LEADERSHIP

Great CEOs See the Importance of

Being Understood
by Michael Schrage
DECEMBER 16, 2016

No one who listens to Alan Mulally describe Fords remarkable turnaround escapes his rendition of
One Ford, One Team, and Working Together. Those are more than just words, he passionately
declared. Ford employees were expected to carry their CEOs one-ness message with them on
laminated cards.

Mulallys mantras literally rephrased how a factionalized Ford would forge unity of purpose.
Ambiguity was ruthlessly annihilated; the new vocabulary created new accountability. Employees
who couldnt or wouldnt speak uent Ford, he warned, couldnt stay. This language provided a
scaold of expectations, communications, and behavior. Ford wouldnt have succeeded without it.

Serious chief executives explicitly redene the key words organizations use to explain themselves.
Yes, leading by example is essential. But enterprises also need a lingua franca to focus and clarify
what they seek to accomplish. Ambiguityis the enemy. When the same words mean dierent thing
to dierent people the result is Babel, not alignment. Leaders with vision create value
vocabularies that make self-organization, motivation and alignment easier.

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Leadership is changing fast.

Being simple, clear and direct doesnt guarantee

being understood. The words CEOs say, write, and
post matter far less than their interpretation. How
theyre played back, Mulally and other successful
CEO communicators observe, is the true test of
understanding.

In other words, if people cant constructively enhance and advance the CEOs essential message
inside the enterprise and out, then something is profoundly wrong with either the people, the
message, or the CEO. Perfecting and polishing a message matters less than how its reected and
rened by the intended audiences.

But people arent parrots. Successful CEOs push managers to go uncomfortably beyond faithful
retransmission: they want their leadership coming up with proverbs and parables to better preach
the new gospel.

At one well-regarded web services rm, the new CEO wanted her company to become more
customer-focused indeed customer-obsessed. She felt the companys existing analytics and
processes simply didnt go far enough in improving customer experiences. One of the greatest
obstacles in promoting more proactive, pro-user initiatives, she quickly discovered, was that her

people were prisoners of their existing vocabulary. They interpreted her calls for customer
obsessiveness by intensifying existing eorts rather than discussing or describing new ways to add
new value.

After weeks of frustration, she realized she wouldnt get the improvements she wanted unless and
until her companys conversations around customers changed. She began talking about how she
wanted customers to feel and share after interacting with the companys services. She pushed
product managers to present enhancements in UX, not just elevating customer satisfaction scores.
Success, which was more gradual than immediate, meant the CEO started hearing her people
articulate dimensions of new customer value she hadnt anticipated. People slowly started
describing customer engagement, involvement, and experience in qualitatively dierent ways.

While the incumbent customer lexicon wasnt abandoned, it neither drove nor literally dened how
marketers and innovators talked about the people they were serving. Intriguingly, the CEO and her
leadership circle now struggle to determine how dynamic they want their value vocabulary to be:
what words should become ontological constants and which ones need to constantly evolve along
with the technology and analytics.

In anindustry thats changing, superior command of language is evenmore important for CEOs.
Microsofts Satya Nadella, for example, has been linguistically maneuvering from a proprietary
Windows/Oce software legacy to cloud computing, platform, and open systems contexts. Machine
learning, for example, is now as integral to Microsofts new value vocabulary as great code.

When you use Oce 365 it is not just simply that you are moving to the cloud as a new delivery
mechanism, it is about the intelligence that is being infused into the application, hes observed. So
we are using the very same concepts of neural networks for example to deliver a focused inbox.

But Microsofts ongoing global challenge isnt how well the CEO articulates a compelling innovation
vision but how creatively its legions of sales teams, marketers, project managers and coders
translate those ideas into persuasive actions. The company requires a new vocabulary to express its
increasingly innovative self.

We see or, more accurately, hear this in nancial services where block chain and novel
payment/settlement architectures profoundly alter business models and, of course, in health care,
where words such as hospitalist scarcely existed twenty years ago.

Entrepreneurial founders, of course, have both semantic and rhetorical advantages over their
successors in this regard. A companys creator disproportionately owns and inuences its
vocabulary. But every CEO leading change and confronting disruption needs people and systems in
place that assure key words are understood by all.

In Jacked Up, the underrated business memoir of GE CEO Jack Welchs speechwriter, Bill Lane
describes not just the time and care his boss put into speeches and presentations but how the
companys Crotonville facility was used to indoctrinate GEs fast-track executives.

Welch, says Lane, ruthlessly and relentlessly reviewed ever senior level presentation his top team
made there. Why? To make sure everyone understood and built upon his key and core messages.
Welchs skills as a listener, Lane concluded, inuenced more change than his vocabulary as a
speaker.

Understanding the importance of being understood is what makes great CEOs great communicators.

Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan Schools Center for Digital Business, is the author of the books
Serious Play (HBR Press), Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become? (HBR Press) and The Innovators Hypothesis (MIT
Press).

This article is about LEADERSHIP

FOLLOWING

Related Topics: COMMUNICATION |

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4 COMMENTS

Staci Tomas

an hour ago

I run a 100-person company. The most important thing you can do is keep the lines of communication open. We use a
great tool called Friday Feedback (google it) to make this happen. I see feedback from the entire org weekly.
00

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