Even with the pandemic in our rearview mirror for over a year now, I see much of our corporate leadership’s ongoing tendency to continue to pull in, and therefore the top team is less visible to those who need to see its strengths.
It is easy for leadership to feel overwhelmed before going out with your public story because of all the noise, the competition for attention, and the potential vulnerability of being chastised by the press or a digital community. Publicists are properly trained to prevent these challenges. We often find the opportunities to go even further toward positive exposure. Inherent in our solution is to take the time to carefully plan so that you have a strategy for each scenario, and then you can execute flawlessly. This often isn’t the approach of startup leadership: Startup founders tend to be uninterested in careful approaches to reputation management. They tend to want immediate high-impact fixes for whatever their CEO has done. But the challenges of recent roadblocks often stand in their way.
As a publicist for over thirty years I have seen leadership teams come out both before their story has been fully formed and also with teams who are ready, and the latter always continues to build a solid reputation and brand. Let’s take a look at what “ready” in 2024 means:
- The organization’s culture has been primed to feel the excitement of their new product’s accomplishments and what they will do for society as a whole. Apple, for example, is very good at including everyone in their big announcements and then the celebration of what they have developed follows. They have the vibe, and it’s contagious.
- Your leadership has their finger on the pulse. They know the need for your product and service because they haven’t spent too much time indoors. For example, a successful director of sales typically spends one-third of their time with people and organizations outside their company, some of that time with other departments within, and the remaining with their direct line of reports. They know — they have spent the time needed to made the rounds. Because they are privy to the strengths of their organization and how those benefits fit externally, they are ready.
- Good stories develop in the telling and retelling, by going out with a fully formed narrative. This includes the struggles and what you have learned from them. Planning requires several deep-dive conversations about what these lessons offer the public.
- Your CEO is ready to take a walk with the public. A literal walk. Because a strong CEO has “executive presence,” something they have developed over years of both challenges and accomplishment, it adds to their portfolio of knowledge and that is often what makes them interesting. Being ready to show your audience what it is like to take a walk with your CEO is part of our partnership with you on that road to successful promotion.
- The Tim Walz leadership style – that plain speak we have all seen recently — works well because it is ready for a wider audience. Research has shown that candidates who used more esoteric or intellectual language were eight times less likely to be successful compared to candidates who used more colloquial language. It’s the down-to-earth storytelling that is more memorable and more powerful than a cerebral style because what the leader says actually sounds more digested , and therefore, better understood.
- Leaders who appear ready talk less about themselves and more about the team. They are happy to share the accomplishments of those who have helped them build “it.”
Last, what makes a leader ready and persuadable is a confidence that puts everyone, even a veteran reporter, at ease. When you have built something interesting, we want to know what it’s like to have a beer with you. We want to know what it is like to walk with you down the hall. It’s the ability to relax, share and know that will catapult you and your leadership to prime time.