🎙 my comms framework.

How I get leaders of $xxB businesses to pay attention.

Mar 11, 2022

Effective communication is a cornerstone of being good at ‘strategy’, and more broadly being a good knowledge worker. Influencing without authority is literally the whole job - you are constantly convincing people to listen to you, rally their resources around your plan, and tell the world how great your idea is. This is hard to do, and the first step to making it easier is great communications.

Today I would like to share a high level overview of how I approach1 getting a message across.

“bring the pieces back together, rediscover communication.” (Keenan, M.J. et al., 2001)

After 10 years in this space, I’ve come to rely on a five-point approach to convince via communications:

What do I want you to hear from me?
Why does it matter (to you)?
How do I know it’s not something else?
What should we do?
Where do we start?

Allow me to illustrate with a recent example - details have been fudged, but this really happened. We’ll use slides here, but the method works for slides, emails, meetings - everything.

I was tasked with convincing two Managing Directors in different organisations that their teams are not collaborating well on Project Kumbaya. The two MDs get along great, and they can’t imagine how their team wouldn’t be the same. however -

Team A and Team B both think the other isn’t pulling their weight.
Managers and junior team members are so busy second-guessing each others’ work, back-channeling frustrations, and trying to fight every single fire that nobody is actually working on the project.
Nobody has actually sat down to look at what the teams are doing day-to-day, or measure progress.

My team thinks we can fix this by building a transparent datasource that objectively measures the actions both teams are taking will help. We plan to pair the data source with manager coaching resources so they can train junior team members, plus a fortnightly leadership email highlighting opportunities to collaborate. Let’s use the framework above to dissect the wireframe version of the actual slides that I built.

Side note: I know that the actual deck template might be useful for some of you, so here is a copy.

1. What do I want you to hear from me?

As a rule of thumb, your slide’s title should be supported by the slide’s contents. In the opener, I am trying to convince leaders that the project is suffering due to collaboration issues. We could spend time talking about the project, how it works, etc. but that is not the focus for today, so we skip all of that.

2. Why does it matter (to you)?

My audience of two MDs care about revenue because that’s what they and their team are compensated on: the goal of this slide is to make sure they care that we fix this. Grounding the impact in revenue is a sure-fire way to get attention. I also take the chance to explain blips in data that might be questioned. Always anticipate questions.

3. How do I know it’s not something else?

Often times, you will be presenting to many stakeholders, and some of them will be skeptical of your solution. The best way to convince your doubters is to show them you’ve weighed the alternatives. In this case, we’ve decided to limit scope to what we can control + what has actual impact.

4. What should we do?

Our proposed solution is grounded in 1) factual analysis of what is causing the problem and 2) factual analysis that this is an impactful lever, within our control. All the interviews and setup prior have led to this, and in theory you should face little resistance now.

5. How do we start?

The MDs don’t need to see every detail, but if they are excited at this stage (hint: they should be), they will want to see a timeline and milestones. Be clear, be concise, and call out any dependencies on other teams. Make sure they know when they will see a finished product.

These were not the actual slides I used, but they’re pretty close. Guess what?

The message landed, and both MDs dedicated resources to ensure we get the dashboard and coaching stood up in record time.
We reduced the dissatisfaction both teams felt and they started to actually work together.
The program took off, and we exceeded our revenue targets. We were able to scale this program globally.

I’d call that a success 😎.

There is a lot more to communication, slide design, and getting a message across. I hope this framework serves as a starting point for your own approach to communicating important, complex ideas. I would definitely suggest putting your own spin on it, as this is simply what has worked well for me.. I will get into fine detail on other communications-related aspects in the future - let me know if there are specific things you want me to cover ASAP.

I developed this framework through years of mistakes and iteration. My consultant friends tell me they’re trained similarly, so if that’s you, apologies for the overlap, but I hope you still got something out of this.