The line-of-sight commandments

A new financial year lands with a certain kind of optimism. As strategies refresh and priorities reset, we hope to see our leaders emerging from their planning-session cocoons, armed with clear, actionable goals. 

But something tends to happen when they start to communicate said goals – they get muddied or lost. The goals may not vanish dramatically from company comms, but somehow blur. Maybe there’s a lovely vision statement on the intranet, and an 80-slide mildly tidied PowerPoint deck somewhere, but after the start-of-year pomp has fizzled, people tend to go back to doing what they were before. 

Why? Because nobody told them what was supposed to change, or why it matters to them specifically. That’s a line-of-sight problem. And it’s more common than you’d think. 

Clarity about the direction of the business is a basic condition for work. People need to connect what they do on a daily basis to where the organisation is headed. The word ‘alignment’ is horribly overused, but if your people are heading in different directions then you’re in for a mishmash of mediocrity. 

So let’s use this moment, at the start of the financial year, to consider how to communicate with clarity. 

Hear ye, hear ye, it’s another edition of employee experience commandments. 

Divine destinations 

Before you communicate direction, make sure you have one. A surprising amount of line-of-sight failures begin in the thinking rather than the communication. Vague strategy isn’t a messaging problem to be solved; it’s simply an unfinished conversation. So hop to it and finish step one you eager beaver: 

• Thou shalt say it plainly
  Can you remember the strategy in the pub on a Friday night? No? Maybe it’s the ouzo talking, or maybe it’s too complicated, bland or unmemorable. A strategy should be expressible in a sentence which a new joiner can understand from day one. You don’t need to dumb it down, but it should be distilled. 

• Thou shalt sanity-test
  Your work might look perfect to you, but take the time to test it with different levels and functions to ensure it is fit-for-purpose. Ask: “What does this direction mean for how you work?” If the answers don’t match your expectations, then get back to the drawing board. 

• Thou shalt not confuse activity with direction
  Initiatives, workstreams and priorities sound great, but they’re not a strategy; they’re what happens when a strategy exists. Your people need a destination. Where are you going? What does success look like? Answer those questions first, then the initiatives will make sense in context. 

• Thou shalt give the tools with the message

  Who are the unsung superheroes for strategy? That’s right, the time-poor middle managers. And surprise, surprise, giving them a bunch of messages to cascade without any support simply won’t fly. The line of sight between strategy and daily work runs almost entirely through this population of managers. They can turn direction into team priorities and individual conversations, so give them the context, the answers, the confidence and the necessary support. 

• Thou shalt make it meaningful at every level

  Bob and his forklift probably don’t care about the CFO’s spreadsheets – and that’s ok. What’s not ok is leaving Bob and others like him behind. The job of communication isn’t to repeat the strategy to everyone; it’s to show each group what it means for them specifically. So think about your audiences: What changes will affect them? What are you asking them to do differently? Then answer these questions. 

Line of sight isn’t a comms deliverable. It’s a leadership discipline, a management capability and an organisational habit. Remember, if your people can’t say where you’re going (in their own words, from where they’re standing), then the destination only exists in a dusty slide deck.