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Does anyone have strong opinions on the cadence of CEO/leadership internal comms? Is weekly just right, too much? Monthly?

alexhutcheson 7y ago
At each level of management, you can probably reduce the cadence of formal communications: 1. Direct team lead (including leadership of very small start-ups) - weekly or biweekly, depending on how many interesting things you normally have to share 2. Director/manager-of-managers - monthly, again conditional on having enough interesting things to share 3. VP and above/leadership of 100+ person company - quarterly It's critical that you actually have interesting content, data, or strategy to share, and it's worth putting effort into gathering this content and presenting it in a compelling way. A common anti-pattern is to have regular all-hands meetings with boring or repetitive content, which causes people to zone out or look for reasons to skip it so they can get their work done instead. It can be hard to identify this, because the bored people won't respond to surveys, or won't respond honestly. A good rule-of-thumb would be that if you're not spending at least a couple hours prepping for the meeting, then it's probably not worth having.
- carrozo 7y ago
  I like the reasoning here but don’t you think that senior leadership only communicating once a quarter (your example of 100+ employees) seems a bit out of touch and all the risks that entails?
  - alexhutcheson 7y ago
    Once/quarter is for "broadcast" communication - all-hands meetings, email newsletters, etc. In addition to that, they should be engaging with each individual team that reports to them. For example, you might also find it useful to do quarterly team-level strategy reviews where the team presents their accomplishments from the previous quarter and discusses their team-level roadmap for the next quarter. At the same time, senior leadership needs to get used to being "out-of-touch" to some extent. Most people who are new to senior leadership make the opposite mistake, and are far too involved in details of execution that they should have fully delegated. Too much direct involvement can deprive your managers of opportunities to take initiative and grow in their careers.
bryanmgreen 7y ago
There are two types of organization-wide leadership communications: 1) New projects/deliverables 2)Organization updates. Both communications should happen frequently and consistently, but not spam-level and delivery-expediency should correlate with the importance of the content. (IE: don't wait 3 months to say you're upset the company has lost 40% of its users) Saying "No significant changes. Thanks for the hard work." should also happen. "No significant change" updates are also an opportunity for leadership to be transparent about metrics and say "we gained X users, or lost X% revenue" and follow it up with a simple statement such as "Happy to see growth." or "We'll bounce back next month." It keeps everyone in the loop and emotions level.

alexhutcheson 7y ago

At each level of management, you can probably reduce the cadence of formal communications: 1. Direct team lead (including leadership of very small start-ups) - weekly or biweekly, depending on how many interesting things you normally have to share 2. Director/manager-of-managers - monthly, again conditional on having enough interesting things to share 3. VP and above/leadership of 100+ person company - quarterly It's critical that you actually have interesting content, data, or strategy to share, and it's worth putting effort into gathering this content and presenting it in a compelling way. A common anti-pattern is to have regular all-hands meetings with boring or repetitive content, which causes people to zone out or look for reasons to skip it so they can get their work done instead. It can be hard to identify this, because the bored people won't respond to surveys, or won't respond honestly. A good rule-of-thumb would be that if you're not spending at least a couple hours prepping for the meeting, then it's probably not worth having.

carrozo 7y ago
I like the reasoning here but don’t you think that senior leadership only communicating once a quarter (your example of 100+ employees) seems a bit out of touch and all the risks that entails?
- alexhutcheson 7y ago
  Once/quarter is for "broadcast" communication - all-hands meetings, email newsletters, etc. In addition to that, they should be engaging with each individual team that reports to them. For example, you might also find it useful to do quarterly team-level strategy reviews where the team presents their accomplishments from the previous quarter and discusses their team-level roadmap for the next quarter. At the same time, senior leadership needs to get used to being "out-of-touch" to some extent. Most people who are new to senior leadership make the opposite mistake, and are far too involved in details of execution that they should have fully delegated. Too much direct involvement can deprive your managers of opportunities to take initiative and grow in their careers.

bryanmgreen 7y ago

There are two types of organization-wide leadership communications: 1) New projects/deliverables 2)Organization updates. Both communications should happen frequently and consistently, but not spam-level and delivery-expediency should correlate with the importance of the content. (IE: don't wait 3 months to say you're upset the company has lost 40% of its users) Saying "No significant changes. Thanks for the hard work." should also happen. "No significant change" updates are also an opportunity for leadership to be transparent about metrics and say "we gained X users, or lost X% revenue" and follow it up with a simple statement such as "Happy to see growth." or "We'll bounce back next month." It keeps everyone in the loop and emotions level.