Managing Director at Snowberry Consulting Ltd.

Nikki Best

Beverly Flaxington

Executive Coach and Best-Selling Author of "The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success" and "Overworked and Overwhelmed: The Mindfulness Alternative"

Scott Eblin

Struggles with my manager

Itamar Goldminz

TED Speaker and Author of "Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance"

Angela Duckworth

TED Speaker "Dealing with Difficult People" and Leadership Development Trainer

Jay Johnson

Scared of a difficult conversation

CEO of Verus Global, a four-time book author, executive coach

Craig Ross

Executive Leadership Coach to CTOs and Technical Founders, Writer & Startup Advisor

Mathias Meyer

Former Airbnb and Google GM turned executive coach

James McClure

Struggle to get buy-in from my team

Senior Consultant at BuzzFeed, book author

Caroline Moss

Contributing Editor to Inc. and Author of "The Motivation Myth"

Jeff Haden

TED Speaker "Why good leaders make you feel safe", Author of "Leaders Eat Last" and Host of "Bit of Optimism" Podcast

Simon Sinek

We struggle to reach our goals

Engineering Leader | Ex-Google, Trello, Fog Creek

Rich Armstrong

COO at Lambda School, and scaled teams from 2-100 people at Facebook and Google

Molly Graham

Sharon Koifman

My team often lacks alignment

Avoid miscommunication with this simple framework.

John Gabaix

5 Ws (and 1 H)

5 Things to do Before You Start a Project

Joseph Pulitzer, Pulitzer Prize and Founder of Columbia School of Journalism

#Five Ws and One H

Communication is hard. Making sure everyone has enough context is tricky, especially when you're stressed out or overwhelmed. 

Luckily there's a fail-safe reporting template used by journalists and the military, to make sure you're always giving the right information, in the right order:
• **Who**
• **What**
• **When**
• **Where**
• **Why**
• and **How**

Let's put it to work!

#🌱 Start with the basics: 4Ws

Imagine you and your team are running some new growth initiatives. Here's an example that Alex, a Marketing Lead lays out to brief the team:

**What:** Create a PR Strategy to drive 5000 new signups
**Who:** Tim (with support from myself, Rachel and external advisors)
**When:** By the end of this sprint
**Where:** Google docs

#🚀 Now, give the background: Why

To give context and get buy-in on the mission, it's crucial to detail the why.

**Why does this matter?**
We've made some major product updates that we can leverage to differentiate from our competitors

**Why now?**
To hit our growth targets for this quarter we need a big increase in signups.

**Why not other things?**
This is not our only bet, we also are investing in referral and content marketing initiatives.

#⚙️ Get into the process: How

Once you've got agreement and alignment on your 5 W's, now you can go into the how.

For example:
*"Let's have a working session tomorrow to outline our story and then Tim, you can put together a first draft.*

*After that we can put together a list of publications we want to be featured in and create a plan for how we pitch to them."*

#Rinse & Repeat

Next time you’re tired, remember “Who, What, When, Where, Why and How” to help you avoid the pitfalls of miscommunication.

Try setting up a template on Trello or a workflow on Slack, to make this framework just one click away!

#1 Best-Selling Author of "The 4 Disciplines of Execution"

Chris McChesney

Executes at high speed and moves beyond the weeds for lean decision-making

Josh Kaufman

Board Member at Culture Amp, Investor and formerly Chief Customer Officer at Brex