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Reflective Paper Organisational Dialogue

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Huhtamaki – Reflective Paper

During the interview, the Chief Executive Officer (Brad) and plant manager (Simon) devoted a considerable amount of time to our communication analysis of their plant. I hadn’t expected two executives to become so involved with a University case study, and to discuss their credo, mission statements, strategies, and—of critical importance to me—internal communication strategy, in so much detail.

Gerard & Ellinor (2001) stress that authentic leaders need to practise and execute dialogue, and to me, this was what Brad and Simon were doing: showing their authentic leadership through dialogue. I thought this may have been purely for our benefit, but after four hours, beginning with introductory meetings and …show more content…

I soon learned that this was a necessary step, as not all employees have access to email. Management has to rely on face-to-face verbal communication to ensure that messages are communicated, received, and most importantly, understood.

Furthermore, to communicate with employees with no access to email, management used the hallway between the cafeteria and shop floor as a ‘communication corridor,’ posting organisational information alongside safety, quality, production efficacy and operational information. I recall seeing very detailed graphs, charts and statistics, and wondered whether the average shop floor employee would be able to interpret and analyse this data.

Simon stated that it was necessary to communicate the same messages continuously in order to engage employees, both verbally in meetings and visually around the work place. I discovered that during most meetings, unless an employee was directly involved in the conversation, he or she would not engage in dialogue. This concerned me; as Schein (1993) states, leaders need to motivate to engage, as employees may not volunteer to engage in dialogue. I now struggled to understand why was it so difficult to engage the employees in dialogue. They would not engage in dialogue during formal meetings and relied on informal face-to-face meetings, where quite often, they needed to be coached to engage in a two-way conversation to find solutions. I felt that management was providing every possible

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