In case you haven’t been paying attention, many tech stocks are under serious pressure. LinkedIn, where I have been an executive for nearly six years, is one of those companies, having lost more than 40% of our value after announcing our 2015 earnings and guidance for 2016 last Thursday.
As you can imagine, this has the potential to cause angst and churn, both internally and externally, and over the last week, I’ve been fascinated by the varied reactions of people, both inside and outside the company, with whom I’ve interacted: indignant, perplexed, resilient, full of pity, inspired and shell-shocked.
When something like this happens at a company, you can witness very extreme, and often negative, reactions from people like the CEO and CFO, who can get into a blame game and create a cycle of negativity. In LinkedIn’s case, I have seen quite the opposite.
At our company meeting this week (we have held a company-wide meeting every other week for the last decade), our CEO, Jeff Weiner, addressed the market reaction to our guidance with our 9,200 employees around the world, and I thought he did a masterful job. While I’ve been his communications partner for many years, and am therefore quite biased, I wanted to share this video as a great demonstration of how to lead through change and how to use transparency and authenticity as a way to connect to your employees to let them know what’s really going on.
Prior to helping put the situation into perspective for employees, he had discussed in detail LinkedIn’s business performance over the last several years, current market conditions and the seemingly natural progression of hyper-growth companies.
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I feel that one’s leadership style is truly and only cemented once you manage a company through a challenging period, and as you will see, I believe our team is off to a great start. The content of the meeting was never intended to become public, but after learning of the positive employee reaction to the approach, I decided that sharing it could be valuable to other companies going through a similar situation.
About Author-
Shannon (Stubo) Brayton have more than two decades of experience leading teams and shaping corporate narratives for some of the world’s most innovative and disruptive companies, including Yahoo!, eBay and LinkedIn. I joined LinkedIn in 2010 as its Vice President of Corporate Communications, and in 2015, I expanded my purview to oversee all marketing activities at the company as CMO.