From the course: Jeff Weiner on Leading like a CEO
Communicate
- The C is FCS communicate the right information to the right people at the right time. Communication is of, the life blood of an organization and especially as it scales. And ensuring that you have the right practices. Knowing when to communicate, what to communicate, who to communicate to. When to email, how to email, when to speak up at a meeting, when to sit tight and listen. To have the right venues, the right meeting cadence, the right forums, the right people around the table, all becomes absolutely essential, to communicating the right information to the right people at the right time. As organizations are just starting to reach scale and hyper growth, should they be under communicating or overcommunicating, if you were going to lean one way or another which way would you lean? Over, every time and speaking from first hand experience, it's no fun to be surprised. Don't like surprise, don't like surprise parties, don't like surprise in business. I don't like to be surprised. I like to hear bad news, even before it's happened. So, if you feel like something is potentially going to go amiss bring it up sooner rather than later. But bring it up with the right waiting, don't over do it. Don't define a potential, attractable problem as an existential one. Call it for what it is. Define it for what it is. Address it and prioritize it as you see fit, as it makes sense. But try to avoid surprises. Overcommunicate and then what's going to happen at some point, as you start to scale an organization, if everyone's overcommunicating, then what happens? Overcommunicating, what happens next? If everyone in a large organization is overcommunicating, communication overload, we're talking about synthesis, we're talking about separating the signal from the noise. That becomes really hard when you have too much information coming at you. Too much email, too many status reports, too many weekly summaries, too many meetings. So there is too much of a good thing. So you have to strike the right balance. You also want to make sure you understand who you need to be sending stuff to. Who's in the To of your emails, this may sound super mundane. It's really important who's in the To and who's being CC'd. It's both figurative and literal. If everyone you send an email to is in the To line, who's going to respond to your email? Everyone. Who's then going to respond to everyone's email? Everyone else. Now you got a lot of email you're sifting through. Be super clear about who you're sending your email to. Be super clear about who you're communicating to. Be super clear about when you expect a response and how quickly you expect a response. You can even create expectation management in those situations. I send you an email, I want to hear back within 24 hours. I want to hear back within two days. I send it to you on a Friday, I want to hear back on a Monday. Just be clear with people in terms of your expectations. It's really important and this is easily overlooked. But getting this right becomes absolutely fundamental.
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