30-Minute Leadership Briefings at Sodexo Canada

The Sodexo Canada 30-Minute Leadership Briefing

A Teleconference Call to Thousands of Managers and Employees Across Canada

As Director of Employee Communications, I hosted and moderated the 30-Minute Leadership Briefing for our Senior Leadership Team (SLT) of Senior Vice Presidents (SVPs) monthly at Sodexo Canada Headquarters in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. At the time, I reported to the SVP for HR instead of the SVP of Marketing who first hired me.

For this monthly teleconference call, the entire SLT sat around a boardroom, facing each other, their speaking notes and a teleconference phone in the middle of the table. At the time, it seemed to be the best way to update 11,000 employees in a 30-minute update heard straight from the President and his team.

Lessons Learned

This first one for the year was 90% scripted, with good intentions. We wanted the team to know who was speaking when and about what. We were hoping for a smooth, interactive and natural-sounding 'radio-show' vibe. Executives, like our team was then, are incredible people with skills, talents and the ability to think on their feet. That wasn't the problem; instead they were rendered more awkward through no fault of their own, but due to the contrived constraint of waiting to 'deliver their next line in the play.'

Most executives I have worked with come across as much more natural when speaking freely about a bullet point, sharing insight into a piece of data or telling a quick story related to their results and their work than delivering lines. In addition, SVPs rarely get the time or opportunity to practice it with each other in advance to smooth out those transitions. We were lucky enough to make the schedules work for the actual event; having them practice was a non-starter.

This was a great performance year for Sodexo and bonuses were healthy. However, this approach of scripting every word for the Senior Leadership Team was not an effective one. From the outside, the Briefing sounded fine, but inside the boardroom, we knew we could do better by allowing more free-flow discussion.

Going Forward

For the subsequent Briefings, we prepared points, topics and who would be sharing the updates. Sometimes, we had PowerPoint Slides to keep us on schedule. Most importantly, there was plenty of room for free flowing discussion, using eye contact and gestures to signals our efforts.

Managers and Employees really appreciated these briefings and felt more connected to their leadership team, as a result.