Communication: The Small Business Superpower

I was delighted to speak to the Brown Advisory’s Charlottesville Office with my Survival to Success co-author Peter Brooks a few weeks ago. We came into the conversation eager to discuss small businesses, their tremendous value and influence in the United States, and strategies for their leaders.

Our book takes the experiences of small business leaders and translates those into guides that other entrepreneurs, founders, and executives can use to lead their own organizations. Thriving small businesses have a superpower that is enabled by the fact that they’re small, due to their size, communication lines are shorter and cleaner, leadership is closer to execution, and culture more easily permeates throughout the organization.

We left the team at Brown Advisors with a handful of takeaways for small business leaders:

• Know that your staff hear a lot, and that you’re all close together. You may not realize it, but staff may feel like they have ownership and intimacy with the business.

• Leaders need to communicate thoughtfully and clearly, share what is needed, and make clear who is making what decisions.

• Communicate often, and use these as opportunities to reinforce culture and emphasize the firm’s values.