Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Friday Happy Hour Photo

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Taken on a motorcycle sortie from Chicago to Des Moines, six years ago yesterday, 2020—the middle of Covid hell. Seemed eerie just to be out in the world like that. Bad omens everywhere you looked.

Got off the bike at my sister-in-law’s house, and my 10-year-old niece Parker ran toward me.

“Can we hug?” I asked.

“My mom said we can!” Parker said.

And so we did.

Oh, we did!

I’m off next week—among other things, bumming around Chicago on my motorcycle with Parker, now 16. All to say sometimes DEAD ENDs aren’t dead. Sometimes they’re not even sick.

Back here next week.

The Two Things Every Audience Wants to Know About Every Leader, Every Time the Leader Appears

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After cursing the communication darkness yesterday, I promised to light a communication candle today.

I was on a call Monday with a bunch of executive communication professionals at the newest ECC member, a giant company that will go nameless because the call was off the record.

I was giving a fast overview of executive communication past, present and future, and someone asked something awfully close to, what’s the point of exec comms? What are we actually trying to do here? I almost gave her the right answer, sharing how former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern communicated during COVID—via various media, you saw her everywhere, in every context—including in her own home, in her sweatshirt—so that eventually you felt you were traveling as a sidekick to her thoughtful, warm, good-natured, curious, indefatigable self. At the time, I felt more comforted by Ardern than by any politician around here. As I wrote back in 2023, “Jacinda Ardern Showed Us How Leaders Should Communicate Now.”

But it was only almost the right answer, because most leaders, especially the kind of hard-driving corporate type my questioner no doubt serves, won’t take the time Ardern took to bring her audiences along so intimately or constantly. Nor should they, probably.

Here’s what they—and, the communication people who support them—ought to do, in every every appearance they do make. Whether it’s a big speech at Davos, a town hall meeting with employees or a selfie video from the road, they ought to be answering the two ultimate questions every audience is asking, simultaneously:

1. What makes them so special? Why am I down here and they’re up there? Are they smarter than me, more devoted to the organization or industry than me, more articulate on these issues than me? (And the audience wants a very good, affirmative answer to at least one of those questions.)

2. Are they like me? Based on their upbringing, their career, their life story, can they understand me and my colleagues and our families well enough to treat us right? Have they struggled, too? Have they had a boss too? Have they worried about their livelihood too? (And the audience wants evidence.)

If you’re in executive communications, you want to be helping your principal answer those two questions over and over again, with every opportunity. Indeed, you should be seeking opportunities to answer those questions. And once you start looking for them, and assuming the leader you’re serving is both special and human, they’re not that hard to come by. See Mary Barra’s Father’s Day post from last week, on LinkedIn.

That short post answers both of the essential questions that any GM employee, customer or investor might have about her:

She’s special because of who her father was and how he raised her, to be a car nut with a curious engineer’s mind and an honest spirit. Who else should be the CEO of GM?

And she’s a normal human being, because her dad was a mensch and diemaker and she was a little girl on his pajama clad lap, just like you. Who would you rather have as CEO of GM?

Answering these two essential questions once isn’t enough, of course. Leaders must answer them, in one way or another, in every appearance. Their comms folks must help them answer the first question humbly. And remind them—after all the years they’ve spent taking private jets to private airports and private elevators to private suites—why they must answer the second question, too.

Communication Doesn’t Seem Worth It, These Days

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Famously, Nixon White House attorney John Dean told President Nixon about Watergate, “I think that there is very much a cancer on this presidency” that, left to spread, would destroy the administration. Only with the Trump administration, the presidency is a cancer on the country. And left to spread …

I’ve lived in this place 57 years—through a few wars, several recessions, good times and bad. (And probably none much culturally grimmer than the years I was growing up, in between rusting Cleveland and rotting Akron, Ohio.)

There’s more meanness in this country now than I can ever remember. Far more. Words hurled rather than shared by people clearly angry about something other than what they are shouting about.

For instance, Wyndham Clark seems to be a somewhat bratty guy who struggles to control his emotions and publicly talks about seeing a therapist to help him deal with it. Did those shortcomings rate five hours of verbal abuse from thousands of emotionally deranged goons on an old-money country club on Long Island Sunday—people mockingly screaming “don’t choke,” and cheering madly at Clark’s every mistake?

And before we get off the subject of Clarks!—does it make any sense that the young professional basketball star Caitlin has to endure what appear to be wholly fabricated rumors by mobs on X and elsewhere about problems with her teammates and rivals alike, and answer reporters’ questions about them at press conferences? Clark has handled all this almost impeccably, even occasionally criticizing her own fans who have said racist or rude things about others. But after several years of it, the once ebullient and spirited competitor looks by turns deeply worn down, and a little bitter, herself. She’s 24.

And why did a LinkedIn conversation I was having last week escalate into an online shouting match when the other guy started sounding so much like President Trump—he actually referred to a newsletter I publish as “the failing Executive Communication Report”—that I finally asked him, “Are you Trump’s ghostwriter, or is he yours?” Before he erased our whole exchange from the thread, apparently.

A close friend asked me later, “Why would you start a fight with that guy on LinkedIn?” Admitting that I do sometimes like to get a rise out of people, and explaining that I’ve been waiting to get a rise out of this particular guy for about three decades, I reminded my friend that my initial two or three salvos were gentle and non-confrontational in tone and substance, and that the guy ratcheted up the rhetoric by addressing me as “dude,” telling me I was too stupid to comprehend his intellect and, also Trump-like, calling my lack of agreement with his point of view “sad!” (And then, yes, I questioned the value of 30 years of his “thought leadership”; fighting words for sure.)

I think my friend might really be asking a deeper and much more troubling question, that too many of us are asking: Why would anyone risk any disagreement in public conversation with anybody, anywhere? It’ll probably escalate quickly, it will probably go nowhere or become about something far beyond what it’s about—and what’s the upside? I ask that question more and more myself. Which would be troubling for any professional communicator, but especially for the author of a 2021 book titled, An Effort to Understand: Hearing Ourselves (and One Another) in a Nation Cracked in Half.

Once, in an Italian neighborhood in Chicago then known as a hub for gangsters, my unwitting father in law, visiting from out of town, had his car blocked, in a parking spot. He started hollering about it, in hopes that the offender would hear him and move the car. I practically pounced on him to hush him, because this could only lead to trouble in a neighborhood where you don’t pick your battles, you avoid battles altogether.

That’s how it feels everywhere right now. Why? I guess I can’t assign all of that to more than a decade of President Trump’s rhetoric and the rest of the world’s counter-rhetoric, seemingly useless in defense. But if you think all that vulgar, all-caps propaganda from the leader of the free world is not a big factor in building the spite walls between us, then I guess you don’t believe that leaders have any influence at all.

Trump Derangement Syndrome? Trump Dyspepsia is more like it. And for communicators, anyway—dystopia, too.

On some Tuesdays it makes me want to put the words away, start working at a soup kitchen, and call it a day.