Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Lyft CFO Brian Roberts: Creating a Dialogue, Testing for Understanding


The Wall Street Journal recently published an interview with Lyft CFO Brian Roberts, an MBA classmate of mine from Harvard Business School. Roberts describes his attempts to create an open dialogue with members of his organization. Tatyana Shumsky of the Wall Street Journal writes,

Mr. Roberts regularly holds CFO chats—free-form, large-group conversations open to anyone and everyone in the ride-sharing company—to facilitate communication and give employees greater clarity on company strategy. He also holds frequent office hours, doled out in 10-minute increments, so that any of the more than 150 people on the finance team can get a one-on-one meeting with the CFO to chew over any work topic.

During the interview, Roberts mentions an important a-ha moment during on of these dialogues:

When I did my first chat since the IPO, I think it was probably several hundred people in the room. And there was videoconference, so it was a much larger group. Obviously the stock has been volatile, and I expected a lot of questions about the stock. But a lot of questions were around the strategy. Why are we doing this? Why are we doing that?


It was a lightbulb moment for me, because I realized if we have internal employees who are living, breathing Lyft 24 hours a day, seven days a week and the strategy is not clear to them, it means it’s not clear probably to the external world as well. And so from that, it gave me a very good lens for the next time I’m in front of investors to make sure that we’re really crisp in terms of why we’re doing certain things and what’s the purpose of strategies.

I've witnessed far too many organizations in which top executives think that they have communicated the strategy clearly, but in fact, employees remain confused or unsure.  I've always advocated a "check the pulse of the organization" approach whereby senior leaders go out into the organization, often in an informal fashion, to see if their message has "gotten through" to employees in the way that they intended.  Do people understand the goals?  Do they understand why we are doing what we are doing?  Do they understand how they can contribute to the fulfillment of our organizational objectives?  Roberts has developed an effective mechanism to get direct feedback.   More executives should follow his lead. 

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