Leadership by ESP
Your employees aren't telepaths, but many CEOs act like they are.
In today’s article, I’m going to encourage you to consider the gap between (a) what you think your team knows and (b) what they actually know. It’s probably wider than you realize.
Part of my work is helping CEOs turn the strategy in their heads into shared knowledge employees understand and act on. One of the ways we do that is ChatCEO, our new AI platform built for the CEO. We are happy to show you how the product can quickly make your communication job as CEO notably easier.
Get started with ChatCEO here.
On the journey to the CEO role, you pick up knowledge every single day. By the time you arrive at the summit, you have accrued so much: lessons, aha moments, metaphors, observations, mental models.
Once you’re at that summit, you have even more knowledge. The vista before you reveals all kinds of things about the business you lead. You sit in board meetings. You talk to every department head about what their team is doing. You have an all-access pass to any corner of the business.
That gives you this beautiful, holistic view of the organization. You understand its strategy, its place in the market, its strengths and its weaknesses, where it needs to go.
Then, for many CEOs, that information just… stays in their head.
Show Them What You See
Many years back I had the revelation that the number-one skill CEOs need is communication.
Unlike so many other jobs, even high-level executive ones, the CEO job isn’t really about doing things. Rather, it’s about communicating things, relentlessly and with purpose. At its heart, this is what the CEO does. They are the core distribution hub for people’s understanding of the WHY, WHAT, and HOW of the business. This is the fount from which performance flows.
I have worked with CEOs long enough to see how frustrated they get when the rest of the team doesn’t see what they see. I hear things like:
➡️ Am I the only one who feels the urgency here?
➡️ Why do I have to be in the room for every decision?
➡️ Why did my CMO make THAT decision?
➡️ Do I have to tell everyone what to do?
➡️ Why aren’t people working on the right things?
In short, this is a result of Leadership by ESP. The CEO arrived at a hard-won understanding of the company’s strategy. Then they assume that this understanding is held by everyone else, too, as if by magic.
Behavioral economists describe a similar phenomenon as the “curse of knowledge.” As Chip and Dan Heath write in the introduction of Made to Stick:
Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has 'cursed' us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind.
It is difficult indeed. It’s hard to drill into CEOs’ minds that a gigantic component of their job is stepping out of that cognitive bias and communicating what they know to the organization in a useful, motivating way.
When they don’t, it’s often because:
❌ It feels obvious. Why tell people something that seems so crystal clear?
❌ It feels repetitive. I’ll sound like an idiot saying this over and over.
❌ They think there’s no need. Why does XYZ frontline role need to know this?
One of my jobs as a CEO trainer is to help leaders counter these strong forces. Nothing is as central to the CEO job as communicating to the organization. Employees can’t see inside your head. They are not telepaths.
What Happens When Employees Are Locked Out of the Strategic View
Most employees experience your company through a very narrow viewport. A software engineer in your product team, for example, knows a lot about sprint velocity and technical debt. She knows very little about why the sales team missed quota last quarter or whether the company’s largest customer is at risk of churning. That’s the natural way organizations work.
But the narrow view costs something, even in the engineer’s own domain. The feature she deprioritizes this sprint might be the one feature keeping that at-risk customer from walking. The technical debt she wants three weeks to pay down might be worth deferring if the company is sprinting toward a growth target. She can’t weigh those trade-offs if she and her manager don’t know they exist.
The value of communicating these things goes beyond better decisions. When you share the company’s strategic picture with her, you’re saying she’s worth trusting with that high-level information. You’re saying she’s a participant in the mission and not just a pair of hands executing tickets. The engineer who understands why the growth target matters is more motivated to hit it than the one who was simply handed a deadline.
From ESP to Strategy Execution
OK, so how is it done?
The good news is that Leadership by Communication (instead of Leadership by ESP) consists of simple, doable activities:
Hone your message. You can’t transmit what you can’t articulate. Be able to state the strategy in plain language: where you want to go, why it matters, and why YOU are motivated to get there. Write it down a few different ways. Get in the habit of writing down insights as they occur to you.
Build simple documentation. Put it everywhere. A 1-Page Strategic Plan is a document showing your mission, vision, differentiating values, and strategic objectives for the next 2 to 3 years. It flows from what you know to be true about the business, and having it in place is a non-negotiable. This should be a familiar sight to every single employee.
Explain the reasoning behind goals and decisions. When you set a goal or make a call, talk about it, to everyone, in terms of the rationale and the thought process that got you there. People will get on board even with a decision they don’t like, as long as they understand how you reached it. Research on workplace layoffs points the same way: employees accept even painful outcomes far better when leaders walk them through how they reached the decision.
Set up rhythms and repetitions. The company all-hands, memos from the CEO, weekly leadership team meetings, hallway conversations, 1:1s: all of these are sites where leadership by communication can take place. Be comfortable repeating yourself. The message that feels worn out to you, because you’ve said it fifty times, is landing on someone who is hearing it for the first time.
Use story. People absorb and remember a story far better than a bullet point or a statistic. Don’t just announce that retention is the priority this year. Tell the story of the customer you nearly lost and what it would have meant if they had walked. A specific narrative makes an abstract strategy stick. Here is my favorite book on that topic.
Share what’s at stake. Be honest about the threats to the company’s success: the competitor gaining ground, the market shifting, the customer concentration that keeps you up at night. Leaders often hide these pressures to protect the team from worry. But people can’t help you fight a threat they don’t know exists, and silence creates the rumor mill. Do the same with opportunities. You can be very transparent about what has you hopeful and excited about the business as well.
There is no such thing as organizational telepathy. Your employees are not going to intuit your strategy, your concerns, or your reasoning, even if it all seems blazingly obvious from where you sit.
Your job is to be the connective tissue of the organization: the leader who sees the whole picture and then deliberately, systematically ensures that picture is shared with everyone who needs to act on it.