When businesses are small, they act like natural extensions of the CEO who perceives what's going on effortlessly.

During this scale, businesses respond to leadership direction with the same immediacy as your hand follows your brain's command. This direct connection fades as companies grow larger. Many CEOs we've spoken to experience this disconnectedness to a severe degree, in instances when the business is going well and also when there are challenges.

Many executives think that more data tools will help, and to a certain extent then do. But the reality of how the business is operating is much richer and nuanced than any reporting dashboard can describe. Their disconnected feeling comes from missing narratives around how their company operates, much more so than the data exhaust emitted from the systems connected to their data warehouse.

Famous CEOs have resorted to some interesting tactics to keep their business connected as they scale. Nvideo CEO Jensen Huang relies on employee's "Top-5 Things" emails to maintain direct communication and stay informed. Apple CEO Tim Cook is known to frequently visit factories around the world so that he can personally experience how they are operating. Former Intel CEO Andy Grove (the one cited as the father of OKRs in management) required weekly written updates from his direct reports and often skip-level reports to stay connected to the business. Tesla / SpaceX / X CEO Elon Musk forcefully addressed this issue by emailing all Tesla employees: "Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the 'chain of command.' Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere."

One way to fill in these gaps, is to tap into the tacit knowledge of your employees by implementing a practice of weekly team updates.

Weekly Updates in Convictional

Convictional now offers a system to do weekly team updates, where employees can submit concise summaries of their accomplishments, goal progress, and challenges at the end of each week. Weekly questions are configurable by your organization administrator so the questions asked can evolve over time. In addition, owners of Convictional Goals will be prompted to update status on their goals and success conditions.

Weekly updates enhance communication by creating a consistent channel for employees to share progress, challenges, and current focus areas with managers and other teammates. This regular information flow ensures teammates stay informed about weekly activities and can provide timely support, fostering better alignment across the organization. The practice encourages proactive problem-solving as team members identify potential issues early and document them clearly, allowing both employees and managers to address bottlenecks before they escalate into larger problems.

Convictional's update system significantly reduces meeting overhead by capturing routine status information in writing. This shifts the focus of team gatherings from basic updates to meaningful strategic discussions, making better use of everyone's time. The practice also promotes self-reflection, as employees regularly review their accomplishments and growth areas, building a culture of continuous improvement and personal accountability.

Leaders gain valuable insights through these updates, developing a clearer picture of team workload, morale, and potential obstacles. This visibility enables more targeted coaching, better resource allocation, and more effective leadership. Convictional enhances this value by seamlessly integrating updates with the rest of the platform including goals and research threads.

Weekly Updates Are More Than Just a Manager Tool

As they scale, organizations suffer from information gaps when teams lack crucial context for effective decision-making. The Decision Context Problem intensifies as companies grow and specialize, resulting in misaligned strategies, duplicated efforts, and missed opportunities.

Having teammates do a brief weekly written update can solve many of these issues.

Breaking Down Information Silos

Weekly updates are typically thought of as a bottoms up communication flow. However, if done properly insights will flow between teams. Weekly updates bridge disconnected information systems by establishing regular knowledge exchange between departments. When marketing shares customer preferences, product development gains critical insights. When finance alerts operations about cost changes, teams adapt proactively. This cross-functional awareness transforms specialized knowledge into shared organizational context.

Capturing Tacit Knowledge

Organizations possess valuable tacit knowledge—insights that exist only in employees' minds. Weekly updates provide a mechanism to surface these observations, transforming individual insights into collective wisdom and creating feedback loops between frontline experiences and strategic decisions.

Correcting Information Distortion

As information moves through hierarchies, critical details get sanitized or diluted. Weekly updates establish direct channels for unfiltered insights, enabling leadership to address emerging issues before they escalate and aligning decisions with operational reality rather than filtered abstractions.

Building Institutional Memory

Without very rigorous documentation, organizations repeatedly solve the same problems as context disappears with team transitions. Weekly updates create searchable records of decisions, rationales, and outcomes, preserving institutional knowledge and accelerating onboarding for new team members.

Implementing Weekly Updates: Overcoming Cultural Hurdles

Rolling out a weekly update practice is deceptively simple in mechanics but deeply cultural in impact. The most common barrier to adoption isn't the tool—it's the perception of value. Employees may initially see weekly updates as "just another task" or a form of surveillance unless the purpose is clearly communicated and modeled from the top.

For this reason, leadership participation is critical. When leaders consistently submit their own updates—honestly sharing progress, setbacks, and decisions—they set the tone for transparency and psychological safety. It signals that these updates are not about scrutiny, but about alignment, trust, and growth. A culture of openness begins when leaders go first.

Another challenge is ensuring updates feel worthwhile to write and valuable to read. Generic prompts or rigid templates can lead to shallow responses. Instead, teams should adapt questions over time to reflect changing goals, challenges, or strategic themes. This flexibility keeps the process relevant and engaging.

Finally, it's important to close the loop. Updates should not disappear into a black hole. Leaders and teammates should reference them in conversations, highlight insights, and act on surfaced issues. When people see their input leading to action—or at least acknowledgment—they'll engage more deeply and consistently.

Implementing weekly updates isn't just about habit formation—it's about shaping a culture where context flows freely, where everyone is heard, and where alignment doesn't rely on endless meetings.

Create a More Connected Business

In a world where business scale often creates disconnection, weekly team updates offer a simple but powerful antidote. They reconnect leaders and teams by making the invisible visible—surfacing the nuance, the context, and the real-time pulse of how work is unfolding across the organization. Far from being just a management tool, they foster transparency, cross-functional awareness, and a shared sense of purpose. By capturing tacit knowledge, correcting distortion, and preserving institutional memory, they help organizations stay aligned, agile, and human as they grow. At Convictional, we believe that the practice of weekly updates isn't just about better communication—it's about building a company that continuously learns, adapts, and wins together.