[Post by Chuck Krugh, June 10, 2023]
It was great to see everyone over the past week at the All-Hands meetings. It took 32 meetings to cover our entire company. It’s important to have these opportunities to get together where I can give you the status on our company in person, face-to-face. It certainly was a lot of talking for me. While the setting is not ideal for one-on-one conversations, I did get to spend time with some of you before and after the meetings. Thank you for sharing your perspectives with me.
I thought it might be interesting for me to share some of the nuts and bolts behind the All-Hands meetings (i.e., preparation leading up to the meetings, the meeting process and the technical aspects of the meetings). It’s probably stuff that you don’t normally think about.
Our Communications team, led by Julie Rabinowitz, had to figure out and manage the logistics for the meeting schedule. The goal is to hold the fewest number of meetings necessary but be sure to include every employee and make the most of both your time and my time. This year, the team organized 32 meetings across three shifts in multiple locations as well as the transportation for employees to and from the meetings and the scheduling of ASL interpreters. They also dealt with unexpected things that came up, for example, finding the owners of items left behind and dealing with an offsite tent collapsing because of wet ground from all the rain.
Behind the scenes, they are working to keep the meetings on schedule and making micro adjustments during the meetings to keep things moving smoothly while managing the logistics of getting almost 7,000 people to one of the sessions. Purchasing, Training, Facilities and the Sign Shop also played important roles in supporting these events. Thank you to everyone who had a part in making these meetings happen.
While the meetings were getting organized, I worked on the content. Here’s a little bit about how I write my All-Hands speeches.
To begin the process, usually a couple of months in advance of the meetings, I start working on the message themes. These are usually based on what I pick up walking around the yard talking with people, as well as our company’s performance and what I observe when I’m out in the yard. I make mental notes of interesting tidbits that I pick up and eventually start to form the themes I build on.
As I gather pieces of information, I start listing them, making an outline of the message topics. Topics get added, subtracted and added again as I work through the messaging. About one-and-a-half months before the meetings, I start writing the text based on the outline. It usually takes a week or two to get down about 90% of what I want to say in the way I want to say it.
Once I get to that point, I start sharing it with the Senior Leadership Team and our Communications team to get their input. The revisions normally go pretty quickly, and the meeting script moves to 95% complete in short order.
The last step is creating any visual aids I want to show during the presentation, like the charts I used this past week. It is important that I share information that is going to be meaningful across the company and that relates to my overall message in the script.
The process I used last week is slightly different than what I have used in the past. I used to do All-Hands meetings in a presentation format using PowerPoint and without a written script. I used the presentation to prompt me to speak to the topics on each slide. It was more free flowing and less precise.
So why the difference here?
It mainly has to do with the sheer volume of All-Hands meetings that I have to do to make sure that I talk with everyone. In my past, we had large aircraft hangars that we could seat the entire company in one or two meetings, not 32 of them. Because I had fewer meetings before, I was less worried about any variation or inconsistency between the meetings.
In our case, we are a large company that requires many meetings for me to talk to everyone. I want to make sure everyone in the company gets all the information and the same information. That helps us be transparent. Therefore, sticking to the message strictly becomes important. The way you do it is by making a script.
While the script method may feel less impromptu, more formal and maybe more impersonal, it is the way that works the best to stay on message so that everyone hears the same thing. It isn’t my preferred method, but when you have so many important topics to cover, it really works. I don’t want to accidentally skip a section with one group and skip a different section with another. Sticking to the script prevents that from happening.
You might be surprised to know that I find it difficult to do the presentations this way. Using the script as a guide to keep me on topic takes away some of the opportunities for spontaneity based on the audience. It is personally challenging to deliver the same message repeatedly so many times. But at the end of the day, it is important to me to have these meetings so that I have an opportunity share information with all of you. It’s worth the work!
I hope you found this view from the other side interesting. I look forward to seeing you on the deckplates.
Please continue to Safely Execute High-Quality Work!
Chuck
President, General Dynamics Bath Iron Works
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