Mastering Leadership Communication: Insights from Oliver Aust | Peter Sorgenfrei | EP. 7

Welcome to the Whole Human Podcast. This episode is a little bit special because it was a LinkedIn Live event that I recorded with Oliver Aust, who is an expert in communications, and we spoke about leadership communications. Oliver has worked at EasyJet and General Motors. He's now an independent consultant. Helping executives communicate more effectively. He's written several books and we had a, a lively conversation about a bunch of different topics from crisis communications to how to lead intentionally and, and a bunch of other things. I hope you enjoy the episode. I'm really happy we finally get to do this, Oliver.

Me too.

Today we're gonna talk about effective leadership communications, a topic of which you are an expert. We're also going to cover a couple of other different topics. The way that we've set it up to the people watching this is Oliver and I have shared 7 questions, maybe 8 or 9, from each our side that we're going to try and get through. And then of course, we'll take questions from the audience. You can either write them in the, or actually you have to write them in the comment thread of this live event. And we'll be sure to pick those up along the way. We've decided that instead of just doing it at the end, we'll take a break in between, look at what questions have come along, and then try and address those in turn. And we'll try to get to everything and have an interesting conversation that hopefully will be helpful to all of you. So with all that admin out of the way, Oliver, why don't you tell people who do not know who you are and what you're all about?

Thank you, Peter. I'm really glad we're doing this and it's really great to connect. So leadership communication, the topic of today, is really my topic. I write about it every day here on LinkedIn. I write about it in the weekly newsletter. I podcast about it on Speak Like a CEO. And here with my team at Ewepsi Communications, we help leaders communicate better. You can ask, how important is communication for leadership? In my mind, it is leadership in action. It is one of the 3 pillars of leadership. If one is sensemaking, understanding the world. If another one is decision-making, then the third one is surely communication because you can understand the world and maybe you take great decisions. But if you can't take people with you on that journey, if you can't motivate them, engage them, it will be a rudderless ship. So communication is increasingly becoming the bottleneck in large organizations and small organizations alike. And that's why we focus on it so much. And it's a passion topic. It's a topic I've been working on and studying since the '90s, since I basically was a student and I went to London, become a spin doctor. And learned everything there is to know about communication on the way, but I'm still learning every day. And what I learn, I immediately share with the community on LinkedIn and everyone else who's interested in listening.

Excellent. And, and for those who don't know me, my name is Peter Sorgenfrei. I've spent the last 20 years building 6 companies, some of them successful, some of them not so much. The last 4 years I've been a coach to founders and CEOs globally. Currently clients in 7 different countries. And a topic that I often talk to them about is communications, right? Because it is surprisingly difficult to get right. It's surprisingly difficult to, you have a thought, you have a good intention, and you try to transmit it either verbally or in writing, and something completely different is either heard or interpreted from what you've said. So what are some of the, I think we want to go back to, to start where we wanted to start our conversation around the trends in communication, right? So from my perspective, there's more of it in more channels with more people, with more cultures. How do you navigate all that? How do you set yourself up for success when communicating with people, Oliver?

It's really about those first principles, right? To understanding who you are, what you are about, having that narrative. For yourself and for your company, being very clear how you want to get that across on which channels, what the timeframe is you dedicate to this. The narrative is different from the story. The narrative is the Christmas tree and the stories you may tell, those are the baubles, the, the, the tinsel with which you decorate your narrative. But that narrative, that very clear story, big picture story needs to be at the beginning of that journey. And then of course, it's how do you deliver that? What you say and how you say it. And how you say it is part of the equation, I would argue. It is wonderful to have a good narrative, but you also need to be able to get that across to people and engage them. And if you undercommunicate, essentially your organization, your team will not know what the direction of travel is. They will not know how their job links with the bigger vision of the leadership and the company. And that will make them very ineffective and will make for an unproductive team that may get a lot of things done. But if everyone sits in a boat and tries to sail into a different direction, the boat will not go anywhere fast. Get the narrative straight first. Be sure you have the clarity that people understand. Then work on the delivery that you are able to deliver your message in a concise and compelling way. And thirdly, decide on the channels that you want to prioritize. So some people, some leaders are very good with the spoken word. They love to be in front of a camera, in front of a microphone, LinkedIn Live, right? Use that. Don't force people into something they're not comfortable with at the beginning, right? I think everyone has to learn these things, but in the beginning, you want to basically play to someone's strengths and ensure that the strategy fits the person and not make a person fit the strategy. Some people are better with writing. Some are better in front of a camera. Some are good in one-on-one interactions. Some are great on stage with 300 people in front of them. So make them, make the most out of your existing strengths.

And so I'm a fairly Practical guy. So when I listen to all this stuff, I'm like, oh, that's a lot of things for me to keep tabs on. I'm just a startup guy trying to not run out of money and trying to have a life and trying not to be angry with my teammates when I come across in communicating because I love them, I care for them, but I'm stressed out of my mind.

Yes.

So one of the things that I've advocated a lot is before you have to communicate something where you have a suspicion that it might be a little bit tricky. Just write it down for yourself. Sit down with a blank piece of paper and write down saying, all right, I'm gonna talk to the team about, let's say it's a, a challenge situation. It's like layoff. All right. What are my, why are we doing this? How are we going to do it? How are we gonna take care of people? Write down sort of your process of what's going to happen so that you're in your mind have a logical structure of how to communicate it. And then the second thing I advocate is to say, take that piece of paper. And read it to yourself, actually out loud. What does it sound like? What does it feel like to say that? And then go forth and communicate. Obviously, if you're going to do it verbally, or if you're going to write the email even, or whatever, however you do the communication, it's helpful to have that little moment with yourself. Are there any other tricks or tips that you can give people that are easy to remember when they go away from this call today?

Sure. And I agree with you. It seems like a lot, but actually it saves a lot of time. You mentioned not running out of money. So if you're in a fundraising situation, as many founders are, and my last book, Message Machine, was actually written for founders who face this very problem, it actually helps you save a lot of time because if you have the clarity in your pitch and your equity story is really compelling, you may not have to meet 100 investors. Maybe you only have to meet 30 to get the required funding. So there's a huge time saving, but let's be very actionable and practical here. As a founder, as a leader, you speak in front of people all the time, right? 3, 4 times a week at least. So how do you make that easy for yourself, but also very compelling for the audience is by using a structure. And I usually, I often share a number of structures that help me a great deal and help the people we work with. And just to give you one example, what, so what, now what? That's an easy structure. And often these structures have just 3 steps, right? So what, what's happening? What are we talking about? So what? Why does it matter? And now what? What shall we do now to alleviate the problem or move forward? So once you have these structures in your mind and internalize them, it is actually very easy to craft a presentation, a speech, uh, just your all-hands meeting, whatever it is, all these communication opportunities. It will be so much quicker for you and it will be so much better. And that is always our objective. Help people become better communicators while saving time. And that's obviously what makes it compelling to leaders. If you just tell them it's another thing you need to do, it's not quite as compelling. So I know everyone is busy. Save time. Becoming a better communicator actually saves you a lot of time and these structures help.

You mentioned the fundraising. If we told the startup founders who are getting 200 or 300 nos, Mm-hmm. Along the way that by doing the work upfront and being more diligent about how they communicate, they could reduce the amount of nos before they get to a yes.

Exactly.

Uh, I think a lot of people would pay more careful attention. Why do you think it's communicating to many people, I believe, is riding a bike. We know how to do it. We know how to not fall over. We've been doing it for a long time, so we don't really practice at it. Yep. How do we make communication a more High interest activity. How do we make it popular again?

Yeah, that's how to make it pop. That's a really great question. And the emphasis is on again, because for most of human history, it was very clear that leaders had to be great storytellers, right? And then in the second half of the 20th century, I think the whole propaganda thing obviously was seen in a negative light or was communication was equated to propaganda in a certain way. But also we entered the organizational age, like big technocratic organization The big state apparatuses were built as well as the biggest companies we've seen in history so far, right? Big car manufacturers and so on. And in a way, communication and speaking and storytelling became a lost art. And I think especially since COVID we're coming out of that. And I think this is a good development. COVID was an accelerator because leaders saw that they had to get better at communicating with people internally and now externally with the advent of AI. And also you mentioned at the beginning. Cognitive overload. There's so much happening that I just have to become a better communicator to make my unique voice heard. And it's also an opportunity for me to position my company, position myself, attract customers, attract top talent, and attract investors. And these are really the 3 things a company needs, right? Investors, top talent, and customers. If you have enough of those, you don't have to worry about the business. So usually one of them is lacking or 2 or 3 of them are lacking. that communication helps you attract these 3 key, sorry, these 3 key groups of people to your business. And that's really what usually convinces people is like, ah, you're right. If I had more customers, if I had more top talent, more investors, my problem would be, would go away essentially. Communication helps you achieve that.

All right. We've gotten a couple of questions. One is from Jurgita. I hope I pronounced that correctly, who asks, what is narrative? Mission, vision, or something more close and easily understandable to people? The way I would answer that question is narrative is the story. It's what you're telling people. It's a fancy word for story. Is that fair, Oliver?

Yeah, I would say it's the big picture story. So the American dream is a narrative, right? Or the European dream is a narrative under which a lot of stories are true. So it's the one big picture story.

Got it. And then we have another question here from our friend Alexei who says, what strategies can leaders employ to ensure their communications effectively motivate and inspire their team members towards common goals and objectives? My answer there would be enthusiasm is always good.

Yes, it's infectious.

Transparency. And the way that I've always done it is I actually didn't try to do it differently than just being me. So the way that I would do it is bring all of me to the communication. If it was good, it was upbeat, a lot of energy, positive. If it was bad, people could actually see and feel me in the communication. And I think that, that helped them understand my message better. Do you have other pointers?

I'm fully on board with that. I would add that it is push-pull exchange. That's the kind of system you want to build, especially as an organization grows. So a lot of companies push out information, but don't necessarily pull information in forms of surveys, in terms of asking people what they think, what helps them. It's a lot of listening that leaders have to do that. An exchange is really sitting down and talking to people at all levels. And there's some famous examples. Airbnb is one of them where the leaders actually do take people out for dinner at all levels of the organization, listen to what they have to say and go into an exchange. So think about this as a push-pull exchange exercise where it's not just pushing information out, it's listening and it's going into exchanging views.

Got it. We'll remind people, thank you for those 2 questions. If anybody else have any questions, just type them up and we'll pick them up as they come in. It's a lot of fun to answer your questions rather than listen to ourselves talking.

I've, I've a question for you, Peter.

So here we go.

You talk a lot about intention leadership. How does that relate to communication?

I think it's about being aware of what you're going to do. So as you turn on the computer in the morning and meet your team, or as you go into the office and meet your team, having an intention for who are they going to see? How are you going to do what you need to do that day? And as it relates to communication, it's intentional. I think one of the many mistakes I made early in my career was I would just share like an idea in the hallway, communicate it, but it never came out. But what you realize when you're a leader or CEO of company, the entire ship then goes in that direction. I wasn't intentional with my communication. I didn't think about what happens after I say whatever I'm going to say. So intentional leadership is maybe just a fancy word of being aware of who you are in the space and how people are going to respond to how you lead.

Yeah.

And a large part of that is your verbal and physical communication, right? We all know the one where if I sat like this in meetings, I'm having my arms crossed. If you're not watching the video, clearly people are getting a signal. So intentional leadership is about being aware, essentially.

Being aware even of the signals you send when you're not speaking, right? You mentioned your body language, but even the look on your face when you enter the office, if you, is it energetic? Is it sad? People pay attention to that.

I had a call a couple of months ago on a project that I'm supporting, and I was sitting like this a little bit, like scratching my head because I was looking at my notes. And literally one person on the other end called me out on it. She's, Peter, have you given up on us? Why are you, why is your head down? Why are you so— no, I was just trying to look at my notes and I was thinking and I actually forgot that I was on video. So it's very clear that people actually see these signals. Unfortunately, they don't necessarily call you on it, so you yourself have to be aware of it.

That's right.

All right. Very good. So we're, we're 16 minutes into this. I hope the people on the stream are enjoying it. Please do fire off your questions as you have them. Another question, another topic that we, that we had between us was you wrote something like magic words to get what you want. I only know one and it's please.

It's actually the first one we learn or being told. This is not a concept invented by me. It's a book by Jonah Berger who's written some fantastic books that touch on leadership and communications. And to give you an example, so basically the message is words matter. Yes, please makes people more likely to comply with your wishes, but there are others. So for instance, if you use the noun, it ties the word to your identity. So if I say be a leader, that's stronger than saying lead. Or be a voter, not just calling you to vote. So nouns help us tie an activity to our identity. And we can also say, what could we do instead of what should we do? That gets people according to surveys more excited and more creative. So what could we do? It opens possibilities rather than should, which narrows them down. So it's a wonderful book, which I can really recommend. It's a fun, it's a fun read, but also very useful because it opens your eyes to what seemingly are small differences, but make a big, big difference in terms of the impact and the outcome.

Would you just remind or repeat the name of the book and the author, please?

Yes. The book is called Magic Words by Jonah Berger.

Got it.

E-R-G-E-R.

It's funny as you say that. So some of the topics I work with people on is getting them to sleep better and remembering their exercise and honestly remembering their relationships and stuff. And so One of the, and congratulations on your recent marriage, by the way.

Thank you.

Now and now. Last weekend.

Exciting times.

But I've caught myself saying things like, and teaching people saying, you're not going to go for a run. You are a runner.

Right.

Or if they have trouble sleeping, instead of saying, I have trouble sleeping, saying, actually, I'm a good sleeper. Yes. So by changing, we're back to the narrative, Georgi, it's that by changing how you talk to yourself, the words that you use. You can actually put yourself in a mind frame that gets you that result that you want. So in that way, it's a magic word, even in your internal dialogue, right? Which I think is a good thing to remember.

It's an interesting point you're making that effective leadership communication starts with ourselves, right? How we talk to ourselves. If we are too harsh with ourselves, that will probably ooze out. But if we are too soft and too forgiving with ourselves, that may set low standards. So the self-guiding and self-leadership part is so crucial as well.

Yep. Yep. All right. Where should we go next, Oliver? What topic should we cover now?

Can I ask you a question?

You may certainly.

Yeah. So you wrote that you can't force yourself to think faster. If you try, you're likely to end up making much worse decisions. And I thought that was fascinating. Because our whole culture and leadership ethos tends to entice us to take faster moves, make faster moves, take faster decisions. But you say actually that's counterproductive.

Yeah. And I believe it is. And I think if you look at your sort of personal life, something we all can relate to, whether we lead people or not, is if we're rushed getting out of the door, chances are we forget something, the umbrella, the keys. I live in Denmark, right? It rains here all the time. So. Chances are you forget something if you are rushed in a dialogue. Now you and I are talking. If I was on my phone at the same time and writing notes, I was somewhere else and my child in the other room was calling, I, I just wouldn't be able to make good decisions about what I'm gonna talk to you about because I'm not present with you and focused. So when you try to make, or when you try to think faster or accomplish the thinking task in a shorter time span. You don't see all the angles. You don't see all the bits and bobs that you need to take with you into consideration. So I think the primary thing most professional human beings need to learn to do is to slow down your movement, honestly, not rushing all the time, slow down your thinking. So be with yourself and actually think about whatever topic it is that you're working on or thinking about. And then thirdly, and we're coming back to communications. I speak pretty fast.

Mm-hmm.

I've discovered when I slow down my speech and take longer pauses, people pay more attention to what I'm actually saying. So I, in, in general in life, I think taking out pace helps you to make better decisions, come across stronger, and essentially be more impactful.

Because only a few decisions actually matter, right? When you look at the life of a CEO, maybe 10 years at the helm of a company, but we can probably boil it down to a handful of decisions that really defined his tenure or her tenure.

No, I absolutely. And we also all know that we all make hundreds of decisions subconsciously every single day. And back to the intentional leadership thing, right? If we're Bringing that out to everybody. Try tomorrow, the people listening or watching this, to be very aware of all the decisions you make.

Yeah.

Right? From what time you're getting up to how you get outta your bed, to how you brush your teeth, to how you put on your clothes, what clothes you're wearing, why you're making those decisions. So today I knew I was gonna speak to you. So I thought, okay, I, I can't sit in a t-shirt. I'm gonna wear something. That was a decision. All sorts of decisions like that we make all throughout the day. Many of those decisions are not, I don't wanna say life and death, but they're not that significant. If I wore a black sweater or a gray sweater, we'd probably be fine.

Mm-hmm.

But the decisions that I made as a CEO, for example, in terms of who I would hire or who I would take investment from. Or whether or not we should launch this product feature or that product feature. Those decisions are really big ones and they should not be made at speed. The thing I see a lot of leaders make the mistake of is they hire really fast. They're like, holy smokes, things are going really well. We need a bunch of hands. Let's just hire this woman because she's available. Or we make an ad. But I've already spoken to 7 people. Let's just hire one of them. That is the worst decision you can make.

So tempting and so bad.

Yeah, exactly.

All right.

We've gotten, we've gotten another question here from Sarah who asks us, what would you say leaders should focus on in communications with the rise of AI? What are the trends in leadership communications? I think that's squarely one for you, Oliver.

It's so fascinating and something I've been thinking about quite a lot over the last year or so. So AI is obviously very helpful in terms of improving someone's communication, especially written communication, but also when it comes to, let's say, drafting a presentation, drafting a speech, AI is really good at that. And if you know a few prompts, as most listeners will, obviously it can really help you. And on the other side, I would say it doesn't deliver your speech for you. It doesn't deliver your presentation for you. So there is an element that AI can't do and probably won't do in the near future. And the way I look at it is big picture. It helps save time, makes us better communicators, but also because AI will always give us something that is not original. It's already out there. It will amplify those voices who are unique, who stand out, who have opinions, stand for something. And that's a big opportunity. And that has started before AI came on the scene big time a couple of years ago, but has really been accelerated through AI. So. Your unique voice becomes more valuable because of AI and your ability to be a human being and connect with other human beings is also more valuable now. So I would say rather than competing with AI, let AI do a lot of the grunt work and focus your time and effort on building those connections and making your unique voice heard.

And I want to paraphrase that to the time before AI, right? So you worked for some pretty big companies, EasyJet, General Motors. I've always had a beef with you guys because I felt that when a corporate executive came out from General Motors or EasyJet or Lufthansa, pick one, it doesn't matter. Big corporate that has a communications department. And my good friend Dan Siegers is from there when we worked together at Toyota too. It all sounded the same, man. I could have said, I don't know if this guy is selling dishwashers or if he's selling airplanes. Line tickets.

Yeah.

And so one thing that I've missed in corporate communications for years is the courage of an executive to come out and actually be the person he or she is. Mm-hmm. And communicating that way rather than something that's been polished off by 18 people and you see them reading from a teleprompter and it just feels like plastic.

Yes.

That's how, to me, AI feels.

That's a really, that's a really interesting comparison. And I don't disagree with you. And there are 2 things. Big organizations become bureaucracies, even if they're in the private sector. And secondly, if you're a listed company, then investor relations, lawyers, et cetera, make it rather bland, unfortunately. It doesn't have to be that way, but that's the reality. Now, that is an opportunity for anyone listening who's not working for a huge company because we as independent companies, solopreneurs, as startups, as founders, We can have, we can afford to have that unique voice. And in fact, it is our competitive advantage. We don't have a 20-person corporate communications team potentially, but what we do have is the ability to go out on LinkedIn and say what we want to say. And that is the beauty of it. So it's actually advantage for David, not for Goliath. And that's how I would look at it. But I totally agree, like a corporate statement, actually AI is probably better now than most corporate statements.

I want to bring in, I want to bring in this guy to the conversation.

Yes. Yes. Very interesting communicator.

There you go. Elon Musk, the head and majority shareholder of 3, 4 major companies that are changing the world. We all have opinions about him. We all have opinions about his leadership style, all this other stuff. But it is clear he does not give about corporate communications. He's going to talk in whichever medium he wants about whatever he wants, whenever he wants, because he owns the shop. Is that good or bad?

He's a part owner. I think he owns 20% of Tesla. So I think he's a real outlier. That's why it's a fascinating case, but just not, I think, applicable to most other executives who just don't have that standing and will probably lose their jobs. Now, what I would say is that, yes, be courageous because if you don't stand out, you don't exist, right? The old corporate statements that got you some visibility because you had a big company. They, that doesn't work anymore. No one cares anymore. So I see and predict the rise of social CEOs and creator CEOs at all levels, big companies, small companies, solopreneurs, because social media is a great leveler, right? It's a, it's the same. All our LinkedIn accounts are the same and you and I put effort in it. But if I'm a big company CEO and I don't put any effort in it, I will probably be pretty invisible. And my comms team may write my LinkedIn post, but it's probably not going to be very successful if it's not my own voice and my own opinions. So that's how I would see it. It's a great opportunity. Use it for yourself because it is, it is a once in a lifetime opportunity potentially that we all have these media at our disposal. And yes, I would encourage large company executives to be way more courageous than they are.

And I also think we're seeing really good examples in the social sphere. Alex Hormozi or others. There's Justin on LinkedIn, right? 500,000 followers because he talks about how to use LinkedIn better. Obviously a good audience. But still you can build a following by being who you are without having to be as crass and as rude as Elon is. And he's doing his, so very good point.

And these are great examples because people like Alex Hormozi and Justin and Eric Partaker, they provide value, right? Of course, there's a business behind it for sure, but they provide a lot of value and they're not necessarily big on all the platforms. So you see some people are very big on YouTube, but they're no one on LinkedIn and vice versa. So there are plenty of opportunities depending on your preferences and And strengths.

Yep. So everyone, we've been going for around half an hour at this point. I think we're going to be going for a little bit longer in case you have any questions like Alexei, Sarah, and Chiquita, just put them in and we'll get to those. But let's cover, let's cover something else. As we've talked about Elon a little bit, you crisis communications, things go wrong. How do you do that? How do you do that?

That's a great question because we see more crises spreading faster in the world. That is partly due to social media, partly due to AI. We see more deepfakes. It is an interconnected world. So for many reasons, more crises spread faster. There's some good news in here as well, because the world moves on quicker as well. If you respond in the right way, if you respond like Boeing, obviously it goes on for years and you don't get out of that hole. But if you play your cards well, you can get out of that hole relatively quickly. Now, what do I do in a crisis? First of all, I need to prepare, right? You can't figure out what to do in a crisis as an organization when you're in a crisis. Because it moves so fast that speed is of the essence and you don't have the time to figure things out when it happens. So the best preparation is to first assess your vulnerabilities. What could happen? Cyberattacks is a classic we see these days. Deepfakes. And then there are emergencies. The building may be on fire. We may lose our customer data. So there are some classics that probably apply to most companies. And there are always some specifics for companies depending on the business they're in. So I need to understand where my vulnerabilities are. And then as the next stage, I have to draft and create a crisis playbook that encompasses business continuity, that encompasses crisis communications. What are we going to say? Chain of command, roles and responsibilities, logistics, but don't get too heavy on the logistics. Think about what are we actually going to do and what are we actually going to say? And then if a crisis breaks, and then you want to simulate it, you want to get trained, you want to simulate it. We do these simulations. It's actually great fun. We come up with a scenario. We throw that at people and see what they do to identify shortcomings and then fix these together. So that's the process. First, vulnerability assessment. Secondly, the playbook. Thirdly, practice. Then you're relatively ready for a crisis. And in a crisis, I always advise to do the 3 A's and don't do the 3 D's. The 3 A's are you acknowledge it is happening. So that's the first thing you know about is And the message you're sending is, we know about it and we care. And you could do that within minutes, right? The thing that just happened, we know about it and we do care about it. We are on it, right? So that's the first one, acknowledge. Second one is act, is apologize. So often an apology is an order and an apology does not mean that you resume legal, basically legal responsibility and agree to pay. And this is something people often confuse. We know how to phrase statements so that you basically apologize without admitting guilt in the legal sense. So that's number 2. And number 3 is act, and often means overreact. So you want to tell the world that we know it's a problem, really sorry it happened. We've taken these measures and we make sure it doesn't happen again. And that is how you maintain and win back trust. And last point I want to make is a crisis is so severe that it always has an impact on revenue. Otherwise, it's not really a crisis, right? So. If something happens so bad for your reputation, people will buy in lesser numbers. So it has immediate revenue effect, which means it should be a priority for every CEO to ensure the company is crisis-proof. To me, not doing that once you go past 10 people or so is negligence.

And again, it's pretty clear that we come from 2 different worlds. You have had most of your career until you did this in larger corporates and larger systems, and mine has been in tiny little things. And I think for those who are working in that space, what you're talking about, the 3 A's, is actually material, right?

Yes.

So instead of denying it, you didn't get to the 3 D's, but instead of, I'm assuming one of the D's is denying it.

Yes.

You say, yep, we lost customer data. Yep. You apologize. We're terribly sorry. Here's what we're going to do about it right now.

Yes, exactly.

It is, it doesn't have to be more complicated than that. And so if you feel like creating a playbook and doing all these scenarios and doing all this training and stuff is a little bit too much for your 7-person or 27-person startup, just start with preparing yourself to be ready to apologize and accept, apologize, and act.

Yes. I think for a small company, it can be a few hours at a workshop, right? Identify the weak spots. And then write down what you would want to do or what you would do, what you would say, and who's in charge. Where do you meet? What's the link to the video call, et cetera? So that can be done in a few hours. I agree. I wouldn't over-engineer it, but it needs to be thought through because you have 4 hours maybe next month to do workshop, but you don't have 4 hours in a crisis, right? So.

Exactly. We've, there's been a couple in Denmark recently. Our stock exchange burned to the ground. You know, this is a building that's several hundred years old. And they're still figuring out what happened. It was under construction. There were some renovations going on, but the image that everybody has is the employees carrying out paintings, basically national treasures that they wanted to save. And the narrative is that the CEO, he sat with a binder with pictures of all the pictures they had. And he basically, they figured out, okay, we're going to save these paintings first because they're most significant. I don't think that came necessarily out of a preparation for a fire exercise. If it did, I'm impressed. But that's the story now, right? That's where we're thinking about. We have sympathy for what happened and we're going to figure out what happened and they're going to figure out where they're going to relocate all these other things. But right now there's this sense of, oh my God, these people saved our national treasure while their office was on fire.

Yes. The power of images, right? It is. I need to look into this. I wasn't aware of it, but that's—

Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's pretty devastating.

Yeah.

Oliver, what would be a good topic or question to round off on today? What do you think we should do?

I'd love to ask you about personal growth. And I think this is an area we're both very interested in and probably everyone listening. You mentioned that personal growth is as important as your company's growth. And I would love to hear your thinking on this.

When you think about it, when you start a company or when you resume the role of a founder or CEO at the first time. You and your skills are at one level, right? You're probably technically good if you're a technical founder or you're good at marketing or you're good at some topic that got you to where you are. But now all of a sudden you have to start thinking more broadly. There's going to be other departments in the company. There's going to be a lot of other people, personalities. There's going to be external stakeholders you have to relate to. You might have to, as you talked about, pitch investors. There's all this other stuff that you have to do. And so it, it's erroneous to assume that you can just learn on the job, right? I'll just figure it out as I go along. I don't think that's a strategy for success. So personal growth actually starts before you get there. It starts by saying, what am I, Peter, what am I good at today?

Yeah.

And what do I need to be good at in the future in order to be successful in whatever I set out to do? And then start a journey of developing that. As long alongside developing your company. Because what we see with most companies is they start failing when the people haven't developed as fast enough as the company has developed. You have a CEO who all of a sudden has hundreds of people in their organization, but they've never developed their leadership skills. They've never developed their communication skills. They've never gotten feedback on Whether they're empathetic or not. And so people start seeing that and then they start having adverse effects. They start quitting, they start being dissonance in the ranks, all these other things. So companies typically fail. They fail for a bunch of reasons. Number one is running outta money. But number two is people. It's because the people don't evolve as fast as the company does, or they don't get outta the way. That's another one, right? Actually, it takes a fair amount of personal growth to realize that, yes, I might be the CEO and I've done this for this last 7 or 8 years, but it's time for me to take a step back or go down to a technical role or something else.

Yeah.

You don't do that unless you've developed personally along the way. And that's why a company fails. We've actually gotten down to the wire. We've gotten another question from Aya, which we will close off today's session with. And the question is, how do we ensure the vision and mission communicated to middle management is cascaded well to the whole organization. That's a good one, right? There is a CEO and an executive team. This is where we're going, guys. They tell their middle managers. Yeah. And then the rest of the organization is like, what? How do we do that?

So my view on that is a little controversial. I don't believe in cascading because it doesn't work in my experience. And I would rather have the leadership ensure that All levels have access to them. It comes back to push-pull exchange, right? You go into the exchange and you make sure through the channels you have from social media to your internal channels that you communicate your vision directly. So nothing gets lost in the middle and that you also get direct feedback and understand which parts may not be clear and need to be clarified going forward. We know from surveys and studies that The vast majority or the majority of people in large organizations, probably also small organizations, they don't understand or know the company strategy or how they should act upon it and execute against it. That's a huge problem. We also know from studies that once you have a proper internal communication system set up where the CEO is really the chief communicator, it increases dramatically. So the vast majority of people understand the strategy and can act upon it. So that's the difference. And that's why I would say cascading doesn't work. I would delete the word from the vocabulary of organizations if I could, because it, it gives people in leadership positions the illusion that they can say something to the next level and everyone in the organization would know about it when we know that is not true.

It's, uh, it's like the game of telephone. We're standing in a circle and I say a sentence to the person next to me and they repeat it. And by the time. The sentence comes back to me, it's gibberish. And so somebody once told me, a very astute chairman of one of my companies, he said, it's like marketing.

Mm-hmm.

People need to hear or see the message 7 times in order to act and understand it. So just you, just because you've said something in an all hands and you've sent the email afterwards and you've told your managers to reiterate at their next one-on-ones. You're still 4 short of the amount of times that people need to hear a message in order to respond. Oliver, this was a distinct pleasure. I very much appreciate your time doing this.

You too.

I hope the, the people on the stream got out of it what you hope to do this afternoon, morning, or evening, depending on where you are in the world. We've recorded this and we'll publish it probably on our podcast or on LinkedIn or otherwise. If you have any Questions that you want to have answered around communications, you can send them to either me or Oliver.

Please do.

And we might do one of these in the future.

I'd love to. And please follow Peter on LinkedIn, his, and his newsletter, his content is amazing for anyone in leadership positions.

That's, that's very big of you to say. I appreciate that. I should return the favor. You're the published author and the expert on this topic. Thank you very much, everyone. Have a good afternoon.