Writing Your Annual Letter and Musings on Twitter
Today’s video muse is broken into two parts: writing your annual letter, and my initial thoughts on what’s happening at Twitter.
Let’s start with your annual letter. In the late summer of this year, we produced a miniseries on the importance of establishing organizational clarity through effective communication on The Balancing Act Podcast. Your annual letter to employees is a critical part of any internal communications strategy and planning for your annual letter should start now. Don’t wait until the afternoon of December 31st to put pen to paper!
Other things to consider:
The annual letter is a device to distill the outcomes from your annual long-range planning and budget cycles into a digestible, understandable communication piece for the entire organization. Use it to bring the company’s purpose, vision, and goals to life to help teams and team members draw direct lines between the work they do and where the company is going. Focus on the why and how.
Yes, the CEO of the company should write a letter to all staff, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write one too. If you’re a middle manager, write a letter to your team that explains the goals of the department and how those goals align with overarching corporate goals. Your team members want to know that the work they do matters. Use an annual letter to help them see how everything lines up.
Use your annual letter as a tool to spark conversations with your team(s) on how things are going as the year progresses. For example, in a quarterly review, pull out the annual letter and ask questions about how/if the team is making the progress that was expected at the beginning of the year. Are we tracking toward our goals? Do we still have the same priorities? What’s changed and why? Your annual letter is not a “one and done” communication.
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Now let’s have some fun and talk about Twitter. If you’re searching for lessons in leadership and sustainable, people-focused business management, take a look at what’s happening at Twitter and don’t do that. From a raw economic perspective, for $44 billion, Mr. Musk could have built multiple “free speech” social media platforms from the ground up to compete directly with Twitter and run a horse race between them. Being extraordinarily simplistic, at ~238 million daily active users as of Q2 2022, Mr. Musk paid $185 to acquire each Twitter user. Ignoring initial platform build costs and considering them as sunk, is there ever going to be a world where each Twitter user generates a significant multiple of that acquisition cost in the form of sustainable net revenue? Oh, then there’s $ billions in debt that needs to be serviced. Time will tell, but let’s just say the finance guy in me is really scratching his head…
More importantly, as an organizational health and continuous improvement leader, to say I’m appalled at Mr. Musk’s management style (or lack thereof) and how he’s handled the entire acquisition process is a gross understatement. There’s one episode at Twitter that I’d like to highlight here to augment my comments in the video. Remember when, after terminating half of Twitter employees, Musk send an email to all staff containing a 24 hour ultimatum that asked team members to agree to a “hardcore” work environment or consider themselves terminated with three months severance? Yea, don’t do that. Ultimatums don’t work on children and they certainly don’t work on grown adults.
Can you imagine the post-acquisition, post-ultimatum work environment? First, half of your former colleagues are gone—poof! Then, you’re forced to proclaim your “hardcoreness” with 24 hours notice. Those that chose balance over workaholism are now also gone—poof! Those that remain need to “prove” that they’re hardcore and will be constantly looking over their shoulder for the other shoe to drop, or worse yet, have another colleague rat them out for not being hardcore enough.
Moreover, what does hardcore even mean? To some, that might be five 10 hour days a week. To others, it might literally mean working around the clock and catching a few zzz’s—leaving a pool of drool on the breakroom couch! This lack of clarity, coupled with mass terminations and ultimatums will create an environment of suspicion, insecurity, and self-doubt. Trust and accountability have no way to take root in an organizational culture like this. Active disengagement, obfuscation, mistrust, and a$$ kissing are the most likely results. Yes, there will be a few stars that rise to the challenge, but there is no path toward long-term cultural sustainability that leads to a positive work environment in which voices are heard, constructive feedback is welcome, and teams collaborate/rally around a common set of clearly defined goals.
The irony is deep and rich—for a man who ostensibly purchased Twitter for $44 billion to protect “free speech,” speech seems to be highly constrained within Twitter 2.0. Those that challenge Mr. Musk are terminated and/or ridiculed out in the open on his new public “town square.”
My favorite quote that sums up the whole debacle is: “The Twitter wildfire is $44 billion acres and zero percent contained.” (Author unknown)
We’ll be talking more about Twitter in future muses as the situation unfolds. I predict business school case studies will be written on the subject for the next decade or more.
Remember this. People are your business’s most valuable asset. At Twitter, people seem to be expendable cogs who will need to work their butts off to help the world’s richest man recoup his outlandish, ill-advised acquisition. Is there a path to a long-term, sustainable, positive cash flow, organizationally healthy company buried under the ashes of Musk’s acquisition? Maybe, but…
