Dirty little (anecdotal) secret: Most CEOs don’t write their own blogs.

That’s right. Despite CEO’s best intentions to write frequently and informally, most communicators end up having to write—or heavily edit—these personal posts.

Ghostwriting your CEOs blog can be an exhausting endeavor! You have to come up with an idea, craft a post that mimics the CEO’s voice and vision, incorporate substantial edits from the CEO, make the post live, and then, wait, fingers-crossed, hoping that the post will receive enough comments or views to prove that blogging is indeed a worthy pursuit, which, of course, it may not be at all! CEC Members, visit our Leader to Employee Communication Topic Center to consider the appropriate channel for leadership communication given your objective.

CEO blogs come in a variety of audiences, intents, and styles, but for the purposes of this discussion, let’s focus on the CEO blog that sits on your corporate intranet and whose main audience is employees. If you’re going to have to write the post anyway, why not write about something that will have an impact on employee performance?

Here are my top 10 questions that your CEO’s next employee-facing blog post could answer:

1. What are the strategic goals of our organization? Which ones are the most ambitious? Why?
2. Which market trends should employees pay most attention to?
3. Which key markets matter most to our company? Will those be the same ones in 2020?
4. What are the risks our company is facing? How are we mitigating them?
5. In what ways might pending government regulation in key operating regions impact our company?
6. How have people or teams from across silos of the business come together to produce amazing results?
7. How is our company building an infrastructure that enables employees to communicate and collaborate more effectively?
8. Which of our competitors do you admire most and why?
9. What publications and people do you follow to stay informed on our business and industry?

10.  What’s the most surprising customer or consumer trend you’ve seen develop over the last five years?

To be clear, I’m not advocating that your CEO spill your company’s proprietary secrets in a 500-word blog post; that just wouldn’t be smart business. What I am advocating is that your CEO shares the bigger picture trends and assumptions that most employees, who must focus on a small piece of the business, might fail to appreciate. Would you rather talk about the CEO’s upcoming marathon or newly adopted golden retriever? Read on to learn why that approach won’t move your organization forward.

Why Talking Trends Works Better than Being Personal

Employee’s personal connection to the company and exposure to market context are the two main drivers of their agility, the biggest driver of overall performance in a high-change environment. What’s more is that confidence in leadership has almost zero impact on agility. CEC Members, rely on our research and data on Building a Change-Ready Organization to help teach executives why this is true.

And yet, most CEO blogs that I’ve heard about or come across aim squarely at building employee confidence in leadership. In fact, in times of uncertainty, CEOs ask Communications to help her/him be more transparent, visible, and confident in the eyes of employees. S/he wants to seem personable, like “one of us” to exhort additional effort from employees to keep the company sailing straight even if the waters are choppy.

In the end, the key is to help employees (and potentially other stakeholders) understand how the CEO and leadership team are thinking. Sometimes the CEO and leadership are too close to the company strategy to recognize that most employees aren’t aware of what’s being thought of at the top. To help you help your CEO, consider the information and perspective that the CEO has that, if shared, would help the rest of the organization to think more strategically on a daily basis, not just at the annual strategy summit.

CEC Related Resources:

• Engage Employees in Strategy through Scenario Planning
• Strategy Assumptions Matrix (Lilly)
• Arm Employees with Information to Solve Problems
• Information Needs Assessment Process (ConAgra Foods)
• Information Personalization Session (Saudi Aramco Downstream)

CEC Related Blog Posts:

• How to Talk Strategy in a High-Change Environment
• Make the “Big-Picture” Relevant to Employees
• Questions to Surface Employee Information Needs
• Disappointed by Internal Social Media? You’re Not Alone

CEC Member Discussion Threads

• Use of Social Media & Blogs for Senior Leaders
• Senior Leadership Blogging and Engagement with Employees