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Show me the value

The first Director of Communications at the White House was Herb Klein, who stayed in post for four years and 162 days.

Roll forward nearly 50 years and note that President Trump’s Directors – Sean Spicer (45 days), Mike Dubke (88 days), Sean Spicer again (49 days), Anthony Scaramucci (10 days) and the just resigned Hope Hicks (169 days excluding her time as the interim post holder) – have averaged between them fewer than 100 days each. Something is clearly not working as it should.

A long time ago, in this very galaxy, when Jeremy Clarkson was a power in the land, each Monday following the broadcast of a new episode of Top Gear, Comms and PR directors whose company products had featured on the show, were criticised by bosses and colleagues alike if the showing was caustic and the verdict damning.

“Why can’t you control him?” was the oft-asked question.

Well the truth is that in those heady days, British motoring journalists were powerful people, mostly independent of the industry about which they wrote. They made their judgements about a car’s technical merit, and design, knowing that their views were largely untouchable and that they would always (mostly anyway) be protected by their publishers.

So it is in serious political reporting today. Journalists and their editors on the great newspapers of the world – New York Times, Economist, Washington Post, Financial Times and the Guardian – have been rigorous in the way that they have reported the President’s words and actions. It is the same at the BBC, CNN, ABC, ITN and other professional news broadcasters.

We have to wonder if maybe, just maybe, the President has taken the words ‘most powerful man in the world’ too literally. He now wants to know why his many Directors of Communications have failed to control the media and were thus forced out, for that specific failure.

His ego, we are told, is as fragile as it is humungous.

The value of a great director of communications, in commerce as in politics, is mainly to be found in two specific areas. First, she or he must be a brilliant manager of time, money and staff.

Second, he or she must have the forensic judgement and courage of Machiavelli, the intellect and writing skill of Cicero and the street-fighting gutter instincts of Alastair Campbell.

Wise indeed is the boss who understands and appreciates these skills, listens very carefully when the comms chief speaks unpleasant truths, and appreciates that managing an organisation’s communication is a long game, sometimes reactive and more often proactive.

Is this about me, or you?

Cartoon doctor

Listen and respond

A senior consultant physician is employed to teach young doctors. Nothing odd about that, is there?

What if the subject that she teaches is not medical but communication? Does that strike anyone as unusual?

OK; but what if the detail of her lesson does not teach the student how to communicate well with someone the news that they are dying but is concerned, instead, with lessons as to how best assuage the feelings of the young doctor whose job it is to impart said bad news?

To put it another way, the health service pays seniors to teach juniors that however much it upsets them to bring deadly tidings to the terminally sick, they still have to do it.

To many people, this will sound completely bonkers. This is not about the feelings of the person delivering the bad news, which are largely irrelevant in this instance, they might say, but about the feelings of the terminally sick recipient.

Well yes, and no.

Like all human communication, this is not a binary event or undertaking and there is no hierarchy as to the people involved in this real-life event. The terminally ill person, their families and friends, the doctor and those supporting her or him – all are involved and all have feelings about the matter. All of those feelings are relevant to the effectiveness, or not, of the communication.

The crucial aspect is that good communication is key to getting something like this right first time, because there won’t be a way to ‘unsay’ the wrong way.

Talks about death are difficult and require empathy and honesty first and foremost from the persons in the conversation. They do not work well when key aspects are hidden behind artifice designed to spare feelings. Bad news, and good, is better received when it is easy to understand. That is the only way to respond and react to whatever that news is.

Knowing something is always better than not knowing, unless you’re an ostrich. And that head-hiding analogy has been proved to be a myth.

Personally, I like the Gina Miller approach: “I come from South America and it’s part of our culture to speak out. It’s a lot healthier. There’s a big difference between being respectful and being restrained. I am more interested in teaching my children empathy than subscribing to our ‘me’ culture and obsessing about ‘how do I feel’ all the time.”

Effective communication is always about all of us, right up to the time one of ‘us’ is no longer there to listen and respond.