ceo-communicationslisted

# CEO Communications A message in a leader's name is judged twice. First on whether it says the right thing, and second on whether it sounds like the person whose name is on it. The second judgement happens faster and is harder to recover from. An audience that reads a paragraph and thinks "she would never say that" stops reading for content and starts reading for who actually wrote it, and from that point the message is a piece of evidence about the communications function rather than a message from the leader. The costlier failure is quieter. Most communications from leaders answer the question the sender wanted to answer. The audience arrived with a different question, almost always some version of what this means for me, and if the first quarter of the message does not touch it they stop listening and fill the gap themselves. What they fill it with is worse than the truth, because the space between an announcement and its explanation is where a rumour gets its shape. A reorganisation announced without saying whose reporting line changes produces a week of speculation that costs more attention than the reorganisation itself. Both failures are avoidable and both are avoided before the drafting starts. ## When to use this, and when not to Use it for anything delivered under a leader's name to an audience larger than a handful of people: all-hands scripts, company-wide announcements of reorganisations, leadership changes, strategy shifts, acquisitions or redundancies, in