Whenever I write something here that seems more professional than personal, some readers complain that they like the personal stuff more. So I thought I’d try to mollify these beggars/choosers by making this professional piece a little more personal. It’s all personal to me, to some extent, as I try to never do anything for money that I can’t justify as at least having the potential to make things better. For instance with this business below, I’m hoping to help largely powerless people who work in the proximity of power to do that hideously clichéd thing called “talking truth to power.”
Or as Emily Dickinson advised much more realistically:
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
Yep, that’s what we’re helping folks to do, with their powerful bosses.
And we sure hope it works. —DM
***
The term “executive presence” didn’t exist three decades ago when I first became acquainted with the joys and sorrows of corporate executive communication professionals. But I would have made fun of it if it had.
Back then, exec comms pros could be identified by sight in a corporate PR department: They were the oldest, and frequently the most rumpled ones. They were not “people people.” They were intellectuals. Their stock in trade was not “emotional intelligence” (a term that no one used back then either) but “intellect” (a term that people actually did use back then).
“Executive presence” wasn’t really a problem for them, because they had built-in gravitas: The gravitas of a Master’s or a Ph.D. The gravitas of a big shelf of books like Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, from which they extracted quotes from Alexis de Tocqueville, for their CEOs to say. They had the gravitas of their gray hair. And usually, the gravitas of being a man, in male-dominated (and even macho) c-suites.
And if they had messy hair or crooked glasses or a mustard stain on their shirt, it only made them more lovable and more credible, as the eccentric, absent-minded professor. The resident intellectual. Every company had to have one.
So much has changed since those days. Almost everything, in fact.
CEOs don’t quote de Tocqueville anymore. In fact, they don’t give many formal speeches anymore. Executive communication has become much more extemporaneous in style and much more diverse in media, as corporate leaders express themselves via video, employee town halls and smaller meetings, LinkedIn posts and X.
And you don’t hire eggheads named Hiram to help leaders to nimbly navigate spontaneously spouting issues of the moment across social media channels. You hire people—women, at least as many as men—to guide leaders (many more of whom are now women themselves).
You hire much younger people, on average. Why? They’re conversant with modern communication media and popular culture. And, they’re affordable to staff exec comms operations that have ballooned from “CEO speechwriter” to whole teams.
Which is great, as it allows more corporate leaders to express themselves more readily to more stakeholders more effectively and frequently than they did, giving one conference stemwinder at a time.
But which creates a gravitas problem. That we’re now calling an “executive presence” problem. And that is very real. “Oh my gosh!” an exec comms director exclaimed when I told her that our Executive Communication Council is offering a virtual seminar next month called Executive Presence for Exec Comms Pros. “My people need that so badly. I keep wanting to tell them when they go into the CEO’s office, ‘Be bigger’!”
Well, it’s hard to be big when you’re twenty-five years younger than the CEO, six levels down, and making in a year what the CEO makes in a week. Hard, but as our seminar leader Jeff Davenport believes, not impossible.
Whereas an executive presence course thirty years ago might consist of, “Hortense, tuck in your shirt”—Davenport, who taught executive presence with Silicon Valley CEO star-maker Duarte, is going to show modern exec comms people how to manage their professional image, from attire to presentation skills. How to pitch ideas to the principal, and listen deeply to their response. And how to react to objections and overcome execs’ reluctance, to command the credibility they need to become trusted advisors to the leaders they serve.
Lots of exec comms pros and some whole exec comms teams are registered for this course. I’m personally eager to experience it—not just to learn for myself what Davenport has to teach, but for the conversations we’ll have with ambitious exec comms people, trying to get bigger.
Thirty years ago, I saw the shift at my own company: the reliance on note cards, impromptu speeches, and what amounted to rambling (and long) lectures. The change seemed to happen overnight — from thoughtful, reasoned, and researched speeches to something that was impossible to submit to Vital Speeches unless you transcribed it and then completely rewrote it. The speeches became the ones no one remembered and had no influence or impact beyond a moment in the room. People who heard these speeches would say they were inspirational, but ask them what was said, and they’d just stare at you.
That’s exactly right, Glynn. Though I’d say that the purpose of the corporate speech has changed over those decades, from primarily thought leadership (not that the “leadership” was always so “thoughtful” even back then)—to primarily audience-schmoozing.
And I don’t mean that in a bad way, entirely. Employees and other stakeholders want to know what kind of people their CEO is—what makes her or him special, what makes her or him relatable—and modern speeches (and fireside chats, etc.) are designed to show that, in as precise and strategic a manner as possible.
It’d be nice if there was an idea in there somewhere, maybe like once a year. But then again, what WERE those great corporate CEO ideas of the past that we pine for? Larry Ragan used to tell of CEOs opining in speeches in the 1970s, that “profit is not a dirty word!”