687: Getting Better at Internal Communication, with Roy Schwartz

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
Many organizations spend more time and energy on external communications than internal ones. In this episode, how your internal strategy can reduce email, save time, and create space for innovation and insight. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 687. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning., maximizing human potential. Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:40]:
And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. One of those conversations that almost every leader wants to do a better job having is internal conversations and specifically internal communication. How can we do a better job of being able to get information flowing about what’s happening inside the organization? Almost every organization attempts this in some way, but very few have figured out ways to do this well. Today, I’m so glad to welcome an expert who has helped not only their own organization do this so effectively, but also is a leader in helping other organizations do this well too. I’m so pleased to welcome Roy Schwartz. He is cofounder and CEO at Axios HQ, the world’s 1st AI powered internal communications management platform. He’s also the cofounder of Axios, the award winning news organization known for its smart brevity writing style.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:39]:
He’s the coauthor along with Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less. Roy, pleasure to have you here.

Roy Schwartz [00:01:49]:
Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:52]:
This is such a challenging problem for so many leaders and organizations. We spent a lot of time thinking about getting our message out into the world, marketing, sales, all those things. But when it comes to internal communications, so many organizations really do struggle with this, don’t they?

Roy Schwartz [00:02:11]:
Oh, absolutely. What’s really interesting to me is I have an MBA. I went to business school at University of Maryland, and they told me how to do spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations, but not once did anyone share with me how do I write an email to all of my team, to all of my staff. And so a lot of people, even very successful executives, struggle with how do you communicate effectively.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:36]:
You write along with Jim and Mike in the book that this has also been a struggle for you all along the way, and I’m quoting you, “There’s another thing we learned the hard way. At Politico, in our early days, we scoffed at communications and culture and figured everything would be fine if people just did their jobs. We were dead wrong.” What was it that you ended up being wrong about?

Roy Schwartz [00:03:00]:
You can’t talk about your mission, vision, culture enough. It really has to become something that you feel as an executive and as a leader that you have overcommunicated and maybe then it has just started to sink in. Those things are so critical to get people aligned. It takes so long for that to sink in. And we thought that we talked about it enough, and we had all hands meetings, and we, talked about culture and we talked about our mission. But we found out that as especially as we grew, we became misaligned. And I would say with COVID and remote work, that has become even more difficult. So this need to communicate effectively is 1 that I think a lot of leaders are really grasping with right now because they see the damage of not all being in the same place, not being able to walk by and say hi and talk to people in the office and trying to get people to do their best work is really difficult if you can’t communicate effectively and keep everyone on the same page.

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:02]:
1 thing you all have discovered that works at Axios is in house newsletters. What is it that got you down that path?

Roy Schwartz [00:04:10]:
So we started using our own tools. So Axios is well known for its newsletters. We write literally dozens of daily newsletters, read by millions of people in the news and media space. But we started using them internally as a way to keep all of our executives on the same page. So we started with an all hands. So Jim wrote a weekly newsletter of the top 5 things that people needed to know within Axios. We then followed that by doing 1 per department. So marketing, sales, finance.

Roy Schwartz [00:04:40]:
And we did that every week and we shared it amongst the executive team. And what we found was we had a lot fewer issues, especially when it came to alignment and understanding because we were communicating so effectively. The other thing we did was we put everything in smart brevity. So everything was short. Everything was concise. Everything was in a hierarchical order. And so people could get through that information very quickly and effectively. And what it actually did was cut down on the total number of emails being sent out because instead from sending out 5, 6, 7 messages, you knew that once a week you were going to get an update with everything you needed to know about marketing, everything you needed to know about sales.

Roy Schwartz [00:05:20]:
And so it actually ended up saving people a lot of time.

Dave Stachowiak [00:05:24]:
That’s 1 of the things I think stops a lot of organizations from thinking about doing a newsletter internal communication is there’s this assumption well people aren’t going to read their email no 1 wants more messages It’s gonna be information overwhelm. But because of the way you’ve done it, it’s actually the opposite. It cuts down on some of that unnecessary communication and email traffic.

Roy Schwartz [00:05:48]:
It cuts down on that, and it also saves people time. So, ultimately, in the beginning, it’s gonna start. You know, it takes a little time and effort to put things in a hierarchy, to develop a format and a template that is going to resonate. But once you have those down, you end up saving a lot of time and effort. Because instead from there being several different emails or several different updates on different initiatives, you can pull them together. You can shorten them, and you can make sure that essential information is shared. We also spend a lot of time thinking about the hierarchy of that information to make sure that people understand what’s most important, and we put that at the top of each of these pieces of communication. So I would say I don’t love the term newsletter because I feel like it sends negative connotations.

Roy Schwartz [00:06:34]:
It feels dated. But really, they’re updates. They’re series. They’re updates about different initiatives within an organization or different departments within an organization. The most important 1 is the all hands. The most important 1 that any company can send out is from the CEO or from the C suite to the rest of the organization. And we always advise people to do it at least once a week, even if it’s just 1 item or 2 items, once a week communication so that people know, hey, every Monday or every Friday, whatever day you end up sending it at this time, I’m going to get a piece of communication. And it actually does a lot for the company because there’s a lot of things that happen and you’re almost always instantly thinking, Oh, when do I have to communicate about this? But if you have a weekly cadence, it gives you actually some more time to put thought into it and to make sure that your communication is effective and people aren’t expecting it on a Wednesday or a Thursday.

Roy Schwartz [00:07:28]:
They know, hey, every Monday at 9 AM, I get this piece of communication from the CEO, and that’s when this issue is gonna be addressed. And so it gives you a little bit more time to plan it and make sure that what you’ve written is appropriate.

Dave Stachowiak [00:07:42]:
And how interesting that you don’t love that term newsletter. I’ve banned that term in our business because I always have the thought as thinking about it from the receiving end that, like, no 1 really ever wants to get a newsletter because in so many places, a newsletter is like information or details from another organization that you don’t necessarily want or need. And That’s right. I think that part of this as far as mindset, and you all are real intentional about this, is what you call it really matters. And how do you go through the process of deciding what it should be called and and making sure that lands well with whoever’s gonna be reading it?

Roy Schwartz [00:08:25]:
Yeah. So because we have 1 for each department, it’s very department specific. It has to speak to the content that’s gonna be in it. And ideally, it gives people a sense of what they’re going to open, right? So we have 1 that’s called The Weekend, and we send it out on a Friday. And it basically covers all the things coming up for the following week that we want people to think about before Monday. And so that’s the 1 that we send out. We also have a sales update and an account management update. We wanna make sure that whatever, is promised in the title, it comes through in what people receive.

Roy Schwartz [00:09:01]:
And then you can have fun with it. Right? So I have 1 that I get every day from my chief of staff, and it’s called the daily drive. And it’s really just my agenda and all the meetings I’m gonna have and a little rundown of what each meeting is. But because I’m a car guy, he puts it in the daily drive, and he has emojis of different cars in each of the items. And it just keeps things fun and fresh.

Dave Stachowiak [00:09:24]:
Yeah. And and having fun is part of this message. And 1 of the highlights in the book is make me smile in some way when I’m actually gonna engage with this or read this that that just brings the human element into this right?

Roy Schwartz [00:09:38]:
Absolutely. People should allow their creativity to come through, their personality to come through. These should not be dry. If anything, they should be fun. We use a lot of emojis. Not every company is gonna like to do that, but we do it for an element of fun. In our software, we actually you can hit a button, and it will select the subject line for you, and it’ll put in an emoji. And they tend to be, I would say, pretty fun and on the mark.

Roy Schwartz [00:10:04]:
And we’ve noticed that you get a 2% to 5% increase in open rates when you generate using AI, you generate the subject line. So it’s interesting. You can start to, I wanna say game the system, but you can improve your open rates based on what you put in the subject line.

Dave Stachowiak [00:10:21]:
Which matters a lot because if the subject line isn’t good, apparent, what I get from reading this message and I never click on it to open it, then nothing else you do with the communication matters. Right?

Roy Schwartz [00:10:36]:
I mean, I was the worst at writing subject lines. I have to admit, I’m I used to just that would be the first thing that I would write. Then I would sit down and write the email. And I didn’t go back and change the subject line and it tended to be boring and really very general. And so, you know, I love AI. Like, it can be super helpful. And I would use I would start utilizing AI to help you think about the subject lines because I say generally people are not great at coming up with creative and fun ideas. But once you’ve constructed the email, it’s actually very easy for the AI to look at that and say, oh, this is what it’s about.

Roy Schwartz [00:11:12]:
This is what will be effective. This will get people’s attention. And it’s delivering on the promise, of what’s inside.

Dave Stachowiak [00:11:19]:
I wanna ask you more about AI in a few moments because you’re such an important key concept to this, and you all have done some incredible work on this. Before we get there, there’s some really interesting benefits that come out of this other than just people knowing what’s going on and also lowering overall email load, communication load. And 1 of the things I thought was really interesting is mentioned a few times in the book is that when you sit down to have conversations with people and other leaders in the organization that people are already caught up. So you don’t have to spend the time talking about the what’s happening. You can spend time on the bigger stuff, innovations, disruptions, the kind of stuff that we wanna maximize in person time for.

Roy Schwartz [00:12:04]:
Absolutely. So I’ll just give some examples from my own work. So I have 1 on ones with all of my executive team. I get an update from each executive member before that meeting. It’s usually a 2 minute read. I get caught up on all the facts, right? So let’s just take sales. I know what the sales pipeline is. I know what we’re forecasting.

Roy Schwartz [00:12:26]:
So I don’t need to ask those questions. I can get into the strategy. I can get into the insights. And so it makes my 1 on ones much more productive when I’ve done this 2 or 3 minute read ahead of time. And the person has had to construct their thoughts, right? I think that’s the biggest part. That’s the secret sauce really is that the executives had to sit down and think about what am I trying to communicate to Roy? What are the top 5 things I’m working on? What are the updates that I need to give him? And so when I go through it, I can get into the insight from that leader rather than just the what are you doing and why is that happening and just the basics, right? I can go much, much deeper and I can do it much more effectively. So that’s been a huge gain, I think, in terms of writing these pieces of communication. It’s organizing your thoughts and getting that communication out there so that people can save time.

Roy Schwartz [00:13:18]:
And eventually, you get really good at writing them too. You start to become very quick at writing in Smart Brevity and it becomes second nature.

Dave Stachowiak [00:13:26]:
You add f”or the cofounders, these updates are an early warning system for anyone’s activities that might be veering away from the company goals. In 1 Sunday evening, we can be sure everyone’s on track and spot pockets that need our attention, encouragement, or kudos.” There’s an element here of accountability and recognition in this as well too.

Roy Schwartz [00:13:47]:
A 100%. You you want to be able to, 1, make sure your company is aligned. So if you’ve set your vision and your mission, you’ve set your goals, you’ve set your QBRs, and you want to make sure that everything is marching in the right order. And sometimes when you look at those updates and you see that 1 thing is out of place, it allows you to have an early conversation that says, Oh, I thought that would actually be a higher priority for you. Oh, maybe there’s a misunderstanding. Maybe there’s a miscommunication. And you can set things right before weeks or months go by.

Roy Schwartz [00:14:21]:
And before you know it, you’re starting to divulge into 2 different strategies. So I would say it’s really essential. And we’re very transparent. We share it with the entire executive team. So the updates that I get by department head are actually shared with the entire executive team so that everyone can see what each other are doing and make sure that there are no misunderstandings in terms of the strategy that we’re going with.

Dave Stachowiak [00:14:44]:
For someone who’s never thought about doing something like this in their organization or maybe their organization more broadly does it, but they don’t do it for their team necessarily. I’m curious, like, what would be a good starting point? And I’d love to bring AI into this conversation as well too because I think what a great tool set we can all use. Everyone’s, of course, in a little different place on AI. A lot of people are using it really substantially. A whole bunch of people haven’t really dipped their toes in it yet. For someone who’s starting off, maybe they’ve messed around with ChatGPT a little bit, but they haven’t really gotten into AI yet. And thinking about putting together a weekly update for my team, what’s what’s a good starting point to think of, like, alright, what would I do to be able to just start to draft what that first 1 looks like?

Roy Schwartz [00:15:33]:
Yeah. The blank page problem is a real issue. So with Axios HQ, our software, we have about 650 clients that utilize it. And I would say the biggest thing that they’re trying to do is they’re trying to get an ROI, increase in productivity, increase in employee engagement, some other return from improved communication. But when they sit down, the biggest issue they have is the blank page problem. What should I say? How should I say it? What should be in it? And so our AI, which also actually utilizes OpenAI, allows you to construct your initial template, right? It helps you understand what should be in your initial draft. But if you’ve never done it before and you don’t have Axios HQ and you’re just doing it in ChatGPT, you can still get some pretty general feedbacks. It could say, look, I’m writing a new weekly update.

Roy Schwartz [00:16:24]:
I’m in the, let’s say, product department. I have 10 employees. I’m trying to keep them updated on these 4 different initiatives. What should I put in my weekly update? And you’d actually be pretty impressed with what comes back. It’ll give you the structure of a weekly communication. What are the items you should generally talk about? And then you can fine tune it from there. You can say, Okay, that makes sense. I like those 2 or 3.

Roy Schwartz [00:16:49]:
This will be my format. And then you can start to write that weekly update. So I would say keeping things weekly is really important. Some people say, Oh, that sounds like a lot. It can be a very short update. And especially before holidays, it could be, Hey, just wanted to send you a quick, you know, for Thanksgiving, thanks for everything that you’ve done. Enjoy spending time with your family. There’s no other updates this week.

Roy Schwartz [00:17:11]:
But the cadence is really important. People need to know that you’re sending it every week. And what we’ve seen is you can drive open rates into the seventies eighties if you have a weekly cadence. In small companies, I would say it’s in the nineties.

Dave Stachowiak [00:17:25]:
And for perspective on open rate, a lot of organizations sending out marketing email, if they’re getting open rates in that, what what would we say, 15 to 20% zone, that would be, like, considered decent. Right? So having 70, 80, 90% open rates, people seeing that cadence, that’s huge.

Roy Schwartz [00:17:44]:
Yeah. So it can make a huge difference because if you think of an organization where 70% of the people have read and understand a weekly piece of content versus an organization where maybe it’s sent once a month and only 20 or 30 people open it, that’s a huge difference in alignment.

Dave Stachowiak [00:18:01]:
What you call it is important. The subject line’s important, and part of the SmartBrevity model is also starting with 1 big thing, that there’s a hierarchy to how things are presented in that communication. How do you think about that and what and the philosophy behind that?

Roy Schwartz [00:18:18]:
Yeah. So the insight that led us to that was that when we were at Politico, we noticed that 80% of people stopped reading after the first 250 words. 250 words is roughly what fits on 1 screen of your phone, and it really can only give you the broad strokes of 1 thing. And so, that’s what ultimately led us with this concept of 1 big thing is when we realized that people’s attention spans were just so short, and that was in news. So that’s a little bit different. It’s not me opening up my company’s newsletter. This is, you know, me gathering news or information from clicking on a link on an article. But it gives you some sense of what people’s attention span is.

Roy Schwartz [00:18:58]:
And so, we generally advise that you can have up to maybe 5 items in your weekly update, but each item should be no more than 200 or 250 woods. And that way, if I’m reading it, if I already know it, I can skip it and go down to the next 1. If I haven’t read it, I know that I can read it in 30 seconds and get up to speed.

Dave Stachowiak [00:19:20]:
And that 200 words is the aim to have the key communication in that 200 words and or is the invitation to get someone to click and to then go to a much more in-depth video, update. I I’m kinda curious, like, how you think about that as far as internal communication.

Roy Schwartz [00:19:44]:
So we believe in internal communication to put as much as you can into the document, but have it be the go deeper section. So as an example, if you’re doing a weekly update and it has 5 items and you’ve given a general overview in the 1 big thing and it’s 200 words or so, but there is a go deeper. Let’s say it’s about vacation policy. Then at that point, you could have a link, and then you could say, go deeper, click below to find out more information. Or you could say go down to the lost item, and there’s more information there about our new vacation policy. So that’s a way to have the headline, have everyone understand what’s happening, and there’s changes to our vacation policy. Great. We’re eliminating this day.

Roy Schwartz [00:20:26]:
We’re adding this day. That’s your 1 big thing. But then if people wanna go deeper and understand, well, what are the other days and what’s the vacation policy overall, there’s a link to it, and they can go deeper if they want it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:20:37]:
And the distinction I’m hearing there is, like, the headline, the big thing, get that in the communication, especially internally. If people need more, maybe there’s a link. But try to keep it as easy as possible so you don’t have people having to go and spend time reading if they don’t have the time or the bandwidth to do that.

Roy Schwartz [00:20:52]:
Yeah. So we have the subject line of the update. But then within the update itself, if you’ve got 4 or 5 items, each item, we have its own headline. And that headline should give you what you need to know. Even if you read nothing else, it should be the most essential thing that I’m trying to convey. And then beyond that, they should be able to read. So in the case of the vacation policy, it would literally say, we are changing the vacation policy. Okay.

Roy Schwartz [00:21:20]:
Now I’m gonna read that. Right? You don’t wanna bury the headline. Right? So the headline is, I’ve made a change. You should take a look, and now you can go deeper if you want to.

Dave Stachowiak [00:21:29]:
Yeah. And part of the SmartBrevity model is 1 strong first sentence and then some context as to why it matters. Right?

Roy Schwartz [00:21:38]:
Yeah. The what’s new and the why it matters. So we like to think of it as if you and I were sitting down and having a cup of coffee, having a drink, and you asked me, What’s going on? And I would tell you what’s new and I would give you the why it matters, I would do it naturally. Right? I’d do it within the tone of conversation. And I’d usually lead with the most important thing because I’m trying to get your attention and I’m trying to be interesting. For some reason, when people sit down and write, that’s not what they do. They start with context. They start with background.

Roy Schwartz [00:22:06]:
They use words that we would never use in real life, like aforementioned. You know, it doesn’t make any sense when you say it out loud, but it is what people do when they start writing for some reason. I think we were trained in school. Right? It was all about length. It was all about using SAT words. It was all about give me a 1, 000 words on this topic. And, you know, how many of us had to change the line spacing and the magins just to make it to look like we completed 2 pages worth of work when really we were struggling to fill a page. It didn’t mean that our writing wasn’t good. It just meant that it didn’t fulfill some idea of the length that it needed to be.

Roy Schwartz [00:22:44]:
And so, unfortunately, those bad habits have been ingrained in us. And now, we have to unlearn them because we don’t have the time. And we need things to be efficient at work. And if you think you’re getting a lot of emails now, oh, boy, are you in for a surprise. Because, unfortunately, because AI makes it so much easier to write content, we are all about to be bombarded. So if the average executive now gets 300 emails a day, don’t be surprised that number jumps to 3, 000. It’s going to become so much easier to fill your inbox with content. So just treat that as a little forecast of what’s to come.

Roy Schwartz [00:23:21]:
But I think we’re all in for a rude awakening when it’s when it comes to the volume of communication coming our way.

Dave Stachowiak [00:23:27]:
I got the advice a while back to write the way that you talk, and that may not be the way to write if you’re working on your doctoral dissertation. Right? But in most other contexts in certainly in organizations in our daily life, just stopping and for me, I’d like stop and read it out loud. Like, would I would I actually talk that way? Like you said, a format. Like, we all do that to some extent. We all of a sudden these words emerge that years of writing classes have taught us to do, and it’s all fine and good for that context. But a lot of times, just natural language is so helpful.

Roy Schwartz [00:24:04]:
A 100%. Read it out loud. Read it out loud. And and if you stop and go, wow, I would never say that. That does not sound right. You have to change it. And so, now I do it out of habit, but I would say it took a little practice at first to read everything out loud. And it does help you write the way that you speak, which makes it easier to understand and makes it much more memorable as well.

Dave Stachowiak [00:24:29]:
You hit on this a bit ago of the concept of making people smile. And you mentioned your chief of staff frames things around cars because that’s what you love and enjoy reading it. Right? The daily drive.

Roy Schwartz [00:24:40]:
That’s right. Yeah. And and I’m You see, you remember that. Right?

Dave Stachowiak [00:24:44]:
Yeah.

Roy Schwartz [00:24:44]:
The daily drive.

Dave Stachowiak [00:24:45]:
Yeah. Exactly. Because it’s not Exactly. Because it’s it’s it’s unique. It’s memorable. It connects to a person. And I’m curious, like, what the when you think about making people smile in the terms of the internal communications that go out to a whole bunch of people, what are the kinds of things that people do that really get people smiling, bring in some humor, bring in some personality to these that actually get people to wanna read them?

Roy Schwartz [00:25:12]:
So first, you gotta be true to your personality. You know, if you’re a fun person, if you start with a joke, then that’s natural. If that’s not natural for you, then don’t fake it. But basically try and be true to your personality. I think that’s important. 2, we actually add a section that we call the 1 fun thing. That 1 fun thing can be a drink that you tried, a restaurant that you went to, something that made you smile or made you laugh. And now you can start to bring in things that other people have shared with you because once you add a 1 fun, thin section, what you’ll get is people will write to you and say, Oh, I did this.

Roy Schwartz [00:25:49]:
I think we should share it with people. And so, I’m never at a loss for content on that 1 because I’m getting advice all the time from my team. I have a 130 employees. I usually get at least 2 or 3 emails each week with something interesting that I can add into our weekly update. So once you start writing, you’ll be impressed by how quickly people will start to actually petition you for content. Like, hey, can you please give kudos to this person? Can you please mention that this team did this? Or can you tie this back to the mission of the company? You’ll start to get content from other people.

Dave Stachowiak [00:26:23]:
And that means people are reading it and paying attention, right, which is the aim of this whole thing is, to get that message out there. So cool. We talked about the what everyone can do. There’s also a group of folks who are using AI and are looking at tools like yours and thinking how do we do a better job at really automating more of this of utilizing the technology well so that we can spend more time doing the things that the technology can’t do. For folks who are looking at a tool like Axios HQ, how are organizations engaging with this right now? And what does it do that I’m not gonna sit down or a team’s not gonna sit down and be able to do on our own?

Roy Schwartz [00:27:05]:
So I’d say most communication departments don’t have a tool at all. So they’re band aiding together Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, Mailchimp, you know, Google, several other things that were meant for different uses, but they’re trying to make it work in order to organize and manage the different pieces of communication. What we found is that we’ve understood the workflow of communicators. And so it’s everything from planning that communication, collaborating on that communication, getting the approvals that you need before you hit send, scheduling the test send, scheduling the send itself, and then the analytics, who opened it, when did they open it. And then now we’ve added ability to deliver the message through Slack, Teams, SharePoint. So you can write it once and then you can share it in multiple different ways. And that is also really important because you’ve got to meet your audience where they are. Some people love Slack.

Roy Schwartz [00:28:01]:
Some people love email. Some people love the Internet. You’ve got to be able to share it into all of those different places so that people can consume it the way that they want.

Dave Stachowiak [00:28:10]:
The book has gotten so much traction. Big congrats to Jim and Mike and you on on framing something that’s been so helpful to people. I think it just speaks to the need of us all being smart about our communications, being concise. Right? And I’m curious as the book’s been out in the world, you’ve obviously been talking with a lot more people about it now. A lot of other organizations are utilizing model. I’m wondering what, if anything, you’ve changed your mind on as people have started engaging with this model even more.

Roy Schwartz [00:28:43]:
Yeah. The the book’s been really exciting for us. It it has sold a 150, 000 copies. We sell somewhere around 1 or 2, 000 copies every week.

Dave Stachowiak [00:28:51]:
Wow.

Roy Schwartz [00:28:51]:
It seems like people are buying it for their teams because they’re usually selling in 5 or 10 books at a time. So it seems like someone’s reading it saying, oh, I want my team to communicate this way, and then they buy it for the rest of their team. So that’s been fantastic. I would say in terms of things that maybe we would rewrite or redo, I think that a lot of people- it came across as being impersonal that brief meant not putting in your personality. And I think although we talk about it in the book, I think we could Dave done a better job of giving examples of how you can bring your personality into it, how you can make it more fun, and how even though it’s brief, it doesn’t necessarily always mean short, and it doesn’t necessarily always mean to the point and with no personality. And so I think that’s the part that I’ve had to explain the most as people have asked me questions about the book. They don’t wanna lose their personality. They don’t want to seem robotic, and that’s very, very far from what we’re actually trying to convey.

Roy Schwartz [00:29:54]:
We want eventually for your personality and for for the person writing it to become this celebrity almost within the organization that people are petitioning for different updates and trying to get their update into the weekly all hands and that that person can put it into their voice and and make it exciting.

Dave Stachowiak [00:30:13]:
Roy Schwartz is the co author of Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less. Roy, thank you so much for your time and your work. If this conversation was helpful, 3 related episodes I’d recommend to you. 1 of them is episode 5 18, the way to make sense to others. Tom Henschel was my guest on that episode, the host of the Look and Sound of Leadership podcast. Dear friend of mine, Tom and I talked about how do we actually do a better job verbally of some of the things we talked about today in our communications, how to be more concise, how to make sure it lands well. Tom talks through his fabulous model on sorting and labeling in that episode step by step of exactly how to make sense to others.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:02]:
Episode 518 for that. Also recommended episode 651, getting better at reading the room. Kirsten Ferguson was my guest on that episode. We talked about both literally and figuratively needing to read the room. Leaders need to do that all the time. We have all missed that. We have all seen other people miss it. We talk about how to get better at both aspects of it in episode 651, a good complement to this conversation.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:29]:
And then finally, I’d recommend episode 666. Get people reading what you’re sending. Todd Rogers and his work at Harvard, the excellent book writing for busy readers, we get into a lot more of the tactics of actually how to get more concise in your writing. We talked about the big picture today’s strategy on internal communications, how to position that. In episode 666, we get much more into the tactical. Actually, how do you really write in a way that is more concise? Todd and I go through some great detail on that. I think you’ll find it a good complement to this conversation. All of those episodes, of course, you can find on the coachingforleaders.com website.

Dave Stachowiak [00:32:08]:
I’m inviting you today to set up your free membership. It’s gonna give you access to the entire library that I’ve aired since 2, 011 searchable by topic. And 1 of the benefits that you receive as part of your free membership is the weekly leadership guide. It’s 1 email I send out each week with exactly what we talked about today. A couple of key bullet points from every episode, the related episodes that I just mentioned, usually 1 or 2 articles, videos, other podcast episodes I found during the week that I think you should be paying attention to. And usually a quote, a short quote from 1 of our past guests, their books, and reminding us of the things that we’ve heard on the podcast previously. It is part of your free membership inside of coachingforleaders.com. If you haven’t set that up, just go over to the homepage at coaching for leaders.com, and you can set that up.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:01]:
And I was thinking today as I was recording this conversation with Roy, Roy and I got on the line. We were on camera. We were talking. And then when we started recording, we turned off cameras until we finished the recording. And then we did a little bit of a debrief and turned cameras back on. I almost never record podcast interviews on camera. It’s an important reason why, and it comes down to communication and meeting people where they are. I talked about that in detail in a recent journal entry inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:32]:
If you’re looking for a bit more insight from me, a little bit of the behind the scenes, a little bit more from our members perspective, and a lot more on the how how to behind the things you hear every week here on the podcast. I’d invite you to discover Coaching for Leaders Plus. You can find out more by going over to coachingforleaders.plus, 1 of the many benefits inside of there. Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. I hope you’ll join me next Monday for a conversation with Will Gadera, author of Unreasonable Hospitality, a New York Times bestseller. We’re gonna be talking about the power of leadership through hospitality. Join me for that conversation with Will.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:19]:
Have a great week, and see you back Monday.