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Good morning from Fast Company. Here's our daily look into what's driving.

Today'S creative business leaders.

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A leader's heart more than an upcoming announcement. Yet big changes and announcements are the turning point for many organizations. Whether it's layoffs, acquisitions, launches or reorganizations, the pressure to get it right is real. Company performance, team morale, retention, and public image are all on the line. Unfortunately, most leaders rely on advisors and experts when it comes to how, when and what to communicate well. Meaning attorneys, publicists or CFOs typically water down the message and the company ends up with something that is factual but uninspiring. Oftentimes that message is also ambiguous. With no plan, next steps or information on how, this isn't helpful for building morale or to arm employees with the right information to move forward. To do so, leaders need to strike the right balance of information and and inspiration. Here's how. Step 1 Start with the Information when change is underway, humans fill the void of information with any number of presumptions and speculation. As our head of culture reminds me, often people just want to know how it affects them. She's right. It's critical for leaders to share as much information as possible as soon as possible. Our agency navigated this recently. A long time client, partner and friend acquired our business. It was a great acquisition situation and one we had worked on for years. Yet we knew for most of our team it would come as a big surprise. And surprise can turn negative in our minds. This is probably bad. I'm losing my job. This is going to be terrible. To prepare and help ensure that they understood how this would affect them, we created a list of questions we knew would be top of mind and tried our best to answer them. In our initial announcement, we were also upfront about questions we knew we couldn't answer yet. Lastly, we told them when we could expect more information. STEP 2 Share why with care to build confidence Everyone wants to work for an inspirational leader in seasons of change. Inspiration comes from understanding the why. It also comes from leaders who truly care and are able to share their decision making process with vulnerability and understanding why keeping an open, inquisitive mind is paramount in volatile times. During a live broadcast of south by Southwest, Brene Brown joined Kenya Barris and Malcolm Gladwell to discuss shame, success and above all, curiosity. At the start of the COVID 19 pandemic, I always tried to explain what we were doing and why. We came back to the office sooner than some would have liked and later than others could understand. I knew we had to acknowledge that. Here's what I said to our team. We know some are wondering why the office is still closed and it may feel too cautious to you. Others are still concerned with safety. We're trying to make the right decision for everyone and for our business. We also know we need to stay at maximum capacity right now because so many of our changemaker clients are in need of our support. So here's what we're going to do. Acknowledging that I understood how it might feel and that I took their concerns into account allowed me to build confidence and trust with them. It also helped everyone understand why. Step 3 Tailor the message to your people in communications, we talk at length about tailoring the message to your audience to your people. The same principle applies when you're communicating change to your employees. Those in creative industries often lean more into inspiration, while those in technical fields typically need more information. I was speaking with a marketing director for a biotech company about our mutual experiences introducing employee ownership to our teams. Her experience with a company of scientists was very different from mine at a creative agency. I told her that we took our team to Disney World for the announcement while she noted that her team would have considered that fluff and preferred a different approach, there is no right or wrong here. The key is knowing your people and what they need to navigate a transition successfully. Your employees response is also highly dependent on organizational culture which comes from day to day interactions and operations. Consistent, candid, clear information builds trust. Once you've established that, you can lean into more and more inspirational messaging. Without trust, deeply inspirational messaging can seem manipulative and inauthentic. Step 4 Don't be afraid to showcase Vulnerability While you should never make a company announcement about you, a dose of honesty can go a long way. Shortly after our acquisition, I was speaking privately with our team and they wanted to know how I felt. I could hear leadership experts in my mind instill confidence, but we all know nothing is 100% wonderful or perfect. So instead I told them I'm 95% sure this is a great decision and I laughed as I said the other 5% is just because you can never know. I watched as they smiled and knew they really believed me because it was true. We're all looking for truth and can smell talking points from a mile away. Step 5 Know when to Mix Information and Inspiration Great leaders inform and inspire, but exceptional leaders know just how to mix the two. I remember a leader of a billion dollar global organization who stood in front of her large team. This year we are going to double revenue, she said. Her team cheered. They were highly engaged in the global good, their work provided for others and they respected their leader. She fed into the enthusiasm and continued her pep talk as the meeting time wrapped up. Everyone anxiously awaited for details but got none. She ended with alright, let's do this. No plan or next steps. No information, no how. She lost credibility that day in a big way. Instead of the start of a new level of growth, it became the end of trust and ultimately her role in the organization. Exceptional leaders know that people need both the why and the how, the inspiration and the information and mix both to meet the needs of their teams. These are the leaders we love to follow and work hard for. That's all today from Fast Company. Talk to you tomorrow.

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