Building a manager toolkit to strengthen the comms cascade

How would you describe the way that information flows from leaders to managers and finally to employees? Is it a cascade or a trickle? Are managers provided with advance notice on larger company directives and empowered with all the resources they to personalize the big news to their teams?

During last month’s Employee Communications 101 Conference, Dawn Foods Senior Manager for Global Internal Communications Dave Lawrence shared his tips for crafting a manager communications toolkit to aid in the seamless cascading of important messages.

Here’s what we learned.

Start building with the end in mind

As COVID upended the food services industry, March 2020 became a galvanizing moment for Dawn Foods.

“We had done manager cascades before, but we mainly sat down, wrote a bunch of stuff and delivered those materials to managers,” explained Lawrence. “And then we expected managers to deliver them to their teams. Honestly, there wasn’t a whole lot of two-way communication during that process. There wasn’t a feedback mechanism to keep us flexible and honest.”

The moment required something more innovative, so Dawn started with the end in mind. This required asking quesitons like: