Information and understanding is not uniform throughout any organization, and the flow of information does not typically follow a smooth or linear path. People at the top of the corporate hierarchy know things that are unknown to people lower in the hierarchy, but the reverse is also true. There are pockets of people ‘in the know’ and pockets of people ‘in the dark.’ Once a business gets beyond a sole proprietorship, perfect knowledge is a thing of the past.
Each layer in the corporate hierarchy exacerbates the problem. A CEO may be in mind-meld with their direct reports, but those leaders may not have the same knowledge sharing with their reports, and so forth down the corporate hierarchy. It is like a game of whisper down the lane—with each step the story changes, and the same is true as information flows up the hierarchy. Front-line workers have a detailed awareness and understanding of what is happening, but as they report their situation up the management chain, the story morphs and gets watered down.
In addition to the challenges introduced by passing information through multiple layers in the organization, it is also true that not every mid-level manager will grasp the nuances underlying the information, and therefore may not be particularly great at communicating it. If you step back and consider this imperfect internal communication channel, it feels an awful lot like a fog. We have limited visibility, and things look and sound just a bit distorted.
The challenge for the CEO and leadership team is to cut through the fog and ensure everyone is on the same page. At a minimum, we have to make sure the team knows what we are trying to accomplish, and is equipped to act appropriately with the information they have. One method is to adopt clear corporate goals and disseminate them throughout the company. We back up the goals with clarity about our values and basic operating tenets, and hope that everyone ‘gets it.’
However, communicating the goals is not a one and done process. I live on an island in a bay, and when the fog rolls in, the foghorn starts to sound. It does not just blow once and assume all of the mariners heard it. Instead, it repeats continuously until the fog clears. Like a foghorn, the CEO and leaders need to continue to blast out the goals and values repeatedly so everyone absorbs them, even in the fog of information flow within the company.
But, it goes deeper than just goals and values. It’s great that everyone knows what the goals are, but not everyone knows why they are the goals and how they all fit together to make a great company. Nature abhors a vacuum, so if the team does not know why we have a goal, they will fill the vacuum with their own ideas. Too often, human nature leads them to create reasons that are not positive. For example—Q:“Why is the CEO so focused on hitting this goal?” A:“The CEO must have a bonus tied to it, and they will make a fortune if we bust our butts and hit the goal.” CEOs and leaders cannot just deliver the goals like tablets from the mountain. They have to go beyond the face of the goal and explain that ‘this is a goal because it will result in XXX, which is important because…’ In other words, it is a critical component of being a corporate leader to also be a teacher and explainer.
A good place to start in the software as a service (SaaS) world, is the collection of well established SaaS metrics. They are clear and meaningful and easy to communicate. Underlying the SaaS metrics is the concept of building corporate value, and rank and file employees all understand building value. Demonstrating how the goals result in improving SaaS metrics creates a foundation for why the goals are the goals, and a scorecard for measuring success. When team members understand the rationale behind the goals, they are better equipped to cut through the fog to achieve them.