Bravo, Mr. Nadella, Bravo!

Satya Nadella, the newly named CEO of Microsoft, distributed an email to employees last week. This is one letter that other CEOs need to read.  We found it to be engaging, sincere and full of relevant information for the global Microsoft workforce.

Click on the image below and let’s take a brief look at what Mr. Nadella did right.  He:

This post is part of our Hit or Miss’ive column, where we analyze real-life situations that show what effective leadership communication looks like—or in some cases (like this one), what it doesn’t look like.

Many companies are looking to cut their costs in order to maintain or increase profit margins.  But while keeping an eye on costs is a sound business practice, cutting them without thinking through the consequences can backfire, as a large global company located in a wintry climate recently learned.

It took AOL CEO Tim Armstrong 4 days to apologize for the firing of an employee in front of 1,000 other employees. 

One has to wonder what took so long.  I can only hope he realized the day of the incident that what he did was egregious.  Given the delayed response, I’m not so sure.

Which makes me think about the dialogue inside AOL.  Here are my thoughts about what might have happened (expletives have been removed):

Imagine getting fired.  Think how you might feel.  Then think about getting fired in front of a peer.  What about in front of 1,000 employees? Still worse, by the CEO.

A bad dream?

Not so.  This was the reality for an employee at AOL last week.

Recently in Hit or Miss’ive I commented on Yahoo’s letter to employees that halted telecommuting for its workforce.  My goal of that column was to highlight what was wrong with the communications around the policy change announcement (not necessarily the policy change itself). Unfortunately, Yahoo lost an opportunity to communicate tough news in a credible way employees would respect; instead, the email cloaked in rah-rah from HR caused resentment internally and a media storm externally.

Last week, Best Buy one-upped Yahoo on the same subject.  Best Buy chose a less direct approach, perhaps having learned from Yahoo’s mistakes, by announcing that telecommuting is no longer “a right,” for employees but now “a discussion.”