As a chief executive officer, you play a key role as a decision-maker and a communicator. You are the focal point in communication between all kinds of different parties. This includes board members, stakeholders, customers, employees, and your overall C-suite team of executives.
Your central role as the governing voice of a company relies heavily on communication. Without effective communication strategies, you likely wouldn’t have even gotten to this point. However, there is always room to learn and grow, to strive for new skills and frameworks that can help you manage your company to greater success. All this starts within the C-suite. Master communication in the C-suite, ensuring alignment in strategies including your landing page development.
This article will serve as a guide to understanding and improving the ways you engage and communicate with every chief officer in your organization. Through these strategies, you can streamline your communication, address blind spots, and improve your team dynamics to build a better company.
Follow these tips for better C-suite communication.
1. Understand Your Stakeholders
Your first step is to understand the key stakeholders who have the most power and influence within your organization. These individuals will be the determiners of the decisions you make and the paths you take as CEO. From prominent investors to the C-suite itself, your relationships with these key stakeholders can make or break your ability to navigate a company towards its greatest potential. Additionally, these relationships will guide your communication, recruitment, and interactions with your C-suite.
Start with the C-suite. Get to know and understand your key players and the ways they interact with the larger organization. A C-suite is typically composed of:
- The chief executive officer (CEO)
- The chief financial officer (CFO)
- The chief information officer (CIO)
- The chief operations officer (COO)
- The chief technology officer (CTO)
All these roles carry diverse responsibilities that will dictate what executives do and who they interact with. You’ll find understanding these hierarchies are essential to know how to communicate within the C-suite. For example, the CFO will need to work closely with the audit chair and certain board members. Understand the coordination of these relationships to know how to leverage the points you want to make.
Knowing who to talk to about any given issue is your first step to success. But it always helps to fill your C-suite with officers who you know are aligned with your overall business goals.
2. Match Your C-Suite Team With Business Goals
Ideally, as CEO, you will have the ability to recruit or adjust the C-suite to best fit the needs of your company. With recent years breaking records for C-suite turnover, the likelihood that you’ll have some power over recruiting is high. Making the most of these opportunities requires first thoroughly understanding your stakeholders, then matching candidate talents with the goals that you have for your business.
For example, if one of your company’s goals going forward is to streamline the accountability and transparency of your finance department, you may consider shaking up your C-suite with a chief accounting officer (CAO) as well as the chief financial officer. A CAO represents a more specialized role that directly handles all things accounting and typically reports to the CFO.
Such an officer, dedicated to transparency and accuracy, could help you maintain effective communication across company finances.
Determine your goals from the outset, then craft positions and seek out candidates who explicitly fulfill these needs. From there, communication will be much easier because you will all be on the same page.
3. Get to Know Your C-Suite and Their Personalities
Quality communication across the C-suite will be much easier to promote if the entire team knows each other on some level and understands their wants, needs, and overall values. When you’re getting to know anyone, these items can be a challenge to crack. After all, we all have our ways of expressing ourselves that may or may not be following what we ultimately strive for.
To help you get to know your team and the ideal communication strategies for every member of your C-suite, encourage team-building exercises and expressions of value statements. One simple way to do this is to encourage every member of the C-suite to maintain a personal website. Not only does such a website help you recruit team members who espouse the same values you have as a leader, but a personal website can be a hub for workers, employees, stakeholders, and investors to get to know and understand the executives that manage their assets.
With a personal website—and perhaps even a business-focused social media platform—you can cultivate easy communication with a clear definition of values that will assist each member of the team in addressing specific needs.
4. Put Yourself in Others’ Shoes
On your path to leadership, it might have been instilled in you that a focus on empathy betrays a kind of weakness. However, empathy does not mean caving in where you need to stand your ground or sacrificing some element of success. Empathetic leadership is essential when coordinating the kinds of communication you need to lead your C-suite.
As previously stated, understanding your team—their wants, needs, and values—helps you get at the core of effective communication. Putting yourself in another’s shoes allows you to do just that. For example, imagine you are trying to relate to a CIO the importance of adopting new artificial intelligence technology and you know that the officer values securing employee jobs above all. You can cultivate your messaging to highlight that assistive AI is not meant to replace workers but to make their lives easier while maximizing productivity.
There are no limits to the ways you can assess another’s values to best craft a narrative that will appeal to them. From your investors to your fellow executives, empathetic communication is effective communication.
5. Adapt Your Communication Styles
From an empathetic standpoint, you are also in a better position to adapt your communication styles to the various needs and personalities of your entire team. Whether you’re working with multicultural groups using English as a second language or managing a family-run organization, everyone has a different personality that requires a unique approach.
In business, common personality types include:
- The Driver: Responds to logic and analytics
- The Guardian: Responds to proven strategies, traditional methods, and consistency
- The Integrator: Responds to authentic communication, consensus, and collaboration
- The Pioneer: Responds to creativity and new ideas
Your C-suite can be made up of any of these personality types. This will require you to adapt your communication approach to satisfy your entire team. It might help to chart out Myers-Briggs personality types for your C-suite to help you understand who will respond better to certain types of arguments and different mediums for presenting the information.
6. Lead With the ‘Why’s
No matter what the personality type and distinct responses are for each member of your C-suite, it helps to lead your communication efforts with the reasons why. The ‘why’s will help all members of your team connect the information presented to business goals that are ultimately their own goals.
For example, if you’re instituting new delivery policies in light of a public health crisis like COVID-19, overhead costs may be an issue for members of your team. However, if you reassert the why—in this case, issues of safety, continued functioning, or changing customer behaviors—you will position yourself to get more stakeholders on board.
By leading with ‘why,’ you consistently align your messaging with the values of your audience. Your C-suite will have to follow you logically from there. This will ensure that the entire team functions from the same source of understanding and are better coordinated to maximize the potential of the decisions you make.
7. Invite Coaching and Collaboration
Finally, your ability to cultivate successful communication among the C-suite will depend on your ability to learn, grow, and collaborate. No one enters the role of CEO with a perfect skill set for communicating their diverse needs and business goals. Therefore, it is important to invite coaching and collaboration into your communicative process.
As a CEO, it may be all too easy to let communication pitfalls like the following distract from your message:
- Talking too much about yourself
- Failing to listen
- Discouraging questions and comments from your team
- Failing to empathize
Good leadership communication requires collaboration. By recognizing this, you should automatically position yourself to hear and understand the issues or concerns presented by your team. From there, you can address issues more effectively and become a better leader.
Consider finding a communication coach or learning from the many examples available in the biographies of great leaders and successful CEOs. As a business leader, continuous growth is just as important for you as it is for your company.
Bottom Line
As CEO, it is your job to clarify, communicate, and coordinate the goals of your business across every department. No matter who occupies your fellow executive roles, you need to be prepared with a comprehensive approach to communication that invites collaboration and practices empathy. By following these strategies you not only secure the interests of your business but build a more fulfilling work environment complete with mutual understanding.
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