Communication strategies for effective CEOs
Please read the original article here from the CEO of Sametab: https://www.sametab.com/blog/operations-and-internal-communication-strategies-for-effective-ceos
Most of us are wired to believe that if we say something, those who hear us will just naturally execute it exactly as we had envisioned it in the first place. If only managing people were that easy. In reality, just because you said, doesn’t mean it’s actually going to happen.
The fundamental premise is that success is achieved not when the CEO thinks something is important, but when everyone thinks it is. What follows are some prescriptions to help you understand how effective CEOs, and leaders in general, should think about internal communication and operations. First we’ll go through some basic principles, then we’ll look at some real-life examples from some of today’s best companies, including Salesforce, Drift, Front and PayPal.
Narratives (not facts) are what move people
Subtract facts from reality, and what’s left is storytelling. Great leaders know that while facts help people understand and comprehend reality, it’s in narratives that make enthusiasm, excitement and passion “happen”. Ultimately, we are the stories that we tell.
When communicating important new messages, rather than presenting new facts try thinking of it as broaching a new narrative. Think of what you’re trying to accomplish in a broader and more holistic way, surrounding the facts (the actual company goals and milestones) with a convincing and appealing narrative. A good narrative can not only help you make facts more compelling and inspiring, but it can actually make them easier to understand. The more your narrative (as opposed to the facts) resonates with its intended audience, the more likely you are to have an impact and actually make an impression in people’s heads.
Employees at all levels want and need to understand not only the particular work they're assigned but also the larger story of the way the business works, the challenges the company faces and the competitive landscape. People need context to really do their best work.
As your business scales up (by way of hiring more people and expanding to new offices), so too does the scope of objectives, priorities, themes and eventually storylines that you end up communicating. This will inevitably lead to a larger number of narratives being shared with the team. Yet, people can only grasp so many things at once. Once you pass a certain threshold, try consolidating. Even more importantly, as communication has little to do with what you say, and more to do with what people understand – try taking things off the list. As people have a maximum cognitive capacity per day, be thoughtful about the signal/noise ratio of your message. The fewer and more distilled the things you communicate, the more likely people will be able to successfully absorb the message.
The why always before the what
Your best people want to know the why and understand the broader context beyond their individual responsibilities. Just because you said the what, it won’t magically make it happen unless you have a very convincing why. To make things happen you need to spend a disproportionate amount of time on the why than the what.
Why does this particular thing matter so much right now?
Why does it have an even higher priority than what the team is currently working on?
Are there any numbers to support this? What’s the underlying strategy that ultimately justifies this?
Why is this a better strategy than the one discussed last month?
Alignment is not one-way only
No matter how clear and profound your explanations, after explaining the facts and your narrative, it's equally critical that the team feels heard on the subject. People have different perspectives and it’s vital that communication goes both ways. People must be able to ask questions and offer critiques and ideas. Ideally, they should be able to do so with all managers, including the CEO.
Humans are naturally reluctant to change. The greater the impact of your decisions on their work, the more space you have to give them to ask for clarifications, whether it’s about something new they expected to do or a decision made by management, for instance. Not only does this mean they will be better informed, but over time it will instill throughout the company a culture of curiosity and deeper commitment.
Repeat, repeat, repeat
David Gergen, former advisor to several US presidents wrote:
History teaches that almost nothing a leader says is heard if spoken only once
Being a great CEO means you have to enjoy telling certain stories over and over again. If done correctly and concisely this will end up creating what I call the “inner voice”. If the outer voice concerns what you tell people, the inner voice concerns what they tell themselves.
The best leaders are able to determine the inner voice i.e. what people say to themselves in the back of their minds. There are no shortcuts to this, it just takes time and effort.
How to Communicate as a Founder CEO
In this section we will tackle some practical examples of recurring internal communication that you as a Founder CEO can easily embed in your own internal communication framework, making it part of your weekly, monthly or quarterly routine.
Weekly Team Update
One of the best communication strategies for entrepreneurs is a weekly update email to employees, advisors, mentors, and investors.
The basic macro elements that you should always include are: revenues, recruiting, product and customers.
Here’s a structure that you should follow:
Premise: write a quick paragraph summary about what happened last week
Yearly Goals: current metrics for annual goals and how you’re measuring up against them
Quarterly Goals: current metrics for quarterly goals and how you’re measuring up against them
Quarterly Priority: percentage complete and any updates to the most important projects
Revenue: The top three weekly metrics for the sales team, or for smaller teams, the top three metrics for every person on the sales team (e.g. calls, appointments, deals won, new recurring revenue, etc). By having every sales rep listed with their -metrics, it provides transparency and peer-pressure to hit their numbers. Comments or highlights from last week (e.g. the name of a big customer win or customer stories in general)
Product: (1) Features that went live in the last week and (2) features that are going to go live in the next five days
Marketing, Customer Service & Customer Service: The top three weekly metrics, plus comments or highlights from the week
Operations: new processes or procedures (eg. a new Slack etiquette, a new remote work policy, new room procedure or new habits that you are trying to inculcate generally)
Culture Highlight: share topos, stories or examples from the week that project the company culture
People spotlights: give exposure to members of the team and expose their work to the entire org
Beyond the Obvious Weekly
As a Founder CEO there are certain things about your company that only you can see. How does your product fit into the big picture? How is your product going to change your industry category? What is your company actually about? What’s the underlying secret upon which your company is predicated?
Just because you shared your vision once in the onboarding camp, doesn’t mean people actually understand and believe in it. That’s why sharing your thoughts in internal memos is so critical to helping the people around you understand the broader context of your vision and how your organization fits it.
You want to communicate the broader picture and go beyond the obvious. Use these types of communication to give employees the broader picture:
If you’re company is about building advanced rockets and spacecraft, don’t just talk about physics, design and manufacture, talk about going to Mars and making human life multiplanetary.
If you’re company is about building computers, don’t talk about hardware and software, talk about creating a “bicycle for the mind”.
If you’re company seems to be an e-commerce business, talk about why it’s actually about technology.
If you’re building an online CRM, talk about how it’s going to change the status quo of software distribution and sales in the years ahead.
While the creation of new narratives will help you in each communication, they are indispensable in these types of messages.
All-Hands Meeting Notes
This is probably the most important meeting in your entire company. This is where everyone convenes to make sure the entire company is executing in the right direction. You want to maximize coverage and make sure every single item that was brought to the meeting has actually been understood by every single person in your team. One way to do this is to make sure you send the team company-wide minutes after the meeting has ended.
Here’s the structure of a template that you can use:
New hires!
Product update (OKRs, Special features)
Revenue updates (OKRs, customer of the week)
Special topics
Weekly awards
Leadership musings
Q&A
Quarterly V2MOM
As a Founder CEO you should take the time every quarter to ask questions about whether the company is executing in the right direction, where a disconnect may be arising and if necessary, re-align efforts to ensure that everyone is on the same page. One of my favourite examples of this is Benioff’s V2M0M. In Behind the Cloud, Benioff describes the V2M0M as one of the main contributors to Salesforce’s achievement of high-level organizational alignment and communication while growing at breakneck speed.
V2M0M is intended to enable you to clarify what you are doing and communicate that to the entire company as well.
The vision helps you define what you want the team to do. The values establish what is most important about that vision; it sets the principles and beliefs that guide it (in order of priority). The methods illustrate how you will get the job done by outlining the actions and steps that everyone needs to take. The obstacles identify the challenges, problems and issues you may have to overcome to achieve your vision. Finally, the measures specify the actual result you aim to achieve.
Combined, V2M0M should give you a detailed map of where you are going as well as a compass to direct you there.
In short, the V2M0M is an exercise in awareness, the result of which is total company alignment. Not only it does it help to clarify direction and focus collective energy on the desired outcome, it also eliminates the anxiety that is often present in times of change.
To come up with your own version of Salesforce’s V2M0M, you should think about your overall organizational goals or a present-day challenge within your organization, and discover how you can outline the steps to succeed.
What a Founder CEO should expect from their exec team
As a Founder CEO, it’s not just a matter of how you communicate. Your responsibilities also include the communication of your entire executive team. Generally speaking, you should expect your exec teams to distribute context at the edge of the organization.
While good leaders are able to create context in their teams and within local scopes, great ones are able to distribute it effectively to the entire organization, increasing global awareness and maximizing context.
Here’s a couple of ways to do it:
Meeting Notes
Any meeting of more than two people, someone’s required to take notes and send them to an [email] alias
Here’s a framework for making good meeting notes:
Purpose: What’s the point of this meeting?
Agenda: Link to any notes here, or briefly explain the schedule you’ll follow
Limits: What you will and will not do during this meeting
Decision: Are you hoping to reach a decision from this meeting? If so, state it here.
Email Transparency
Stripe was one of the first companies to embrace the idea of full email transparency. By convention, every email at Stripe is CC-ed to lists that go to either the entire company or to a particular team. This includes internal person-to-person correspondence. The lists include dev, sys, office, product and support.
General Principles of how you should operate as a Founder CEO
1. Cut through the clutter
If you don’t pick the right medium, you won’t have people’s attention. It’s simple as that. Make sure your message is able to cut through the clutter. Pick a medium where people are actually able to focus, and read at a slower pace. Wiki vs Slack, Email vs a message.
2. Pick an internal naming convention
Create an emotional connection between your messages and your people. Learn to treat your people as a fully formed audience and your message as internal publication. It’s easy to call a weekly email update about the top metrics “Weekly Metrics Update”, but that won’t resonate with people as much as “Two Truths and a Take”. Find good terminology that resonates with people and jumps off the page. Not only will this help your publications to become really embedded in your company’s culture, people will also create an emotional attachment to your terminology over time and will inevitably make it part of their glossary.
3. Be Consistent
One of the keys to good internal communication is consistency. As your goal is to create habits in people’s behaviour, you want to stay consistent and avoid making too many changes on the fly.
Once the schedule is made, you should never miss an update. Once the medium is selected, you should never change it. Once the tone is established, you should never subvert it. Once the content bottomline is defined, you should never drift away from that.
That’s the only way to build people’s habits. There are no shortcuts to this, it just takes time and relentless effort.
4. Measure, Measure, Measure
Just like you measure everything about your product, you also want to measure everything about your internal comms and operations. That’s the only way to improve it at scale.
Keith Rabois explained how back in his early days at Square as COO, he created an internal dashboard to display internal key metrics for the company. Everyone from Engineering to Customer Support should be able to grasp it easily.
The unique thing was that he measured the effectiveness of that dashboard based on the numbers of “Squares” that checked it every day.
When you communicate an important message, how do you know people are actually reading and absorbing what you are saying? The absence of a feedback loop makes the entire system less accountable and more unpredictable as your organization grows. Instead of mistakenly assuming that people are reading and understanding, it’s better to communicate through a transparent firehose where metrics, such as read-rates, are publicly visible to you and everyone in the team. Data can do more than inform your strategy and have an impact on what you say or how you say it; it can actually make people feel how compact and aligned the organization is.
Conclusions
One thing to bear in mind is that good communication compounds over time. But by the same token, the implications of bad communication magnify progressively. If your people aren’t informed by you, there’s a good chance they’ll be misinformed by others. If you don’t tell them how the business is doing, what your strategy is, the challenges that you’re facing or what market analysts think of how you’re doing, then they’ll receive misinformation elsewhere, either by other equally ill-informed colleagues or from the web.
from Manage by Context, not Control
Most people think conflict arises when A thinks X and B thinks Y. In reality, conflicts have a higher chance of arising not when people don’t share the same ideas, but when they don’t share the same context and don’t make judgments using the same lens.
