Writing Boots

In a Boots post earlier today, I asked, “Do I Have to Change My Communication Style Now That I’m Older?”

My friend and PSA collaborator Justine Adelizzi had a different theory about why I’ve been lately discouraged by some of my friends from posting certain things … and why I’ve found myself running things by more people, in the first place.

David, as one of the consiglieri, let me take a crack at the question you pose in your title.

I think you may have become a bit of a victim of your own success. You’ve built the Professional Speechwriters Association into something that has grown so much in recent years, and it now encompasses a broader, more diverse population of speechwriters and executive communicators than you probably could have imagined when you took it over.

But what that means is that even when you’re speaking as David Murray, author and critic, people hear David Murray, founder and executive director of the Professional Speechwriters Association and the Executive Communication Council. You’re now, ironically, the exact kind of leader that speechwriters and executive communicators advise.

So I’m not surprised you’re running more things by people, or that you’re sometimes getting pushback. That’s the nature of leadership. You’re representing a large and diverse group of people.

Instead of asking if you need to change your communication style, here’s the question I’d toss back if you were a leader I was advising: is your communication style advancing the interests of the current and future Professional Speechwriters Association and its members?

Justine, per usual when you write, you provide much to consider. I’ll respond to your points in order:

First, I’m not sure the PSA does encompass a broader, more diverse population of speechwriters and executive communicators than it did when I founded it. The industry demographics of the first PSA World Conference were about the same as they are now. We’re larger now, and we do now also convene the Executive Communication Council and the Higher Education Leadership Communication Council. But everyone in those groups would was represented at that first gathering in New York in 2014.

I think we’ve become more established over the years: more of a symbolic institution, in some people’s minds, than a free-thinking writer’s society that spent much of that first conference in McSorley’s Saloon. And so perhaps increasingly, it strikes some folks as odd, when the head of the Professional Speechwriters Association—even on his personal site Writing Boots, to which he carefully confines his most provocative opinions—comes out with a piece with a headline like I did a few years ago: “Reading Axios Communicators = Eating Toilet Paper.”

The head of the International Association of Business Communicators would never write a thing like that, nor would the head of the Public Relations Society of America. Where does the head of the PSA get off?

I started my career at Ragan Communications, working for its founder Larry Ragan. Larry believed you could be a convener by day and a critic by night. In fact, when he slew a sacred cow or humbled an old fool in a high stool, he frequently quoted the P.T. Barnum maxim, “If you want to draw a crowd, start a fight.” Ragan Communications doesn’t do that sort of thing anymore, but they sure did back then. When IABC paid a zillion dollars to commission a phony “Excellence Study,” Larry came after that bullshit in a four-part series, one part headlined, “Does Selling Scads of Brassieres Constitute ‘Excellent Public Relations’?” Meanwhile, Larry put on warm, smart conferences and was an admired figure in the business for many decades.

So I came up in a tradition that said you can champion a profession and simultaneously participate boldly in the conversation surrounding it.

Still, when a bunch of veteran scribes came to me around 2010 to ask if I would start an association for speechwriters, I resisted so anxiously it came across as angrily. I’d covered a lot of association executives over the years as a trade journalist, and watched their jacket sleeves get longer and longer every year I’d see them. I liked my sleeve-length perfectly well at the time.

That would not—that will not—happen to me. I’ll wriggle out of the role before I see myself, as you suggest, as “the exact kind of leader” that most speechwriters advise. Or before I run my every utterance through the test that you suggest: Is my “communication style advancing the interests of the current and future Professional Speechwriters Association and its members.”

I want to be better than the kind of leaders speechwriters generally advise (and frequently complain about, usually on account of those leaders won’t say shit if they have a mouth full of it). I want to be more candid, more intellectually honest, more interesting, (and more loving and even funnier) than any of those CEOs, university presidents, military leaders, nonprofit chairs or government ministers. And I dare to think that the speechwriters will support me in that, as they have—as you have—for all these years.

I’m a writer first, an association executive last. You might not be surprised to know that I haven’t received a lot of calls from recruiters wanting me to take my talents to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, or the Society of Human Resource Management.

I realize my role as an industry figure makes my rhetorical situation more complicated, and that is why I do occasionally run some of my writing past you and other valued members of our wee society. But there’s a reason I write hard things sometimes, in colorful language: Because that’s the nature of leadership, too. And sometimes it’s required, precisely to advance the interests of speechwriters, and communicators everywhere. Or, sometimes, just to tell the truth.

One last thought, before I toss this back to you: I have frequently advocated for institutional leadership communication to be done in such a way, with such a frame, that the leader can sometimes speak separately—as a human being, who doesn’t represent every employee, every customer, every board member of the institution. My father did advertising for General Motors in the 1950s and 1960s. Back then, he wasn’t allowed to write, “At GM, we believe …” It had to be, “General Motors believes …”

As a communicator, my dad chafed under that kind of institutional domination of the human voice and spent his whole career fighting against it.

I guess that fight goes on, in me.

Aren’t you ultimately with me in that?

Been getting some confusing counsel lately, about my writing.

I’m at a moment in my career—I’m 57 and have been watching the communication business for 34 years (and both my parents were professional communicators)—when I’m pretty sure of my judgement about a lot of things. Perhaps I haven’t seen everything over these decades. But I’ve seen most things, like a hundred times.

Known for most of my career as a relatively acerbic commentator in the comparatively milquetoasty communication business—in my twenties, I was dubbed “the world’s youngest curmudgeon”—I find I’m running especially low on patience in recent years, with sharpers claiming to square circles, with deck-chair rearrangers, with graspers of the obvious and with platitudypuses of all types. I literally don’t have time, as I suggested last week, to play tiddlywinks with your ego.

But just when I’m feeling like shifting into a late-career fifth gear, people whose judgment I trust are telling me I need to tone it down in some cases, or maybe not say it at all. Why? I don’t know for sure. Nor do I know why I am suddenly running things by people in the first place. In my rumination, I’ve considered this little section from my own 2021 book, An Effort to Understand:

I once had a conversation with a middle-aged seventh-grade English teacher who told me he was in the process of taking on his third entirely separate persona at the school.

When he was in his twenties and early thirties, the students regarded him as a big brother, with whom they cooperated out of admiration. 

Then one day in his mid-30s, he yelled at a class and saw to his surprise that they were terrified. “I realized they related to me as their father now,” he said. 

And he had to modify his approach accordingly. And through his forties and early fifties he behaved as a father.

Then one day—and this had happened not long before he and I had this conversation—the teacher yelled at a class in his thunderous Dad voice, and detected pity on their faces. “Uh oh,” was how he read their look. “Gramps is losing it.” And so he knew he had to establish a wholly new basis of influence—an elder’s role.

The decades don’t quite align, but is it possible that by my reputation and longevity I’ve unwittingly graduated in some people’s minds from brother to father in this business, and every punch I throw looks like punching down? (And hitting the kids!?) Or—worse?—are my consiglieri afraid that someone could interpret my lively critiques as Gramps, losing it?

Gotta consider that, gotta consider it. Once you go Gramps, it’s hard to go back. Very early in my career, I heard PR pioneer Scott Cutlip, then around 80, lament with a chuckle during the acceptance of some lifetime achievement award that he had once been lauded as “the angry young man of public relations,” but that somewhere along the line and without noticing, he’d become “the grumpy old man of public relations.”

Still, though: Some offenses in and around our business deserve yelling (and some even a spanking), and I feel more clear than ever about which offenses those are, and more competent than ever to call them out. And I suppose I could be convinced to leave the yelling to other, younger teachers. Except, I don’t see those corrective critical thinkers coming up, in this world of LinkedIn logrolling. Do you?

At the same time, I’ve got a communicator correspondent who’s always telling me he wishes he could bring himself to pop off as frequently and irascibly as I do. Just the other day, he lamented, “I don’t know why, but I still have more fucks to give than you.”

I care just as much about how I’m perceived as anybody else. It’s just that, my whole career, I’ve seen my role as a critic (as well as a convener). For me, the risk has always been being seen failing to call out a bad idea or a bit of hypocrisy or a phony dealer in false hope.

But maybe—maybe—I need to find a softer tone of voice. The very idea of which totally pisses me off.

POSTSCRIPT:

A communication manager responds:

I loved your piece about changing your communication style as you age. I almost said something in the comments, but thought better of it for all the reasons you described.

I remember being yelled at by editors in newsrooms and, after growing in skill and confidence, fearlessly yelling back. Was it healthy? Probably not. But we were able to say what we needed to say and help each other not look like assholes or get sued.

Now that I am a 53-year-old woman, I find that no one wants to hear it from me. If I speak up, I have to couch everything in corporate cushioning so I don’t look like a big meanie. Like you, I have grown more comfortable in my professional judgment of things, because you just know some shit after working on something for 25 years.

At first, I was told to back up my opinions with data, so I did, and whaddayaknow? The data, does, in fact, back me up. But my younger colleagues still do not want to hear it. I get labeled as difficult and negative by some people, but a joy to work with by others who, like me, have to actually get shit done.

I have watched my younger colleagues get promoted, and now some of them are my “leaders.” If I don’t just nod and blow sunshine up their asses, I’m told I need to work on being more collaborative and strategic. So my big change in communication style in this phase of my professional life is one of survival: Smile more, congratulate everyone on all their successes, and keep my mouth shut about terrible ideas.

I’m not at all bitter.

When I finished clapping at my desk, I replied that I thought this issue of needing to have to recalibrate one’s tone as one ages is worse, and probably much worse, for women. Which brought forth another blast from my correspondent:

I suspect you’re right about it being much worse for women. By this age, we have lived through being told many contradictory messages about getting ahead: Be hot, be assertive, be bold, be positive, be empathetic, be collaborative, be a good listener, be supportive, get a master’s degree. Now I’m just getting: Be quiet, you irrelevant crone.

And my patience is nonexistent, but these are supposed to be my biggest earning years, so I have to put up with it because the market is terrifying. Even my therapist said she left her corporate job and never was able to earn as much again. So now she’s stuck listening to people like me complain about work all day.

If I’m ever in a position of power, I’m only going to hire hilarious bitches over 40.