An interview with this year's EXCEL honoree Rick George

Communication World, August-Sept, 1998 by Gloria Gordon

GG: When you took the helm at Suncor in 1991, you instituted some dramatic changes with some dramatic results. Could you discuss the most important elements that you felt contributed to those results?

GEORGE: By way of background, Suncor is a company with three very distinct businesses: We are in the oil sands business [extracting oil from massive deposits of tarry sand in northern Canada], which is our largest asset; we're in the conventional oil and gas business in western Canada, and we're in the refining and marketing business in Ontario.

I think what really made the difference in the early days was, rather than just going in and taking a shotgun approach to make change, we took a number of months to devise a strategy to get each one of our businesses to be top performers, yet remain as low as we could on the cost curve. Unfortunately, as a result, we laid off more than 500 people, so those were very difficult days. This was strategy-based, long term, and executed down to where we now have a very solid company. So it's not just cutting for cutting's sake. And through it all we made communication a top priority, which it continues to be today.

GG: You obviously are a true believer in the importance of effective communication within an organization - have you had any formal training in communication, or have you honed your skills "on the job," so to speak?

GEORGE: I think I've honed my skills more on the job than in formal education. In engineering school, we only had to take one speech class ever, although law school certainly helped some! I found early on in my career, when I was running smaller organizations, that communication with people was absolutely important in terms of having them share a common vision, take ownership in what we were doing and where we were going. These early experiences convinced me that if you are going to get an organization to really change with you, you have to be able to articulate your objectives clearly. I am an optimist by background. I have a feeling and belief that 98 percent of people want to do great work; they want their companies to succeed; they want themselves to succeed. You can either design an organization for that percentage of people, or you can design it to take care of the two percent who don't want to do well. My point is, effective communication really gets the crowd with you. Once you get the majority of people moving, it's amazing how quickly things change.

GG: How is your communication department structured? How many employees do you have dedicated to either internal or external communication?

GEORGE: In each of our three businesses, we have between one and four communicators. All must be able to handle internal as well as external communication. In our corporate office, we have people who specialize in internal and external communication, but the work is handled on a project management model. When a manager takes on a project, he or she is responsible for all aspects of the communication, both internal and external. So I would say we have a team of generalists, as opposed to people who are focused in very narrow channels.

GG: What have you seen as the most significant changes in the role that communication plays in an efficient and profitable business?

GEORGE: At Suncor, it's a bit of an interesting case. Seven years ago, I felt I had to push the communication group into senior meetings on strategic issues. I experienced some resistance to that in terms of, "Gee, why do you need the communication people in here? We'll get to the end of the decision-making process and we'll tell the communicators what's going on and they can write about it." We progressively have brought them in earlier and earlier to the point where today, I think, they have a voice at the strategic table, and people now get concerned when they're not involved. That being said, every one of the communication people in our company would say we still don't bring them in early enough. But I think they get involved much earlier than in other companies.

In general, I would say our communicators have more of a strategic emphasis rather than just the mechanical writing of the facts after the decision is made. I think that this strategic partnership has been very interesting.

GG: And how do you see that as having evolved?

GEORGE: It's not revolutionary. Once the communication group shows that they can add value in a strategic sense to the company, then I think managers are more willing to pull them into issues much earlier. So in a way, it's a building of trust.

GG: Do you think that most organizations generally recognize the importance of good communication? Is it just the successful ones or the unsuccessful ones?

GEORGE: In our industry, we tend to be led by people with engineering backgrounds, and we tend to see this as an industry of assets and not necessarily an industry of change. We've been able to make communication a key part of what we've been doing, and I think this differs from how other CEOs might see it.