Executive teams in any business care about the numbers and growing the business. We all know this. Some of us have even read Ram Charan's book, What the CEO Wants You to Know, which explains five business drivers that CEOs want everyone in the business to understand. These are a top priority in any business. A close second in priority is communication because the only way an executive team can get everyone in an organization to understand the key drivers of the business is through effective communication.

In fact, effective communication might be a more important priority for executive teams because without good communication, it is difficult to help people to understand the mission of the business and then motivate people to join the mission. Perhaps it is better to have everyone on the same page driving towards the wrong mission than to have the right mission and not have everyone on the same page.

"Even if you are on the right track, if you are standing still, you will get run over." - Will Rogers

If executive teams want everyone in the organization to know the key drivers in Charan's book, how will that occur?

Through continuous, repeated, and effective communication.

Internal Blogging Key to Effective Executive Communication

One of the best ways an executive team can communicate to everyone in the company is by blogging. And blogging regularly. Blogging is effective because everyone can read the messages when they can, people can sign up to receive alerts when new blogs are posted, and people can comment and otherwise engage in conversation in the context of the blog. Executive teams can have continuous, asynchronous engagement with the entire workforce through regular blogging. 

But how does an executive know that blogging efforts are having the intended effect beyond the anecdotal evidence seen from "likes" and comments (or lack thereof)?

Elements of an Executive Communications Dashboard

What if each executive had a personal dashboard on the intranet that showed:

1. How many blogs each posted (Are you communicating regularly? How often?)
2. How many views on each blog (Are people seeing your blogs?)
3. How many likes and comments (Are people engaging with your communication? Are you engaging back?)
4. List of name of people liking and commenting the most (How is most engaged? Who are our high potential employees? Who is expressing problems and solutions not getting through management layers?)
5. What topics the blogs were about (What are you focused on? What topics are you ignoring?)
6. A ranked list of most, least popular blogs (What is resonating? What is not?)
7. The number of days since their last blog was published (Why did I stop communicating? How long has it been?)

You Can't Manage What You Don't Measure

Armed with this data, an executive could make any of the the following decisions:

1. If this was the most popular topic, maybe I should write more about it.
2. If this blog was un-popular, but the topic of it is critical to the company, how can I get the message out? Re-write the blog? Do an internal webinar? Go on a road show? 
3. How can I gather our most engaged/vocal employees in a more intimate setting to talk about the business?
4. Why did I stop blogging and how can I get back in the groove?
5. What do people care about? What else should I be talking about?

Imagine how much better an executive team communication effectiveness would be if they were armed with data. 

Challenge

I have a challenge for you. Show this blog to a member of your executive team and ask them if they think this data would be valuable to them? Comment below and share their reaction. We would love to hear those stories.

You can help your executive team communicate better. And they are itching for a tool to help them get their message out. The ServiceRocket Reporting Add-On can be installed on your Confluence Intranet and provide you with all of the metrics above on any Confluence page you choose. You can design a personal dashboard for each executive that displays the data points mentioned in this post to give them the data they need to improve the effectiveness of their communications. 

To learn how, watch one of our recorded webinars in which our product manager, Jesse Miller shows you how to use the ServiceRocket Reporting Add-On.