In this newsletter/book report we’ll look at a few things Ben says that hit on how a leader communicates.
Ben says, "Who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say at an all-hands. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. It’s what you do. What you do is who you are."
The "you" is you as the leader, it’s you as the employees, it’s you as the company in the eyes of the outside world.
Every professional communicator knows that talk is cheap. Yes, we craft artful soundbites. Yes, we coach people to deliver them well. Yes, we coach leaders to handle that tough media and analyst Q&A. But we all know that words have limits. The truly great PR person has the courage to say, "You can’t spin your way out of this one" to a misguided, misbehaving leader.
Harold Burson pretty much invented business PR. The best sentence I ever heard him say to a client was, "You don’t have a PR problem, you have a behavior problem."
When things get rough, words won’t fix it. Behavior fixes it. Words explain and call attention to behavior, but without the behavior to make the words real and true,
words are meaningless.
Here are a couple of other great nuggets from Ben’s new book: "No culture can flourish without the enthusiastic participation of its leader."
Right! You can’t outsource modeling the right way to behave. Your people are smarter than that. What you actually do matters so much more than what you tell people to do. They want to be like you, to win your approval. They’ll ferret out the real way to do that. Which brings us to the last quote for today’s enthusiastic book report. . . .
Ben says, "Finally, you have to pay close attention to your people’s behavior, but even closer attention to your own. How is it affecting your culture? Are you being the person you want to be? This is what it means to create a great culture. This is what it means to be a leader."
No one, especially Ben, ever said that being a leader is easy! Here’s to taking up the challenge with grace and self-awareness.
My team and I will be relishing holiday downtime in the next couple of weeks - I hope that you do too! We’ll be back with our first 2020 newsletter on January 14. In the meantime, happy holidays and here’s to a wonderful beginning of the new year!
On poseyblog
We're talking about how you, as a leader, and your behavior are your message:
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