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Guest: Chris Braun, a coach at CEO Coaching International. Chris is a YPO member who has served as a CEO for 24 years across a diverse range of industries, including franchising, medical devices, power generation, SAS, and specialty plastics. He’s also led multiple companies through successful exits and private equity transactions.
Quick Background: Consistent, transparent communication is a hallmark of great leadership. But a CEO is never communicating to just one audience. Employees, customers, shareholders, board members, regulators, franchisees, and the press are rarely all tuned to the same frequency. If you want to be heard and understood 100% of the time, it’s essential to learn how and when to adjust your messaging.
On today’s show, Chris Braun discusses how to communicate effectively to multiple stakeholders to drive alignment, maximize value, and Make BIG Happen.
Keys to Effective Communication From Chris Braun
1. Know Your Audience
You’re launching a new product. Your marketing team has put together a slick promo video that’s racking up likes on social media. You’ve whipped up excitement and appreciation in the sales department and on the factory floor.
But there are other BIG stakeholders in your company who might not speak TikTok. They don’t care what the packaging looks like. They don’t care how revolutionary the tech is. They just want to understand how investing in a new SKU is going to affect the company’s bottom line.
“The way that you’re communicating, the frequency of communications, I think those need to be geared to each group separately,” Chris says. “What works for one doesn’t work for all. I think there’s also formats that these different groups are used to seeing communications in regularly. From a board member perspective, this is all about transparency. This is about talking in terms of the strategy of the organization, looking at topics like risk management, looking at shareholder value creation. Those are very specific things that a board member or a chairman is interested in talking about. That’s very different than an outside stakeholder. Knowing the audience is a big part of it.”
2. Your Board: Align With the Chairman
No two boards are the same. Some might be handpicked by the founder or CEO. Some might be a group of controlling family members. Others might be appointees from a recent round of VC investment. And still others might be a patchwork of members with different backgrounds and agendas.
To keep your board aligned to your vision, Chris Braun recommends cultivating a strong working relationship with the chairman. You don’t have to be best friends, and you don’t always have to see eye-to-eye. But you do need to establish enough mutual trust that you can have potentially challenging conversations without disrupting the delicate balance on the board as a whole.
“ That relationship with the chairman is really the key to being effective with the rest of the board,” Chris says. “If you can have a casual conversation with the chairman, a non-threatening conversation, just a share of ideas back and forth about a particular subject matter, the chairman can then become a vehicle to help you sell the rest of the board on that idea. I really encourage CEOs to create that open line of communication directly with the chairman first and talk very frequently and often with the chairman about things that are on their mind and potential upsides or downsides in the business. It becomes a good way to gauge how the rest of the board might react and you can also have a very big influence with the chairman on the rest of the board members. So if you can create that alignment and buy-in with the chairman, it helps to condition the board much more effectively than opening a topic for the first time at a board meeting without having had sidebar discussions with the chairman or maybe other influential board members.”
Some boards won’t mind if a CEO is having those sidebar conversations without informing the entire board. Others might start to feel left out of key decisions or paranoid about their position within the company.
One best practice: don’t waste anyone’s time, including yours. Check in with board members if that will make your next meeting more efficient. And if one-on-ones are only creating confusion, stick to your regular meeting rhythm or get an extra strategy session on the schedule ASAP.
3. Your Investors: Set a Course Towards BIG
While board members might want a hand in shaping everything that’s happening at the strategy level of the business, investors usually have just one thing on their minds: ROI. You don’t need to sell investors on a CFO candidate or an AI Roadmap. You just need to show them numbers trending in the right direction.
“ What investors are most interested in is what is the company doing to innovate?” Chris Braun says. “Are you being financially prudent? Are you essentially minimizing risk? And are you maximizing the value of my shares to ultimately create an ideal outcome or exit for the business so we all win at the end? There’s not a lot of fluff in any of that. There’s not a lot of day-to-day activity discussions in that. There’s not a lot of minutiae. You don’t need to get very granular. This is about setting the vision and sharing that vision and knowing what they value the most. They had an opportunity to put money in a lot of other companies, but they chose yours. And when they chose yours, they chose it because of the vision you had and where you could take it with their help as an investor.”
For CEOs who have stock or performance-based bonuses, relating to investors might be less complicated than wrangling a board. If you have skin in the game, then investors know that you want the same thing that they do. Any additional communication should be delivered on a need-to-know basis, typically at shareholder’s meetings.
“I tend to speak with them as peers,” Chris says. “Our investment together is this, our interests in trying to merge or sell or acquire are for X, Y, and Z reasons. Using the term ‘our’ in this case. It’s your money and my money riding on this. And the cadence with investors is either biannual or annual unless there’s some other structure in place. These are not groups that you should be sending newsletters to once a month or opening up phone conversations two or three times between meetings. I would also tend to keep it very high-level.”
4. Your Franchisees: Mutual Optimization
Chris has extensive experience in the franchise space, and he’s found that the relationship between corporate owners and individual stores can pose some unique challenges for CEOs.
“A franchisee and a franchisor do share this coexistence and partnership where one’s success hinges on the other’s success,” Chris says. “There’s this symbiotic relationship that exists. It’s really critical that the franchisor and the franchisee are really in a healthy situation, are really trying to optimize each other’s skills and interests and abilities to maximize the potential for the brand.”
Innovation is one area that’s essential for any BIG business, but potentially difficult to implement at street level. If the CEO of a national fast food chain decides to test drive a new sandwich in one market, they first need to “sell” that new product internally and execute on the processes necessary for a successful launch. But the CEO also needs to sell that sandwich externally to individual franchises and to customers who may be resistant to change.
“With these processes in place, now you’re talking to the franchisee about what the value is of that offering, or that change, or that new market,” Chris Braun says. “And you’re having to sell it in a very different way, which is not how you’re going to make money at it, but how they’re going to make money at it. This creates an interesting dynamic. You get a lot of, ‘I understand how you envision this happening for the brand. How does that affect me? How is it going to work for me?’ So you have to be prepared to live a day in the life in their shoes and understand how they would implement things in their organization, how they would be working with their employees to ensure that the outcomes are met as we agree to between the franchisor and the franchisee. And then there’s the importance to the market and to the consumer. And the more you can actually share those together and make that a point of discussion, the better alignment you’ll have executing that type of strategy or that type of initiative.”
5. Your Coach: The Cone of Silence
There will be points in your tenure as CEO that you feel more and less comfortable talking to various stakeholders about various topics. You might also struggle to find the right message, the right tone, or the right delivery system for a given audience in a given moment.
But there’s one person that a CEO can always trust to be on their side and keep their confidence: your CEO coach.
Whether the news you have to deliver is good or bad, whether you’re prepping your annual planning session or steeling yourself for a contentious board meeting, a coach can provide the wisdom and perspective you need to find your voice and Make BIG Happen.
“With a coach, there’s this unspoken cone of silence,” Chris Braun says. “There’s many sensitive subjects that a CEO works on with their coach that may or may not be board-ready material and may never be. That ability to know that you’re in a very safe space with your coach is part of how you get so much work done. And you can cover a lot of ground because there isn’t this, ‘Can I say this? Should I be saying this?’ It’s really an open, free-flowing dialogue, which is not necessarily what every board meeting or every encounter you have with your chairman is going to be like. A CEO should be using their coach as a sounding board for some of these things first. A coach can actually help you sift through what’s the messages for what audience and how to create alignment in those different groups.”
Top Takeaways From Chris Braun
1. Communicate consistently but tune your message so each audience will hear it.
2. Create alignment between what’s best for the company and what’s best for specific groups of stakeholders.
3. Talk to your coach about anything and everything as your prep your next move.
Links:
Active Listening Techniques for CEOs and Senior Executives – These four techniques could help you and your leaders improve the dialogue at every level of your company.
How CEOs Can Take Back Authority From a Controlling Board of Directors – If you’re getting pushback from your board about a key decision, try using these two strategies to support your case.
About CEO Coaching International
CEO Coaching International works with CEOs and their leadership teams to achieve extraordinary results quarter after quarter, year after year. Known globally for its success in coaching growth-focused entrepreneurs to meaningful exits, the firm has coached more than 1,500+ CEOs and entrepreneurs across 100+ industries and 60 countries. Its coaches—former CEOs, presidents, and executives—have led businesses ranging from startups to over $10 billion, driving double-digit sales and profit growth, many culminating in eight, nine, or ten-figure exits.
Companies that have worked with CEO Coaching International for two years or more have achieved an average revenue CAGR of 31% (2.6X the U.S. average) and an average EBITDA CAGR of 52.3% (more than 5X the U.S. average).
Discover how coaching can transform your leadership journey at ceocoachinginternational.com.
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