Do you feel like you're saying the same thing over and over? Having trouble remembering whether you've made this point before to this person or group? No worries. If you notice that you're being redundant in your talking points, you're benefiting your team.
Think about this - when you're the CEO your job is to keep your eye on the horizon - to see what is coming over the mountain, and to prepare to meet (or conquer) whatever that thing is. You're thinking about conditions, competitors, trends that might be one year, three years, even five or ten years out from directly impacting your business. You might be reading or listening to resources on the topic. You might be going full immersion.
Next you're talking to your senior team, perhaps your business coach, and maybe even your spouse or business friend about it. You're going multiple rounds inside and outside your head, thinking through the situation, the potential opportunities or threats, and the options for your company. In total, you might be processing information dozens of times over several weeks and months. Of course you're repeating yourself!
By the time you are communicating your game plan to the troops, your first words to them are your 10th (or 40th) repetition of your idea. Are we exaggerating to make the point? Maybe. But not by much. It feels like redundancy to you, but it's news to most of them.
If you're like some of my clients, you have processed and analyzed, talked, maybe even written a bit to bring your thoughts together. By the time you tell the team where the company is going and what you want - BAM! You feel urgency, even expectation, to implement right away. You've lived with the idea for a while, so you are more than ready to go, go, go. Their job is to do it, right? Get their hands and feet moving right away in the direction you outlined just now?
It's not that easy. Depending upon what research you read, it takes 5-6 repetitions of a piece of information for a person to remember more than half of it after 2 weeks. One message delivered one time will fade to almost nothing after just a couple of days. Your team needs you to talk about where the company is going, and they need you to do it over and over if you want them to remember it, even be able to recite it. They need to connect the dots, and to see where they fit into the new picture. They need multiple iterations for them to integrate it into their thinking and problem solving to help you get it done.
Here's the other thing. Beyond repetition and retention, your track record about ideas influences how quickly the team will fully engage on this current one you're introducing. If you're a member of the "shiny new things" or "flavor of the month" clubs, you have unwittingly created a culture of wait and see. Your team keeps heads down, waiting for this to blow over before committing, because your shiny new things and flavors have given them whiplash before.
You might be asking, "What about new information, and the way that might change things midstream?" We're not saying here that there are no course corrections allowed. It's important to make a lot of decisions and fail fast rather than continue to allow failed initiatives to roll along, thinking tomorrow will bring a different result. But the big stuff takes time and consistency. When it is a strategic change you're making, time is needed for the outcome to reveal itself. Same goes when there are a lot of moving parts, or there is a big investment to make in people, equipment, materials, etc. to get it done. You don't pull the cake out of the oven early, before it has had a chance to bake.
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