CEO as Communicator

First, I’ll make note of the fact it has been a year since I’ve posted.  I’ve been planning (or plotting) my return for a few weeks.  Realizing that a whole year has gone by is a spur to activity.  My intention was to begin with several posts on media training issues aimed at executives rather than PR pros.  But I read an article on cio.com this morning that jolted me into action.

The article by Bob Enderle Is about HP CEO Meg Whitman’s analyst meeting last week.  It does not begin with the state of HP’s business but with the excellence of Meg Whitman as a communicator.  “It’s a pleasure to see someone like Whitman speak; she prepares properly, articulates her points clearly and has been trained to pace a talk.”  Thanks, Bob!  Music to the ears of communications trainers worldwide — and may every CEO, indeed, every executive who gives speeches and presentations, get the message.  One really does communicate better when one spends time preparing.

The author doesn’t stop there.  He critiques practices that are all too common.  “Often the folks giving financial statements seem ill-prepared.  One, they don’t rehearse enough.  Two, edits are being made right up to show time.  These are bad practices that distract significantly from the presentation and from the appearance of capability for both the CEO and the firm.”

Because Whitman fell into neither of those traps, says Enderle, “we could focus on the message without struggling to understand the message (or the speaker).”  He goes on to make the whole piece a combined examination of both the content of her presentation and “the art of delivering a message from a CEO.”

The article is absolutely worth reading, linking to your brochure, whatever, and I won’t do a prolonged report, except to point out Eberle’s insight into audiences — or specifically analyst audiences.  In a study he did some years ago, he found out that “Warhole Was Right – You Only Get 15 Minutes . . . If you don’t get the core message across in that time, you’ll never get it across.”

There are plenty of folks who ought to hear this – and act on it – right away.  On the other hand, I’d venture an educated guess that the vast majority of CEOs know this, and if they don’t, their IR and PR executives certainly do.  So the real question, the one I’ve thought about for decades, is why so many seem to care little about it.  And of course, there isn’t one answer, there are scores if not hundreds.

Here are some I’ve seen or inferred from available evidence over the years:  too busy to rehearse; assume they are already quite good; understand the situation so well themselves, they can’t envision that others might not; just haven’t done the work to put together a viable story line that connects all the financial (and other) dots; deem rehearsal somewhat below their position; don’t listen well to counsel from top communicators; work with teams that either lack or do not integrate with available communicators; just too darn behind the eight ball to find time to get it together; hate, really hate, having to do this at all and therefore resist all efforts to do it well.

But let me offer another side to this story.  I’ve worked with CEOs and senior executives for years who absolutely DO see telling their story to analysts, the press and directly to key audiences as a critical part of their job.  Few (actually, none in my experience) have had their skills annealed in a major gubernatorial campaign like Meg Whitman, but they have worked with their teams to get the story right, provided their perspective on key messages, personally worked on speeches and presentations, and scheduled significant amounts of time to rehearse.  My sense — and I refer you my post from August last year ago — is there are more and more who want to be, not just good, but very good communicators.

And that’s good for those of us who counsel and coach these individuals.