Executive Helps Firms Improve Communication Skills Small Business Executive Rising Star – Joe Jotkowitz, Communication Development Associates By SHELLY GARCIA Senior Reporter The big idea has always been among the most revered notions driving American business. But as the dotcom boom and bust showed, recent history is littered with brilliant ideas that failed because those who conceived them could not lead, execute or communicate what was needed to bring the concepts to fruition. Enter Joe Jotkowitz, the 33-year-old managing partner at Woodland Hills- based Communication Development Associates, whose practice is geared to bridging the gap between vision and execution. “We went through a ramp-up of big ideas and now it’s a matter of what’s going to make money,” Jotkowitz said. “We took our small area of the world and said, we have to be practical to clients. We have to show them how to produce results, and we’ve got to deliver metrics that are going to be able to prove that.” It’s an approach touted by any number of human resources consultants, but it is the way Jotkowitz delivers it, clients say, that makes the difference. “My clients, the IT people, it’s so easy to lose credibility with them in a heart beat, and once you lose it, they’re not coming back,” said Dawn Stancarone, training and development manager at NBC Universal’s Universal Studios unit. “Joe’s classes, it doesn’t happen, and I get feedback like ‘I just can’t believe how much things have improved for me’ and ‘I got my boss to see me as a different person.’ I usually don’t get that from other classes.” Jotkowitz, who was raised in Simi Valley, received a bachelor of science degree from Bradley University in Illinois and a masters in communication studies with a specialty in organizational communication and interpersonal relations at Ball State University in Indiana. After briefly running his own consulting practice in Indiana, he decided to return to his hometown and about eight years ago, joined Communication Development Associates in Woodland Hills. Human resource management was going through a sea change, and companies were demanding the same productivity improvements from their personnel investments that they had come to expect from their other operations. “There’s a whole movement toward measurement,” said Tom Henschel, a past president of the American Society for Training & Development whose Sherman Oaks-based consulting firm Essential Communications competes with CDA. “It started in the manufacturing field where people said if we can measure this we can make it better, and what people began to realize is you can measure human performance too.” Real-time assessments At CDA, Jotkowitz developed a new unit, e-ssessnet, focused on measuring performance, including a 360 feedback program that uses the Internet to log assessments in real time. The responses, which can be used to evaluate specific functions like presentations at the time they are made, or for ongoing activities like management skills, open the door to work on specific skills in ways that traditional performance appraisals cannot. “The feature I like is it will take anecdotal feedback,” said Henschel. “Most assessments turn up as statistical data. “Yes or no gives us some trends, but if I get to say, ‘she’s really great about this,’ then the feedback is really powerful.” Consider the case of a manufacturing vice president who was earmarked to take over the president’s job but for one potentially deadly shortcoming he could not communicate his often brilliant ideas. “He rarely interjected (his point of view), and second, when he did offer up his opinion it was disorganized and long winded,” recalled Jotkowitz. “At the end of the meeting, just about everybody didn’t remember him offering his perspective.” Armed with the feedback from e-ssessnet, Jotkowitz worked with the executive showing him specific tactics for making presentations. “We got him to start his entire presentation with, this is what we know; this is what we’re expecting to know; and this is what we’re doing about it,” said Jotkowitz, “as opposed to there’s a bunch of things we’re looking at and here’s a bunch of things we can do. That bores the heck out of people.” Changing an approach It wasn’t long before the VP got a chance to use his new skills to argue against another company executive who was campaigning to close down a manufacturing plant. “He presented a compelling argument to keep it going,” said Jotkowitz. “He had been presenting the same data for six months, but his expertise got trivialized because it was complicated and convoluted.” Being the guy charged with telling a senior executive to change his or her behavior isn’t easy. More than a few consultants either end up telling executives what they want to hear or putting their feedback in terms so theoretical and academic their point is lost. But those who have worked with Jotkowitz say that he is able to win the ear of the executives he works with because of a style that is both informational and down to earth. “He’s got this thing where he makes you feel like he’s one of the team,” said Stancarone. “And all of a sudden he has this leader head that happens, and he’ll coach you through it and you don’t even know what’s happened.”
