Make your face-to-face time count

How to cascade and tailor information in meetings

No one person—including the CEO—can do all the face-to-face communications alone. The best thing he or she can provide is an infectious model of speaking transparently and listening candidly.

But the CEO should also require that his or her direct reports pass all relevant information down to their reports, who should pass it down to theirs, and so forth. Communication at the very top of an organization tends to be good, and at the supervisory level, also, pretty good. Where things get stuck is in the great bottleneck of middle management.

So another communication responsibility of the CEO and his or her direct reports is to help ensure that decisions and plans at the highest levels reach those at the farthest level, without filtering but with tailoring, in ways that are meaningful to everyone in the organization.

The cascade model