The same breath

This was the call that mattered. The conventional approach is to keep the transformation story and the difficult news apart – celebrate the impact in one communication, handle the job losses in another, on a different day, in a different tone. I argued for putting them in the same document.

The transformation narrative I wrote sits £2 million in savings and a marked improvement in the charitable spend ratio directly alongside the plain sentence that we had said goodbye to friends and colleagues, and that changes like it might not be uncommon in future. It does not soften it and it does not bury it.

The reasoning was simple. Everybody in that organisation already knew both things were true. A narrative that acknowledged only the good one would have told them the leadership was either not paying attention or not being straight with them – and once staff conclude that, nothing else you send them lands. Naming the cost in the same breath as the achievement is what made the achievement believable.

I set the tone rules explicitly for anyone using the material: positive realism, transparency, empathy. Don't dwell in the challenge, but don't pretend it isn't there. Err on the side of more information rather than less.

A single page holding the guiding message and two pillars – Unifying, combining energy and expertise for broader reach, and Evolving, adapting operations to support communities with efficiency and speed – each with its key messages and, underneath every one, the proof points that made it defensible.

A pro bono adviser cannot be in every conversation across two organisations. What you can do is make consistency the path of least resistance, so the easiest thing for a busy leader to reach for is also the right thing. Consistency that depends on the adviser's presence collapses when the adviser leaves. Consistency built into materials outlasts the engagement.

Seven steps, each with its own channel and its own level of detail. Chief executive to leadership team. Leadership to employee forum – deliberately early, so the messaging could be tested and challenged by the people who would have to live with it. Chief executive to the whole charity. Directorate adaptation. Managers in team stand-ups and one-to-ones, attaching personal relevance. Person to person, until the language became common rhetoric. And finally person to company: colleagues using the messaging as the foundation of their own communication, in blogs, in all-staff calls, in award submissions.

That last step is the one people skip, and it's the one that tells you whether any of it worked.

A second framework mapped the challenges at three levels: the sector adapting, the charity evolving, and the individual. At the personal level I named transformation attrition, change fatigue and burnout as real, alongside the behaviours that would help – calmness, realism, openness, balance.

Putting burnout in a leadership messaging framework is not the obvious move. But a workforce that has been told to be agile and innovative for nine months, remotely, through a pandemic in their own field, will not hear another round of it unless someone acknowledges what it has taken out of them first.

The chief executive announcement was built as a single sequenced plan: internal first across both organisations on one day, external the next morning, with trustees and major supporters briefed ahead of staff hearing it from anywhere else. Press release, media strategy, internal announcement, staff briefing, tailored stakeholder letters, social, and a transition programme running through to the new chief executive's arrival three months later.

The sequencing was the substance of it. Everyone inside the charity heard about their own leadership change from their own leadership, not from the trade press – and getting that order right matters more than any sentence in the release.