Organizations do not exist in a vacuum and are instead part of dynamic ecosystems influenced by their stakeholders. These stakeholders range from boards to investors, employees, the media, customers, regulators, communities, partners, suppliers, and industry experts. All of these people have a say in the longevity and profitability of an organization. Therefore, learning how to communicate with them effectively is one of the most strategic things you can do as a leader. We cover why variation in messaging matters and how you can get it right every time.
Why Do Leaders Differentiate Their Communication?
While stakeholders may all have a vested interest in the goings-on in your organization, their priorities differ by a great deal. Let’s contrast boards with employees, for example. Boards focus on good governance, short and long-term strategies, and risk management. As such, they want oversight and accountability, and will be more than happy to go through periodic reports and projections. But employees care about things such as organizational culture, job security, and purpose. So, unlike board members who want to hear about the facts and figures, employees want to know how your decisions tie into factors such as their career growth, sense of belonging, and daily work.
These are but two examples of the different priorities at play in any organization. But why do these priorities matter to you as a leader? Well, they influence how stakeholders receive your messages in the following ways:
Selective Attention
Have you ever listened to someone’s story or explanation while feeling restless because all you wanted was for them to get to the part that you actually cared about, yet they were diving into other things? Well, that same restlessness shows up in stakeholders.
You see, when you talk to them, they do not take in every detail. Instead, they sift through the information to determine what matters to them based on their priorities. Everything else becomes a by-the-way, which they can ignore or hold on to for other purposes.
For example, if you announce that you are embarking on a sustainability initiative, investors may care more about the cost of the project, while employees may zero in on how this will affect their working conditions. While the message is the same, people will care about different elements.
Risk Perception
Priorities define how stakeholders perceive risk. Thus, a project that one person may look at as an exciting opportunity may feel like a risky gamble to the other person. And if a leader does not understand this, they can end up causing fear or anxiety among some stakeholders.
Let’s use a product expansion as an example. If you announce that your organization will now launch two new products, investors may be over the moon about it because it signals growth. However, regulators may be hesitant because of compliance risks, and your employees may wonder what this means in terms of their responsibilities.
Interpretation
You may not think that words carry a lot of weight, but they do. In fact, a single phrase may carry different meanings for different people, as it all comes down to what they value. And so while one listener may walk away feeling optimistic about the future, another may feel anxious or skeptical after coming from the same meeting.
Here is an example. Suppose you say to your team, ‘We are streamlining our operations.’ To your investors, this sounds like an improvement in efficiency, and they will support your decision. But for employees, this may sound like an impending layoff. And your customers may hear this and think that the quality of your products will reduce.
Streamlining in itself is a neutral term, but without much context, it is left open to interpretation by different stakeholders based on their priorities. And the same can happen with any other word.
Effect on Identity
Human beings often tie their identities to what they do, and this is the case even in organizations. Employees, for example, think of themselves as contributors to the organizational goals while customers see themselves as the beneficiaries. These identities shape the roles that they play within the organizations as well as how they receive messages.
Take a new product launch, for example. Your customers, who seek to benefit from your products, will listen keenly to understand the usability of this new product and its price. If they can’t understand how they will benefit from it, then they will likely be unwilling to buy it, which can result in you missing out on a market.
How to Adapt Your Communication Effectively
When your communication does not take the priorities of your stakeholders into account, you run the risk of your audience disengaging from the conversation. What’s more, it can hurt your credibility, weaken the relationships you have with the stakeholders, and even impact organizational growth and reputation.
The best way to avoid these issues is by adapting your messages to fit every audience. The goal here is not to change the truth or the facts in your message. Instead, it is to ensure that your delivery resonates with the audience’s priorities and identities so that you can address their pain points and deliver a message that they can pay attention to and appreciate.
Here is the correct way to go about this:
Align the Messages
Sometimes, leaders alter their messages so much to fit each audience’s needs that they end up changing the core vision. Unfortunately, when stakeholders compare notes and realize that they have been told different things about the same issue, they lose trust in the leadership as they wonder why there is no consistency. Some stakeholders even start thinking that the leadership is intentionally keeping things from them because it is not acting in their best interests.
Alignment helps you avoid getting into this boat as it allows you to adapt messages for every audience while sticking to the central vision. This way, when stakeholders liaise with each other, they realize they are reading from the same script, and this earns you credibility in their eyes.
How to Achieve Alignment
To align your messages across all fronts, you need to start by defining the single narrative that you will share with your stakeholders in relation to the organization. This message is what we refer to as the central vision. For example, yours could be that you are launching a new project.
From here, you come up with the values, themes, or metaphors that will be consistent across all contexts. Then, with vision and consistency out of the way, you note the areas of emphasis for each stakeholder group based on their priorities. For instance, with a new product, customers will care about value and price, while your investors will care about the return on their investment.
Example
Suppose you head a transport company that is about to transition to electric trucks. Here, your core message can be your transition to cleaner logistics for a sustainable future, where your core themes would be sustainability and clean energy. So, how do you communicate this to your stakeholders?
To the board, you would emphasize how this transition to clean fuel would position your company as a leader in sustainable logistics and how this would tie in with their long-term goals. And to your customers, you would focus on how this sustainability-oriented change would result in reliable deliveries and would help them play a part in environmental conservation.
So, the message stays the same, but you tap into their different priorities, thus encouraging buy-in from all your stakeholders.
Manage the Expectations
Ambition is a great thing, not just in leaders but also in stakeholders. After all, it sets the ball rolling for growth, innovation, and so on. However, it is important to manage ambition with realism because different stakeholders have different ideas when it comes to success and risk. For instance, investors may be willing to go the extra mile in pursuit of higher returns, while employees may be on the fence because they do not want to back ideas that may affect their job stability. As a leader, it is important that you adapt your message in a way that clarifies factors such as timelines and risks for every group so as to address assumptions, provide reassurance, and protect your credibility.
How to Manage Expectations
The first thing you want to do is create boundaries regarding your central vision. Be clear about the timelines, risks, limits, and other such factors in relation to your ambitions, as these will act as your guide. Then, set different expectations for each group of stakeholders. While they should all tie to the same central vision and the boundaries in place, you need to communicate them differently while making sure that they do not contradict each other. Finally, you need to revisit these expectations often to ensure that stakeholders are not drifting away from what you communicated to them.
Example
Let’s assume that you head a biotech firm and you are on the brink of announcing a new treatment for recurrent gut infections. Given the ambitiousness of this project, you can imagine that the expectations will be high. To the investors, you can be clear about factors such as when they will start turning a profit and how long it will take to get approvals from regulators. To employees, your focus can be on the staffing changes that will take place in the coming years, what opportunities will be available to them, and what projects the firm can take on once the treatment has been approved.
By ensuring that every stakeholder is clear about what they can expect, you can avoid disappointing people.
Balance Your Transparency
While it is true that being open helps you build trust among your stakeholders, too much honesty can overwhelm or even harm them. Take financial trouble, for example. If you tell the board that the organization is making losses and share the data with them, they will appreciate this honesty because it allows them to address the issue before it gets bigger. But if you share the same data with employees, they may start thinking that you are about to lay them off in order to save on operational costs. And that’s because while boards need full disclosure, employees are better off with straight-to-the-point information.
Given these nuances, you need to strike a balance between being honest enough to protect your credibility and measured enough to protect your organization. And the easiest way to do this is through layered transparency, where you share the same truth with different levels of detail depending on the stakeholders in question.
Practicing Layered Transparency
Start by deciding who needs what level of detail and why. For example, media outlets need you to be open without exposing the vulnerabilities in your organization, as they rely on this information to educate the public. On the other hand, boards and governance bodies need as much information as possible because it helps them decide the best way forward under the circumstances.
Secondly, determine how much information stakeholders can take in without getting overwhelmed. Like we said, every stakeholder has a set of priorities that affects how they perceive situations. Take your employees as an example. If you are too open with them to the point that they start worrying about their futures, this detracts from their work. You need to find a way to share enough information for them to trust the message without getting caught up in overwhelm, confusion, or vulnerability.
Example
Suppose your organization has faced a cyberattack that has disrupted its website. Such an attack can expose the vulnerabilities in your own systems and can cause a wave of panic. To the board, you can share the full technical report, complete with financial exposure, existing vulnerabilities, and the steps you have taken to remedy the situation. To the employees, you can be honest about the updates regarding the steps you have taken, reassure them about their jobs, and use this as an opportunity to implement new security measures. For the media and the public, you can acknowledge that a breach has taken place, explain what you are doing to protect existing and future customers, and emphasize that your organization is resilient and will get through this.
Each group gets sufficient information, and you get to avoid panic or damage to the organization’s reputation.