The Weekly CEO Update: A Great Way to Increase Your Team’s Performance
A question I often get from my coaching clients is how to help their teams perform better — to make better decisions, solve more problems, and maintain a higher quality bar.
Strong performance starts with strong communication. In order to make your team a force multiplier of yourself, you need to share the right context, help folks understand where the company is headed, and teach them how to think and act in alignment with you.
One great tool for accomplishing this is a weekly update from you, the CEO, that shares what your team needs to know in order to perform at their best. Without this information, they won’t have the context, knowledge, alignment, or motivation needed to do their best work. This post will show you how to write a great weekly CEO update.
The value of a regular CEO update is to:
- Stay connected to your team as it grows and you’re not able to maintain strong individual relationships with everyone on the team.
- Communicate context and institutional knowledge that you can no longer communicate efficiently via 1:1 conversations.
- Help your team get a look into what you’re thinking about on a regular basis and get more smart people thinking about the biggest challenges your company is facing.
- Maintain alignment around vision, mission, values / culture, strategy, and goals to help people make better decisions.
A few tips:
- Be concise and clear. A rambling ten paragraph email about your inner musings is not effective. Writing with brevity and clarity is also great practice for all leadership communications, especially as your company scales. Axios does this really well.
- This update is for your team, not just for you (though it will help you process and clarify your thinking). As you’re writing, think about how to position it so your team receives learnings, insights, and makes connections that increase the quality of their work.
- Let your voice and personality show! Part of the value is helping your team get to know you better and create connection. Bring positivity, enthusiasm, excitement, quirkiness, a sense of humor — whatever makes it feel like ‘you’.
- At first, it may take time to put your updates together. You’ll get faster over time, and you can solicit help from your team in certain areas. For example, gather metrics updates from the owners of each goal, or gather shout outs and customer stories from folks on your team. You can also have someone like an EA or Chief of Staff help gather anonymous feedback to share out.
- I recommend sending your weekly update either Mondays to kick off the week, or Fridays to bookend the week.
Use the following template as a guide to pull together your weekly update. Edit the template to fit your needs, and iterate over time based on what works for your company.
Template: weekly CEO update
Wins / Accomplishments
Share a few wins each week. When you’re working hard and long hours toward a lofty vision, it’s hard to remember to pause and acknowledge wins. But, this is one of the most powerful ways to create motivation and a sense of progress and accomplishment, especially when times are tough.
Wins can be:
- Customer updates — new customers, expansions, customer stories, etc.
- Feature / product announcements
- Culture — welcome new employees, culture resources, etc.
- Shout outs — Shout outs are a great way to reinforce and highlight company values. Who exemplified company values in something they did this week? Who went above and beyond? You can do your own shout outs, and you can also include shout outs from others on your team (ping people the day before you send the update to gather shout outs from others)
Progress on key goals & metrics
Include top company goals and metrics in every email update. Share the numbers, and whether they are on or off track. This helps your team stay laser focused on what actually matters.
For each goal, share the PPP — Progress, Problems, Plans
- What progress did we make this week?
- What problems / challenges did we run into?
- What are our plans for next week?
Repetition in communications is key as your company grows. You will likely get tired of saying the same things over and over again, but your team needs to hear key messages and communications repeated so they become embedded in the way the team thinks and behaves. Repetition supports clarity and focus.
What’s on my mind
Share what’s taking up space in your head. It’s the ‘look inside the CEO’s brain’ that your team wants and needs, especially as you scale and can’t maintain individual relationships with each person. Aim to share 1–2 things that are top of mind for you in each update.
These topics may be the big, hairy problems that feel hard to share with others. But, sharing challenges is an opportunity to get ideas, suggestions, and thoughts from the smart and talented people you’ve hired. You don’t need to make everything seem perfect. Be honest — don’t BS or gloss over problems.
At the same time, be mindful to bring balance to these updates. While you should be honest, these updates shouldn’t create fear. Keep an eye on tone and topics week over week, aiming to bring a balance of positive or forward looking topics, with honesty and transparency around big challenges.
Prompt ideas for ‘what’s on my mind’:
- The biggest challenge on my mind right now is…
- The thing keeping me up at night is…
- An insight I had about the business this week was…
- A big question I’m pondering right now is…
- A question I’ve been hearing a lot from the team, customers, or others recently is…
- Something I’d love help from you (the team) is…
- Share resources that sparked insights or learnings for you — podcasts, articles, books that others might find helpful. These could be industry specific topics, or more general like hiring, culture, management, etc.
Ask for feedback
Unsurprisingly, not getting enough feedback is one of the top challenges I hear from my clients. Ask for feedback every week. This reinforces that you’re open to and want to hear from your team. Anything from ‘What could we be doing differently to increase customer retention?’ to ‘What feedback do you have for me on our last All Hands meeting?’
You can ask for direct replies to your weekly update message, or set up a simple google form. When you receive feedback, always close the loop — share out the feedback (anonymously), express appreciation, and communicate what you will do with it, or why you won’t be actioning it. Don’t let feedback go unaddressed — this sends the signal ‘I don’t really care what you have to say’ and you’ll get less feedback over time.
