The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan, 5th Edition

CHAPTER 5Manage Communication, Especially Digitally with Your Remote Team

Everything communicates. Everything—even the things you don't do and don't say send powerful signals to everybody in the organization observing you.

Because we live amid a communication revolution, the guidelines for communicating are changing dramatically. As much as you would like to treat communication as a logical, sequential, ongoing communication campaign, in many cases, you must manage it as an iterative set of concurrent conversations.

The prescription for communication during the time between Day One and co‐creating a burning imperative requires discipline and finesse for the new leaders following this program. The time before co‐creating a burning imperative is all about converging—almost always.

This means you can't launch your full‐blown communication efforts yet. You can't stand up and tell people your new ideas. If you do, they are your ideas, and not the team's ideas.

So, this period leading up to co‐creating a burning imperative is marked by a lot of listening and learning. Your learning will be directed by your message. You'll be living your message, but you're most definitely not launching a communication campaign of any sort.

Keep that in mind as you go through the rest of this chapter, which lays out some points on communication that you may or may not start during this period but ...