‘Educate your bosses’: The keys to boosting your executive comms efforts

Even the best leaders don’t always fully grasp the power of well-planned and executed communications. Comms pros can serve as an educational guide to help executives fully grasp the value of effective, employee-centric messaging.

At Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference last month, Farnaz Khadem, vice president of university relations at Stanford University, shared an anecdote from her early career about the comms-executives relationship that stuck with her through the years.

“One of the first things a boss ever told me — and it was life-changing — was, ‘Your number one job with your leaders is to educate your bosses,’” she said. “We assume executives know communications the way we do, but they don’t. They don’t understand that there are no boundaries between audiences, or how a message to employees will also land with alumni or faculty. Part of our job is to walk them through that.”

Khadem advised communicators to try to create messaging that fits within a leader’s personality rather than just making them mouthpieces of the company line. Creating a sense of authenticity — especially with employee audiences — can make a message resonate.