Katie Todd

The Communications Leadership Lab

The Communications Leadership Lab

Katie Todd is a communications, marketing, and people person based in New York’s Hudson Valley.

  • The four pillars of communications

    Throughout my career in comms, I have come back to these four principles whenever I’m stuck on how to get something out. They have served me well during business-as-usual communications, as well as periods of difficulty. I’m sharing them with you in the hopes that they serve you, too.

    The four pillars of communications:

    1. Consistency
    2. Clarity
    3. Transparency
    4. Kindess

    Consistency

    Consistent comms are the building blocks on while you create a foundation of awareness and trust. When we implement a comms strategy, each piece that goes out across your org contributes to a fabric of understanding. By introducing consistency to that plan – for example, monthly, weekly, daily comms – you set expectations among your stakeholders that, over time, builds trust and reduces anxiety.

    With consistent comms, people expect to learn information and how it impacts them through a specific cascade that you have created. What this also does is cause them to pay more attention when you step outside of that cascade. If I send a weekly newsletter email and then send another one mid-week that I don’t usually send out, people are more likely to read it because it’s out of the usual schedule. This wouldn’t be the case if I always sent out information at random times.

    Clarity

    Making your communications understandable and easy to grasp acknowledges the different contexts of your stakeholders and provides comms that are quick and convenient to read and digest. This includes other elements of user experience such as length and accessibility. Compare a one-page bullet point style newsletter with a four-pager packed with dense paragraphs. Which one are you taking time out of your busy day to read?

    Transparency

    Transparency is distinct from clarity as it is about the accessibility of information rather than how it is presented. Transparent communications are open about the good and the bad, and this is intentional. Human beings depend on a sense of safety and security. When that is threatened – especially by something unknown – they tend to panic. This has a serious negative impact on trust in leadership, culture, and employee retention.

    I get it. Being upfront about bad news sucks. We want to protect people from bad news, especially if whatever it is may not even happen. But in so many organizations, word gets out anyway. People talk and their trust in senior leadership erodes, especially if the issue continues to go unaddressed in all hands calls and other meetings. Honest is best.

    Think about it this way. If you or a loved one has gone through the experience of getting scary tests at the doctor and had to wait to find out what was going on – isn’t the waiting the worst part? Even when you get the result, good or bad, you now have the knowledge you need to move forward. There’s a relief in that, even when the news isn’t what you hoped. You’re no longer frozen in time. That is what transparency provides.

    Kindness

    Being kind and empathetic in your communications shows people you respect and value them. Kindness doesn’t always mean nice. Sometimes it means clear. Sometimes it means upfront. Always it means seeing the other person as a human–and proving it. Kindness is how we share difficult news: we are upfront, we are clear, we are transparent.

    Other principles of communications

    While these are my main guideposts for effective comms, there are many other sets of principles out there. What do you think of these, and what philosophy of communications do you use to guide you forward?

  • How do you create employee comms that people *actually want* to read?

    The average attention span has dropped to 47 seconds (or lower, since this interview is from 2023), down from two and a half minutes in 2004. That means precious little time to convey your message.

    Given it probably took around 10 of those 47 seconds to read the above, I’ll be brief:

    • Ask people what they want
    • Experiment with how you deliver it, using the four pillars of communications (consistency, clarity, transparency, and kindness)
    • Measure the impact: do A/B testing, survey people, ask for thoughts
    • Keep iterating and gathering feedback

    What else would you add for creating comms that people actually want to read?

  • How can I turn hesitant stakeholders into enthusiastic supporters of my strategic initiatives?

    TL;DR

    1. Build a data-driven plan that is clear, showing how you came to your conclusions
    2. Empathize with stakeholders so you can address their concerns directly while taking their feedback seriously
    3. If required, iterate your plan, collaborating with stakeholders to make it stronger

    There are so many reasons stakeholders might be hesitant about strategic initiatives. If you’re experiencing stakeholder hesitancy on your plans, fear not! There are several paths you can take to manage it. 

    First, there’s the initiative itself. When you are building out your initiatives, it’s helpful to think of them as drafts rather than the final version. Like writing a novel, you build out the bare bones and then write the messy version of the story on top*. You evaluate and revise until you feel good about it. And, importantly, you gather feedback to do some more revision. Maybe you get the insights and input before you even start, which is an excellent way to begin on a steady foot.

    Include as much data, evidence, and context in your plan as you can to support clear, transparent strategy. Learning how to measure your impact, especially as a communicator, can be tough when it’s intangible – but there are ways to combine user data with business developments

    Empathy – our greatest asset

    Once you have your proposal, it’s time to earn any buy-in you haven’t already secured. If your stakeholders are hesitant, practice empathy in order to understand them and address their concerns directly.

    As communicators, empathy is one of our greatest assets. When we put ourselves in the shoes of our stakeholders, using our own experiences to help us understand why they feel the way they feel, we can show up in a much more effective way. Empathy helps us show we’ve thought about our strategy from multiple perspectives – including theirs – which helps them feel heard and that their viewpoint matters (because it does!).

    And it’s good to prepare yourself for feedback and concerns that have merit. Always be on the lookout for gold that you can incorporate into your plans to make them even stronger. Give credit to your collaborators for their ideas and input. This builds trust and shows you are a collaborative person who prioritizes what’s best for the project and cares about relationships.

    Ultimately, focusing on making your stakeholders feel valued for their experience and perspective, even if you don’t incorporate all of their ideas, will go a long way for building trusting relationships that will bring hesitant people onto your side. You don’t need to cater to their every need, but having a data-driven plan, empathizing and addressing their concerns – including explaining why your idea is strong (with evidence) – can change an “I don’t know” to a “go for it!”

    * Regarding writing a novel: okay, if you’re a pantser, this is NOT how you write a novel. And I would know, I used to be one – until I learned the magic of planning in advance and eschewing the pain of writing myself into a corner for now and ever more!

  • I find it hard to measure the real impact of my communications efforts. How can I track success more effectively?

    Let’s save the easy stuff about open rates and surveys til last, because there’s something really important at play in communications that is much more difficult to measure: conversations.

    As communicators, much of our jobs are done through verbal conversations where we are using our influence and leadership to support others in getting things done. How exactly are you supposed to measure that?

    When I first started, I struggled to measure impact. How exactly does one measure the results of conversations? It wasn’t until I got my coaching certification through New Ventures West that I discovered how using plans and metrics determined in advance could be applied to conversations. It just takes some planning and thought, like any strategy.

    For example, if I was speaking with someone with the goal of conveying what was important in an upcoming presentation they had, I could put as a metric whether or not they successfully conveyed that message. Or if I was coaching a team or individual to resolve an issue they were dealing with, how did they end up dealing with it? Did they deal with it at all? And did new behavior arise through their personal development that helped them make different decisions in the future? 

    Measuring the impact of written communications

    Stepping out of verbal comms into written, it becomes a little easier. We can measure engagement with written comms like email with data analysis, awareness and opinion through surveys, focus groups, and ad hoc temperature checks. Longterm, we can measure attitude and behavior shifts over time through surveying teams, gathering feedback, and experimenting with new techniques based on their needs. 

    Building out my first three year strategic communications plan, I had three goals, each with its own set of measurable functions. These goals were:

    1. Keeping the community informed and aligned
    2. Building culture and community
    3. Supporting productivity and development

    These goals were chosen based on the needs of this particular group. It could be different for yours, but they are also general enough to be applied to most organizations beneficially. 

    As communicators, much of our jobs are done through verbal conversations where we are using our influence and leadership to support others in getting things done. How exactly are you supposed to measure that?

    For each goal, I had sets of tasks that could be measured. For example, under goal one of keeping the community informed and aligned, I implemented a casual weekly internal newsletter with relevant news, announcements, events, and community-based updates. I measured the efficacy of this through surveys where people rated their sense of awareness and provided feedback. I also asked people directly what they thought. Over the course of a year, people’s awareness and sense of connection to the community increased by 50% through this and other initiatives. I was only able to measure this because I took a baseline at the start and planned ahead. 

    Measuring the impact of intangible communications

    Let’s do one that’s a little more difficult to measure – building culture and community. I had a lot of fun with this because knitting teams together is something I get a lot of satisfaction from. For me, communication at its heart is about relationships and connection, so all comms strategies should have connection as a major goal. But how do you measure it?

    This is absolutely a trickier one because it’s very much about vibes. But even attitudinal changes can be measured through behavior. Do people show up to optional events more often? Does productivity increase? Do teams experience less conflict or more amenability to figuring it out? Does your Glassdoor rating go up? Consider what ‘culture and community’ means to your organization and build backwards from there.

    Tracking results is not just important from a KPI and performance perspective. For communicators, who do a lot of intangible work, it’s critical to track impact in order to communicate with ourselves how good a job we’re doing. Once I learned how to do this, I never had to question my own impact again – which ended up enabling me to show up with confidence in my own capabilities and, in turn, do an even better job. 

    More to come on this topic and let me know in the comments what you want to see more of!