Simple tools to scale communication in large organizations

Philippe Ciampossin (Jan 2024. All rights reserved)

Leaders have multifaceted skills, but one that needs to stand out is learning how to become a great storyteller and more specifically a prolific micro storyteller.

It doesn't mean you need to be extraverted or even give Ted talks regularly, but to thrive in management, you need to be able to tell a story to deliver a good sense of direction so your target audience can relate to the task at hand. The recipient of your story could be your board, investors, customers, but for this article's purpose we will focus on how to reach out more effectively to your employees at all levels.

On the more mechanical side of planning techniques that are also used to communicate at scale, my experience has been that OKR or other frameworks like MS semester planning are very good at harvesting objectives, aligning organizational priorities and project funding. In my experience, they are especially useful in rolling up objectives at the top level to identify portfolio misalignment, with a nice side effect of finding out resource allocation to core versus non-core projects, which in large organizations is difficult to assess.

These frameworks however are pretty process oriented and not great engagement tools, as they fail to capture how your team is doing on a more day-to-day basis and reporting on progress made seem more like reading a scorecard.

So let’s dive into it...

One of my favorite quotes from the great storytelling book by Karen Eber is:

"Stories are the original scalable communication technology, allowing you to deeply touch an endless number of people at once."

This is why we carefully craft all-hands meetings as high-precision on-stage performances. The issue is they have to pack a large amount of information all at once for all levels of the organization, not really addressing specifics relevant for each work function. You can't fully discuss all your concerns, anxieties and sometimes lack well-defined action plans, as all-hands report on scorecards (good and bad results), next steps, and ultimately aim to energize your organization across levels and functions. Sometimes CEOs vent about specific people during tough times, but usually it doesn’t help and defocuses the team from addressing real issues.

Despite well-crafted events, in large organizations information often fails to flow effectively to all levels. This holds regardless of the number of all-hands or other events you organize. Managing and scaling communication in large teams is probably the most common tip I've been asked to share from leading 1000+ employee organizations. Today's topic is how to convey insights, points of view and feelings about projects to all corners of an organization.

Communication based solely on intermittent big events does not have lasting impact. You need consistent organizational rituals that can be repeated without creating fatigue. While key messages and objectives need reinforcing, the format should be more casual than big production events that seem to always happen at the wrong times when managing global teams. Even more important than frequency, information should be tailored to specific audiences. Direct communication at scale happens through targeted story delivery to a set of teams, where you can be more direct and candid.

Let's look at two rituals from my time at Cisco and NetApp that reinforced messages while enabling genuine communication:

• TOM (Top of Mind): Conveys your real-time focus and priorities to your org in a story format with broad reach

• AMA (Ask Me Anything): More open-ended sessions focused on senior staff that enable alignment through directness/candor difficult in formal settings

Top Of Mind - Simple but Powerful

"Top of Mind" (TOM) is a code phrase used to signal verbally or in writing to your staff that you are about to share thoughts and perspectives that are very important about the organization's current state and priorities.

TOMs can vary from very tactical status updates to more strategic concerns on the horizon. But they allow leaders to share what is top of mind for them that week, which orient teams to current challenges and priorities. In any case, writing or recording TOMs to reach a broad audience is an effective method to continue discussing key topics from all hands meetings but can be tailored by functions.

At NetApp Engineering, we had a weekly ritual where each leader of the organization was asked to publish their TOM to the whole organization in writing. The intent was to convey your real-time focus and priorities in a story format. 

TOM can also be conveyed as an engagement ritual at the start of a staff meeting. For example, having each functional lead give a 2-3 minute TOM to kick off the meeting agenda. This provides an easy way to engage your team to share good news, concerns and priority changes. Especially with remote teams, it is a great ice breaker before diving into other topics. And it orients the rest of the meeting discussion very effectively by surfacing current priorities and pain points upfront.

In essence, TOM provides a lightweight way for leaders to regularly reinforce key messages and give color on organizations' real-time focus areas. It taps into the power of storytelling to cascade information across large teams. When done consistently, TOMs enable broader shared context and visibility into the most important topics across an engineering org.

Ask Me Anything - Direct and Candid Dialogue

The goal of AMA sessions is to discuss topics of importance more openly with your senior staff, elevating the discussion beyond typical meetings. With a smaller, more homogenous audience of leaders, you can have frank conversations without filtering.

No questions are off limits, and you need to aim to answer candidly while staying professional. Attendees can vent frustrations during these sessions, but the goal is more for them to get insight on specific situations and better understand the rationale behind decisions. The monthly AMA sessions I held at Cisco and NetApp focused on senior staff, around 50 people across geographies. Given the experience in the room, we could debate issues openly and bounce perspectives off each other.

Over time, some interesting location-based participation dynamics emerged. Some regional teams preferred submitting anonymous questions to prime discussion. Others reacted live, asking follow ups to the TOM or building on dialogue from their peers. And some participants tended to silently observe.

Surveys showed consistent interest and attendance regardless of interaction style. While AMAs catered to both extroverts and introverts, they enabled alignment across the leadership team.

The sessions always started with my TOM to set context and seed initial dialogue. But they often drifted organically to other pressing topics once the audience was engaged.

In essence, the AMA format fostered more tailored and genuine dialogue with my senior staff. It amplified storytelling by enabling more candid discussion and greater depth than less targeted mass communications could allow. 

At the end they reinforce each other

The TOM + AMA combo enables tailored, authentic communication reinforcing key messages to specific audiences in order to multiply reaching out at all level of your organization about issues specific to each level.

When used on regular basis it does help connecting with your organization and make you more approachable and genuine than reading score cards at your all-hands

As a note I asked attendees not to record sessions, since that can limit difficult questions from more introverted technical staff. This is actually part of making sure that they understand that the goal is to be candid in my responses.

These two simple rituals amplify storytelling by minimizing sterile, mass communication targeted for everybody therefore often impersonal and lacking specifics which in turn makes employees less engaged.

As always let me know what you think by reaching out on LinkedIn…