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 actually 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 active 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.

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 doesn’t really understand what the CEO said as a result.

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

I think one reason it’s actually hard for leaders to do this (beyond the fact that it takes work) is that it’s an exercise in empathy. When you come up with a message, it’s easy to remember it and understand it because it’s your own creation. But that doesn’t mean it will be easy for someone else to digest it and retain it.

Ego is also a factor. Leaders have a tendency to believe that what they say is particularly important. But you have to put yourself in the mindset of the people you’re trying to communicate to. If you spend weeks coming up with detailed goals and plans for your team, of course you’re going to know them in and out. But someone who hears them for the first time is unlikely to immediately internalize them. You need to repeat them and put them somewhere for people to reference.

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.