Leading from the Middle

My work at CARE addressed cultural power dynamics. Email communication patterns were one example of the historical top-down approach. Executives would either reach the top 150 employees - or send emails to all 5,000 employees. 

Relying on the top leaders to cascade messages appropriately reinforced the old power structure, caused bottlenecks, and left the new CARE strategy up to local interpretation - while the messages sent to all 5,000 employees were often irrelevant and not translated. 

My response: a group of ~700 strategic leaders was targeted for communications and many different forms of engagement, 

which eliminated bottlenecks and communication noise - and improved 

employee satisfaction with leadership transparency.

Leadership and communicators across 36 countries were also trained on lowcost translation tools.