How to prepare an "elevator" speech to communicate strategy

As organizations start to pick themselves up from the recession and cautiously look toward the future as a brighter and more prosperous place, new business strategies will be formed to which employees will need to be connected.

Leading industry consultant, author, and keynote speaker at our SCM Summit in Sydney, Bill Quirke, says that in order for this to happen successfully, organizations will have to ask themselves some searching questions, including: do employees know the strategy you think they do?

"Employees may think they know what the strategy is, and may say so in the survey, but it's easy to be misled into believing everything is OK," Quirke says.

"We discovered from a well-known building society that its employees did know the strategy," he says. "It was great news until we discovered that it was the wrong one. The strategy they knew and were adhering to was the one the organization had stopped following two years ago, when it changed its chief executive. So you had employees who were engaged and passionate about entirely the wrong strategy."

Keep reading for more advice from Quirke as to how you can create an "elevator" speech to succinctly give employees all the information they need about the business strategy.

QUESTION 1: Do your employees need to know the strategy at all?
Over the last couple of decades, the answer from major organizations has been a resounding yes. Senior leaders understand that employees who know the goals of the organization and understand their individual impact on them can create an efficient loop of success.

Not all organizations operate at this level. Some organizations may not have a formal strategy or may not have a formal process through which to articulate it. "They often say 'We're still working on it' or 'We haven't sorted our problems out yet,'" he says.

"They may take the stance that 'As far as I know, we are still carrying on what we were doing before.' They normally have something they are trying to do, but don't have a formal strategy."

QUESTION 2: Do employees know the strategy you think they do?
Employees may think they know what the strategy is, and may say so in the survey, but it's easy to be misled into believing everything is OK, Quirke says.

"We discovered from a well-known building society that its employees did know the strategy," he says. "It was great news until we discovered that it was the wrong one. The strategy they knew and were adhering to was the one the organization had stopped following two years ago, when it changed its chief executive. So you had employees who were engaged and passionate about entirely the wrong strategy."

QUESTION 3: Do employees need the level of detail on strategy you're giving them?
PowerPoint slides developed in the boardroom make perfect sense ... to everyone in the boardroom. The same is not necessarily true further down the line. "Presentations of the strategy, developed by executive consensus, accurately capture the board members' thinking, their thought process, and most importantly, their values," Quirke says.

"But as they cascade down the organization, confusion sets in. Employees don't want 71 slides when you can encapsulate information in 30 seconds. If you want them to get the strategy, you have to be able to present it in six slides. It's like Mark Twain said: 'I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.'"

The Elevator Speech: Turning complex written concepts into ideas to chat about
To rectify this problem, Quirke works with small groups of senior leaders and managers to develop their "Elevator Speech". He starts the stopwatch, giving them 30 seconds to tell their strategy story in a more simple and direct way, in relation to their business line or division.

To support leaders, his team will help them break it down and think about the strategy in terms of its relationship to employees. In small groups, the leaders work together to deconstruct the strategy, pulling the written document apart and rebuilding it in a much shorter, more useful, verbal form.

Assessing the state of the strategy: "We start by identifying where they are trying to get people to go, where they are now, and what they need to say to employees get them to close that gap." Quirke says. Middle managers, with critical knowledge of their team and their ongoing needs in the field, are ideal in this role.

Summarizing in 30 seconds: The groups must then re-write the strategy so it can be told in 30 seconds. This forces them to boil the concepts into a compact, succinct idea. Throughout the process, they are talking the strategy through, chatting about it in their group, finding different ways of phrasing an idea, and spotting those concepts that are difficult to explain.

Rebuilding essential elements: The next step is to begin to rebuild the strategy for the purpose of the speech, identifying three relevant perspectives of the strategy. Quirke asks the groups to identify just three bullets in each category:
* The Three Whys: Why are we doing what were are doing?
* The Three Whats: What are we doing?
* The Three So-Whats: The impact of what we are doing.

Delivering the strategy: Groups are given a time limit to work on the speech, but the critical time factor is the length of the speech. One member from each group delivers their version of the strategy to the rest of the large group. A contest is held for the person closest to 30 seconds.

In large multinational organizations, the biggest communication bottleneck, Quirke says, is managers at the senior level of business lines. As they funnel information through from the board room level into their areas, they often lose the opportunity to transform it into meaningful messages for their unit.

"Strategy can be tedious," Quirke says. "It's part of internal communication's role to equip middle managers to do the job, giving them templates and tools to make the translations themselves for their area."

Until next time,

P.S. The keynote speaker at the UK SCM Summit in London is Wayne Clarke of the Best Companies Partnership. He'll be talking about the communication traits that the winning companies have. And the next 25 people to register receive a free flip digital video camera - so book your place now!

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