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Hi everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. Thank you for continuing to tune in each week. And of course, if you are just joining us for the first time, a huge welcome to you. [00:01:00] It's great to have you here. And to be honest, if you ever run a podcast, you'll know it's a lot of work. There's a lot that goes on behind the scenes, planning, recording, editing, promoting, all of the above. So to get your feedback to know that you are finding this stuff valuable really helps to inspire me to continue doing it. So thank you again for tuning in for rating the show, leaving a review. You are amazing.

Today's episode is about something you may have tried before with your own communications, or perhaps you didn't know it existed and it is happening, and that is the communication cascade. So this is a strategy that has been used since the beginning of time with comms, where we give information to senior leaders and we expect them to pass it on to their next line of leaders.

Then we expect them to pass it on to their teams. And so forth. And look, the reasoning behind this is pretty solid because we know from research that people are more likely [00:02:00] to listen to information that is given to them by their direct leader than any other source. There's been some really wide ranging research into that, and it really reinforces why good leadership and good relationships are so important in the workplace, particularly when it comes to the effectiveness of communication.

Also one central person or one central comms team cannot possibly communicate personally with every member of an organisation. No senior leader can do that either. So the logic is very sound. People trust what they hear from their direct leader, and it helps us manage big teams, right? But, humans, we get in the way, unsurprisingly.

And what ends up happening is often a game of Chinese whispers at the corporate level. You know, by the time the message actually gets down to the team member level, it's been distorted or doesn't make sense anymore. Um, or there's what we call the [00:03:00] permafrost layer, usually around middle management, where the message gets trapped in the permafrost and just doesn't progress any further.

What we really want is for leaders not to just pass on a message, but to also tweak it and make it relevant to their teams, put it in their own words, using their own voice, personalise it to reach their audience. And so while our strategies around cascading information might be done with the best of intentions, the reality is they're actually not that successful.

So how do you navigate getting information out to the whole organisation when you can't personally communicate with every individual? And that's what we're going to tackle today. We're going to still work around using the communication cascade because I said the logic is solid, but we're going to put in place some strategies to help give you a better chance of success.

Firstly, we need to understand why the cascade is broken, [00:04:00] because when you know why, you can put in strategies to fix it, right? That's that whole cycle of continuous improvement that we talk about with our communication, and that's why measuring your communication is so important. Go back and look at the previous episode on measurement.

So the key reasons why messages aren't passed on and or don't land correctly as we go down this cascade are, number one, leaders are time poor and they can't put the time into sending on the message. Number two, because they're time poor, they also don't put the time into making the message relevant for their teams or personalizing the content.

So they're passing on generic messaging with no specific relevance to the people who are receiving it. Number three, they themselves don't see the relevance of the message, so they're just not passing it on. Why would you, it's not relevant to me or my team, or, I can't see how it's relevant. So it's stops here.

And the [00:05:00] fourth reason is that it might not be easy to share that message or to pass that information along. Maybe it's overly complicated, it's overwhelming, , or it's not presented in a way that's easy to pick up and personalise and pass on. So those are the four main reasons that I've heard over the years around why this permafrost layer exists in that communication cascade.

So knowing this, how do we fix it? That's a million dollar question. So I'm gonna give you a few tips now on how you can fix it or circumnavigate some of these issues that we're seeing. Number one is make it easy. If it's too complicated or too time consuming for leaders to be able to tweak that message and make it relevant or to put it into a format for the channels that they use, then it just won't happen. It might sound like a bit of an oxymoron, but we need to put a lot of effort into making something easy.

That means equipping leaders with the tools they need to make [00:06:00] it easier to send that message on. Those tools could be knowledge, uh, templates, technology, whatever that looks like, but just making it easier increases the chance that your message will actually go through that cascade.

So a few ideas for making it easier. Number one is brief the leaders on the comms that is coming or the project or the message that you want sent on, and you can do this in person or virtually, but it gives them an opportunity to ask questions and understand why that message is important or why it's relevant for them and their teams.

Also, it's much more engaging to be briefed than it is to just receive an email with, "Hey, this is what's going on. Send this on please." I'm not gonna remember that, but I'm probably going to more likely remember to do this work because I've had a briefing. I've been engaged in a meeting already, and it's really top of mind for me.

It's also really a good opportunity for senior leaders in these briefings to reinforce [00:07:00] why this message is so important and the responsibilities of those other leaders to pass on the message. So that can encourage other people to prioritise it. Um, the other ways you can make it easier: provide tools like key messages or email templates and indicate where they can tailor those to make them relevant for their teams.

So whether that's the work they're working on, the processes they're engaged in, whatever that looks like. So for example, you might have a list of key messages and that they can copy and paste and use in whatever channel they want to use. And you might have a couple of broader messages that talk to the overarching piece and then have a spot for leaders to fill in themselves and give some sentence starters there.

Things like, so what this means for our team is... and then they can fill that in and you can provide some guidance and instructions there too, like: "insert information here about what this will mean for your team's work or processes or [00:08:00] technology," whatever that looks like, but make it specific. The other tip here is you can also provide other templates, so like speaking points or maybe some PowerPoint slides, as long as it's easy to use and encourages leaders to tailor the message before they pass it on.

Now the second tip for tackling the issue of the broken communication cascade is making sure you have multiple touchpoints for that message. So you're not just solely relying on the message coming down the layers of leadership. Right? So this means having, uh, other sources of information apart from hearing the message from the leader, where else could I possibly pick up that information from? So this could be things like, Um, that briefing that we spoke about earlier, the leader briefing, we could have an edited version of that recorded and made available on the intranet or in teams, right? Uh, the audio could be used in a [00:09:00] private podcast stream.

The message could be shared as a news story or article on the intranet or on a internal social media channel like Slack or Yammer. For big organisations and for really important messaging, I'd recommend repackaging for at least three different communication channels, including the leaders themselves, so you've got a really good chance of it being picked up elsewhere as well, regardless of whether that cascade is working or not.

Okay, so the final tip for getting that communication cascade cascading is make it interesting and relevant. If a leader can't see the relevance of a message and it's not presented in a way that's engaging, there's every chance it will not be passed on. So let's start with relevance. Firstly, check your own work.

Is this actually relevant to all the people you are sending this to, or is it only relevant to a subsection of those [00:10:00] people? Make sure you're communicating with those who really need to hear it or who need to take some sort of action. For everyone else, that's just gonna become white noise. If you're sure it's relevant to your audience, you'll need to make it clear why it's relevant.

So don't overthink this. Really, just don't overthink it. You can be really literal here and just say, "you are receiving this communication because...", "we are holding this briefing because your team will need to..." All right. So be really, really clear. It's much better to be clear than, uh, trying to sort of couch it around some flowery language, which will probably just confuse people.

Do that early on in your communication in terms of making it really clear so that you capture that attention of your audience as well. So you've made it relevant. Make it interesting. So this might mean the way it's formatted, the visuals you use, in the stories you tell, or the facts you include, but it has to capture [00:11:00] attention because leaders are busy.

They've got a lot of information flowing in at them from all different parts of the business at any one time all day long by multiple channels, right? Yours has to stand out to stand a chance. So again, your communication has to stand out to stand a chance. So how can you put this information in a way that is actually interesting for leaders so that it captures their attention, shows how it's relevant really quickly, and they will actually pass it on.

So a quick recap. The communication cascade, it's important because it's based on very sound logic. And we want to make sure audiences are getting information from a source they trust, but it's not always successful for those reasons we talked about earlier. We have to understand that leaders need to see the information as relevant, interesting, and important if they're going to pass it on. Now to help [00:12:00] address some of these blockers, the first tip was make it easy.

So a little spoon feeding here goes a long way. Giving leaders the tools and the knowledge they need to make sure information is sent on, and that they're making it personalised to their audiences. The second tip is to have multiple touchpoints for the message, to repackage it in different ways for different channels so that even if a person isn't getting the message directly from their leader, they're still able to get the message in some other way.

And the third tip was make it interesting and relevant. So be clear in why the communication is relevant to the leader and the team and present it in a way that's interesting, that resonates with them. At the end of the day, a lot of this comes back to what I bang on about all the time, and that is there is no one size fits all approach to communication.

You need to know your audience. You have to understand who you're talking to, how they prefer to receive information, their communication [00:13:00] preferences, and the context they operate in. If you just take a blanket communication approach to leaders, you will get nowhere. So it's absolutely worth doing a bit of research with a few leaders to find out their preferences, what's of interest to their teams, what channels are they currently using with their team members that actually work and that their team members have told them they want to keep using.

Then you can tailor your comms and the tools you provide to them in a way that makes it really easy for them. Trust me, they will absolutely appreciate you putting in the effort to make their lives easier. Okay, so that's it for today. As always, if you have any feedback or questions or topic ideas, please hit me up.

I'm not hard to find on LinkedIn or Instagram, and the links are always in the show notes. Have a wonderful week and keep doing amazing things.