Every so often we all have those “ah-ha” moments. Those brief learning experiences in which some small truth is revealed to us. We get to feel a twinge of cleverness when that moment takes place. It could be finding a short cut that takes precious minutes off your commute to work, or discovering a helpful new tool buried in your smart phone. However, an experience that is much more exciting, though more elusive, is the shazam moment. Shazam moments bring a profound sense of enlightenment and can change our behavior or attitudes, but still you can’t help but feel like a five year old kid again when you say the word. That’s most likely because according to dictionary.com, the expression was made up for Captain Marvel by DC Comics in 1940. Regardless, they are exciting and rare occasions.
I had one of these moments about a year ago. I was working as the director of public relations for a large hospital and was feeling frustrated about how information didn’t seem to be trickling down from management to frontline staff. The challenge was to provide information to 4,500 workers who had varying education levels and work schedules, and were all geographically separated. Administration would have monthly meetings with managers to outline new programs, current financials, quality, etc. More than 100 people sat and listened – some even took notes. We relied heavily on managers who often could only meet with their staff once a month due to the diverse work schedules that come with running a 24 hour operation seven days a week.
We had other communication pieces in place – a colorful newsletter that came out every two weeks, an intranet, global e-mails, but each piece had its own flaws. We didn’t print a newsletter for every employee due to expense (we did supplement with posting it on the intranet). Additionally, the problem with our intranet and mass e-mails was that some groups had low computer utilization, such as environmental service workers and plant operations employees. There were still too many ways for employees to fall through the cracks.
As I looked around the room, moving my eyes from nurse, to physician, to accountant, to operations manager - it hit me – I was the only person whose focus was solely on communication. These were all bright people – they can fix your broken arm, balance your monthly statement, or re-build your office from the ground up, but they weren’t all natural communicators and public speakers. In fact we were making it hard on them; some of them wouldn’t see their staff for another three to four weeks. I can barely recount what I had for lunch yesterday; much less summarize all of the salient details of a meeting that was held a month ago.
So shazam! I went back to my office with all the energy, verve and gusto of a comic book hero and created a bullet point list of what we covered. I broke it down in short sentences so that managers could read directly from the list. I had our graphic designer jazz it up with some color. We gave it an easy title – Meeting Notes. Subsequently, we began e-mailing it out to all leadership prior to the monthly meeting. This made it easier for directors and managers to recount what happened in the previous leadership meeting and ensured key messages were being communicated.
The truly heroic element to this method was that it didn’t cost the organization any additional money, and it quickly became one of the most trusted and valued forms of communication we had. The information was provided by supervisors – the most valued source of communication, and helping foster greater discussion between leadership and frontline staff.
Though this shazam moment didn’t save a damsel in distress or prevent a bus load of people from going over the edge of a cliff in fine caped-crusader fashion, it did ensure that managers were able to stay on message. Consistent messaging for large organizations with multiple shifts, and geographic locations is a monumental task, but it doesn’t require a large amount of funds or a superhero alias.
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