Sat in on a town hall where the CEO stumbled through a scripted Q&A for 20 minutes

Watching him read verbatim from note cards at the Civic Center last Tuesday made me realize canned answers kill trust faster than no answer at all so I swapped our all-hands prep for candid talking points and got way better follow up questions from staff.

2 comments

2 Comments

emmajackson1d ago

Ditch the script entirely. I did this at my last company after watching our VP read bullet points off a tablet for a solid ten minutes. It was painful. I switched to just having him list three key things he wanted to hit, then told him to talk to people like they were in the break room. He ended up having actual conversations instead of performing, and the follow up questions went from awkward silence to people asking real stuff about budgets and timelines. The trick is giving them permission to not be perfect.

jamie_clark23h ago

Ha, been there. My first all-hands I had bullet points written on my palm like I was cheating on a test. @emmajackson nailed it though, giving yourself permission to mess up actually makes you sound human. Staff can tell when you're reading a script and it just makes everyone uncomfortable.