Communication

What I learned from the one of the world's greatest communication experts

When I was an MBA candidate at the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University, I had the opportunity to attend several seminars led by Merrie Spaeth, who is an expert in communication. Her seminars were amazing because she would show multiple video clips of people talking to the media and explain what they were doing right and what they were doing wrong. I learned a TON about strategic communication. For example, if you are giving a press conference and the majority of the people in the room are reporters, they are not your audience. Find the video cameras and talk to the cameras; your audience is watching you on TV and you need to talk to them.

But the one thing that she drove home constantly was that as a business leader talking in a public setting, the most important audience is not your customers, your suppliers, or your investors (although they are important). The most important audience is your employees. Whatever you say publicly, your employees are listening and they can potentially adjust their behavior depending on what you say.

As a leader in the military, I took this lesson very seriously. Anything that a leader says in public needs to be filtered through the lens of how subordinates will interpret it. This doesn’t mean you need to be disingenuous or only say things that soldiers want to hear, quite the opposite; you need to be consistent. Tell your soldiers the truth, and tell them in a way where they can make sense of it.

This is one of the dangers for military leaders on Twitter. Tweets are so short and so free of context that things can very easily be misinterpreted. This is why I tweet little and write so much. Sure, if you want to find something I wrote and purposely take it out of context you could easily do that. But a typical soldier who reads large amounts of my work will understand it.

I recently came across a tweet that I really disliked. Replying your objection to a tweet is often silly, and so I refrained from doing so. Plus, a 1,000-word response is more my style than 240 characters. Here is the tweet from an Army Major whose profile says that they are an attorney:

Okay, let’s ask ourselves this question: if you were this officer, and you were thinking like Merrie Spaeth would want you to think, would you want your soldiers to consider being in the Army as “just a job?” Well, are you willing to give your life for just a job? Would a Walmart greeter risk their safety to stop a shop-lifter? Not only would they not, but they also are prohibited from doing so by company policy (according to a former Walmart store manager who is an acquaintance). There are definitely some dangerous jobs out there where people risk their lives and safety, but the vast majority of people in the developed world work in relative safety. In the Army, especially in the combat arms like infantry and armor, there may come a day when we are not asking soldiers to “risk” their lives but to literally “give” their lives. War is not pretty, as we have seen in Ukraine most recently. Many soldiers on both sides have gone into situations where they knew it was more likely than not that they were not going to make it out alive. That’s not “just a job.”

Of course you don’t want your soldiers to consider themselves as having “just a job!” You want your soldiers to think of themselves as doing something special, of answering a higher calling, of serving their country and their comrades. In fact, many of the problems the Army is facing right now is because too many people think of themselves as having “just a job,” and the workload is falling more and more on those who think of it as something greater than that. We need leaders who are willing to have the moral courage to stand in front of their soldiers and declare that they are doing something special and they don’t have “just a job.”

When my wife saw this tweet her reaction was even more visceral and her argument even more pungent. She said, “Okay, go tell all of the Gold Star families that their family member had “just a job.”

More on this topic next week.