From the course: Become a Chief of Staff
Communications
- Given how closely you'll work with the CEO, you'll often be in a position to help drive key communications, such as keynotes and presentations. You'll have a great relationship, you'll know what's top of mind and you'll have that shorthand, and so you'll be in a great position to drive those narratives. And at LinkedIn, I partner with our communications teams, our design teams to develop those internal and external presentations, whether it's our annual plan narrative or external customer keynotes. When developing these communications, it's important to not work in a silo. It's really easy to get trapped just in your office with the CEO, and I think the best keynotes are a highly collaborative cross-functional effort. So engage the marketing team, the communications team, R&D, design, really anyone across the organization who can help make that narrative better and crisper. Upfront, I recommend defining roles and responsibilities. This way you avoid overstepping or duplicating efforts across the different team members. And so it's really important to understand what role you're playing and what role you expect others to play in the process. Lastly, make sure you understand how your CEO prefers to work in developing these keynotes. Some are tops-down where they have a narrative in their head and they need your help to get it out, and others are more bottoms-up where they prefer a collaborative, iterative approach to develop the content. What works best here is to simply ask your CEO what style they prefer in developing that content.
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