Is what you see what really matters?

It’s 9 pm Tuesday night. You’re doing final rehearsals for tomorrow’s earnings call with your highly competent CEO. But she keeps flubbing one part of the script. Her energy is great otherwise, but every time she hits this section she misses words, she sounds cranky.

Your instinct might be to tell her to try again, to work harder on learning the content. But the problem may not be insufficient practice, it may be how she feels about the words on the page.

What if your CEO met with the product team this morning and she knows the product in this paragraph will have to be sunsetted later this year? Facing that truth makes her nauseous, because it was this product’s incredible success that put her on the ladder to becoming CEO in the first place. But this product can’t survive the agentic age. She’s grieving, she’s ashamed, and she can’t admit it to herself or to anyone in the room. But she still has to get through tomorrow’s earnings call before she and the team build the succession plan for her favorite product.

So what do you do tonight as you watch her get more frustrated? Honor your spidey senses. You feel it - the problem isn’t practice, it’s something underneath.

Part of being a great communications leader is pattern recognition. You can’t read any executive’s mind, but you CAN spot a hesitation that reminds you of a similar hesitation you saw her exhibit before. What did you do in that situation? Did it work? Try it again!

What if this is new CEO behavior and you can’t discern the potential cause?

First: create space. "Elizabeth, we’ve rehearsed more than usual - I don’t think one or two or ten more runs at this section will change the way it feels right now."

Second: invite but don’t push a conversation. "If you’d like to rehearse again in the morning, or change some language, Investor Relations and I will be free."

Third: prepare for questions/communication that may be necessary if she doesn’t open up to you and the script stays the same. Prepare for questions/communication that may be necessary if she does and the script changes.

You are not a therapist. You are a communications professional. But you do know that every leader’s performance as a communicator is downstream from their emotional state. You also know that their emotional state at any given five minutes can be impacted by SO MANY things, some of which you’re drowning in too, some of which will remain a mystery forever.

Right now, every leader you work with is carrying more unprocessed weight than they’ve ever carried before. Your CEO is carrying burdens she’s ready to vanquish tomorrow, burdens that make her want to throw up, and burdens she hasn’t even faced yet.

You can always ask yourself, "Is something deeper going on here?"
You can help her communicate masterfully to internal and external audiences about truths she’s ready to face, and be available to help her communicate well about truths she hasn’t yet processed when she’s ready.

The best communications professionals don't just prepare leaders for what to say. They learn to see and move like water around what's in the way of their leaders saying it well.