It’s usually on page two of the Sunday New York Times business section. A short Q & A with some notable business leader that covers the usual ground – “How do you hire? What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?” This week, Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, is on the hot seat, and she joins a long list of her peers in crediting effective communication for much of her organizational effectiveness.
There isn’t anything particularly earth-shattering in the interview, and truth to tell, there usually isn’t. But I continue to be heartened by the focus on communication as a business process that I see in this feature almost every week. Faust says:
“I spend a huge amount of time reaching out to people, either literally or digitally, and with alumni networks all over the worl, so that I can connect. Leadership by walking around — that a digital space now, it’s virtual space. An enormous amount of my job is listening to people, to understand where they are, how they see the world so that I can understand how to mobilize their understanding of themselves in service of the institutional priorities.”
The interviewer says, “But you can’t make everybody happy.” Her reply:
“No, you don’t make everybody happy, but if people feel they were listened to, they’re going to be much more likely to go along with a decision.”
If that short conversation doesn’t motivate communicators to see themselves as something other than a media publicity machine, I don’t know what will. We, alone in the organization, are well-equipped to counsel leaders on communication effectiveness. Yet, we too often cede this skill to Human Resources (“Well, it’s really about training people, and that’s HR!”).
We are the experts at communication. We understand why dialogue and discussion among our employee base is important. We know what a good presentation is and how to help improve the level of communication in our organization. If not us, whom? And yet, most of us would rather work with a reporter on a media story than do the hard work of remaking our organizational culture from hierarchy to high performance. We rationalize that choice by claiming that the media story has more impact on revenue. But the jury is still out on that, except for marketing communication and product PR. I submit that we’d positively affect reputation in a measurable way if we focused more on making our leaders and their teams communicate better.
I’ve been reading the Corner Office in the Times for years. I haven’t yet seen an executive say that media relations is a core leadership function.
