"How to Measure Your Communication Programs" by Angela D. Sinickas
copyright 2005 Angela D. Sinickas. All rights reserved. ISBN 0-9661757-1-9.18
How to Conduct Executive Interviews
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The top management of your organization decides what is important to the organization's success. They define objectives, set policy, approve new projects, appropriate money, choose key players on various decisions, and otherwise rule the world you and other employees live in during a good many of your waking hours. As you progress in your career, you may begin to have more and more input into these decisions yourself. Interviewing these key decision makers as part of the communication auditing process will provide you and your task force with some critical pieces of information. Executives' answers can be used for focusing the audit process upfront (what questions to ask of focus groups and on your questionnaires) and for learning how best to present your final conclusions and recommendations so that they get approved and funded (what blind spots executives have, what their pet projects are, where their perceptions are quite different from their employees' or customers' views). This chapter will prepare you to get the most out of the executive interviews you conduct as part of a communication audit. It covers: • The purpose of executive interviews. • How to get your own objectives met as well as those of the audit. • How these interviews compare to the journalistic interviews you typically conduct. • Announcing the interviews. • Conducting the interviews .(End of Excerpt)
