No one who hears Alan Mulally describe Ford’s turnaround will escape his rendition of “one Ford, one team” and “working together.”
“Those are more than just words,” he declared. Ford employees were expected to carry their CEO’s message with them on laminated cards.
Mulally’s mantras rephrased how a factionalized Ford would forge unity of purpose. The new vocabulary created new accountability. Employees who wouldn’t speak fluent Ford, he warned, couldn’t stay. This language provided a structure for expectations, communications and behavior. Ford wouldn’t have succeeded without it.
Serious CEOs redefine the key words that organizations use to explain themselves and clarify what they seek to accomplish. Ambiguity is the enemy. Leaders with vision create “value vocabularies” that make self-organization, motivation and alignment easier.
Being simple, clear and direct doesn’t guarantee understanding. The words that CEOs speak, write and post matter far less than their interpretation. How they’re played back, Mulally and other successful CEO communicators observe, is the true test. If people can’t enhance and advance the CEO’s essential message, something is wrong with the people, the message or the CEO.
But successful CEOs push managers to go beyond retransmission: They want their leadership to come up with better ways to preach the new gospel.
At one Web services firm, the new CEO wanted her company to become more customer-focused. She thought that the company’s analytics and processes didn’t go far enough to improve the customer experience. One of the greatest obstacles in promoting more pro-user initiatives, she discovered, was that her people were prisoners of their vocabulary. They interpreted her emphasis on customer focus as a call to intensify existing efforts rather than discuss new ways to add value.
After weeks of frustration, she realized she wouldn’t get the improvements unless her company’s conversations about customers changed. She began saying how she wanted customers to feel after they interacted with the company’s services. She pushed product managers to present enhancements in user experience, not just to elevate customer satisfaction scores. Success camewhen the CEO started hearing her employees articulate dimensions of new customer value that she hadn’t anticipated. People slowly started describing customer engagement, involvement and experience differently.
While the incumbent customer lexicon wasn’t abandoned, it neither drove nor defined how marketers and innovators talked about the people they were serving. Intriguingly, the CEO and her leadership circle now struggle to determine how dynamic they want their “value vocabulary” to be: What words should become “constants,” and which need to evolve along with the technology and analytics?
In a changing industry, superior command of language is even more important for CEOs. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, for example, has been maneuvering from a proprietary software legacy to cloud computing, platform and open systems contexts. Machine learning, for example, is now integral to Microsoft’s new-value vocabulary.
But Microsoft’s global challenge isn’t how well the CEO articulates a compelling vision of innovation. Instead, it’s how creatively its legions of sales teams, marketers, project managers and coders translate those ideas into actions. The company requires a new vocabulary to express its ingenuity.
Entrepreneurial founders have semantic and rhetorical advantages over their successors. A company’s creator disproportionately owns and influences its vocabulary. But every CEO leading change and confronting disruption needs people and systems that assure that everyone understands key words.
“Jacked Up,” the business memoir of GE CEO Jack Welch’s speechwriter, Bill Lane, describes not just the time and care his boss put into speeches and presentations, but how the company’s Crotonville, New York, facility was used to indoctrinate GE’s fast-track executives.
Welch, says Lane, relentlessly reviewed ever senior-level presentation his top team made. Why? To make sure everyone understood — and built upon — his core messages.
