As Toyota Motor Corp. President Akio Toyoda’s prepares to attend tomorrow’s congressional hearings and the company is served with SEC subpoenas, from today’s Wall Street Journal comes another revelation.  This time it’s not about safety, but instead concerns the company’s internal communication about the growing crisis.  The piece, titled Support Wavers At Toyota For Chief, gives us a view from the inside:

Some employees complain that they feel they have been left in the dark…

In early February, Mr. Toyoda—the grandson of the company’s founder and known in Japan as “The Prince”—sent an email to employees in Japan to explain the U.S. recall, asking them to work together with him to “regain customer trust” and “work on building great cars” through mutual effort. Since then, he has given three news conferences in Japan within two weeks but there has been no broader internal communication with Toyota employees.

“The only way we find out anything about the crisis is through the media,” said a high-ranking Toyota chief engineer in Japan. “Does Mr. Toyoda have the ability to lead? That’s on every employee’s mind.”

There are several points here worth noting.

1. Employees are every company’s ambassadors.  They are the living, breathing, walking, talking personification of the company, wherever they go. If your employees are uninformed – or worse, ignored – they become a liability instead of an asset.  Too many companies assume that if they don’t tell employees anything, then they won’t have anything to tell anyone else.  This is a dangerous assumption, which leads to point #2:
2. In an information vacuum, people find sources of information.  If they aren’t getting current information from reliable sources, they will seek out and find other sources.  And you can be sure the information they hear through the grapevine and the rumor mill won’t be positive, especially if they perceive that they’re being ignored.  Not to mention getting information from the media.  Employees consider that to be a slap in the face, as if they aren’t important enough to be communicated to directly.
3. One of the most valuable intangible assets a company or organization has is trust.  It takes a lot of time and investment to build and gain trust, but it doesn’t take much to destroy it.  And a culture of trust has to come from within.  If your employees don’t feel trusted, they won’t trust you.  And I think we all know that can’t lead to anything good.  Interesting to note that Mr. Toyoda asks his employees to help him “regain customer trust,” but apparently many of his employees don’t feel trusted.  This, in turn, leads to a cycle of distrust.

I remember reading a quote several years ago from a speech by Larry Bossidy, CEO of AlliedSignal Inc., which so simply and eloquently states something many business leaders overlook.  I think this really nails it:

“I’ve never seen a company that was able to satisfy its customers which did not also satisfy its employees.  Your employees will treat your customers no better than you treat your employees.”

The very best companies are typically the ones that understand this and live it every day.  They invest in their employees through their actions – they walk the walk – because they know it builds trust, which makes the organization stronger, more productive, and a better place to work.  If your employees feel valued, they will go the extra mile for you.  It’s as simple as that.

Building trust is a long-term investment in the future of any organization, and it begins with honest, transparent communication.  Why is it so hard for so many companies to understand?

Today’s Wall Street Journal carried a front-page piece on Toyota’s “nightmare come true” for its new president, Akio Toyoda, who took over the company his grandfather founded in 1937.  The WSJ piece, as well as a companion story, recounts unintended-acceleration accidents, some fatal, attributed to possible manufacturing defects in several Toyota models. The company has now halted sales and may expand the recall as it fights to salvage its hard-earned reputation for quality and safety.

A second companion story focused on Toyota owners who are standing by the company.  As one loyal customer said, “There’s not another company in the world that would stop production and stop selling to get it right.”

Against that backdrop, it was incredible to me to read the comments from two of Toyota’s spokespersons in today’s Journal.

1) “Toyota spokesman Mike Michels said Wednesday that the sales halt was required by law after the recall. “It’s not a voluntary thing,” he said.”

Apparently, Toyota is required by law to stop selling the vehicles without a fix for the issue.  But rather than to state that “they made us do it,” the company should have stated that it is doing everything possible to ensure the safety of its customers and is working to quickly to correct the problem.  You do the right thing, period.  If it’s also the legally required thing, so be it.

2) ”A senior Toyota executive reached Wednesday declined to say how long Toyota had known about possible defects that may have caused its vehicles to accelerate unintentionally. “That [time frame] is a very important point, and it could become a very difficult problem for us legally,” he said.”

In crisis situations, any statements that are made become part of the record, from both a historical and a legal perspective.  You must have the relevant facts before making comments to media.  The story notes that the senior executive “declined to say how long Toyota had known,” but he went on to speculate.  Even worse, his comment implied that the company may have known about this all along.  If you’re going to decline comment, decline comment.  Let the attorneys handle the legal issues.

In fairness, this is probably the worst crisis ever to hit Toyota in its 73-year history, and no crisis situation is ever handled perfectly.  But Crisis Communication 101 says there are things you should always do, and things you should never do.  Here are a few:

Always: 1) take responsibility, 2) protect public safety and health, 3) be truthful and transparent, and 4) tell the public what you are doing to fix the problem.

Never: 1) speak without knowing the facts, 2) speculate, 3) answer hypothetical questions, or 4) point fingers.

Personally, I think Toyota is a great brand — I own a Camry, and it’s the best car I’ve ever had.  But Toyota would do well to brush up on Crisis Comm 101 before it’s too late — if it isn’t already.

After the Washington Redskins’ expected loss to Philly on Monday Night Football, even I’m getting a bit tired of all the piling on about the team’s troubles. But this piece on the Washington Post’s D.C. Sports Bog was just too much. It seems that Redskins’ management, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to ban all signs from the stadium.  There were some pretty sad examples in the photos on the Post’s site.

I think there are some good lessons here for communicators:

1. You can’t “control” the conversation.  People are not going to stop being dissatisfied just because you tell them they can’t say so.  They’re going to share their opinions whether you like it or not, and if you aren’t part of the conversation, you can’t be part of the solution.

2. Trying to clamp down on dissenting opinion only makes things worse.  It’s an insult to your audience, and it makes you look paranoid.

3.  Never disrespect your customers or take them for granted.  They’ll never forgive you.

4. Own up to your mistakes, and move on.  Trying to pretend nothing’s wrong — or even worse, pretending everyone else is delusional — only prolongs the suffering.

5. Keep it all in perspective.  Above all, your customers/audiences want to have a pleasant experience when they deal with you.  If it’s more pain than pleasure, they may decide it’s not worth the trouble.

This goes for everyone, not just the Fake Dan Snyder.

Unless you were living on another planet yesterday, you probably heard about the Twitter outage, which was apparently caused by a denial-of-service attack.  A quick Google search turned up 7,580,000 web results and 1,131 news stories on the topic.  (Of course, those statistics are completely meaningless, but I include them here as a nod to clueless journalists everywhere.)

The Associated Press, in a rare moment of attempted humor, reported that “the outage meant no tweeting about lunch plans, the weather or the fact that Twitter was down.”  Hundreds of other news sources had more dire pronouncements. Business Week featured a story about the impact on U.S. business, but one of my favorites was from a Jacksonville, Fla., TV station that focused on how a local PR firm “panicked” when Twitter went down.  Included in this piece was a weighty quote from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “The use of Twitter is a very important one not only to the Iranian people, but also now to people around the world.”

There were stories and posts about the withdrawal symptoms of Twitter users, including this one from a blogger at  Richmond.com who admits to “freaking out a little bit.”  I even saw a poll on Twitter yesterday asking “where I went” when Twitter was down, e.g. Facebook, etc.  (I said “lunch.”)

Don’t get me wrong.  Twitter, Facebook, and all the other social networking apps can be important communication tools.  But with the information overload we have to deal with, maybe it’s a good thing we all got to take a break yesterday.  Maybe we should stop just for a minute and think about what life would be like without Twitter.   I think we’d survive.  Might be something to consider if Twitter ever figures out how to “monetize” its business model and starts charging users for its service.

I’ve always thought of myself as somewhat of an early adopter, but I’ve never been what you might call obsessive about technology.  I don’t have an iPhone or an iPod — just a really old, beat up Blackberry and a cheap mp3.  In fact, I don’t even use the mp3 too much since the only time I really have time to listen to podcasts is in the car, and I’ve always got a Bluetooth in my ear, so the podcasts go on a CD.  I know — that’s old school. But I continue to be fascinated by the advances in communication made possible by the vast array of technological tools we have at our disposal.

It wasn’t too long ago that email and web sites were a new frontier.  Now when I tell my 16-year-old son I’ve sent him an email, he looks at me like I just told him I mailed him a letter by Pony Express or chiseled something on a stone tablet.  If I want to communicate with him online, it had better be on Facebook, or at least on a Facebook chat. It’s amazing how quickly new communication technologies have been developed and adopted, to the point that we now take for granted things we wouldn’t have dreamed of only a few years ago. So I like to try to stay involved and keep learning.

I signed up for a Twitter account about a year ago, but I never did much with it.  Same story with blogs.  Being a professional communicator, sometimes I just have to take time away from the profession and just chill.  I mean, if you are a doctor, you don’t hang around hospitals on nights and weekends, do you?  So I haven’t spent all my free time on social media, to say the least.

But as the phenomenon known as Twitter continued to evolve, I finally decided I needed to figure out what it’s really about.  (At least I beat Oprah to it.)  I went to a friend of mine who is a social media guru for some answers, and he explained that it’s all about joining the conversation, sort of like being in a big room and gravitating toward people who have interesting things to say.  That totally made sense to me.  Now I’m somewhat of a Twitter fanatic, but I’m not what’s called an “evangelist.”  In fact, I don’t really like that word in that context.  It kills the spiritual connotation for me.

My initial impression is that so much of what I’m seeing on Twitter is all about social media and Twitter (i.e., @bigtimesocialmediaguy: I’m at a new media conference and I’m tweeting everything the speaker is saying…).  Either that or what someone had for dinner.  There doesn’t seem to be enough in between.  Either it’s an obsession with Twitter as a marketing tool or it’s people just doing it so they can say they’re doing it.

It sort of reminds me of when I got my first computer back in the early 90s.  I was really excited about having something that would save me a lot of time and help me get organized.  Then, after a while, I realized I was spending a lot of time just maintaining the machine — running defrag, scandisk and virus scans, installing antivirus software, tweaking all kinds of settings to try to make it run better — all focused on the machine instead of what it could do.

I’m starting to wonder if Twitter isn’t a bit like that now.  So much of what I see out there is focused on the medium rather than the message.

What do you think?