Resume
Internal communications professional and subject matter expert with more than 30 years of hands-on and leadership experience.
Skilled in all areas of Internal/Employee Communications, transformational Change Management, department leadership, workforce engagement, policy development, project management, leadership coaching, collaborative technologies, enterprise risk management and communication strategy.
Quick Reference Guide
This laminated, multi-page Connections Quick Reference Guide was a highly successful part of the company-wide introduction of the Enterprise 2.0, collaborative platform.
With a goal of having the average employee reach minimum platform competency within the first 15 minutes of use, the Connections Quick Reference Guide was a centerpiece of the enterprise rollout of this new communications technology.
Unlike traditional pilot-model technology rollouts at Lowe’s, the Employee Communications and Change Management teams were challenged by the CEO and their Executive Steering Committee to introduce the Connections platform using an enterprise-wide “Full Cutover” process.
It Takes a Connected Enterprise to Make Work Simple
Short video clip produced to introduce the Enterprise 2.0 collaborative technology solution (Connections) at the introduction of the CEO's speech at the annual National Sales Meeting in Las Vegas, NV.
The clip also supported the Connections rollout event and was designed to play on enterprise digital signage, Business Telivision and the Lowe's Intranet.
Making Meaning: The Business of Understanding
Written at the request of a Fortune 100 company, this executive white paper presents the case for change modern Employee Communication teams and enterprises must address to ensure success with the workforces of today.
This executive white paper goes beyond just doing the right things (Strategy, Leadership and Planning) and making the important connection between the business strategy and the communication strategy. It also addresses doing things right (channel management/content development, the role of the employee communication function, face-to-face communication, and impact measurement) to deliver on the promise of building meaning, higher understanding, and employee commitment towards greater performance.
Storyboard: Unleash Your Sales Potential Campaign
In 2011, Lowe’s was preparing for an enterprise-wide transformational change initiative centered on transforming Lowe’s from a “home improvement STORE and into a home improvement COMPANY”. At the center of this effort was introducing employees to new “project sales” mindsets and the use of new sales technologies designed to better manage customer purchasing habits across the enterprise.
The “Unleash Your Sales Potential” campaign was designed to introduce employees to every step in a customer’s project lifecycle – from the initial “Inspiration” phase to the customer’s final “Enjoyment” phase.
The use of a Storyboard helped build a higher level of understanding among members of the Lowe’s management team and established critical intent for the campaign among change sponsors and agents.
Change the Discussion: Quarterly Leader Dialogue Toolkit
A sample communication asset developed for Regional Vice-Presidents, District Managers, and corporate Vice-Presidents to aid them in continuing their dialog with employees regarding the ongoing “Unleash Your Sales Potential” change initiative.
By arming identified change agents with a uniform outline of key communication deliverables, including the associated intent and “dialog starters”, the goal of building meaning within the workforce, regarding the significant changes occurring around them, was achieved.
Feedback regarding this communication toolkit from members of the management team assigned to lead these important meetings was overwhelmingly positive.
While the toolkit contained the critical data needed to support a dialog with employees and the key talking points and messaging to be included, leaders were free to make the delivery of the content in their own style and manner.
Purpose, Values and Culture Matters
Chosen by executive leadership to help lead a select 10-person team of Lowe’s employees tasked tasked to formalize the company’s “Purpose and Values”.
Once defined, the team outlined the company culture needed to deliver on the company’s purpose and values and further describe the desired employee mindsets and actions needed to support the culture and guide Lowe’s day-to-day behaviors and decisions.
PURPOSE COMMUNICATIONS: Key Focus Areas
A sample of the Employee Communication executive overview of the enterprise “Purpose Reveal” campaign sponsored by the company CEO.
The CEO’s Purpose Reveal campaign was designed as an element of the grander effort to transform Lowe’s from a chain of home improvement stores into a home improvement company, prepared to meet the customer at every point of the home improvement lifecycle.
Even though Lowe’s was in business for 70 years and research revealed 90+% of employees could quickly identify “what” Lowe’s did, and 55% of employees could explain “how” Lowe’s operated, less than 5% of employees and less than 8% of members of the management team could identify “why” Lowe’s existed. In short, fewer than 10% of Lowe’s employees could identify the company’s purpose (To help people love where they live.).
Through a yearlong campaign of events, leadership tools, visual assets and storytelling, designed to inspire Lowe’s employees and ignite a company dialog around “why Lowe’s exists” and how each employee fits into the effort to fulfill its promise – the Purpose Reveal campaign proved to be an overwhelming success.
Post-campaign research revealed 94% of fulltime employees were committed to the company’s purpose and able to tell their personal story of how they help people love where they live.
Sample Communication Plan
Sample Communication Overview designed for Executive sponsors of the enterprise-wide transformational change campaign “Unleash Your Sales Potential”.
The Unleash Your Sales Potential campaign was part of a larger, multi-year, transformational change campaign designed to transform Lowe’s from a chain of home improvement stores and into a home improvement company.
Experienced Change Management Professional
Level I certified Change Agent in the Conner Partners Change Management methodology, and experienced user of the popular Prosci ADKAR Model. I’ve helped several smaller business organizations, including a church, bring their organizational change strategy to life.
A LEADERSHIP GUIDE TO MANAGING CHANGE IN THE WORKPLACE is my streamlined recipe for successful Change Management in organizations of any size.
Talking Points – Corded Window Products Investigation
In September of 2015, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) urged Lowe’s and other retailers to eliminate the sale of window products with cords they believed could form a hazardous loop and risk the death or injury to children who could potentially be the victim of strangulation after becoming entangled in the cords. Lowe’s was one of several retailers engaging in ongoing dialogue with the CPSC staff regarding the Chairman’s concerns.
After being contacted by a producer for ABC News regarding investigative reporter Brian Ross who was researching child deaths from defective window blinds and said plans were in place for a related segment scheduled to air on Good Morning America and/or World News Tonight.
In less than 4 hours, and coordinating with Lowe’s Legal Department, Risk Management, Store Operations, Public Relations, and the associated Merchandising team, I developed the official Lowe’s statement and key responses to the ongoing issue (Talking Points). I further communicated customer messaging for members of store management teams approved to speak to local media and customers with inquiries related to the issue.
Sample Message Structure
This structured approach to messaging helps individuals clarify their thinking and improve the logic and coherence of their presentations. Ideas should be organized in a cascading order, starting with a single overarching idea or conclusion, followed by supporting ideas and arguments, and finally, supporting evidence and details.
This structure helps to ensure the presentation is focused, easy to follow, and persuasive and is successful whenever clear communication is essential.
The Communication Escalation
The Communication Escalation is a framework designed to help Employee Communications build commitment from other parts of the enterprise around the most successful communication prescriptions for a given mission.
By leveraging the required degree of change against the level of involvement needed to reach a desired company goal, this framework helps business partners better understand which communication tools and deliverables will be most successful in building the meaning and understanding they need to be successful.
Change Management: Enrollment
The Change Management Enrollment Process, designed for Change Sponsors and their supporting Change Agents.
After Sponsors of the transformational change become committed to consistently displaying support for the change, through influential communication and meaningful consequences, they are then tasked with cascading the intent to the Targets of the change.
Change Targets must become committed to the new ways of thinking and operating required to fully realize the intended outcome. This process is often a difficult one and prone to a high level of failure.
Sponsors are aided in the process by Change Agents, who are experts in the change process methodology, measurement and risk analysis and help Sponsors identify areas of weakness and opportunities to move employees beyond simple awareness of critical change and into areas of adoption and internalization.
The Change Management Challenge
It's often said four basic conditions must be met before employees will change their behavior:
A. A compelling story: They must see the point of the change and agree with it, at least enough to give it a try
B. Role modeling: They must also see colleagues they admire modeling the desired behavior
C. Reinforcement systems: Surrounding structures, systems, processes and incentives must be in tune with the new behavior
D. The skills required for change: They need to have the skills to do what is required of them.
This prescription is well grounded in the field
of psychology and is entirely rational. Putting all four of these conditions in place as a part of a dynamic process greatly improves the chances of bringing about lasting changes in the mindsets and behaviors of people in an organization - and thus achieves sustained improvements in business performance.
One of the merits of this approach is its intuitive appeal, so much so that many managers feel, once revealed, it is simply good common sense. However, this is precisely where things too often fall apart.
There remains an inconvenient truth to organizational change management.
The prescription is right, but rational managers who attempt to put the four conditions in place by applying their “common sense” intuition typically misdirect time and energy, create messages that miss the mark, and experience frustrating unintended consequences from their efforts to influence change.
While the art and science of Change Management has been continuously examined since the 1970's, when the first comprehensive studies revealed most organizational change processes fail 70% of the time. a number of counterintuitive insights regarding human irrationality and implications for putting the four conditions for behavior change into place.
Intranet InfoGraphic
I used Intranet InfoGraphic to promote the introduction of collaborative technologies and their impact on Project Sales.
During key campaigns, rotating InfoGraphics appeared daily on the company Intranet and Corporate and Regional digital signage. They also appeared as “bumper material” between regularly scheduled TV segments on Lowe’s Business Television channel.
As InfoGraphics grew in popularity, store and Regional Distribution Center employees would informally compete to have their InfoGraphic placed in regular company rotation.
2.0 Adoption in the Enterprise
Founded in 2008, the Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Council gathered leaders from large and mid-sized organizations who were spearheading their company’s efforts to adopt the use of new collaborative software solutions and best practices.
The 2.0 Adoption Council was a peer-based, information-sharing community interested in the latest thinking, best practices, case studies, and helpful tips associated with executing socio-collaborative strategies and projects in the large enterprise.
Representing Lowe's as a founding member of the Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Council, I led the organization's research effort and authored the initial council report “A Framework for 2.0 Adoption in the Enterprise”.
This widely read research paper among Fortune 200 companies was designed to help 2.0 practitioners by providing guidance and recommendations gathered from council members working in a variety of different fields and industries. It was our aim to promote the 2.0 Adoption Council and encourage other practitioners to join the group and share their experiences. Membership in the council was free to all participating members and sales of this research report helped fund the council's wide variety of programs, activities, and services.
Financial Times: Snakes!
The Financial Times published an article on November 6, 2012, highlighting Lowe's early achievements in the field of collaborative technologies and Enterprise 2.0.
The article quickly went viral when it highlighted a case of a store employee being approached with a photo of two 5-1/2 foot long snakes hanging out of a vent on the side of the homeowner’s home. Not being a snake expert, the employee quickly used the company's internal social network (Connections), to find if any of the 300,000 Lowe’s employees on the platform is a snake expert.
Within minutes, a fellow store employee from a store several states away and a member of the state’s largest herpetology organization and owner of many domesticated snakes. Because the employee included the customer’s photo with her inquiry, her fellow employee was able to quickly identify the two snakes as non-venomous Black Rat snakes common in the customer’s state. The fellow employee and snake expert further advised the customer that the two snakes were likely full-grown males keying in on a likely bird’s nest within the vent, and because they’re capable of climbing brick walls with ease, the customer should cover the vent with a protective grill to keep future birds away.
This article helped to demonstrate the power of Enterprise 2.0 and its ability to unify each Lowe’s store into a collaborative network of experts.
Solution Developer
In 2014, Lowe’s had no centralized way of knowing which stores were being inspected by government agencies. The existing paper-based reporting process required stores to complete a form and fax it to various outside legal counsel for review if inspected by a state or federal agency.
The Lowe’s Legal Department challenged me to transform the process of compliance issue reporting and leverage the power of collaborative technologies to transform the entire process and create enterprise-wide, real-time compliance reporting and response.
Working with subject matter experts at every level of the company and process, I designed, developed, tested, and launched a new enterprise software solution – including salesfloor mobile capability – capable of notifying the Lowe’s Legal Department and surrounding Store Management teams whenever a store is inspected by a government agency.
Target E-Mail Platform
First developed in 1999, the Lowe’s Target E-Mail Platform is a highly customized, highly granular enterprise solution for the composing, addressing, delivering, recording and measurement of all company messaging originating at the Regional, Divisional, and corporate level and is used exclusively by members of the Store Communications team in the daily dissemination of corporate messaging within the organization.