Building Your Level of Influence with Asahi Beverages

Managing up: leading from the front the Asahi Beverages way

When it comes to building your level of influence as an internal communicator, forging strong connections with the key players in your organization is where it’s at. That ‘seat at the table’ has to be earned – and it has to be earned through trust, understanding and support.

For Group Head of Internal Communications at Asahi Beverages Kirstin Stapelberg, getting to know what makes your executives tick is the secret to building the kind of relationships that foster positive results, great communications and inspirational leadership – and she’s happy to share her seven steps to success…

1 Communicate their vision

“We communicate the strategic vision to employees at Asahi Beverages with relentless consistency and repetition. It's a huge area of focus and it starts right at the beginning of every year. We hold an all-employee broadcast from our CEO, who goes through the evolved strategy for the year and works through the strategic pillars for everyone. That's followed by a series of workshops across the entire organization – all functions, all sites, all levels. Prior to the pandemic, the CEO and ELT were actually holding these workshops on-site with everyone in the organization on a personal basis – that’s how seriously this element of our communication and engagement strategy is taken. It's part of our DNA.”

2 Let them lead

“In the last 18 months, Asahi Beverages has experienced three major change interventions. They’ve been the biggest comms and change projects that I've ever been involved in, and all have taken place in the environment of lockdowns and remote working. The actions of our leaders have been the difference between these succeeding or not. Had we not had our leaders involved as they were, we would never have managed to achieve what we did. Because of COVID-19, we rely more on our leadership-led communications than we ever have in the past – and how wonderful, right? We've been encouraging this from leaders for so long. And now, all of a sudden, it feels like we've been really catapulted and propelled in that space, with leaders actively taking up this role and owning their role as the single most important communications channel in the business.”

3 Encourage collective ownership

“Who owns the employee experience at Asahi Beverages? Everyone. Definitely not Internal Communications and not even HR. We’re really clear on that. And, most particularly, it comes to bear in major communication and change programs, where we’ll actively insist that the ownership of that experience is everyone's responsibility: it’s the responsibility of the leadership team, it’s the responsibility of those running the program. Of course we’re there as Internal Communicators to assist, to curate, to fine tune, to finesse, to do the right things by the right channels – but the overall experience is the holistic output of everyone involved.”

4 Think ‘next level’

“We have become far more sophisticated in the way that we communicate at Asahi Beverages over the past two years. An example of that is the way we present our quarterly broadcasts – the town halls that are run by our CEO and the executive leadership team. They used to be fairly standard affairs: great PowerPoint deck, awesome commentary from the CEO… Now they’ve become very sophisticated, virtual and digital affairs – lots of graphics, lots of digital engagement tools, lots of video, increasingly featuring more and more of our people to bring everyone together and create that two-way engagement. That has moved to a completely new level that will stay there. We will never go back to the way we were doing things before. It's far more engaging now – and really fun to watch.”

5 Upskill and support

“We’ve placed a huge focus on giving our leaders enough support – and the right material – to make their job as easy as possible. And it's tricky. Not everyone's a natural communicator, we all appreciate that; but the accountability on leaders to be the primary communication channel in the business is more heightened than it’s ever been before. We place huge importance on that at Asahi. From an internal communication perspective, I spend a lot of time focusing on our executive team and our senior leaders – getting to know their idiosyncrasies, their nuances, what they’re passionate about. It’s that depth of knowledge that helps me effectively assist in their communications.”

6 Start them early

“A big shift that I've noticed in the last few years, is not just our reliance on senior leaders to be brilliant and important communicators, but the need to involve them in the process far earlier than we've ever done before. There's usually a very logical marker in the timeline when we’d normally start engaging with leaders around communications, narratives, storytelling and key messages. We’ve massively moved that forward to a point where we’re now starting to co-create those narratives, to align on key messages, to get everyone's input right at the start of the change intervention. Our senior leaders have far more skin in the game now, because they are co-creating far more of the the key messages, the narratives, the content… and they’re doing it earlier on in the process than ever before.”

7 Learn the language

“In order to gain that all-important ‘seat at the table’, as internal communicators we need to be really solid in our business acumen and business knowledge – that's critically important. We need to speak the commercial language that our senior leaders, our sales teams and our supply chain speak. This fantastic space that we find ourselves in as communicators almost every day is having this plethora of information that we need to communicate. But you can't communicate it simply and authentically and in a way that people understand unless you have that view of the whole. Our role is to connect the dots; to be across the totality of what's happening so that we can write that high-level story in a way that people understand.”

This article was first published in the Journal of Internal Communication brought to you by Gallagher. As a world-leading internal communications agency, we are excited to share our round-up of internal communication trends and provide practical examples of how organizations communicate with their people.