Investing in Leaders’ Communication Skills
Inside a $15B CPG Company-Wide Effort
👋 Hey, it’s Andrés from Astrolab. Welcome to our weekly newsletter on how to increase your influence. We write for leaders, senior individual contributors, and business owners.
Today: The story of how we appeared in the 2024 Shareholder Annual Report of a public food and beverage juggernaut
The problem
What happens when the leaders in your organization aren’t great communicators? Even worse, what if they’re terrible?
Engagement goes down—70% of employee engagement is driven by managers and how their communication effectiveness—sales stagnate, and innovation fails to take off.
Learning and development managers are tasked with making this change, but the CEO is the one who will benefit from the investment.
It might seem that, in this age of AI and uncertainty, investing in communication skills is outdated. The truth is exactly the opposite.
Communication is already the most in-demand skill across jobs according to a LinkedIn report published last year. This January, the World Economic Forum published their Future of Jobs Report where Leadership and Social Influence appear among the top three core skills.
The real challenge is scale: How can a learning and development manager increase the chances of success while designing and rolling out a program for a big pool of talent in a global company?
In this case study, I want to share how we’ve been helping a multinational $15B CPG company embark on a cultural shift of this magnitude.
It all started two years ago.
The call
In May 2023, one of our outbound emails got a response that led to one of Astrolab’s biggest projects ever. The email was from Alexa, a learning manager:
Hey Andrés, can we talk soon?
One week later, Alexa and I met. She got the point fast:
This is a request from the CEO. He’s fed up with leaders who can’t get to the point quickly. We want to train our managers in this skill. I took Astrolab’s INSPIRA Storytelling for Influence program some years ago, and I think it makes a great fit with our needs. I still use PERA and the other storytelling frameworks I learned during the workshop.
Fernanda, the company’s Talent Director, joined us during our next meeting:
Communication always appears in our Training Needs Assessment (DNC in Spanish). Our CEO has been very bold with us. He recently told us: At this point it is not only important but urgent for our leaders to become better at this. They bring me data but they’re not good at explaining why the data matters and what we should do next, he told us last week in a call.
And then came the request:
Can we get a proposal on how 1,000 managers could experience INSPIRA over four years? We are looking for a program that helps scale our managers’ communication capabilities.
We got to work.
The challenge
The company operates in seven countries and is involved in both the production and distribution of beverages, foods, and snacks. The company has recently expanded into distributing other CPG categories, such as alcoholic beverages and personal care products.
In the past, we have handled the roll-out of several INSPIRAs, but never on a scale like this.
INSPIRA is a live 7.5-hour workshop. It can be delivered in-person—our suggestion—or virtually, split in three days. The suggested size of each group is around twenty-five people, a size that encourages participation, feedback, and storytelling.
That said, we’re flexible.
The program has had a consistent NPS above 8.5 in the past four years, but this project required us to think about a dozen key considerations we hadn’t tackled before.
How we did it
First of all, we had to make sure INSPIRA worked as well in English as it had been working in Spanish. The materials had already been translated for a previous engagement, so great start.
Then, we needed to make sure we maintained consistency throughout the different regions. Every Astrolab facilitator is bilingual, so also great. We ran a series of tests, and decided on the best combination of facilitators for English and Spanish.
Also, we needed to make sure the time zones and dates worked for our facilitators. We worked with Alexa and Fernanda to make sure everyone got the workshop invitation, workbook, and communication style test on time. We were going to monitor attendance and make adjustments as needed.
Finally, we wanted to tailor our program to their culture and business context, a huge organization obsessed with execution. We thought of stories and cases that could make INSPIRA a better cultural fit for their talent and their daily challenges.
The results (so far)
We rolled out the first INSPIRAs last year, and continue to do so this 2025. So far we’ve delivered twenty INSPIRAs workshops (around 400 participants) throughout the different regions, both in-person—Mexico, the US—and online.
This past week I ran an online INSPIRA for a group of managers from one of their snack divisions in the US.
Here’s a list of quotes from recent participants in the company:
“We got very relevant tools for something that really matters”
“Practical and relevant”
“Amazing workshop, interesting and dynamic”
“A good set of exercises to put it in practice”
So far, the program has maintained an NPS of +9.0 throughout the different regions, and received a mention in their 2024 Shareholders Annual Report with a causal link to business results.
Last year, a talent manager in charge of learning and development for the HQ employees reached out after Emilio from Astrolab ran an INSPIRA at one of our offices.
Everyone is still talking about it. It definitely won the Oscar for the best training this year. Can you send me a proposal on how we could bring this program to the teams of four managers that attended INSPIRA?
Before the year ended, Alexa got promoted to a senior role. John, her successor, was nervous when he started this new role. We’ve tried to make sure everything works extra smoothly working with us.
Last month, John asked me if we could talk. I jumped in a call and both he and Fernanda told me about a new request:
Now, we want to ask for your help with another thing. Could you help us train 15,000 middle managers in their ability to be better at having conversations?
That call was a turning point. It confirmed that our partnership is working and that there’s trust to do more together.
Becoming a catalyst
The effort in investing in your leaders’ communication skills can feel like a longshot filled with pitfalls, hurdles, and obstacles, especially when your organization has operations in many regions. Also, you could think that because you’re not a training manager, this problem falls outside of your responsibilities.
This is true just partially. As I wrote at the beginning of this text, the CEO is the one who will benefit from the investment, and this applies to any decision-maker interested in beating the competition.
Having an international responsive learning partner like Astrolab can make this journey easier, better, and less uncertain.
If you’re a learning manager that needs to make this change happen, shoot me an email, drop me a text, give me a call—I’m running out of verbs and nouns here—or schedule a meeting here.
I’ll share more details on what KPIs you need to pay attention to when designing and rolling out a communication program at scale like this.
Briefs
First Impressions 😬: Only 15 spots left for our webinar Introducing Yourself Should Be Easier, this Thursday, May 22 at 5:30 pm (CST). The webinar will be led in Spanish (!) by our co-founder Óscar Ramírez. You’ll learn a simple structure to introduce yourself in business settings. Save your spot here.
Same, but
betterin Spanish 🇪🇸: Quedan 15 lugares para nuestro webinar Presentarte debería ser más fácil, este jueves 22 de mayo a las 5:30 pm (CST). Dirigido en español por mi cofounder Oscar Ramírez, aprenderás una estructura que te ayudará a presentarte en esos eventos de networking, en entrevistas de trabajo, o durante una carne asada. Regístrate aquí.Back to Microsoft NYC 💾: This next Wednesday I’ll run Let’s Be Clear for a group of Microsoft employees in their Times Square. Excited about this!
That’s all for now! See you soon.
—Andrés