Best Practice Tip For Internal Corporate Communication-CEO Email Guide

Executive leadership within the context of CEO best practices and approaches that are intended keep employees fully-informed as to on-going outbound initiatives (and perhaps strategies still in the pipeline and planning stages) is obviously the subject of countless articles, white papers, books and pontification from tens of dozens corporate leadership genies.

For those who embrace the notion of full-transparency, leading experts offer a menu of strategies and mediums that lead to higher employee morale, and in turn, contributions from employees that can prove integral to the decision-making and project implementation process.. From town-hall meetings to use of Twitter (for employees only and with safeguards that make those CEO tweets non-retweetable!), the topic of internal corporate email is typically the top medium that CEOs are most prone to deploy.

Putting aside for a moment the calamity that resulted from the hacking of Sony’s corporate email platform, one can’t emphasize enough the need on the part of employees to be connected and informed, the communication culture is arguably driven directly from the c-suite cubicle of any company’s Chief Executive office.

With that in mind, we noticed a compelling comment expressed by NewBrand Analytics CEO Kristin Muhlner, who was profiled in the Jan 18 edition of the New York Times Business section.  Mulhner’s approach is simple and straight forward:

“..I’ve started sending out an email once a week called ‘Where’s Waldo?’  The email is just to say where people are, such as who [company] our VP of sales is meeting with this week, as well as provide updates on other initiatives. Its amazing the reaction that it [email update] gets from people, because they feel like ‘wow’, cool stuff’s happening, and now I know why he’s not responding to my email today. It helps.”

If not the best way that the NYT reporter could have framed the insight from Muhlner, the point should be evident: transparency, whether in form of email or other communication is critical to leadership best practices, and the culture of communication should be appropriate,  well-defined and consistent.

 

Best Practice Tip For Internal Corporate Communication-CEO Email Guide