Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Jacinda Ardern: This Is How Leaders Should Communicate Now

01.19.2023 by David Murray // 1 Comment

Jacinda Ardern announced her resignation as New Zealand Prime Minister yesterday, and she’ll be as sorely missed by the leadership communication community as by the citizens of New Zealand and admirers of her policies and style from around the world. Except, now maybe she’ll have time to do other good things. Like helping other world leaders become more dynamic, more sane and more humane, as I describe in this piece, written in the beginning of 2021. —DM

***

I gave a session last week at our ExecCommsNEXT conference on how New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is entirely changing the way leaders communicate. 

Or at least she should be. 

I keep hearing from all these leaders who are wondering, after a year of emails and Zoom statements on COVID, on George Floyd, on our divided society—what on earth there is left to say?

Well that’s just it, Boys! Communication is more than you talking. As is leadership.

In between your virtual speeches, Op-Eds and white papers, you should be demonstratingleadership, and expressing the humanity they want so badly to think you share. 

In short, you should do as Jacinda Ardern does, and implore your exec comms staffers to help find inventive ways to invite people along so they almost feel they’re by your side as you lead.

In the session, I showed how Ardern:

• Speaks candidly (yet still discreetly) about what it’s like balancing motherhood and statesmanship.

• Comes to you from her bedroom on a Sunday night in in the middle of a crisis, giving an update on what to expect and what to do in the week ahead. (I’ve also seen her coming home from a late-night meeting, surrounded by her exhausted staffers, on bus.)

• Regularly interviews public health experts and others—modeling a kind of leadership that’s not based on omniscient gravitas but on convening and learning, and “empathetic leadership,” as she calls it.

• And yuks it up with Stephen Colbert in a way that doesn’t try to demonstrate that she’s funny, which we don’t need a leader to be—but rather that she has a sense of humor, which we do need them to have.

And then here came Ardern yesterday on Facebook, bringing us into the speechwriting process itself.

By now every single Kiwi feels they’ve caught their PM in the fairly crude state of leadership over this year—as she’s led the island nation to the most effective COVID response in the world. Because she’s kept them right by her side, all the way through.

I’ve been trying to recruit Jacinda Ardern to keynote the PSA World Conference for two or three years now—and I’m not giving up.

Meanwhile, start watching her yourself, world leaders and corporate CEOs. This is what modern leadership communication is. In whatever style that’s authentic to your personality, this is how it’s done.

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When the weird, niche business you’ve been studying for 30 years becomes interesting to others

01.18.2023 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

Most Writing Boots readers have two questions about corporate executive communications the one subject I’ve probably studied more consistently than any other in my life (because I’ve been paid to):

1. What is it?

2. Who cares?

So it’s rare that I post anything here on that topic. But this week I’m interviewed on EE Voice, a podcast on corporate communication hosted by veteran corp comms execs Sharon McIntosh and Sharon Phillips.

“It’s a really interesting time to be studying this field,” I told the Sharons, looking back over my 30 years of reading CEOs’ speeches and listening to business leaders communicate with employees and other constituencies. “It’s the only interesting time!”

They laughed. I wasn’t kidding.

In this conversation, I share the two things every employee wants from a leader, and how a good leader can get those two things across in one quick story. I explain why my entrepreneur friend likes Elon Musk (and why lots of CEOs probably secretly do, too). And I question chronic hopers who think artificial intelligence composition is going to save writers a lot of time and leave us “smoking cigars and thinking big.”

And so on and so forth. It’s actually fun. Seriously. Not even kidding.

EPISODE #67: DAVID MURRAY – WHAT’S AHEAD FOR EXECUTIVE COMMUNICATION

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“Happy New Year”: What is this?

01.17.2023 by David Murray // 4 Comments

The unhappiest phrase I read all year, is “Happy New Year,” in a thousand emails from people who supposedly mean well.

God almighty, I even catch myself writing it myself—still, on January 17.

Why?

It’s called a new year, but what it is, is a new January, and there’s nothing happy about it. Because January is the Monday of the year. Proportionately speaking, it’s two Mondays. Experientially, it’s 31 Mondays. (With the subsequent promise of 28 Tuesdays, 31 Wednesdays and 30 Thursdays before we see the Chicago sun again.)

Pipe-bursting, gray-skied, hopeless wintry-mix Mondays during which everyone you meet is like the raspy, sick-eyed, gray-skinned guy who works at CarX and looks like he has congestive heart failure and when you ask how he’s doing and he always drones, “Livin’ the dream.”

January is a greeting card from Kierkegaard. January is two Newarks. January is a shit sandwich on moldy bread. January is the kind of month that’s brightened up considerably by a root canal. January even sounds cold, and the only pleasure most of us can find it it is to watch professional football players drive each other into the frozen ground.

January is so joyless that some people don’t even mind not drinking during it. “Dry” is the least of January’s problems, and alcohol doesn’t even cut January. “Drinking more,” a friend reported to me one January, “and enjoying it less.”

Of course, lots of assholes say “Happy Monday,” too. That’s offered either ironically, or with toxic positivity—gallows humor or forced cheer. You can’t tell on email, and no one would ever say a thing that egregious to your face.

Let’s skip “Happy New Year,” and quit “Happy Monday” while we’re at it.

We’re just making each other feel worse than we already do, which is really saying something.

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