One of the U.S. presidents in my formative years was Ronald Reagan. He was known as "The Great Communicator." What I remember most is not the policy detail. It is the language. Leadership in business requires the same discipline.
One of the U.S. presidents in my formative years was Ronald Reagan. He was known as "The Great Communicator." What I remember most is not the policy detail. It is the language. Leadership in business requires the same discipline.
One of the U.S. presidents in my formative years was Ronald Reagan.
He was known as "The Great Communicator."
What I remember most is not the policy detail. It is the language. Phrases like "shining city on a hill." Simple. Visual. Aspirational. You could carry it with you.
People even referred to his recurring phrases as "Reaganisms." When a leader's language becomes portable enough to earn its own "-ism" label, communication has moved beyond information and into memory.
Whether someone agreed with him or not, they understood what he believed mattered.
That has stayed with me.
Because leadership in business requires the same discipline. It requires the ability to translate complexity into clarity in a way that can be remembered. Not once. Repeatedly.
When I work with CEOs, executive leaders, and their teams, I ask them to identify their Top 3 Key Business Results.
Not five.
Not eight.
Not twelve.
Five begins to dilute.
Eight becomes wallpaper.
Twelve becomes a dashboard.
Three becomes direction.
And I almost always hear some version of this:
"We run a complex business. How could you possibly ask me to simplify our multi-national organization to three?"
I am not asking you to simplify your business.
Leadership lives inside complexity. Balanced scorecards. Operational metrics. Financial targets. Sprawling budgets. Regulatory demands. Market pressures. Those realities do not disappear.
But the Top 3 are not for the leaders.
They are for the organization.
Three forces leaders to decide what truly defines success in the marketplace, in the eyes of shareholders, patients, customers, or donors.
Could there be a legitimate fourth or even fifth in some organizations? Possibly. Leaders are always tempted to make exceptions. I am not dogmatic. But every additional result you cascade adds one more thing to remember. And one more thing to remember often becomes one more thing not remembered. That added priority multiplies into layers of activity, reporting, meetings, and initiatives.
Clarity is fragile. Dilution is easy.
The three are the thermometers that tell the organization whether it is winning.
Setting Key Results is one discipline.
Relentlessly communicating them is another.
The leader's job is to be the great communicator of what winning looks like.
In town halls.
In ops reviews.
In team huddles.
In performance conversations.
Repetition is not redundancy. It is education.
In fact, in organizational culture work, this is part of the work leaders must do. It is not only about learning new tools that feel awkward at first. It is not only about telling stories about how employees are fostering trust, though that matters because what leaders recognize is a signal. As I have written before, tools are necessary but not sufficient.
Communicating results clearly and consistently is culture work.
I often tell leaders that I should be able to walk into their organization, pull a random employee aside, and ask:
"What are the Key Results for this organization?"
Ideally, they roll their eyes and repeat them word-for-word.
That eye roll is not just a sign of annoyance. It is a sign of penetration. It means the message has been repeated enough to stick.
But that is only the first question.
The second question is the real test.
"What do you do every day that impacts those results?"
And even more specifically:
What are you doing right now, in the middle of your shift, at your cubicle, sorting product on the line, turning the wrench, watching multiple monitors of market movement, speaking with distributors, that moves one of those results forward?
Too often there is a pause. A furrowed brow. A fumbled answer. They struggle to articulate the connection.
I do not fault the employee.
Give it a try in your own organization. Do you know the Key Results? If you do, can you easily describe how your daily effort moves one of them?
Not so easy, is it?
If people cannot connect their daily effort to organizational outcomes, strategy remains theoretical.
And when clarity is present, something powerful happens.
When employees understand the dial, they:
That is what clarity enables.
I sometimes hear this from senior leaders.
"Ron, you do not understand. We have 'salt-of-the-earth' employees on the frontline. These concepts are too abstract for them."
I do understand.
I have stood in highly unionized manufacturing facilities deep in West Virginia.
I have been on the floors of nuclear power plants and utilities with hard hats and steel-toed boots.
I have traveled through monkey infested forests to arrive at palm oil production plantations and watched multinational crews extract oil under demanding conditions.
I have facilitated sessions with frontline operators, technicians, and mechanics.
I know what they are capable of.
They are not lacking intelligence or drive.
They are often lacking context.
When leaders provide context, the capability shows up.
Being a great communicator is not just about stating the numbers. It is about making the case.
Gary Hamel, a globally recognized management thinker and author, once wrote in Harvard Business Review:
"As an emotional catalyst, wealth maximization lacks the power to fully mobilize human energies."
Numbers alone do not inspire or galvanize people.
This is why leaders must answer the WIIFM question.
And this is where stories matter.
When leaders talk about safety, they can tell the story of the technician who caught a mechanical fault in time and prevented an injury, then went home safe to their family.
When leaders talk about patient outcomes, they can describe how accurate next of kin data allowed a family to be contacted before a life threatening allergic reaction occurred.
When leaders talk about financial strength, they can explain how reinvestment protected jobs, strengthened communities, or even lifted the economic security of a nation.
Stories help employees see themselves in the outcome.
Emotion alone does not sustain performance. That is why leaders must continually update their examples and reinforce the connection. But without meaning, numbers remain abstract.
Communication is a craft.
Get in the ring.
Clear, measurable Key Results are not just targets.
They are the act of sticking a stake in the sand into the future.
Leaders choose where that stake goes and explain why that is where the organization is headed.
That stake gives everyone a visible finish line. It allows people to see how they are performing against it. It exposes gaps clearly. It creates shared orientation.
They tell the organization:
This is where we are going.
Markets shift. Conditions change. Adjustments happen.
But someone must keep pointing to the stake.
Leadership is not just charting the course.
It is educating the crew.
And if your employees cannot roll their eyes and repeat the Key Results, cannot clearly connect their daily effort to those results, and cannot see what is in it for them and why it matters, then you have not said it enough.
The essential insights from this article.
Three Key Business Results become direction — five begins to dilute, eight becomes wallpaper, twelve becomes a dashboard, but three forces leaders to decide what truly defines success
The leader's job is to be the great communicator of what winning looks like — repetition is not redundancy, it is education
The Two Question Test: Can employees repeat the Key Results (the eye roll test), and can they connect their daily effort to those results?
Frontline employees are not lacking intelligence or drive — they are often lacking context, and when leaders provide context, the capability shows up
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