Why Communicators Need to Think Like Operations Experts - with Lizabeth Wesely-Casella

Dan Nestle [00:00:00]: Welcome or welcome back to the trending Communicator. I'm your host, Dan Nestle. You know, I've been thinking lately about this word we throw around a lot in our business. Empathy. It's become one of those terms that just gets tossed into every presentation deck, leadership manifesto, right next to authentic and innovative. I don't know, pick your poison. But here's the thing. Most of the time, when people talk about empathy in business, they're really talking about just being nice. Or maybe they mean understanding your audience. And sure, that's part of it. But what if empathy, as we truly kind of dig into it, could actually be a strategic advantage? What if the ability to genuinely understand human dynamics wasn't just a soft skill, but the foundation for building systems that actually work? Now, I bring this up because my guest today has built her entire career on proving that point. She's the CEO and founder of L12 Services, and she's what I'd call a strategic orchestrator with an empathetic core. She can look at chaotic organizations and see both the broken processes and the human toll they're taking. Her firm specializes in creating internal communication frameworks that drive operational excellence. But what makes her approach different is how she analyzes problems with collaboration, listening and empathy. Now, if you haven't figured it out already, she's not your typical communicator. She's earned a master's certificate in Lean Six Sigma, and I'm sure that many communicators out there are going to go, oh, boy, one of those. But no, she's built a consultancy that's helped clients achieved everything from reductions in project delivery times to drops in employee attrition. But what I find most interesting is her philosophy that structure actually creates freedom and that the best operational improvements happen when you remember there are real people trying to do good work within these systems. So whether you're doing business with transitions or trying to reduce turnover, or just wondering how to create clarity from chaos, which happens to be her company's tagline, I think you're going to dig this conversation. So please join me in welcoming someone who's proving every day that the best strategists are the ones who never forget the human element. A common thread in my show, my friend, Elizabeth Wesley Casella. Elizabeth.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:02:25]: Oh, my gosh. Could you just introduce me everywhere? Every day. That was amazing.

Dan Nestle [00:02:31]: I do my best. You know, we're communicators. We're storytellers. We are people who weave together facts and narratives to present the truth. And that is what I am doing here. I'm presenting the truth about. About you, about Lisbeth, about this whole idea of. Of operations and communications, like mixing together in some perhaps unholy marriage. I don't know. It's a. It's a very interesting place to be. And that's why I really was very interested to having you on the show. Listeners out there or viewers now, because this is maybe my second foray into video. Will, you know, Will. Will know that I'm involved in a lot of different communities and we met through the. Was it the comms consultants community? I believe it was. I believe so, yeah. And communities that we. The communities we belong to, the communications and marketing communities that we're in, you know, are endless source of just amazing people. And I'm glad you're on the show.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:03:34]: Well, thank you. This is rare air and I'm super excited. I feel very seen and heard.

Dan Nestle [00:03:39]: Thank you. No, of course you are. And let's. So speaking of being seen and heard and understanding more about you, Elizabeth, this is one of those things, one of those areas that I'm kind of fish out of water. I mean, I did say that you're a sort of unique case in the communications world. And I mean it. My 20 something years of comms and my, you know, a little bit more time than that as a. As a kind of postgraduate professional, it's rare that you see these worlds overlap comms and operations. And boy, I wish that I would have had more knowledge about this in my. In my last company where operations was such a central part of what we were, what we were trying to communicate about. But why don't we start off just by kind of going through a little bit about your journey and what is all of this? What is L12 services? And why did you kind of get to this point where you're this kind of Six Sigma storyteller? How'd this happen?

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:04:45]: The what and the why? Why are you.

Dan Nestle [00:04:48]: Why?

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:04:51]: Well, it's interesting because it's been a labor of love, but it's also been a real exercise in believing that there was a problem to solve and going about it in a way that path really hadn't been blazed before. And to me it makes perfect sense. But I've been running this firm for 16 years now, so one would hope that I thought that it made sense.

Dan Nestle [00:05:17]: Oh, that's a good thing. Yeah.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:05:19]: When I made it here to Washington D.C. in 2000, I started working for associations, having, you know, already reached adulthood. I brought some skill sets with me that made me kind of A valuable employee. And I was mid range. So I used to be in commercial and industrial construction. I used to be part of the development team. I wore a hard hat. I'd walk the site, I read blueprints, and I would, unfortunately some days have to lead teams back into work that they'd already performed because it wasn't performed correctly in the first place. And, you know, I was in my mid to late 20s and this was the 90s, so women on construction sites, you know, that that wasn't super regular occurrence. And I knew that I needed to kind of present myself in a way different than men. I couldn't just walk on a construction site and pretend I was a man. It wasn't going to, you know, fly. But I still needed to be successful. So I believed from a very early point in my career that communication, clear communication, was going to be my superpower. And it was, it was really the foundation of all good projects. Whether you're, you know, building a wall or you're pouring concrete or, you know, fast forward to today. If you're building strategies or you're trying to create process improvement, communication is the bottom line for either success or failure.

Dan Nestle [00:07:00]: You know, it's. As I'm listening. Well, first of all, I've spoken with quite a few women on my show. Probably predominantly women, actually. I think if you look at my guest list. But, but these, you know, the struggles that women have had in different industries or the challenges that they've faced and overcome. You know, I don't know if construction's changed all that much since the 90s. You know, I know women in real estate who certainly as agents are super successful, but as builders or as developers, it is constantly, you know, going an extra mile to prove themselves. Because there's that, well, let's face it, there's the old boy network, right? There's that whole entrenched structure that I don't think we've, we've gone beyond it for sure. It's much better now than it was then for people who are coming up in any of these industries and even in our own. But it's not, it's not, it's not finished yet. It's not done. It's not fixed. So, I mean, but going through that in the 90s must have been a real kind of, you know, a formative time for you. And that you landed on communication as the superpower is interesting, you know, like, and it kind of, you know, it makes me think of our imperative now to really focus on our audiences and the fractured world we're living. I say that all the time. Audiences are fractured. You know, everything's fractured. You know, pick an ism or pick an ology, it's all fractured, you know, and, and that practice that you had in speaking with a very specific audience and communicating with them properly, I mean, I imagine it must come in handy now as you kind of apply those lessons to, to the, to the audiences you deal with. Now just putting that out there, I think that might probably be the case.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:09:09]: Yes, it's good to be able to. Actually, this is a great segue into how strategically we have designed our services and our philosophy. Over time it became really apparent that it wasn't just the delivery of communication, the delivery of information from me to anybody else, or from leadership down to, down to any downline or the workforce. It became really apparent that also understanding who you're talking to enough that you can share information in a way that it's easily absorbed, but also invite communication back so it's a dialogue became really important. And that is something that I learned when I was testing our services prior to kind of rebranding and opening up our, you know, opening up our book to every industry. So where I tested L12 services for the first few years was in my issue, my area of issue advocacy, which is eating disorders and weight stigma prevention. So I tested these services in the mental health and behavioral sciences world. Basically that's the bottom line. And what I learned from that experience was that empathy and listening and understanding were another key piece to effective communication. Wasn't just understanding what you wanted the message to be or understanding the channels you needed to use, which quite frankly back in the 90s was two channels, the phone or face to face. It was more about creating buy in and creating confidence and creating, creating an environment where people who are working on a project with you understand their value to that project or that process or that initiative. So where we stand today is really a combination of three different skill sets. Behavioral science, lean and six Sigma, philosophy or theory, and internal communications. So we're combining those three applications into all of the services that we provide. We are looking at trying to create the best possible atmosphere for people to receive and give feedback for information. We're trying to create the sense that people who are in the organization are valuable, they have something to contribute, whether it's institutional knowledge or innovation. And that while we are moving through any initiative that deals with improving operations or improving processes, the key piece is communicating what the end result is supposed to look like. So painting a really clear picture of the what's in it for me after I do X? And X is always something that's unpopular or uncomfortable or, or a challenge to overcome. You know, take return to office for example, if I upend my processes and systems again that I have stabilized since the pandemic and I get in my car, I get on the metro and I spend another hour, an hour and a half, go to the office. Why am I doing this? If I can type, type, type, type, type at home and I feel like I'm being effective, why is doing all this other stuff important to my growth? The organization's growth, reaching the goal. Is this necessary? Well, we need to paint a really clear picture through communication, understanding the value proposition of the employee in a way that we can share that end result picture in a meaningful, personalized, you know, process of campaigns so that people create either buy in or hopefully early adoption.

Dan Nestle [00:13:20]: Yeah, there's so much you need to address with, especially with rto. That's a whole, that's the whole thing. We will get to that because I've just written it, big note, RTO circled on my.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:13:30]: Yes, but I want to point out that there are so many shiny object syndrome opportunities for us to take our eyes off the ball right now. Tech has just exploded over the last five years. We have new softwares, we have new initiatives, we have new working and operations theories that people are fractured, to use your word, organizations, groups of people, special interest groups. You're going to be hard pressed to find one specific focus for every organization, but you will have several initiatives running at the same time or several process improvement project. What we need to do in order to create that cohesion is we need to slow down. We need to create a very disciplined list of priorities that we're going to follow and we need to start messaging what those priorities are in order to create that environment that people want to participate in. So RTO isn't the only thing that's going on. There are so many others and you can just use that as a placeholder for just about any example.

Dan Nestle [00:14:44]: For sure. You just mentioned three words that give me the heebie jeebies for sure that just kind of go, oh man, they're almost inimical to my disposition and that is slow down, you know, discipline and prioritization priorities. Now I know for a fact these are very, very important things and of course I practice them, but it takes willpower and it takes, you know, serious kind of going against my own thought structure, thought pattern. You know, I've learned this about myself over time. Right. That it's a struggle. But as a professional, grown up person, you're supposed to be able to manage these things so that you can understand when it's a good time to slow down, when you need to enforce discipline. Always, by the way, if you're a solopreneur, you need to always have discipline. And prioritizing all these things are critically important. And I think these are the reasons why so many, I guess, entrepreneurs or small business owners who are either of the visionary ADHD type don't always make it because you lose sight of these three things. But that said, right, you're, you're talking about these three things and kind of focusing in on getting the key, kind of the vision across to people, to employees, to anybody who's involved in an initiative when they are fractured, when. Well, effectively it's chaos. Right. And you know, your, your organization, I mean, L12 services is about clarity from chaos. So I'd like to kind of sort of dig into that a little bit. Right. Because that's how you've built your whole business is around this idea of clarity from chaos. And I'm, you know, I think we get the sense that you are, you know, going from construction through to, we jumped forward right to where we are now and the different initiatives you're dealing with. But how has that evolved over time? What does chaos look like now within the organizations you're looking at? And even if we've already mentioned a few things, let's dig into that a little bit more.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:17:06]: Sure. So without straying too far away from why we're here, which is to talk about comms, there is a piece of this that we just all need to acknowledge. And I think that everybody understands it to a certain degree, but it never hurts to remind ourselves we are overly optimistic about how many things we can do. At the same time, organizations suffer from this as much as solopreneurs and entrepreneurs and small teams. In order to be competitive, there is a kind of underlying or back of your mind voice that's continually saying, what? Oh, but you got to do this too. Oh, but you got to do this too. Don't forget to do that. So instead of being good at one thing, which used to be the expectation 30, 40, 50 years ago, organizations are now, maybe they have one product, but they're trying to make sure that that product has great marketing and great social media and great, you know, the experience around that one product is so large these days, both internally from the workforce perspective and externally, but we'll leave external to somebody else. Because that's not my bailiwick that people within the workforce are constantly challenged to find time to focus, complete a project, complete a process, even complete an entire task. And so as internal communicators, one of the things that we need to do is we need to kind of plant our flag in the sand and talk a lot about what it means to manage the messaging. Not just that we are a highway or a filter between leadership and the people that are doing the work. That used to be just a fine place for communicators to be, but now with so many, I'll say, priorities, that not everything actually is a priority. So many great ideas. With so many great ideas at the fore, leadership will often have a barrage of messages that they want to share. And as internal communicators in that middle space, we need to be the ones that say, okay, you're about to make all of this turn into noise rather than messaging. And you're expecting everybody within the organization to take in all of this information when really it needs to be segmented, and those segments need to be distributed in a specific type of voice so that information is easy for people to absorb and create engagement rather than just being something that they put off into the I'll tackle this later folder.

Dan Nestle [00:19:49]: Yeah.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:19:49]: So the structures that we're building to create that clarity from chaos, start with evaluating what that fire hose of messaging currently looks like, what channels are being used, and then the communications chaos tolerance of the workforce, what can they handle and communicated in what style so that we are helping create that engagement. We're asking for the dialogue rather than expecting that we've just announced something. Check that box. And now off to the races for something else. That's where the empathy comes in. If we're finding out what the chaos, communications chaos tolerance is of that workforce, and we understand deeply from the workforce's perspective what the value proposition is for working there. We can use those two bits of data and tie in the messages that need to be delivered in a way that helps those people easily accept that information is coming their way and they need to deal with it, rather than. This is yet again, a message from the CEO that I just don't have time for.

Dan Nestle [00:20:56]: Yeah, the idea of segmentation and, you know, kind of going from there. My friend Ethan McCarty, who I talk about sometimes and who's been on the show a few times, is a employee activation kind of internal comms genius and.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:21:15]: Oh, I want him to be my friend then too.

Dan Nestle [00:21:17]: Oh, he'll. He'll be your friend. Trust me. He says, he said, he said once that we have to look at employees as a public. Okay? So we look at employees as a public, and we're always talking about the workforce. And even as we speak about it, do this for the workforce. The workforce is this. I think maybe we're having a linguistic problem here because it's really workforces, isn't it? As much as there's fracturing in the audience landscape, that's reflected in our internal organizations, especially. Especially as we get larger and larger. I mean, for big companies, it's a huge issue. For multinational or global companies, it's a given, but it's. The breakdown or sort of. The fracturing goes far beyond geography. But even for smaller companies and for any organization that really needs to have a unified vision and message and understand, you know, where they need to go, you're dealing with those different. Those different fractured groups. And, you know, as I said in the intro, people think empathy is, like, one way to deal with that. But I think. I think it's not using empathy as a tool. It's having empathy to understand, if that makes sense. Like, the empathy has to be there. It has to be part of, I don't know, the ether in some ways.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:22:46]: Well, the definition of empathy is that I feel your pain. Sympathy is I acknowledge your pain, but empathy is I feel your pain. So having been in the position of being someone in the workforce is critically important if you're going to be consulting in this space.

Dan Nestle [00:23:04]: Oh, yeah.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:23:05]: So if. If we are gonna, as, you know, humanity, look at these various silos, we. We need to approach the project. Whether you're coming as a consultant or you're already within a larger organization, you need to come in with a sense of curiosity and understand that each of those silos has its own culture or has its own challenges, needs to be treated with its own kind of differentiators. So when we're talking about breaking down these silos and creating better communication, it's really incumbent upon organizations to create organizational awareness. My silo understands what my work does in order to put forward the mission, but my silo also understands what your silo does to forward the mission and when it's appropriate to collaborate or to approach each other for, you know, testing innovation? Like when you have new ideas for processes, who do you reach out to in order to make sure that not only is your department or division improving that process, but any. Any other department or division that is touched by that process has a voice in how it's put together and what the end result looks like, and whether or not it impacts them, like, communication is key to making sure that those ripples are smooth rather than these giant choppy waves.

Dan Nestle [00:24:42]: Yeah. If you're in silos, it's interesting you use the word silos usually when we talk about silos. It's like we're siloed. It's bad. Silo bad. Silo bad. Right. It's bad to be siloed in an organization. And. No, I mean, I've always felt that it's good to have some rules, it's good to have some boundaries, but at the same time, you know, yeah, maybe it's a silo, but it's. It's permeable. Should be permeable. It should be like a.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:25:11]: Yes.

Dan Nestle [00:25:11]: You know, like, it shouldn't be a silo that's surrounded in steel. It should be surrounded in, I don't know, sheepskin or something. I don't know. That's terrible. That's a terrible thing to say.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:25:22]: But.

Dan Nestle [00:25:22]: But something. Something that lets the air in and the water through, you know, like, that's. Maybe that's not sheepskin. That's terrible. But you know what I'm saying.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:25:30]: Think of.

Dan Nestle [00:25:30]: Think of an osmotic material of some kind. I'll ask a materials engineer what be. Or biologist.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:25:37]: Cheesecloth.

Dan Nestle [00:25:38]: Cheesecloth. Thank you. That's a great one. Right. Kind of.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:25:41]: We're going into the kitchen now.

Dan Nestle [00:25:43]: We're going to the kitchen. It just. It. It is. It is a. It's a. I think it's a common bogeyman for internal comms professionals, and certainly for you. You always see it when there's transition or when there's new executives coming in and saying, we got to break down the silos. Break down the silos. Silos. Have you broken down a silo today? Break down a silo. And, you know. But I think that it's important certainly to recognize that we all have roles and we all have kind of missions, and if we go. We break down all the silos, then that is definitely going to be a little more chaotic. You got to find that balance. But one thing occurred to me while you were talking about empathy and curiosity, and, you know, I think they are inexorably tied together, but here's. Here's where. Where I kind of. My. My mind went when you were talking about, you know, the. The way that we need to focus and the way that we need to kind of really understand that we have priorities. I'm an AI guy. I mean, we talk about AI on the show all the Time. So this one is absolutely going to be no different. But I just started, for the first time, I thought, wait a second, is AI an enabler? But not in the positive sense of, hey, it's enabling me to be more efficient. I mean, in the psychotherapy sense where it's enabling bad behaviors. Is that a thing? Like when we talk about this, the roles that you must have and staying focused, you know, now we have these miracles of technology to allow us to be a lot more than we were in some ways to allow us to go, okay, look, I'm talking to Elizabeth. She's all about Six Sigma and Lean and communications. I don't know anything about Six Sigma, so. Oh, but I have this whole set of tools now that can help me build an entire Six Sigma based plan or teach me all about Six Sigma or walk me through everything. And in a few minutes I'll have enough information just to not sound like an idiot in a meeting. But over time, I could sort of start to learn a little bit more about it. And does that endanger my focus? I mean, it could, right? It could endanger my focus. So have you been dealing with any of that in your world right now that it's hard to keep. It's harder. Do you find it harder and harder to keep people on track?

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:28:36]: Yes. The short answer is yes. The longer answer is I think that it, like any tool, you know, it depends on how you use it. AI has a lot of great possibility and there are points in certain tasks that it's way overhyped for right now.

Dan Nestle [00:28:59]: Yeah.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:29:00]: I think it was just yesterday that the Washington Post did a review of the five top AI engines and how they performed. Reviewing legal documents, reviewing medical documents, literature, and something else. And it gave them each grades. ChatGPT came in just behind. Oh, what is it? Genesis? No, what's Gemini? Yeah. So there are purposeful uses for it and it can be really beneficial when you're getting a summary of a topic. Like you were just saying, learn a little bit about Six Sigma. The problem is we say, well, I'm just going to get this, this behavioral science again, or just behavioral across the board. I'm going to use this as a shortcut for right now to prepare for this meeting. Done. I'm now going to get back to the rest of my life with the hope that I will return back to that super interesting concept and learn more about it. Way I don't ever have time. So that bit of knowledge that you have about Six Sigma may be all that you get and take forward with you. And it's missing a lot of fundamental information. So, for example, you know, what's the difference between Lean and Six Sigma? Did, did the research tell you that? So you wouldn't know when to apply it. Right. So, you know, quick rule of thumb, Six Sigma helps you identify and reduce defects. So like a pen that wouldn't click, you want to get rid of that if you manufacture pens, Lean, on the other hand, helps you reduce waste. So the waste of time, the waste of movement, the waste of, you know, there are eight of them.

Dan Nestle [00:30:54]: Yeah.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:30:55]: So those two things work hand in hand to create better operations, but you apply them differently under any different circumstances. So that's, that's the problem with how we're using the tool of AI right now. And as it applies to comms within the workplace, where I'm running into a lot of, we'll say interesting use cases is that people will use AI to summarize what they're receiving from internal communications, but they don't get that deeper level.

Dan Nestle [00:31:26]: Yeah.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:31:27]: So the AI is giving them the top lines, maybe not mentioning anything about something that may be negative or that in its almost human capacity, thinks that might be disturbing. It's just giving you the cheerful sunshine overview. So people aren't as informed as they think they are. And internal comms pros are getting very frustrated.

Dan Nestle [00:31:49]: Yeah.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:31:50]: Some of them are turning to, well, we'll just write everything with AI. So then you have this cycle of everything dumbing itself down the farther it gets down the. The line. But you, you also have this, you have this, you know, kind of sieve of human expertise. The internal comms folks that have been working so hard throughout their career to identify the best way to connect with their audiences when they're, when they're so deflated that they're using AI and not adding themselves back into that draft.

Dan Nestle [00:32:28]: Yeah.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:32:28]: What we have is a real recipe for burnout and lack of confidence. And that's what, I'm afraid is going to be a workforce impact. If we don't continue to emphasize that it's a tool that is a foundation, but you must add yourself back into it. Even if you've taught your AI, if you've built your AI and it's only using your information to prepare its, you know, base documentation or draft from, you still need to add to it because you and your knowledge are growing and circumstances are changing, and it's always looking behind itself for the information it's providing.

Dan Nestle [00:33:07]: You got to be the human in the loop. As, as Ethan Mollock says, Yeah, I, it's interesting because perhaps that's a, Looking at it from a different lens is maybe exposing some cracks in the, in the conventional wisdom about internal communications, for example, where, you know, some organization, every organization has a, some do it better than others, let's put it that way, right. Some, some organizations communicate a lot better and some simply don't. And there's always improvement to be made. And you know, it gets crazy when you have factories and, and production lines on the one hand and corporate employees on the other. Those are very different, different audiences and situations that you have to treat differently. But we've been under the assumption that, you know, we, we have an intranet or we have a, A, an internal, like social platform, like a, you know, what whatever workspace has become or workplace has become. I forget what it is now because Meta jettisoned that. But we have, you know, we have these different things that we use internally to, to keep everybody informed and hopefully engage them. But are we really engaging them? And maybe AI is, is, is a blessing in disguise saying, okay, if people are using AI to summarize the important communications, that means that's a task that they probably didn't want to do because that's the first use case for AI is to just, hey, okay, I'm going to just all the stuff I don't have time for, I'm just going to push it over onto my new friend Claude or whatever. And it's incumbent upon the communicators, the internal comms folks, to find a better way to deliver the story, tell a better story or a more accurate story maybe, or continue along the path if they're already telling the great story. But now looking at, almost like a marketer look at it from a distribution side and an engagement side, what do we need to be doing to really implement and enforce the important things? How do we flag when something's important? People need to really read it. Is it simply just flagging it? Probably not. Right? So how does your work help or how do you help people kind of, I don't know, discern the difference or get into that whole idea of how do we need to sort of rethink internal comms in this new and crazy and chaotic world? I mean, I think that's a huge question, so you don't have to answer the whole thing. But what do you think?

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:35:57]: Well, so, you know, this is a conversation where I definitely dig into my communities, my peer groups pain and try and work with empathy. And my suggestion for that is a little bit out of the comms realm and more in the operations realm. From my perspective, we're juicing how we communicate. Whether it's marketing or it's television, or it's any information that we're trying to get in front of other people and get them to acknowledge and act on it. Our worlds are overwhelmed and it is noise. No matter whether you're getting your internal comms at the office or you're getting your advertisements on television or the radio, whatever, we are all at our max capacity for absorbing any more information. So from my perspective, and this is to a certain degree client dependent, but it's not infrequent that I have this conversation. This is when I start to talk to leadership and say, have you expressed to your workforce that part of their responsibility for working here is to become and maintain highly informed status? They need to be a high information worker. So it's important that they take the time at the beginning of every shift, if their homepages, their intranet, to scan it and see what information is important for them to do their job. It can't just be one push from a segment of the organization or division from the organization, comms, marketing, internal comms. It needs to be a partnership. I work here. I understand that in order to be great at my job, to forward the mission, to reach the goals of the organization, I need to be informed. I can't just sit here and expect that I'm going to somehow, through the ether, absorb the things that are important to leadership or my manager and be good at this. I'm glad that I work here. Therefore, I'm going to pay the toll of 15 minutes of going through the intranet each day. That, along with a real emphasis on utilizing the most critical comms channel any organization has, is usually my answer to that. And that super important channel, your humans, your team leaders, your middle managers, those people need to be involved in understanding from a high level what's coming down the pipe, what internal comms is focused on, those messages that need to get out and they need to partner and become a message delivery device to their teams. If the internal comms strategy is we're going to send this information out in our newsletter, we want everybody to click a certain link, then the team leader or the middle manager needs to be a comms channel too, that during their meetings, during their team gatherings, they're saying, hey, did you notice or have you clicked the link or whatever. And maybe some organizations will use internal comms to gather the engagement data and come back to that middle manager and say, hey, only 50% of your team has clicked that link. We need you to double down on it. But using the middle manager and emphasizing as part of the responsibility of the worker that they need to participate, those two can be very, very effective to create a better understanding and higher engagement.

Dan Nestle [00:39:43]: Yeah, here's where we get into the whole, the whole question of, or the whole kind of. Let me rephrase that. There's a statement that I was taught or a friend of mine, a mentor of mine told me way, way early in my career, you know, pre Internet, let's say where I was, I was a recruiter at the time. And you know, I would, I would call people to be, you know, I was doing recruitment. Hey, I forgot this. Great opening this, this role. You're going to be great for this role. I've identified you with such in this particular manner. You know, hey, are you interested? Come on in and talk to me or you know, talk to a client about, you know, hey, what, we have these wonderful candidates, you know, what roles do you have, et cetera, to oversimplify. And people would either be interested or not, but they'd lie. They'd lie all the time. I mean you have a resume, you've probably lied, right? I mean this is the thing. We like to think that we're always honest and we're always kind of above boards. But you know, look at most resumes, there's a lot of lies or exaggerations of truth. So I was complaining to this to my, to my mentor and he said, Dan, anything can go wrong when there's people involved. That was like, as long as there's people involved, something will go wrong or anything can go wrong. And that has never changed. So the, where I'm getting at is this, the internal communicator has this very critically important job to, to inculcate the organization in some ways with the vision and the direction and the, you know, the strategies and just the simple day to day announcements. What's happening from the leadership to the, to the, to the staff. And the staff gets in the way and won't either. They, you know, it's, it's a consistency problem. You'll have middle managers who are all on board and will run their teams and say yeah, by the way, open your email today, click on the third link. It's very important. You'll have some who will say, look, you have other things to do. Go, go on and do those things. And when you're at the end of the day, if you have time, go get, go, go for it. Right. So there's this priority, there's this. That's an organization that has a cultural problem, clearly. But the communicators, I think, really have to factor all this in and maybe that's part of the chaos of growth and transition. But what should organizations do to either or what should communicators do to get around that? In your experience, what is the kind of, what are the things, the methodologies or tactics or strategies that you've seen work in those kind of situations?

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:42:46]: I'm going to make a little sidebar here and I hope you and everybody else listens. There is a comms professional out there. His name is Mike Klein and he speaks directly to this. I think you would have an amazing conversation with him. He's a dear friend and he's been doing this work for a really long time. So my answer to this is to use that empathy piece and bring people along. Because I kind of started this answer out with I feel for the comms folks. I want to take some of the pressure off of them and maybe reallocate it to leadership. I've developed some, some tools and maybe I can share our CATS system Communication Accountability Tool system with your, with your listeners. But it's a way of capturing five different activities that can help ensure that your leadership communicates to their downline. It holds them accountable and it holds both ends, you know, leadership or executives and middle managers accountable for having these conversations and for following through. I think that it's really, really important that, you know, even at the team leader, middle manager level that they're still seeing that everyone gets held accountable. Yeah, it's not just always looking down the line and that being held accountable is punitive. It's actually like you said at the very beginning, good accountability and good process is freeing. It's not, you know, it's not meant to hold you captive.

Dan Nestle [00:44:28]: I think people also feel like accountability. I think, I think there's a massive misinterpret. Just like with empathy, there's, there's a misinterpretation of accountability. What does that mean? Is it responsibility? Is it is, you know, is it, is it well enough defined in an organization or you know, in a team that you understand what it means? It's, you know, it is what you are supposed to do. Like accountability. It is, it is what you need to do, what you are oath bound to do in some ways. I don't know what the best way to call it is and you know it. There are so many dependencies on every accountability and yet when you know, if you've been a manager, anybody out there has been a manager, you know this. Sometimes reinforcing accountabilities or speaking to accountabilities, or having, even having employees declare their accountabilities can feel like it runs counter to empathy because an accountability feels like, okay, you're not living up to or you're not achieving what you're supposed to achieve. You're not following through on what you promised to do. Well, now you're mean. You're having a mean conversation with me because you know I'm doing my best and you know my life is hard and whatever it is and job is difficult. So you have to empathize with me first. So there's a conflict there between empathy and accountability. But you, you, you can't have an organization or a business without accountability. That's, it's just simple as that. Is there, you know, is there a way to reconcile these things? Is there? Yeah, I'm sure there is. And that's why I'm asking.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:46:18]: Again, it goes back to the organization's culture. But for organizations that are really interested in the human component and the success of each individual, there's going to be a conversation at some point about how do we create common language, how do we help our workers understand how we define the word accountability or any other potentially difficult word. And that will hopefully manifest itself in a conversation. Maybe it's during onboarding that says, you know, you are accountable for X and accountability is not being called in front of the classroom and berated because you didn't bring your homework in. Accountability means that we've created a structure that connects the dots, where along the way you'll be able to make sure that you are in line with what's expected of you and you don't have to have a major course correction. You don't need to be shamed or embarrassed. So accountability is a ladder or a tool or a list of boxes that you check that help guide you so you're always confident and you're never guessing where you are in the process of reaching your personal or your corporate goals. Accountability is your friend. It's not punitive, it's not intended to be negative. And that's, I think, a common refrain that needs to be reinforced about what is workflow, what is process, what does process improvement look like? And to a certain degree, and this is kind of self serving as a consultant. But when you have an initiative, when you bring a consultant in, those are the same type of empathetic conversations that you need to have with your workforce so that they don't have that moment of fear that we all saw in office space. Like bringing in the two bobs does not mean everybody's losing their job. Sometimes bringing the two boss means that you have input into the solution that needs to be identified, and your life will be easier, better, faster, shinier. You know, you'll be able to jump higher at the end of the day because they brought somebody and that somebody being brought in is here to help.

Dan Nestle [00:48:39]: This whole idea of workflow and process, I think we forget sometimes that process workflow are the ways that you make accountability happen. You know, they. In some, you're. And this is where I think I'm realizing about the freeing aspect of it. You know, you, okay, here's this process. I follow this process. I don't have to think about these things so much. If I do A, B, C, D, E, I'll get to F. Maybe I don't want to say F. It's got a bad connotation for those of us in the American educational systems, but F is for fun. F is for fun. Right. So if I go to abc, I'll get to D, also bad. That said, there's workflows and processes on an organizational level. I understand that. And this is certainly why we need operations and why we need people who do this. Because you create these workflows or you find the most efficient ones to achieve what the organization needs to achieve, to achieve the strategy, to align with the strategy to make the products better, to fill in the blanks. On a team level, it can break down. Any process can break down. And I'll just throw AI in here again, because AI is again, it can speed up these processes and it does call for new processes or to rethink some of these processes given the tools that we have. But it can also break them when different people on a team have different capabilities with AI, for example, and might not be, or might be accelerating their. Their ability to reach their accountabilities in one direction, but then they're off gallivanting in others. Right. So the workflow sort of can break down a little bit. I don't know if this is a. If this is becoming an issue or if it's. Or if it's. Or if there are enough people rethinking all these processes. I imagine there are, because there's businesses out there that do this, but I don't know. I feel like that's a big. There's something there to pull on with the effect of, I guess Process breakdown within organizations and. Or within a team or on team level, even on an individual level, you know, it leads to broken. Left alone. It can lead to essentially a broken organization if it grows too fast, you know, and that has. That has real consequences. How do we nip that in the bud? You know, it's kind of where I'm.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:51:26]: Thinking, so are the broken processes in this example because there's a lack of communication or because there's a difference in adaptation to the use of AI?

Dan Nestle [00:51:42]: I would imagine it's both of those things. Right. I mean, you have. This is why AI adoption is difficult, I think, for many organizations, because, you know, because it's not. It's not one size fits all. It really isn't. And, you know, when you're talking about employee empowerment, there's almost nothing that we've ever seen in the history of technology that's moving more empowering than this. But that makes it difficult, I think, for many employees to then say, okay, I'm empowered to now do all these things, but I still have to live in this box. And fine, I'll live in the box. I'll do the processes I'm supposed to. But boy, oh boy, look at all this other stuff I can do now. And there's. And it. And it can result in gradual dissatisfaction or a sense of. Of dissonance with the organization. If, you know, if they go out and go in the directions that they want to go, and frankly, maybe that's the best thing, then you have people who will determine what they want to do and hopefully wouldn't cause too much of a disruption to the organization's business. And we're unlocking a lot more every day, but we're also causing disruption. So, you know, but if it gets to the point where the organization is broken or where the culture breaks, there's a massive cost to this. And it's not a technological one, it's a human one. Right. I mean, what do you think?

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:53:20]: So, I mean, obviously being in an era of innovation means that all this is messy for a while.

Dan Nestle [00:53:29]: Yeah.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:53:30]: So we kind of acknowledge that and we move forward the best that we can. Four years ago, I was helping organizations put together their communications policies, defining what channels we use, how we use them, when we use them, where you can find the information. And not a single one of them had AI use in that comms policy. Today, every single one does. So I would encourage organizations to really get clear on what they want to adopt, how they want to adopt it, what job titles will adopt and won't adopt, like, get clear on what your expectations are and what would have been a recommendation to, you know, go and readdress that once every year, probably is readdress it once every quarter or at least look at it and evaluate it once every quarter. That said, when you get down to the individual level, if there's an expectation to use AI or there's an expectation to avoid AI, that's where the devil's in the details and the mess happens. We're going to find people who are going to self select in and out of environments based on just that aspect alone. And I know that that sounds very Pollyanna ish and as though everyone has the privilege and the ability to choose which job they have. And that's not the real world, but there is to a large degree a population that's significant in size that can and will do that. And because they're doing that, when I listen to, you know, the people on the news reporting about, you know, Bureau of Labor Statistics and how job movement happens in our nation, sometimes what I'm hearing is the depressing side of things, that everybody's going to leave. Yeah, well, if you open up a bunch of spots, other people that are interested are going to come. Maybe there's a lag there and there's definitely going to be an impact on, you know, the economy, but those jobs will get filled unless you are a failing company. So there, there are going to be people who don't want to use AI that will gravitate toward those companies that say, no, we don't use AI and then there are going to be other people that like, I am so good at creating prompts. I want to use these super skills someplace. And yeah, poof, they'll, they'll get their dream job. I hope everybody gets their dream job. Yeah, of course, you know, well, I.

Dan Nestle [00:56:08]: I'm in the same boat. I mean, I, I, I personally, I, I think anybody who, or any organization that avoids implementation of AI is destined for, for either massive failure or, or, or disruption that they're not able to handle. It's just, it's, it's in the, it's in the, it's in the world now. It's in the ether now. There's nothing you can do about it. You have to actually figure out, you have to figure out how to handle it and use it within the confines of whatever your, your guidelines are or whatever your policy is and in the furtherance of your business and, you know, smaller businesses have, have a little bit, I think, of an advantage in either, you know, in being faster to adopt. For sure it's easier for them, but at the same time they can also hold off a little longer probably until they figure things out. Because you know, there's not as much at stake as, as in a, as in a public facing massive organization necessarily. I mean, I guess if you get down to the personal level, there certainly there's plenty at stake. But it's just interesting me, I think the jobs, the whole idea of, of, of internal communications, what we do is going to continue to evolve and change, you know, and you know, as we, as we sort of wind down, I see we're sort of kind of coming up on it. But what is it like? I think there's a lesson or a secret here about understanding process, understanding operations and adopting new technologies, experimenting, innovating within the internal comms world. And you know, I'm sure that we can talk about what that looks like, but have you thought about that at all? I'm sure that you're being on that cusp or having, having that Venn diagram where ops and comms are greatly overlapping. You know, what is the future of internal comms and why do they need, at least I think they need to really understand ops and processes.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [00:58:28]: My preference would be for people to focus on how to use AI in the internal comm space as a way of creating strategy for low engagement, for channel use, for opportunities to create greater organizational awareness between silos. I think that that is an excellent use because it's analytical, possibly for creating first or second drafts of content, whether it's video or audio or written. But I would like to see more focus on using an individual, an individual's time in the editing space. Yeah, for that, the time that used to be used for the creating space. So if you're going to reduce your creation time by using AI, make sure that you bubble up and balloon your editing time for creating that content. Because that foundation may be excellent, but that deeper knowledge and that forward looking knowledge, that thing that you just learned, you need to keep adding that in. If you want AI to help you and to learn with you, you've always just got to be one step ahead of it, adding something new to it. But to use it to analyze how to use your channels better or to find out which channels are being used best, maybe ones that are redundant. You know, what we call a channel assessment. I think that's a really great use right now. Obviously it's growing and changing and improving almost on a daily. Well, almost on an hourly basis. Yeah, but in today's environment, I think that an internal comms professional can be safe using AI that way and still make an argument that, you know, there's no replicating the human element here. AI can't have my job.

Dan Nestle [01:00:26]: Yeah, of course. I mean, I don't think AI is going to take your job. Okay.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [01:00:30]: I think so many people do. And that's that what I'm trying to. Yeah, I guess what I'm trying to comfort our community in saying it's not happening yet. You still have a very important role to play.

Dan Nestle [01:00:42]: There's a couple things that. Okay, I certainly am concerned about intake into our profession. What does the career path look like? And you know, I have to put a pin in that one because I can't help everybody. But for those of us who are, you know, who've been in the, in the world for a while, who have, who have like senior jobs or middle, even mid level to senior jobs and have a body of work and a body of knowledge, that body of work and body of knowledge is yours. Right? That is, that is yours. That is what we need to understand how to, you know, empower and leverage. That is going to be the differentiator between you and anything that AI can do, at least for now. Right. That's one thing. The second thing is we don't know what is going to happen. I'm a little more optimistic about when change happens in a society or in an organization. Yeah, the way we did things before is done. It's just like it's the past. But you can't make a prediction about how things are going to be based on the way things are now or were. Because nothing is linear like that. Is it linear? Yeah, we can't make a linear prediction based on unknowns and variables. So I think that, and in fact I'm sure that yes, some things will go away, some things will, will, will appear and maybe, maybe you will lose. Lose, and I use lose in a just for the sense of being understood. Your job will go away, you will lose that job, but you will only lose it if you have nothing else to gain or if you've let it go. If you are, if, if you are embracing or going with the change and understanding that value is more important than output, for example, than ever before. If you start to really understand, especially the need for guidelines and frameworks, methodologies such as lean to govern your day to day in such a way that you can take advantage of the efficiency that AI supposedly gives you. Right. You're not going to have the same job that you had, your job will change. So yeah, you're going to lose your job because your job's going to be different. Right. But you have to go with it. You can't just sit on your laurels and say, oh no, I've always been, this is what I've always done. I've always called up the media and, and gotten stories or, you know, yes, I manage the intranet and I post things from the CEO every day. And that's what I do, write newsletters. Okay, fine, continue to need those things. But there's an end there that we have to discover.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [01:03:58]: Absolutely. And if I might, bringing it back around to the very beginning of our conversation, that's where the Internal Comms Pro becomes the specialist in understanding what the priorities are, reducing the noise and making really strategic decisions about what gets communicated. Because you can't communicate everything. You can't emphasize everything all at once. You have to choose.

Dan Nestle [01:04:24]: Yeah.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [01:04:24]: Even the most dialed in workforce can only take so much time to make sure that they're a high information worker. You gotta give them those three things or those four things that they focus on, but not 12. And it may be that AI can help you prioritize them, but nobody can sell it like you, Internal Comms Pro. So feel good about that.

Dan Nestle [01:04:52]: Yeah. And I know I'm giving this a little short shrift just to build on that. Elizabeth, I mean, let's not forget something you said earlier. The people are the other channel that we need to be using or that we can't forget. And so many experiences in the last year or two have, have reinforced this. I think it's a fact that we as humans, when we're together in a group, in person, do amazing things, unpredictable things. Something happens in our thought processes. Something happens when you're talking to somebody and you see their face and you change the way you think about something. All these millions of synapses, billions firing off in your brain as you, as you discuss things with somebody. And I'm sure a neuroscientist can tell me all about that. Those are the kinds of, I mean, let's just say superpowers that we as humans have that AI does not and will not. So how do we leverage that? How do we get into that more? How do we remember that that is available to us? And I think it's easy to forget that it is. Elizabeth Wesley Casella. Like the waltz. I like it. This has been amazing. I did want to really learn more about Six Sigma and Lean, but we sort of went in these interesting directions about internal communications. And, and I think, you know, I think there's so much more to uncover, but I really, really appreciate your insights. Any last words before I close us out?

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [01:06:44]: I will share the Communication Accountability Tool with you to share with your folks. And yeah, I think we should do this again. Talk about Lean and Six Sigma and the human element of oxytocin. The AI will never be able to generate.

Dan Nestle [01:07:01]: Oh, I like that. Oxytocin first, maybe first mention on the podcast. Everybody out there look for Elizabeth Wesley Casella on LinkedIn. Her name will be spelled properly in the episode title and L12services.com. That's L12services. So that's Elizabeth's website. And of course on LinkedIn. Elizabeth, what a pleasure. I'm so glad you're here. And you know, we're going to do this again.

Lizabeth Wesely-Casella [01:07:30]: I am so grateful. Thank you. Thank you for the conversation and the opportunity to meet your folks for sure.

Dan Nestle [01:07:36]: All right, bye now. Thanks for taking the time to listen in on today's conversation. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to subscribe through the podcast player of your choice. Share with your friends and colleagues and leave me a review. Five stars would be preferred, but it's up to you. Do you have ideas for future guests or you want to be on the show? Let me know@dantrendingcommunicator.com thanks again for listening to the trending Communicator SA.