Short talk advising managers on how to make important messages stick: emphasize repetition and multi-channel delivery (meetings, posts, chat, examples). Uses the marketing “rule of seven” as an analogy and recommends repeating high-uncertainty items (priorities, strategy changes, values) until the audience can anticipate or finish the message.
Chapters
We're likely communicating a lot, but sometimes there are things that we need to communicate to our team that are more important than others. Like really important. And one thing we know about the human nature and how our brain processes information is that we often need to repeat something many times before it actually sticks. As a manager, we need to understand that and work with it. Here are a couple of pointers on how that looks Communicate many times we often make the assumption if I told you once, I told you right, I have fallen into that trap both personally and professionally. I told you my job is over and done. You should know by now. I thought that if I said it with enough conviction and left a dramatic pause, it would suffice. Nope, this is not how this works. Communication requires repetition. This goes back to the effectiveness of communication. If you want something to really land and stick, repeat it over and over again and communicate it in many ways. Maybe you say it in a meeting, follow up with a post, drop it again in the chat and illustrate it further when you have a chance to bring it up with an example. We need repetition to absorb and understand the message. Another way to look at this is to think like a marketeer. In marketing, there's the so called rule of seven. That is a concept that advertisers know and overuse. Hence ads get repeated over and over again. It states that we need to hear something seven times before it sticks and we can remember it. With all the messages we get bombarded with these days, combined with our short attention span, that is likely more than seven times these days. So if something is really important, then you need to repeat it often. Like priorities, goals and values, a strategy change or something that is going to disrupt people. Any things that will create most uncertainty will need to be repeated a lot. Some say that it was repeated often enough when the other side finishes the sentence for you. Or an even better story. I once heard a guy who was an expert in communication and he said that we One of the measures he teaches his clients is that when you get to a point where you're typing out a message or writing an email or thinking how you're going to communicate something in a team meeting again and the thought of even talking about this one more time makes you nauseous, he said. That's when you know you're probably getting close to communicating it enough.
