Communicating Leadership Changes: 4 Steps to a Soft Landing

Which communications keep executives up at night? In my experience, it isn’t earnings announcements, product launches, or major strategic updates. It’s leadership shifts and reorganizations.

Leadership changes are highly political and uniquely human in their impacts. They might involve an involuntary exit, defection to a competitor, an underperforming part of the business, or a major shift in investment. Leaders’ pride is on the line and employees might be confused or unhappy. Every word in the email announcement and talking points feels loaded.

In my communications career, I’ve navigated more of these transitions than I can count. While details vary, there are four key steps to craft and deliver any successful leadership change announcement.

1. Determine Risk 

Before any communications messaging or plans are developed, you need to look at the landscape of legal and stakeholder risk connected to the news. A CEO change at a public company is material information, and must be handled with tight security; a routine reorganization has relatively low risk. Assess the risk for each key audience:

• Investors: Will investors trade stock based on this news? Will they interpret facts about the company’s business strength or performance based on the change?

• Customers: Will this leadership change be evident to customers, and will they experience disruption?

• Media and influencers: Will this leadership change affect individuals who are highly visible externally, making it “big news”?

• Leaders/managers: Will company leaders feel displaced or upset at the news, in a way that makes it difficult for them to positively influence their own teams?

• Employees: Will the leadership change create fear or confusion about reporting structure, job security, or business performance?

Each “yes” to the questions above adds to the risk of the leadership announcement and signals that more time, diligence, and detailed planning should go into the three steps that follow. If the news is hard, it might not be realistic to expect a strong positive reaction; but you can strive to mitigate the most negative/high risk outcomes of the news.

2. Develop Messaging

Strong messaging is the single most critical component in a successful leadership transition. Sometimes there is information that can’t be transparently shared (such as an involuntary exit), but the messaging should be as comprehensive and genuine as possible. I use a simple messaging framework that covers four elements:

• Business context that necessitated this change

• What is changing

• What this change means, including tailored details for any sub-groups affected

• What happens next

While this framework sounds straightforward, aligning on the messaging can be extremely difficult. Leaders might disagree on everything from what to call a newly formed organization to how to characterize a departing individual. It’s critical that the messaging be 100% signed off with all the announcement stakeholders and decision-makers before moving past step 2.*

*Leaders will sometimes insist that communications teams start drafting materials right away, even though the messaging isn’t done. This invariably results in multiple rounds of redlines and re-routing that could have been prevented.

3. Outline the Cascade

A communications cascade is the flow of communication that happens with a leadership change. Typically it starts at the top and with people most affected, then moves downward and outward in the organization which is where the “cascade” term comes from. This plan is sometimes called the “tick-tock” plan, because it’s very detailed relative to time and sequencing (not to be confused with a viral social media platform!).

If an announcement is material, meaning it could have a direct impact on a publicly traded stock, there will be legal restrictions that require broad distribution of the news at the same time. But for a more typical leadership change, the internal cascade typically flows like this:

1. Affected leader’s direct peers

2. Affected leader’s direct reports

3. Affected leader’s entire organization (often in two or three waves, starting with senior leaders and moving down to the entire staff)

4. Entire company, if appropriate

The goal of this sequencing is that the people most affected by the news hear it first, so they can process it and be prepared to explain it.

If there is a customer impact, communication typically happens in parallel with the steps above, starting with the customers/stakeholders who need a personal conversation before hearing it broadly via email or in the news media.

Organizational news is notoriously hard to keep secret, so I recommend keeping the cascade timing tight.

4. Anticipate and Update FAQs

Sometimes it makes sense to proactively provide a short informational FAQ as part of the announcement. But the far more important element is the reactive FAQ, which is preparation for tough questions that might be asked. 

Preparing the reactive FAQ is unpopular, unpleasant, and 100% required. This is where you outline the uncomfortable questions that employees or other stakeholders are likely to ask, such as: “Will this result in layoffs?” “Is this because of poor business performance?” and “Why was this new leader selected?” Senior leaders sometimes discourage this step in the process, because the questions are awkward or don’t have a good immediate answer. But if it’s likely to be asked, it’s better to think through the answer in advance than when you’re in front of an employee town hall meeting.

FAQs should be a living document. If a question is coming up that wasn’t anticipated, they can be updated and re-distributed to leaders as needed.

Tips on Delivery

The four steps above are critical, repeatable, and manageable actions to make sure your leadership change communication goes smoothly with the right content and preparation. But even with the best messaging, it can land poorly if the delivery isn’t done well. I recommend:

• Acknowledging a departing leader with appreciation and thanks for their contributions. Even if the departure was (privately) an unpleasant one, the company signals its own character with how they handle the exit.

• Providing generous business context for a reorganization, including specific reasons why the new one will be better. Employees need to see the vision and believe it while they navigate the upheaval it might be creating in their daily reporting structure or work assignments.

• Giving employees the opportunity to ask questions, whether it’s in a broad forum or small staff/team meetings. Transparent, non-defensive answers to explain leadership changes go a long way in sustaining employee trust.

Need a Leadership Change Advisor?

Juran Strategies works with companies that are navigating transformation and leadership changes in their organization. I help develop repeatable frameworks and templates for organizational changes or jump in to help hands-on with a specific high-stakes change. If you need a partner in leadership communications, reach out and let’s talk through your challenge.