Communications training program: tactics, strategies, and building confidence

Communications Plan

Communications Training Program

One of the most challenging aspects of leadership is keeping employees engaged and experiencing ownership of their jobs. In defining a communications training program, the need for equipping managers with the skills necessary to excel as leaders who can keep motivation strong is addressed. The book Drive: The Surprising Truth of What Motivates Us (Pink, 2011) is an excellent book to base a communications training program on. Presented in this analysis are several reasons why this book is an excellent choice to build a communications training program around.

Creating and Sustaining Motivation

What makes Drive so compelling as a book to base a communications training program on is its orientation towards motivation as an intrinsic factor that can be nurtured and grown over time. A common criticism of this type of book is that it relies on pop psychology alone, and that in reality the motivating of employees and entire companies is exceptionally difficult and nearly impossible to sustain over time (Giancola, 2010). The argument continues that if it was really that easy to motivate others, more companies would be successful.

Dan Pink addresses this criticism throughout his book, pointing out that too many companies rely on extrinsic rewards that are increasingly irrelevant to professionals whose frame of reference is more on personal autonomy, mastery and purpose (Pink, 2011). This dichotomy of thinking in the book continues with the argument that the more non-routine the work including the need for more theoretical reasoning, the more important it is for an employee to have a very clear sense of autonomy in their work (Pink, 2011). Pink also argues that mastery of their subject area and the sense of purpose they have are also critically important. What makes the book so powerful is that Dan Pink has taken the time to research case studies showing the effects of autonomy, mastery and purpose on people's lives and in turn, across organizations and their financial performance (Pink, 2011).

The book shows that the carrots and sticks approach to defining rewards are outmoded, and that the majority of employees actually want to have a strong sense of accomplishment in their jobs. The book guides managers and leaders with a roadmap of how to shift the focus on rewards away from carrots and sticks (which is transactional leadership and only works in the short-term) to being true leaders and making motivation long-term through the use of autonomy, mastery and purpose. The book is in essence a roadmap for any manager or leader to progress from being an authoritarian or transactional manager to being transformational in their role (Giancola, 2010).

By far the most valuable aspects of the book however deal with how to define goals and achieve them with greater success. This aspect of the book is so motivating and universal in definition, anyone, from an entry-level employee to a senior executive, will find this content fascinating. Writing a presentation on these aspects of goal setting will make any communications plan highly effective and riveting because everyone can identify with the concept of setting and achieving challenging goals and objectives. Here are several of the key lessons learned from this section of the book that covers goal setting.

First, the emphasis on routine, non-interesting jobs requiring direction while the more interesting work that is not easily replicated requiring more self-direction pervades goal setting chapters. The point Dan Pink is making with this premise is that paying someone more for routine tasks will work up to a point. External compensation works up to a point, as do external rewards, until the work shifts and becomes more oriented towards abstract, complex and theoretically intensive work overall. At this point, the intrinsic factors of autonomy, mastery and purpose are critically important for motivating employees that are required to get non-routine, specialized tasks done (Pink, 2011).

Second, another excellent point of this book that is well-suited for a communications training program is the fact that just setting extrinsic rewards for complex tasks makes the reward, not the accomplishment and thoroughness of task completion, the focus. Placing a very high dollar figure on a complex task as a means to reward completion of it actually stops the full depth of creative problem solving that a person will put into a challenging assignment (p. 51). Dan Pink is basically saying that there comes a point in tasks that the employee must take ownership of the quality of the work and no amount of extrinsic motivations will work to drive quality and performance levels up. Instead he argues that the continual reinforcing of an employee's view of themselves as having a strong sense of mastery and purpose is critical, along with giving them autonomy to work as they need to in order to excel (Pink, 2011). He shows in example after example how this combination of factors is formidable as a foundation of internal motivation and the attainment of complex, challenging tasks.