Beat the Drum

My former COO gave me a piece of advice when I became a manager. He said that leaders have to deliver the same message again and again and again to make sure it gets through to everyone in the organization. Sometimes, it’s also necessary to simplify the message and lose some nuance for it to actually sink in. The advice made sense to me at the time, but it became more concrete to me as I tried to apply it and as I noticed when leaders above me failed to do it. I brought it up to my former COO recently, and he put it in a fantastically pithy way by saying “yep, you have to beat the drum.”

In the past, some militaries used drums as a form of communication. The drums kept armies aligned on messages as simple as “advance” and “retreat.” Similary, organizations need their leaders to continuously communicate to keep people in sync.

The larger the organization, the more important this idea is. In a startup with a few people, it’s easy for everyone to stay on the same page. In a massive company with thousands of people, everyone getting out of sync from each other is the default outcome. It takes work to get everyone to even hear a particular message, more work to get them to remember it, and even more work to get them to act on it.

Failure Modes

This may seem wrong. If the CEO wants to send a message to everyone, they just need to send a company-wide email or mention it in an all-hands meeting, right? Nope, because there are so many ways for such a simple thing to fail.

One person only skims their emails and didn’t bother reading the CEO’s detailed email.

Another person was on vacation during the all-hands and never bothered to try to catch up on it.

Another person was out sick and does want to catch up, but the all-hands wasn’t recorded, and nobody took notes. The person asked someone else what the CEO said, resulting in a game of telephone and a distorted message.

Another person got the message but then forgot it a few days later. This is the forgetting curve at work. If the CEO doesn’t repeat the message regularly, the memory of that message disappears. Especially if the message is complicated and has many points.

Another person disagreed with the message, ignored it, and nobody cared. This person eventually learned to just disregard everything the CEO says.

Another person doesn’t have all the context that the CEO does and as a result, fails to fully understand what the CEO said.

There are so many failure modes, even though the message is coming from the CEO, the person who should have the easiest time getting a message across. But even the CEO needs to repeat a message multiple times and figure out how to word it so that people truly get it.

Empathy

One reason it’s hard for leaders to actually do this (beyond the fact that it takes work) is that it’s an exercise in empathy, even though leaders tend to have big egos and to believe that everyone thinks what they have to say is particularly important and smart. But to communicate effectively, they have to put themselves in the mindset of their audience. And their audience may be so used to hearing nonsense that they develop a strong filter for what they hear.

When you come up with a message, it’s easy to understand and remember it because it’s your own creation. But that doesn’t mean it will be easy for someone else to digest it, retain it, and internalize it. You need to repeat it and ideally write it down somewhere for people to reference. If you do that and don’t keep changing what you say, people may actually start to believe that you mean it.

It’s a simple concept but takes discipline to apply. Figure out what’s important for people to know. Say it. Say it again. Say it in a different medium. Say it more simply. Say it to different people. Just don’t stop beating the drum.