- and a challenge that should have a communication professional's mouth watering.

If you've taken the time to immerse yourself and your staff in your company's financials, why not do the same for your company's employees? What could have more strategic potential than to teach a broad array of employees to understand -- and eventually, to influence -- the numbers that senior management worry about every day?

William G. Lee is principal of William G. Lee & Associates, Dallas, Texas.

Suggested Reading

Collins, James C., and Jerry I. Porras, "Built To Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies," New York, HarperBusiness, 1994.

Drucker, Peter, "Innovation and Entrepreneurship," New York, Perennial, 1985.

Handy, Charles, "The Age of Paradox," Boston, Harvard Business School Press, 1994.

Kotter, John P., and James B. Heskett, "Corporate Culture and Performance," New York, The Free Press, 1992.

Lee, William G., "Mavericks in the Workplace: Harnessing the Genius of American Workers," New York, Oxford University Press, 1998.

Levering, Robert and Milton Moskowitz, "The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America," Revised Edition, New York, Plume, 1994.

Lynch, Peter, "One Up on Wall Street," New York, Penguin, 1990.

Pfeffer, Jeffrey, "The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First," Boston, Harvard Business School Press, 1998.

Semler, Ricardo, "Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace," New York, Warner Books, 1993.