After the successful turnaround in external communications, I was given the task and responsibility to build a corporate department for Branding, Marketing, and Communications. My condition from the beginning: to unite the previously separated functions of external communications, internal communications, and market communications under one umbrella, in a staff function reporting directly to the CEO.
Photo collection of Corporate Communications Team activities by Silvio Sommer, former Head of Corporate Design and Corporate Publishing at GETRAG.
My vision was an integrated approach to corporate communications that would break down silo structures and make the entire flow more efficient. I hired 12 of the 16 team members externally, to bring in fresh expertise and an unbiased perspective on the company and its ways of working.
My focus was on team building first, eliminating competitive thinking within the team. I rejected performance reviews for that reason, and my annual bonus payment was used for team activities to celebrate success together. This way, money as a competitive and extrinsic motivational factor was removed. Instead, I focused on the essence of each team member, finding their drivers for intrinsic motivation through team workshops. The team members not only understood themselves and their unique strengths better, but also developed a real understanding of the talents each person brought in for successful collaboration. Instead of an elbow culture, a culture of mutual support and co-creation unfolded. The result was a fun, honest team culture with outstanding results in all communication fields.
It did not stop there. The collaboration extended to all 23 subsidiaries worldwide, including the Joint Venture with Ford in Cologne. I created interfaces with dedicated communication responsibles at each location and in each corporate function for regular exchange, collecting topics for all communication channels, locally and globally, in a monthly meeting called “Agenda Setting.” Here, all topics were collected and distributed across internal and external channels.
One of the first interdisciplinary and international projects within this network, and the basis for a new global branding approach, was to go back in history to the essence of GETRAG and why it all began. The result was an interactive multi-channel storytelling, online and offline, which later won the German Design Award 2016.
Source: germandesignaward.com