Close the Loop From Strategy to Execution With Strong Internal Comms

Effective communication is a critical but often overlooked aspect of running a startup. When done properly, communication keeps employees engaged, promotes collaboration, and ensures the company is executing on its strategic vision. However, several common pitfalls can negatively impact these goals and derail a startup’s strategy.?

There are four prevalent communication issues startups face - lack of regular updates, inconsistent leadership messaging, siloed information flow, and absent goals and feedback channels. Let's see how they impact a company’s ability to execute on their strategy and what you can do about it.

Updates

First, a lack of regular company-wide updates leaves employees feeling uninformed and disconnected from organizational progress. Mathilde Collin , the CEO of Front , the customer service operations platform, recently told First Round Review that she has sent weekly revenue update emails to the entire company for the last four years. “I started sending a daily email to the team to bring that metric front and center. It explained how much revenue we added yesterday, what we did well and what didn't go so well,” says Collin.

“This may seem like a lot of time for an early-stage founder to spend on an internal note every single week, but it was vital,” Collin said. “Amid all the growing pains, people knew exactly what success meant and evaluated everything they did through the lens of ‘How can we make that number go up?”

When employees don’t receive consistent information about objectives, priorities, challenges and metrics, it breeds uncertainty and decreases motivation. Teams may pursue misaligned efforts or lose sight of strategic goals altogether.?

What can you do? Use quick, frequent updates. Implement weekly standup meetings with a clear “Yesterday. Today. Obstacles.” structure to keep everyone on the same page. And if you believe Jeff Bezos’ opinion is worth listening to, start with the most junior person .

Consistency

Second, inconsistent messaging from leadership creates confusion and mixed signals about the company’s direction. Contradictory guidance from the C-suite undermines coordinated efforts by different departments and leads to inefficient use of resources.?

In his book Leadership is Language , former US Navy Captain L. David Marquet describes how teams need consistent messaging during their execution phase. Marquet advocates for a prescribed period of open debate, but once that is concluded, leaders should minimize the variability of messages to enable greater productivity and focus.

OKRs are the typical method of fostering consistent messaging, by declaring and aligning all employees around a shared, linked set of goals. While many startups pay lipservice to the use of OKRs, either on a quarterly or annual schedule, the pressures of pivots and opportunism can degrade the consistency of those messages.

What can you do? Model it from the top. Google is the poster child for the successful use of OKRs and the consistent messaging that comes from them. Rick Klau , a former senior operating partner at GV (Google Ventures) , says when leaders declare and assess their OKRs publicly it models consistency and reaffirms the importance of the stated goals.?

Silos

Third, information silos that form when functions like marketing and engineering operate independently - perhaps unaware of each other’s priorities - cause delays and inefficiencies. Competing for a faster time to market may incentivize a highly distributed, parallel workload, but parallel information-sharing habits must also be built. Lack of integration and information sharing prevents teams from maximizing synergies across the organization.

A recent study of repeat entrepreneurs found that the degree of knowledge sharing is a clear indicator of higher performance. “Startups benefit most from founders' experience in the same industry when resources are allocated to sharing the experience with other members and collectively storing the experience as an organizational asset.”

What can you do? Feed your company culture. Research by the Tokyo Institute of Technology shows that startups share more information when employees see it as a reflection of the company culture. When people believe sharing information will not only help them be more successful, but also create a culture of communal sharing where knowledge sharing is reciprocal.

Feedback

Fourth, failure to establish clear feedback channels allows strategic risks to grow. John Doerr, author of Measure What Matters | OKR Resources and OKR guru, told MIT’s Sloan Review that leaders need to marry the much more well-known OKRs with Conversations, Feedback and Recognition, or CFRs.

Using the NFL as an analogy to explain the relationship between ambition and feedback, Doerr says that while objectives are the end zone, and key results are the individual yard lines, feedback is the play-calling along the way. Without effective feedback, teams are less able to identify the changes they need to make before they become major strategic risks.

Strong internal communication is crucial for startups to scale successfully while executing on their strategic vision. Founders must make communication a priority early on to prevent the disruption caused by these common pitfalls. Regular updates, consistent leadership, cross-functional integration, and two-way feedback mechanisms will help startups overcome communication challenges and foster the alignment and agility required for growth.

What can you do? Value lessons learned. Klau, in his Google Ventures talk, says that one of the benefits of OKRs is that they allow organizations to learn from mistakes, not just at a team level, but company-wide. Openly discussing and valuing the lessons from things that didn’t work demonstrates that positive and negative feedback are equally valued.?

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While overcoming the communication pitfalls that hinder strategy execution presents challenges for founding teams, focusing on effective communication from the start can help pave the way for long-term success. When founders prioritize regular company updates, consistent messaging, cross-functional integration and feedback mechanisms, it creates the conditions for collaboration, learning and engagement to thrive within their organization. Even in times of uncertainty and opportunity, strong internal communication will empower a startup workforce to adapt quickly and execute their strategy as one aligned team.