Manager comms hacks: Thawing the frozen middle

Managers are the aqueducts that keep organization-wide internal communications flowing to the right people, at the right time and in the right way. But if those pipelines aren’t well maintained with clear and consistent communications tailored to each manager’s level, information will fail to flow where it needs to.

At our 2024 Employee Communications and Culture Conference, Ragan editor-in-chief and editorial director Justin Joffe sat down with Amanda Minto, executive director of internal communications for technology, product and experience at Comcast, to find out how her team successfully thawed that “frozen middle” and set information in motion again.

“Employees take their pace, their direction from their direct manager,” she said. “They believe what they say. They have an intense amount of credibility, and that should be the channel you’re using to get your messages out.”

Unfortunately, some of the most critical organizational messaging is sent down from the highest levels of executive leadership to entire employee populations, which fails to let managers translate information to employees in a meaningful way.

Minto believes that comms teams are critical to “thawing the middle” — that is, ensuring that messaging is understood and incites action by cascading that information to the appropriate level of manager.