As your company grows there’s a huge temptation to become a figure head for the business.

That means that every time there’s an important announcement you’re the one to make it, but as companies grow the role of a figure head can in effect become less important than you think.

People often make the mistake of thinking that the man at the top needs to make the big statements but the truth is that letting the man at the top announce the big news can often be detrimental to having a happy organisation.

Every day we seek to reinforce our team’s leaders to ensure that they have both the respect of their teams and their confidence and yet without hesitation we announce to their workers the huge news without even giving them the courtesy of a heads up.

While this undermines your management team it also often has an unobserved consequence. The announcement can often be contrary to something the teams have been told by their direct managers or worse be communicated in such a way as to create more questions for the leadership team instead of less.

Part of being a good leader is understanding your team and as such being able to communicate on a level appropriate to them. This might be a communication to several people or on an individual level; but more often than not most managers have their work cut out dealing with delivering the same message in different way to five people let alone a whole company.

For this reason then, when a figure head chooses to release game changing information to the masses the broadness of the announcement can often create problems because it’s perceived in different ways by different people.

As a solution to this then there are some easy steps a leader can take; brief your managers before an announcement, given them more information than will be released too.

Release a generic statement that doesn’t get into detail and in turn allow your leadership team to deliver a more in depth message immediately afterwards.

As a figure head it’s your role to be the ultimate conductor, but more often than not this means rallying the troops rather than directing them.

Chapter Summary:

• People perceive messages in different way
• Leaders have to tailor their message to different people
• Generic messages can be misunderstood
• It’s better to have a base message and let your leadership team fill in the detail than try to tell everyone everything.
• Always brief your team before briefing the troops

Read our next blog post “View your staff as an asset”.