REPEAT, REPEAT, REPEAT
The research all agrees.
People have to hear things multiple times before they stick.
Dan Coyle, in his fantastic book The Culture Code, cites an Inc. Magazine study where only 2% of people could name a company's top 3 priorities. Executives expected the number to be much higher, implicitly giving themselves credit for higher quality communication than reality. Pat Lencioni suggests that “employees won’t believe what leaders are communicating to them until they’ve heard it seven times. Whether the real number is five, seven, or seventy-seven, the point is that people are skeptical about what they’re being told unless they hear it consistently over time.”[2]
One of our favorite proof points for the benefits of over-communicating comes not from organizational psychology or the business best-seller list, but from a blockbuster movie. The whole premise of the Christopher Nolan film Inception is about implanting ideas into people’s heads. The cast begins the movie believing that true inception - implanting an idea so seamlessly that the recipient believes they came up with it on their own - is impossible. But as the movie goes on, we learn it isn’t impossible; but it is very difficult.
Thankfully, we don’t have to deal with the powerful sedatives or the risk of falling into limbo that Inception’s plot features. But making an idea stick inside an organization - so that the majority of people understand and can use it to make decisions independently – requires real, tedious work.
Sam Altman puts it well in an interview by Elad Gil in the High Growth Handbook,
“The annoying thing to many CEOs is that the way you make it happen is incredibly repetitive. It’s a lot of the same conversation again and again with employees or press or customers. You just have to relentlessly say, “This is what we’re doing, this is why, and this is how we’re going to do it.”[3]
Sam nails it, except for one important part:
This isn’t just a job for the CEO.
This is the entire management team’s job.
That’s right, everyone.