Working with senior executives I get a lot of opportunities to see the communications mistakes that CEOs and top leaders make – over and over again.  Here are the three I witness on a regular basis.

1.  They live in the bubble and think it’s the universe.  Leaders at the top are surrounded by assistants, V-Ps and SVPs, security – all the human apparatus of success.  That apparatus is tuned to its leaders’ needs – recognizing them, satisfying them, anticipating them.  The result is that a bubble is created, inevitably, that is very pleasant to live in and easily mistaken for the entire cosmos.  It breeds a kind of self-centeredness even in the most humble of people.  And in terms of communications, it pushes leaders into believing that everyone is interested in the same things they are interested in, and focused on the same issues and challenges that they are focusing on.  As a result, leaders have to work hard to re-imagine the world from other perspectives in order to communicate well with them. 

2.  They mistake numbers for vision.  As soon as you get below the level of a company where the options are fabulous and the handshakes are golden, people need something to motivate them beyond their salaries.  Most people need to believe that the work they’re doing helps society in some way.  CEOs and other leaders have already made the translation of worth into the next quarter’s profit margins, because they live with those numbers everyday, but most employees don’t.  Leaders need to translate the numbers they understand into the language of purpose that the rest of the world understands. 

3.  They think information is persuasion – and they don’t do enough of either. Once again, because leaders have already accepted the argument that what they’re doing is worthwhile, they don’t need to hear the reasoning behind the company’s plan going forward.  But their employees, and certainly the public at large, are not as deeply invested in the company’s logic, and so they need more than just information.  They need to know why.  It’s not enough for a CEO to inform the employees about a new venture.  The leader also needs to tell the employees why the new venture is worth the effort. 

Top executives too often communicate too little.  When they do communicate, they expect their employees and the world to pay breathless attention.  They need to remember that information is not persuasion, that numbers are not vision, and that the bubble is not where most people live. 

Comments

[Nick Morgan]

Thanks for the great comments. If one top executive reads the post, and changes direction just a little bit......

[speech writing]

Wonderful article, thanks for putting this together! "This is obviously one great post. Thanks for the valuable information and insights you have so provided here. Keep it up!"

[Espen Andersen]

Point 1 is something I have observed in many people - a sociologist I know calls it infantilization. Comes crashing down hard when an exec from a large company joins a start-up.