helping a leadership team create a communication strategy to build stakeholder engagement

Industry: Engineering and technical services

Project: Aligning a leadership team’s communication approach

Challenge: Designing and delivering a workshop approach to help a senior leadership team to develop and align their communication approach, with the aim of building stakeholder engagement internally and externally

Type of service: Change communications consultancy, team coaching, workshop design and delivery

Client challenge

This team works as part of a large-scale UK organisation, delivering state-of-the-art engineering and technology projects. As part of a large-scale transformation, the leadership team wanted to showcase more about the benefits their team delivers, explaining and demonstrating their value to the rest of the business and, in turn, building pride within their own team.

Twist Consultants’ Solution

Working with the senior leadership team, Jo developed and delivered a two-day workshop programme.

Stage 1

The team were very proud of what they – and their wider team – were achieving and contributing to the wider organisation. They knew that communicating this story better would help get more support when they needed it and build understanding among their stakeholders.

Using feedback from both their own teams and customers, the first stage in the process was to explore and develop their mission and vision and then the messages they wanted to share.

Stage 2

In the second phase, the team considered their key stakeholders in depth and worked together to explore how their messages could be delivered in the most relevant way for these audiences. They then began to develop a plan to share these messages both inside their own team and across the wider organisation, including, for example, sharing regular news updates on the organisation intranet and holding stakeholder briefings.

““We genuinely understood the importance of getting better at comms and how to go about doing that. We’re really proud of what we do, and we wanted to make sure that people understood that and the benefit we bring. Those awaydays put comms higher on our agenda, as well as helping to create our messaging.”

— Senior Director

Three takeaways for change leadership teams

1. You may be brilliant at what you do, but you may need support in getting to get the ‘what’ and ‘why’ for your team. Work with someone who understands communication and will ask you the right questions so you can nail your ‘why’ and get to your ‘so what?’

2. Getting a consistent message across a team takes time – and trust – between you. You need to be prepared to invest time in it

3. Make sure that your whole team knows and understands your audiences really well. Working together to develop a stakeholder map is useful for this