Hi, this is Jim Whitehurst, president of IBM. And I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about the importance of communication.

Now, I think most leaders know the importance of communication and making sure that their teams are aligned. But I wanted to specifically address two aspects:

One is recognizing how important it is to continue to communicate, communicate, communicate. Someone once told me that you have to tell people something seven times before it really becomes part of something that they deeply understand. You know, the first couple of times, it’s “Oh okay, I sort of understand that might be on the agenda.” But it’s that repetition over and over again to truly get it in people’s minds is a clear priority. I think a lot of leaders think that communicating something once is enough, but there’s so much information coming at people that continuing to do that becomes really important. I think a good benchmark is when you’re sick of saying it people are just starting to hear it.

Again, a second aspect I think really important in today’s world is the level of communication that you provide, and the clarity within the organization. You know, in a world where most of the tasks that people did were clearly defined in kind of work steps, the importance of understanding the corporate strategy maybe was less important, as long as people had deep specificity on the specific tasks they had to perform. But in the world we live in today, which is much more complex, and we’re asking our teams much more often to apply judgment and creativity and to make their own decisions, all of a sudden, we frankly, want to be less clear on the specific work steps that people are doing. We want to give people latitude to make the right decisions in the moment. But we have to be crystal clear on the strategy of the organization overall. It’s a little bit kind of flipping the ambiguity pyramid where it used to be you can be a little more ambiguous or fluffy on the corporate strategy as long as people knew their work steps. Now it is important that people clearly understand the corporate strategy, so they can themselves, look at it and shape the work steps that best meet that overall strategy in a complex world where we really can’t specify down to the detail of what everyone does.

Back when I was at Delta Airlines, back in the early 2000s, we were in the middle of a turnaround. And one of the things we did was communicate in great detail the turnaround plan. And that was easy to do, because we had to talk about it kind of publicly with creditors and others. And so we took that and we just made sure that everyone in the organization understood that strategy deeply. And what we found is a substantial improvement in performance of the operation. And it wasn’t because we communicated, you know, “Here’s the way we’re going to turn around an airplane faster.” It’s because as soon as people have the context for what we’re doing and in a great amount of detail, people knew how their work fit into the overall, it made people really go above and beyond. So it’s not only whether people can decide what to do on their own, they also had more kind of context and therefore greater motivation associated with being in contributing to the overall strategy. In fact, we ended up routinizing that by asking a question every year in a survey question, that we actually had executive compensation based on, which was around “I understand the strategy of the company, and what I can do to make it successful.” I think it for all of us, if we could feel good that our teams all the way through the organization knew the strategy the company, and they’re part of making it successful, then I think we have a good sense that we’ve reached a benchmark of what good communication looks like.

Hope that helps. Thank you very much.

[To hear more of Jim’s views on culture and open leadership follow him on LinkedIn to see his video series, “An Open Conversation with Jim.”]

I really liked Jim’s message about continuing to communicate, communicate and communicate. I think that’s especially relevant in today’s reality, where almost everyone is working remotely. And there are challenges to communicating in this environment as well. Virtual communication is definitely different.  It’s sometimes hard to get messages across. You can’t really read the room as you would in person and while you can expect everyone to be plugged in, at the same time, everyone is relying on the same few platforms to communicate. And it happens that messages get buried, or people forget to respond. So repetition is necessary and also inevitable.

And that kind of goes into another point that Jim mentioned, that it takes telling people something seven times, for them to truly take it to heart. I’ve definitely felt that to be true. And I think I’ve been on both ends. You know, what’s great and what’s also hard about being a student is that you have so many things on your plate, whether it’s classes, extracurriculars, maybe sports and even a part time job. Everyone is constantly juggling so much. It definitely takes repetition to get people fully on board, and also to hold them accountable.

Jim also mentioned the importance of the level of communication and clarity within an organization in a world where job responsibilities can’t really be specified down to the detail. I think this is very true for all of the organizations I’ve been a part of. We don’t really define tasks down to a tee. Often we have something we want to do and then we split the work and we trust each other’s judgments. But this only works when everyone is clear on the thing that we’re trying to accomplish. And that’s where communication and clarity comes to hand. If we can’t communicate what we’re trying to do, no one knows how to help, and no one knows what they are actually supposed to be doing. So you can’t get anything off the ground. Overall, I think that communicating with clarity is absolutely important to a strong and effective organization. Perhaps now more than ever in a remote environment.