
Find out what Nick Robbins, Account Director, learned about outstanding leadership communications by helping his mother-in-law refine a wedding speech (and doing a new qualification).
I’ve been thinking a lot about outstanding leadership communications in the last few weeks. And that’s only partly because it’s been the basis of the latest module of the internal communications course I’m working through.
Outside of work, I’m often the go-to person for any proofreading or editing that family or friends need looking at. So, during the last visit from my mother-in-law, when she asked me to review a speech she’d written for her daughter’s upcoming wedding, it wasn’t entirely unexpected.
Now, let’s just move past the rich and fertile psychological territory that’s opened up by equating my mother-in-law to a senior leader. Instead, I want to focus on how some of the best practice I’ve been sharing with clients and learning from research helped me with this potentially tricky task.
“Don’t leave important people with nothing to say”
That’s the advice of Larkin and Larkin in their 2006 guide to Communicating Big Change Using Small Communication.
Whether you’re talking about senior leader or matriarchs, the advice is the same: support them to come up with great content and help them to translate their ideas into outputs.
My job wasn’t to write the speech, but to tease out what she wanted to say – and finesse that where it was needed so that it would land with the audience.
Rarely will your senior leaders ask you to write on their behalf. And that’s right, because it’s important that the audience is confident that what they are hearing is coming from the person who’s speaking.
In this instance, I could tell that there were things that my MiL wanted to include but that she couldn’t quite get onto the page. As an exercise, I got her to step away from the laptop and tell me the stories. As she did, I wrote down her words. She reviewed what I’d written and felt confident to include it in the final speech. That simple trick broke the mental barrier of the blank page and unlocked something she’d been struggling to get out.
Share a vulnerability, but only a little one
The speech started with a simple throwaway line detailing how it was the first time the MiL had delivered a public speech since school a few (but not that many, I must add) decades ago.
In leadership communication circles, this is a quality held up by proponents of authentic leadership. Goffee and Jones, writing in the Harvard Business review, argued that authentic leaders should always expose a vulnerability to get the audience on side.
There is an element of calculation to this, of course. The pair claimed that workers need to see leaders own up to some flaw as a trust-building device before they’ll participate willingly in an endeavour. However, that won’t work if your CFO writes that they’ve always struggled with numbers, or the CEO of your automotive company admits they’ve never passed their driving test.
So, a tangential flaw that doesn’t impact your ability to do your job is usually safe ground. For my mother-in-law, revealing that she might be slightly nervous got the audience on her side from the start and helped settle her own nerves too.
Give time to prepare
Fail to prepare and prepare to fail, the rallying cry of PE teachers across the country – at least it was for me. But it’s true for leadership communications too… and also for wedding speeches (thankfully for the purposes of this blog).
In Dewhurst and FitzPatrick’s incredibly useful book Successful Employee Communications, they talk about IC professionals making sure leaders are given enough time to prepare before they deliver communications. That’s not just about practising a speech either. It’s about giving leaders the time and space to sit with the ideas and build the understanding of not just how it’ll land straight away, but how they’ll manage the informal conversations that follow.
For my MiL, when we’d finished getting the speech in a place she was happy with, I told her to take it away and look at it again in 24 hours to make sure she still felt the same way. She could then make some small tweaks so she was truly happy with, and confident in, what she was going to say.
Why speeches work
You remember the great speeches at weddings you’ve been to, don’t you? You might even have gone up to the person who gave the speech afterwards to talk to them about it, even if you didn’t know them before. That’s because speeches are great at personalising the person up there. It’s the reason why the best man doesn’t pin his funniest jokes on a piece of paper to the wedding service and stands up in front of the room instead.
Back to Larkin and Larkin, they firmly believed that outstanding leadership communications takes place in the informal comms network, which is best delivered by oral communication, something they felt was true for organisations of any size.
So, if your senior leaders and line managers aren’t speaking to their colleagues, but just emailing content round instead, it’s an issue you want to address. Gallagher’s State of the Sector 2022/23 found that 56% of respondents recognised their people managers as having an active role in communications. We’ve got to ask, what are the other 44% doing?
As an IC professional, you should be able to support your leaders in delivering outstanding leadership communications in person. That’s not just in town halls, but in informal conversations, one-to-ones and stand ups too. Keep them briefed on the latest developments, give them the key talking points and provide feedback.
If you’re looking for any support in supporting your people managers to deliver outstanding leadership communications, why not drop us a line?
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