Great leaders are great communicators. In your larger role you can no longer rely on one-to-one communication. You need a strategy to reach large groups in a consistent and structured way.
3 must-haves to scale your communication:
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All-hands: An all-hands is simply a meeting that includes everyone. Your “everyone” will be the whole company if you are the CEO, your division if you run a division, or your entire team if you are a team leader. Bringing your “everyone” together at least quarterly is important so that they can hear from you, the leader, directly. This kind of forum may feel impersonal, especially if it involves you on a stage or with a microphone, but simply seeing you and hearing from you actually helps people get to know you.
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Leadership team meetings: It is still surprising to me that all leaders don’t have a regular leadership team meeting. When you lead more than just a few people you have to organize them so they understand what’s going on and get direction, but not directly from you. Otherwise that’s all you’ll do all day! Form a leadership team and meet with them weekly (or every other week).That allows you to say the same thing at the same time to multiple people. Their job is to then translate your message to their teams, and to let you know how their teams are doing.
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Weekly email or blog: There is no substitute for face-to-face communication; equally important is repetition. You need to repeat yourself. (See what I did there?) People want to know what is on their leader’s mind. Write an email or blog weekly to share your thoughts. You might feel this is “impersonal” but in fact regular emails can have a lot of personality – don’t you think my newsletter has a lot of personality?? Write informally, get help if you need to, keep it short. You’ll be amazed at the feedback you get from people from this simple and scalable way to communicate.
I would love to hear if you use any of these tools!
Send me an email to let me know!
