By Priya Ramesh
(Corporate Communications executive and communications coach to CEOs)
Trust you and your families are coping well to this pandemic. My husband and I are thankful for our backyard, keeps us sane in these trying times.
In the last six months, I am sure like me, you have been in numerous video calls, working seamlessly to keep your teams, customers and yourself motivated. The lines have blurred between working hours and personal time because the office IS now our home. As an executive communications coach and advisor to startups and large companies, I have been keenly observing how the executives in my Universe as well as beyond my clientele have modified their leadership and communications styles in this “Working from Home” era. So here are some nuggets of wisdom gathered from the last six months of strictly working from home:
1. Much more focus on internal/employee communications: CEOs are spending more time and rightfully so in communicating with their employees to keep them informed and motivated in light of the grim news all around us. Town halls, CEO messages to the employee base and company updates have doubled if not tripled in frequency since Covid hit us. It is imperative that leaders make employee communication absolutely mandatory and more frequent right now to reduce speculations on the future of the company and its bottomline in a growing recession. Your employees shouldn’t have to hear about an impending layoff or possible acquisition from a leaked media story but rather directly from you, the CEO. Frequent communications to your employee base is critical to keeping the “virtual” organization running as as a well-oiled machine in which all parts know what they are working towards and the direction they are headed towards in this pandemic.
2. Tone is much more important now than ever: The age-old practice of using “Please and thank you,” has never been more important than now when ALL your interactions are virtual so the receiver of your email doesn’t ever get to see you in-person. We all know how emails can come across cold, curt and extremely transactional when we don’t leverage the “niceties,” in our language. Our intention may be in the right place but how we write an email or send a chat message sometimes can come across as cold and insensitive thereby hurting morale and productivity. CEOs that have mastered the niceties have teams that will go above and beyond for them because they have been treated nicely. The tone in the CEO’s written communications should INSPIRE and want you to go the extra mile.
3. Less EGO and authority, more mindfulness in how CEOs communicate: It’s great to see a shift in how leaders are continuing to check-in with their teams on their health and welfare in blog posts, employee emails and video messages instead of going about with a business as usual, top-down authoritative style of communication. Our words have a profound effect on our listeners, great to see CEOs embrace a much more mindful approach to how they are running their business in this global pandemic. This is the time to lead with more compassion and understanding of the fact that people are stretching themselves thin as working parents, caregivers, battling their own personal health constraints in certain instances and keep our executive EGO aside.
4. Transparency and honesty while talking about the future: Pretty much every media interview that some of my CEO clients have done have had to answer the question, “How do you see your business surviving in the next year or in the long term?” This is even more critical for leaders that represent industries that have been hit really hard by Covid like retail, hospitality, airlines and restaurants. My advice to CEOs and executives who are media spokespeople continues to be to remain transparent about the company’s current and future state and not lose credibility by sounding overly optimistic or ignoring the harsh realities negatively affecting your business. This is NOT the time to paint a rosy picture especially when the industry that you represent is bleeding from all sides. Journalists are looking for honesty and transparency in how you plan to survive and stay afloat right now, so let’s tell that story the best way you can.
5. Maintain your executive presence in online meetings: The Working from Home environment is a great equalizer in that everyone is just a face on a video screen YET there are ways leaders must and can maintain their executive presence on video calls by doing simple things like dressing a bit more formally than usual, setting the agenda at the top of the meeting, sounding like the key decision-maker, the influencer in the online meeting. By establishing yourself as in control of the meeting, you have underlined your executive presence. This doesn’t mean you have to talk a lot but instead be measured in your speech and focus more on how to drive the meeting to the desired outcomes. Here’s a Forbes article on “How to Adapt Your Executive Presence to Online Meetings,” for more tips.
Hope this post has given you a pause or re-iterated things that you are already doing. Let’s lead more mindfully and bring out the best in our teams!
Contact me (priya@ceocommunications.co) if you need help building your executive presence.
Stay Safe.