10 Tips On Communicating The Founder To New CEO Transition
Introducing a new CEO to your business is a major undertaking. Handle the change management well, and you’ll reassure your people that the change is positive. Effective communication will help them understand why change is happening and calm fears. Communicating the Founder to a new CEO transition is something we’ve had the opportunity to deliver a few times, so here’s what we learned…
1. Secrecy is paramount
Keeping the change in leadership quiet is essential to getting your communications right. Because if you’re not in control of your story, your competition could be. You need to be in charge of the message, not your employees and definitely not your competitors.
Only the executive team usually knows about the change in leadership in advance. And they need to keep it locked down until you’re ready to tell everyone else.
To do this, you need to avoid any of the following giveaways:
Displaying slides about the change in leadership on display in glass-walled meeting rooms
Diary meetings which disclose the secret
A lack of visibility from your current CEO as they become busy with tasks ahead of leaving
I think it’s helpful to name the leadership change project so only those in the know can identify associated meetings or documents. Make it something like ‘Project Bloom’ or ‘Project Leap’, focused on growth but not immediately obvious it’s about the CEO changing.
2. Setting the scene
One of the best things to do when a CEO is about to step down is to publish a financial update before making the announcement.
It’s good timing because, depending on the circumstance, the CEO isn’t leaving because of financial trouble. If you’re actually doing well, it prevents a lot of worry about job losses, redundancies and business risk. When we shared the numbers, it prevented people from coming to their own conclusions about the reasons for departure.
Something I wished I’d known more about at this time is the company life cycle.
Companies tend to progress through a predictable series of phases. Beginning with the startup phase, they then move into the rapid growth phase, followed by the maturity phase and sometimes a subsequent decline.
This context makes it easy to explain how different business life cycle phases lend themselves to different types of CEO. Founders often come with high energy and entrepreneurial traits ideally suited to rapid iterations, failing fast and learning quickly to deliver early growth.
Growth can also mean finding stability as you scale up – a CEO who provides the steady hand the business needs to steer it through its maturity phase.
Knowing where your company is in its life cycle will make it easier to explain why you need a new CEO. It will also help your employees see this change as a normal part of your business growth and development.
3. Manage the message
In the absence of information, people will fill the silence with their own beliefs. So it’s really important to:
Create an honest narrative and align your messaging to it.
Understand your employees’ concerns and respond to them.
A common belief that often comes up in relation to private equity sales is that the Founder was only ever involved with the business for the money.
I worked with a Founder who’d set up and grown a very successful business; it was his passion and life’s work. He could have picked many different people to take on his role, but he’d chosen a new CEO who he really trusted with our employees in mind. These were the core messages at the heart of our narrative.
4. Get timing right
Who should you tell first? After the executive team it should always be your employees.
How far in advance of going public you do this depends on your company’s culture. Some firms are more cautious than others and tell employees shortly before telling people outside the company. Others invest great trust in their highly engaged workforces. The last company we worked with trusted people with this secret for two days.
I believe it’s always best to communicate significant changes to all your employees at the same time first thing in the morning. This allows everyone to ask questions so no one’s worried or anxious overnight.
5. Avoid email
It might be the easiest way to make an all-employee announcement. But I recommend using alternative channels to email to help you drive engagement.
One campaign we ran used an internal communications platform to make the announcement via a blog called ‘Change at the top’. It included a photo of the new CEO, and we wrote it like a newspaper feature article with the most important news at the top. The founder and the new CEO provided quotes, and employees could use a comments box underneath them to ask questions or provide feedback. Email and Slack notifications made sure everyone saw the post. Throughout the week, we continued with blogs from across the leadership team. As trusted leaders, their positivity significantly impacts employees’ perspectives of the change in leadership. We could track engagement with really good metrics to see how the message landed.
Compare this to sending an all-hands email, which only provides open rate data, and you’ll see why we prefer this approach for our comms.
6. A picture paints a thousand words
It can be tempting to focus on the words, but I always think the visuals are just as important. Make sure that the Founders photo and the new CEO photo align visually. This will make the new CEO look like part of the company. And we can recommend some great photographers if you need help!
In addition to the blog and photography, we like to pre-record interviews of the founder and new CEO. These interviews give employees more insight into the reasons for the change and help everyone get to know the new CEO better. Use them to cover the issues you know will be at the top of everyone’s minds, from where the business is heading next to leadership style and its impact on culture.
Some Engagement platforms offer live channels which gives employees the chance for two-way communication.
7. Culture is key
When your Founder’s personality has been integral to building your business and its culture, some employees will think that the business can’t possibly survive in the same format with someone new in charge. The continuation of our company culture was the key concern among our employees. And so calming fears around this should be a key focus of your communications.
8. Tell the rest of the world
This stage of the communications plan is about ensuring your customers aren’t spooked.
Your Founder will likely have a large following on LinkedIn, so you might decide to reveal the departure externally in a LinkedIn post. Retaining control of the story is essential; you don’t want competitors to imply that your company can’t be the same without its founder. Use the departing CEO’s announcement as an opportunity to set out the reasons why their successor is the right leader for the business.
9. Keep communicating post-announcement
After the big internal announcement, we’ve always opted to key the communication front of mind for the week. We’ve helped clients structure daily live sessions where they broadcast real-time video. Depending on location, it can be a great way to make the message accessible to everyone and to ensure everyone in the business has the same experience.
However you choose to communicate, make sure you:
Cover all geographical locations and time zones if your business is multi-country.
Follow up on any questions asked by employees earlier in the communication plan.
Be honest and open in your responses to build trust, even when you don’t have the answer to a question.
It’s ok to say that your new CEO doesn’t have every detail mapped out yet. Instead, emphasise that they’ll spend time talking and listening to help them build their strategic plans. Commit to communicating these plans when the time is right.
10. Fulfil your communication commitment
First impressions count. How you begin will set the tone and energy for the years ahead.
Like many great leaders, I believe that spending the first 100 days listening, learning and being interested is the best way to begin. During this time, your new CEO should also ensure they’re visible. I encourage all CEOs to travel to all of their locations – even one with two employees – to come up with their forward strategy.
Any CEO who has worked with me will be very familiar with my ‘Mission Mondays’ CEO internal communications. Every Monday, it’s on the CEO to publish strategy-related blogs that keep employees in the loop. It’s one of our best budget-free engagement tactics. Drop us a message if you’d like to learn more about it!
The ideal outcome
So, what are you aiming for with your Founder to CEO communications plan? I believe you want employees to understand why the transition is necessary and that what’s happening is a normal part of business.
It’s also important that your employees aren’t fatigued by too much change and are not anxious or worried about what the future holds for them. Keep them focused, productive and engaged as your business transitions.
After all, although the CEO’s role is very important, one person can never achieve as much as all your employees can. So, keep your people calm, collected and engaged to deliver business as usual, whatever that looks like under your new CEO.
