Larry D. Lauer

Studying the communication dimensions of leadership has been a strong interest of mine ever since I started years ago working for and consulting with institutional presidents and executives.  There are many lessons. Here are three of the most important:

Lesson One: Presidents set the tone, policy agenda and direction for their institutions or nations simply by what they chose to say… so much so that they even have a “contagious” emotional effect on the behavior others. It is both the opportunity and liability of being a president.

Lesson Two: Never, never bad-mouth your predecessor. Comfortable or not, a new president always stands on the shoulders of those who came before. There are too many influential people still around who supported the others, and not to understand this will almost always prove ruinous.

New presidents obviously need to learn from the mistakes of past presidents. But bad-mouthing them undermines leadership stature, exposes personal ego problems, reveals any lack of knowledge of the institution’s or nation’s history, and significantly diminishes attention on (or reinforces the lack of) a workable plan for the future.

Before I retired I worked closely with several institutional presidents, both at my institution and as a consultant. Each one had to deal with the mistakes of the past. With the benefit of hindsight, however, I learned that for the most part the institution had the right president with the right strengths at the right time. Each president made mistakes, no doubt. But it was far more effective for new presidents to honor past presidents’ contributions then to criticize their mistakes. In this way a new vision and plan could rest on a solid historical foundation while reaching out to everyone, no matter their past loyalties, background, or special interests.

Lesson Three: Don’t pick a fight with the news media. Expressing disappointment about poor coverage is certainly fine, even required. But expressing frustration by relentlessly attacking the media will eventually make any president look weak, think-skinned, dysfunctional, and eventually untrustworthy. Make no mistake. It’s a no-win situation.

What also happens is that the president’s entire staff becomes disorganized trying to respond to daily disjointed attacks and soon find it impossible to advance other far more important initiatives. Like it or not the agenda will always be set by what the  president says that day, and the media will reign in the end simply as a result of the administrative chaos and daily supply of crisis news. “Breaking news” increases readership, broadcast ratings, and media profits. It’s as simple as that.

As we all know the U.S. president did not win the popular election. From a purely communication perspective he won the presidency because of two unlikely situations: He found a large number of legitimately unhappy voters. And his opponent failed to manage an email server crisis, fell into the trap of almost exclusively attacking him, and therefore failed to articulate a plan and vision for the future of her country.

My long experience in communication and media teaches that these hard lessons apply to all top leaders of anything, everywhere. And the lessons most certainly apply right now to everyone currently involved in party politics and government.