Today, the head of comms for LinkedIn, Shannon Stubo, posted a video of CEO Jeff Weiner talking to employees about its 40 percent drop in stock value after the business networking company announced earnings that Wall Street did not like one little bit.
Elephant, Meet Room: Here’s What LinkedIn CEO Said to Employees After Stock Dropped 40 Percent
Why pretend?
The weak guidance was a particular issue, especially in this very nervous market for tech stocks and the selloff of the sector. And down the shares fell.
So, why pretend, wrote Stubo in a post titled “What to Say to Your Employees After Your Stock Loses 40% of Its Value.”
“When something like this happens at a company, you can witness very extreme, and often negative, reactions from people like the CEO and CFO, who can get into a blame game and create a cycle of negativity … While I’ve been his communications partner for many years, and am therefore quite biased, I wanted to share this video as a great demonstration of how to lead through change and how to use transparency and authenticity as a way to connect to your employees to let them know what’s really going on.”
Weiner still utilizes a lot of it’s-okay-we’re-just-the-same-as-yesterday reassurances, but at least he is not ignoring the thorny issue for staffers. Whether that will make them feel better is another story, of course.
Here’s the video:
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
