Effective communication is the cornerstone of any successful organization. Harnessed correctly, communication fosters awareness and creates seamless connection points with both internal and external stakeholders.
For this article, we sat down with five McKinsey leaders to learn about critical communications themes they’ve been hearing this year. Here’s what they had to say.
Alexis Krivkovich, senior partner, on culture
For organizations to thrive in today’s modern world, leaders must treat the “soft stuff” as the “hard stuff”—doubling down on culture, communication, and change to build healthy and resilient teams while driving their business forward. Our research supports this.1 Leaders who invest in these areas with the same rigor as they do financial and sales performance more than double the odds of a strategy being successful, and the impact of its execution is nearly double that.
As leaders mobilize their teams, I am hearing a few crosscutting best practices on which they are proactively and boldly focusing:
- Shaping a compelling narrative. A clear set of messages around the organization’s vision and strategy for the future enables leaders to confidently build conviction among stakeholders and rally them around a unified aspiration. In my conversations with leaders, they’re really leaning into storytelling across different mediums to reach their teams systematically.
- Communicating with authenticity. Gone are the days where town halls and other forums are fully scripted—and, thus, stilted. Instead, leaders are winning the hearts and minds of their teams by embracing vulnerability and deliberately fostering deeper, more meaningful conversations with their teams.
- Connecting communications to employee purpose. Our research shows that employees whose sense of purpose connects with that of their companies are five times more likely than their peers to feel fulfilled at work. CEOs and modern leaders have a unique ability to inspire their teams and help them realize their full potential. We are seeing leaders infuse their organizations’ narrative across all facets of the talent life cycle as they attract, develop, and retain world-class talent. This ensures that employees feel inspired and engaged, with the ability to connect their work to a broader mission.
Liz Harrison, partner, on growth
The best CEOs and growth leaders harness the power of communication as an unlock. Our own research supports this, showing that growth outperformers are 80 percent more likely than their peers to communicate their growth successes more often, both internally and externally.
Organizations transforming for the future must communicate their growth aspiration with conviction and clarity. Further, I see the best leaders institutionalize communication excellence, repeating their core messages and enrolling a deep bench of leaders who can systematically articulate and deliver against the growth agenda. Consistent communication, backed by concrete actions, builds a virtuous cycle of credibility and engagement. It unlocks new possibilities in teams and helps them realize their full potential. Further, through effective communications, growth becomes a team sport where everyone plays a critical role, and organizations can move further and faster—together.
John Kelleher, senior partner, on transformation
In the high-stakes world of private equity, where transformation is the norm, effective communication can make or break an initiative. As a former private equity CEO, I’ve seen firsthand that the best leaders employ a triad of transparency, decisiveness, and inspiration.
First, transparency is nonnegotiable. Leaders must articulate the vision and the rationale behind the transformation with crystal-clear clarity. This means sharing both the opportunities and the challenges, fostering trust, and aligning the entire organization with the end goal. In my experience, a transparent leader is one who dismantles silos and ensures that everyone, from the boardroom to the shop floor, understands the why and how of the transformation.
Decisiveness is the second pillar. In private equity, time is money, and hesitation can be costly. Bold leaders make informed, swift decisions and stand by them. They communicate these decisions with unwavering confidence, creating a sense of momentum and urgency. This decisiveness must permeate every level of the organization, empowering teams to act quickly and effectively.
Lastly, inspiration is the catalyst that turns plans into action. Transformations are inherently disruptive and can breed uncertainty. Leaders who communicate with passion and conviction can galvanize their teams, turning skepticism into enthusiasm. They share compelling narratives that connect the transformation to a higher purpose, inspiring a collective commitment to the journey ahead.
In essence, the best communication during transformations is an artful blend of transparency, decisiveness, and inspiration. It’s about being bold, clear, and relentlessly focused on the vision, ensuring that every stakeholder is not just informed but also engaged and motivated.
Harry Bowcott, senior partner, on sustainability
When I talk to my clients who are leading businesses with a strong focus on sustainability, I hear the same imperative coming out urgently. We are in an extremely volatile external environment where short-term distractions are myriad. The price at which sustainability comes—which, in initial start-up mode, is often very high—is being questioned. In some cases, whether sustainability should be a priority at all is being challenged. And there are no signs that any of this is going to change over the next few years.
So, the challenge for CEOs and their communications lead is how to inspire their organizations around the midterm upside potential for sustainability due to the rise of AI, automation, robotics, and other new technologies while dealing with the short-term pessimism caused by volatility, national balance sheet constraints, and evolving sentiment. Instead of backing away from a strong story on sustainability, there can be immense potential for those who mobilize properly.
So how do we maintain a midterm North Star? How do we maintain investor confidence and employee morale? The importance of keeping employees’ and investors’ eyes on a clear, compelling midterm vision is huge. Central to this argument must be the intersection point between two megatrends: sustainability and AI. Given the sizable proportion of the world’s power that goes through electric motors, for example, the possibilities for new designs that make use of gen AI for engineering will be extraordinary.
The only certainty it seems is that things will remain uncertain. That has to affect the ways that leaders talk about what they are doing and how they find an appropriate level of candor to talk about expectations. And their strategies need to be robust when subjected to short-term disruption, while keeping the long-term prize in sight.
Drew Horah, partner, on frontline engagement
Successful transformations can require hundreds of initiatives impacting all areas of the business, and they involve a significant chunk of the workforce to execute them. In other words, there is simply no way to accomplish big goals without engaging the entire organization, including frontline employees who are the backbone of daily operations.
With their hands-on knowledge of the way things work and frequent customer interactions, frontline workers’ unique insights and experiences enable them to identify challenges and opportunities that may not be visible to higher management. Engaging the front line gives them a stake in the organization’s success and ensures that initiatives are practical, effectively implemented, and sustained.
We see a continued trend toward transformations aimed at making operations more agile and productive through the introduction of new technologies that change how frontline workers do their jobs. Many of the initiatives underlying these transformations will require adoption of new mindsets and habits to change deeply ingrained ways of running the business that have been built up over years.
To change a habit or mindset, people need to believe in the why, through a well-crafted and authentic narrative that creates understanding and conviction. They also need to see leaders and peers role modeling the new way of doing things.
By fostering a culture of inclusion, understanding, and engagement, organizations can harness the full potential of their frontline workforce, ensuring that every transformation initiative is not just a top-down directive but a shared journey toward collective success.
1 Scott Keller and Bill Schaninger, Beyond Performance 2.0: A Proven Approach to Leading Large-Scale Change, John Wiley & Sons, 2019.