The CEO of one London-based professional service firm my colleague and I worked with met with her extended management team the first week of every month. Each meeting began with her repeating the firm’s strategy and key priorities. The annual employee survey showed that 84% of the top team were clear on their organization’s top priorities. She was delighted — clearly, her effort to communicate strategy was paying off.
Then, her management team took an execution capacity survey my colleague and I developed, which asked them to describe the strategy in their own words and list the top three to five priorities over the next few years. Its results were more disappointing: the team’s descriptions of the strategy were all over the place, with almost no overlap. Fewer than one-third of her direct reports could name even two of the company’s five strategic priorities — the same objectives she discussed in every management meeting.
Why relentless communication doesn’t work
This CEO was not the exception, but the rule. Most leaders believe that relentless communication is critical to leading execution, and most think they’re doing a great job. The data tends to say otherwise. Among the over 500 companies we surveyed, on average, only 56% of leaders and managers could name even one of their company’s top priorities. Put simply, the most trusted leaders in the organization charged with strategy execution were given five chances to list the company’s top priorities, and half failed to list even one. It only gets worse as you move down in the organization. Only around forty percent of top team members could list the company’s top three priorities, a number that slipped to just over one-third among their direct reports.
Most executives I work with tell me they communicate all the time and are surprised when data shows how poorly strategy is understood. But frequency of communication is not the problem. Ninety percent of middle managers agree that top leaders communicate the strategy frequently enough. So, how can so much communication yield so little? Communication does not equal understanding; shared context does. High-performing companies work ruthlessly to build shared context instead.
What’s shared context? The common understanding of what matters, why it matters, how the pieces fit together and what is and is not working.
The input cannot measure shared context. Only the outcome matters, which is how well key leaders understand it. It comes from constant effort to build a shared understanding and reinforce this with your most critical leaders. And it’s vital: shared context is the nucleus of the execution capability of high-growth companies.
Creating shared context
Want to build it yourself? Here are four ways:
- A simple tune that everyone can hum: Strategy communication should be clear, and to be clear, it must be simple. Think of the song “Happy Birthday” — a simple tune and basic melody all can hum. For your organization, this is a clear definition of success (what does winning our strategy look like), and how will you get there (your top growth priorities). Once you have this, stay on message. This includes varying formats and wording changes. Changing messages, even if minor, that are not linked back to changing context lead to confusion. And confusion leads to inaction.
- Show what it looks like to win: Success at the finish line matters. In frantic execution mode where all team members are driving their OKRs or KPIs, lacking a finish line can lead to the pursuit of varying — sometimes competing — destinations. Imagine running a marathon. If you don’t have clarity on where the finish line is, you cannot make the right decisions along the way to get there. Worse, poorly defined finish lines drain a lot of resources, which also drains morale. Everyone wants to win. If they know the finish line they are aiming towards, they can better align effort and make the daily tradeoffs to get there.
- Discussions, not lectures: Shared context is built on discussion, which can be virtual and via shared platforms, but not just email or Slack. Review the agenda of your last meeting and the time allocation between telling and talking; if it wasn’t majority talking, you are not building shared context. Building shared context comes from frequent, formal and informal conversations with distributed leaders about what’s working, what’s not, and what they are seeing. Resist the urge to tell and ensure you are listening and discussing.
- Talk about what’s not working: It is just as important to discuss what is not working as what is. Even companies that score well on initial communication often fail to go back to the organization with updates on progress. It is these follow-up conversations on strategy progress and why things are working or not that build shared context. Often when things don’t work the first time, the most learnings occur to adjust execution going forward.
Understanding what matters and why
When employees understand what matters and why, they make aligned day-to-day decisions with other employees that allow them to move faster. It feels like it will take too much time to build context, but the gains in time are an order of magnitude over this investment. Building shared context allows you to move with aligned speed. Execution alignment without speed is too slow to matter. Speed without alignment is chaos.
Building shared context means slowing down to speed up. Speed is a competitive advantage in any market. With clear context, less time wasted on re-setting context, and an aligned employee base pushing towards the same finish line, you will move faster than everyone else.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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