poseycorp helps innovators become great communicators. (Sometimes by sending out helpful stuff in a newsletter.)
ISSUE 78
Who owns your face?
"In your position, your face isn't your anymore.”
- Alan Mulally
All the way back in 2017, a great anecdote in Whitney Johnson’s Disrupt Yourself newsletter caught my eye. Whitney writes: “After taking over as President of the World Bank, Dr. Jim Yong Kim asked former Ford Motor Company CEO Alan Mulally for advice. This former CEO of the Year said: “You have a nice smile, smile more.” He then added, "In your position, your face isn't yours anymore.”
When you are a leader your face isn’t yours anymore – your team (even if it’s just five people) is watching you all the time.
If your face doesn’t look neutrally pleasant while the nervous junior person on your team is presenting on Zoom, he may think that you don’t like him, that you thought his performance last quarter wasn’t great, that you are going to promote someone else and lay him off, etc. You may have just read a text that your contractor can’t come fix your roof for six weeks. But that junior person who just finished presenting to you is already emailing recruiters.
Why? Because humans have deeply embedded (mostly unconscious) patterns and beliefs about authority figures. They don’t consciously decide to see you through this lens of biases and fears. They just do.
At the same time, they doconsciously study how you’re behaving to see what they
can learn about how the company is doing. A nervous angry leader’s face communicates danger to your team. A calm, focused leader’s face and body language telegraph confidence and perspective. Every leader is the title as much as she is herself. It’s even more intense externally - the leader becomes the human embodiment of the entire organization – the brand, the products, the financial results. It can hurt being seen as ‘the CEO’, not as Susan. You can feel dehumanized, you can feel like a meat puppet. It is hard. BUT, you can decide what kind of meat puppet you want to be. You can build an
executive persona that’s informed by your real self, by your values, by the best things about your organization, by your customers. When you do this well, you can thrive in the spotlight.
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Your business must scale, and you must scale with it. Great communicators create the change they want to see in the world. poseycorp helps innovators build powerful messages and the skill to deliver them so they can break through the noise and be heard! Lisa Poulson, poseycorp’s principal, is expert at helping innovators scale by becoming great communicators.
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