Cascading other people’s messages is hard. You might:

• Have been given poor material.
• Have no time.
• Not agree with the message.
• Feel uncomfortable delivering it.
• Think it’s not your job.
• Just not want to.
• Feel annoyed with your team that day, so don’t want to talk to them about anything.
• Think the message is boring, pointless or “corporate drivel”.
• Find it hard to passionately deliver someone else’s words (I know I do).
• Think “there are just too many of these cascades”.
• Expect these so-called “critical” messages to be superseded by Something More Important in the next few days.
• Feel unsupported by the owner.
• And so on . . .

I guess the length of this list shows I work on these things a lot. And that people have plenty of reasons to hate them!

If you recognize any of these, it’ll be hard for you to cascade effectively, even if you want to. And, if you don’t want to, that’s a different book!

The previous chapter explained how it’s the owner’s responsibility to do all they can to help you cascade (maybe suggest your boss reads it?)

But it’s also your responsibility to do all you can to enhance the message. After all, if you add nothing, there’s no point in it coming through you. The owner might as well have gone directly to your team.

When Cascading, Be a Colour Car Wash

Imagine a dull gray car going into a car wash, which uses paint instead of water. So, the car goes in boring, but comes out fascinating and multi-coloured.

When you’re cascading, you’re the Colour Car Wash. You get the gray raw material – the owner’s messages – and turn it into something fascinating and multi-coloured for your team. The rest of this chapter will help you do this, by showing:

How to Be a Colour Car Wash

The foundations of successful cascading are the same as for any communication, as I described in chapter 1:

But, when you’re cascading, it’s also important to add your own slant to enhance the message. This makes your communication personal – it becomes “yours” in some way. This helps you bring passion and energy.

Four effective ways to personalize messages, along with examples I’ve seen work well are:

All four help you add colour.

And all are miles better than “FYI”.

How to Cascade, When You Can’t Add Colour

As you saw earlier, there are lots of reasons why you might feel you can’t add colour – nervousness about presenting (the next chapter advises about this), poor material, no time and so on. When this happens, you’ve only got three options:

• Don’t cascade it at all. Don’t tell anyone you haven’t. Just avoid it in every way.
• Cascade it half-heartedly/badly.
• Ask the owner for guidance.

You can tell that I think the last is best. After all, cascading is not 100% your responsibility and 0% the owners’. So, wherever possible, go to them and set the scene, sound keen and come clean: