Cascading Strategy and Priorities to All Employees in High Growth Startups
If there’s one stumbling block that fast-growing start-ups have, it’s not raising capital, or having a solid go-to-market strategy, or scaling the business model. It’s getting the overall strategy into the heads and hearts of front-line employees.
I came to this conclusion recently while talking to the founders of a few high-growth startups. They had successfully raised a lot of investment money and were growing like crazy. But they were also worried — how were they going to sustain that growth as their team doubled, tripled, quadrupled in size over the next two years?
In other words, they all had a sound strategy. They had clear priorities and a growth plan. But they were struggling with how to get buy-in from their expanding team so they would have the alignment needed for high growth. They needed to know how to cascade their strategy throughout the organization.
We See This Problem All the Time
Why does cascading strategy matter? It’s because, as your company’s base of employees grows, it gets harder and harder to keep all those hearts and minds in agreement. Ultimately employees need to understand strategy so they can make decisions in their work, whether it’s designing new programs to support growth, executing on bold, new initiatives, or just prioritizing the tasks they’re going to do that day.
That sounds like a pretty abstract problem. But look closely, and you can see it everywhere, in the form of things like:
- Product managers and engineers working on initiatives that don’t align with strategy
- Front line workers making decisions optimized for their near term goals and not the big picture
- Managers unable to plan for the volume of work and bring on the right people needed to deliver
- Inter-team and inter-discipline leadership not aligning on key tactics that matter — short term or long
Why does this happen? Because the communication style that worked for a small organization becomes insufficient once the organization hits a certain milestone.
For example, when startups have fewer than 100 employees, founder team members know all players and it’s a lot easier to drive the bus, so to speak. A couple of announcements and a few discussions are enough to cascade changes to all employees.
But, when you have a 200+ employee organization (and especially when you have remote team members in the mix), both founders and newly onboarded execs need to evolve their communication style. The style, variety, and frequency of communication must change. Larger organizations require more of a light touch process, and a more evolved communication style, to unlock the next growth cycle.
A High-Growth Communications Template for Start-Ups
In my previous product leader role, our team developed a communication template to help d my peers and me successfully scale company growth. What follows is the step-by-step process we followed for making that template that you can use to develop a template for your company.
Step 1: List out key change management topics in an OKR format
Basically, first you need to identify the most important things to talk about. Start with a list of communication priorities that matter to your organization, and write them down as OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). These form the “topics” of your communication. Think through things like that will make your company strategy real for example:
- Strategy and Priorities
- Trust in Leadership
- Build an Employee Community
- Culture Development
- …
Let’s take Strategy and Priorities, for example. The objective is to help employees understand the overall company strategy and top priorities. They should have an idea of where things are headed. If you do this right, your employees should report that they understand what the business is doing, and what their own goals are. Leaders should say they understand how the business is moving in the right direction, and feel motivated to do their part to remove any roadblocks.
Step 2: Take Stock of the Communication Channels Available for Different Audiences
Modern organizations have many communication channels: All-hands calls, employee chats, “ask me anything” sessions, huddles, intranets, emails, Slack, etc. Take a few minutes and take stock of what is available.
You’ll notice that there are many possibilities — why is that? Put simply, no single channel is adequate for a big change. You need to fit the channel to each particular audience.
So select 1–2 primary channels for a particular audience as a primary communication mechanism. When you do, define the purpose of the channel(s). What type of messages is it intended to send? And to which audience? Once that is in place, you can choose other secondary channels to reinforce your main messages.
For example, for cascading strategy and priorities, holding an all-hands is a great way to share key information with all employees at once. But the all-hands is not adequate on its own; leaders will need to reinforce what is said in the all-hands through other channels, such as a focused “ask me anything,” or a leadership meeting to deep dive and align on the cascade plan for the rest of the org.
Key presentation decks, videos with execs, and talking point notes are highly effective to cascade in all channels like slack, intranet, new employee onboarding, etc.
The main idea here is to establish focused channels and use them consistently with your audiences so they come to expect them as critical sources of information. These will give you the infrastructure needed for communication even before you bring on a dedicated communications team.
Step 3: Publish a Calendar and Set Up a Cadence
If you don’t have a dedicated communications person internally, it will be up to you to put together the calendar of the activities for executing your communications plan. Once you have put the calendar together, publish it. Get it in front of your target audience. This will help set the right expectations when it comes to communication frequency, depth, etc.
Also, in this digital age, there is no reason why all communications cannot be captured digitally, as recordings or transcripts. Make it easy for everyone to access past content with links to those recordings and transcripts. If someone should happen to miss an all-hands, or a leadership meeting, or a huddle, they should be able to get caught up quickly.
Step 4: Hit Your Stride, but Tweak as You Go
Don’t worry if your communications plan seems simple at first. The important thing is that you have a communications plan, no matter how simple — and that you stick with the cadence you’ve developed.
Remember, too, that you might need more than you think. Today, with remote work and hybrid environments, a lot of the usual “water cooler talk” is lost; organizations with high-employee growth will need to compensate by having a more frequent cadence. While it might seem like overkill at first, that investment in communications will start paying dividends in terms of smoother execution and sustainable excellence.
Plan on reviewing your communications plan about once a quarter, tweaking as necessary. Just remember: Setting expectations around communications is critical. Allow some time for those expectations to settle in and take root.
Credit: @Paula Duarte for her expertise and insights on this topic.
