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Hosted by veteran communications strategist and leadership trainer J.Marie, Your Friend in Leadership is an inspiring and approachable podcast created to empower today’s public leaders. Each episode delivers strategic insights, transformative ideas, and actionable communication tools to help you better connect with your communities and move your mission forward. With deep appreciation for the important work of public leaders and the knowledge that leadership and communication are skills that can be built and improved, this podcast is your guide to confident and effective leadership every step of the way.
(Music)
J. Marie
Greetings friends and thank you for joining me today to talk about leadership and communications and how all of those things work together. Last session we talked about kind of a communications 101. And this session what I wanna do is dig into the tools that you might use to communicate.
J. Marie
Every organization has a variety of communication tools at their disposal, from internal emails, staff meetings, meetings with your public, whether if you're public schools, it might be parent meetings, might be student performances. If you are a fire district, perhaps you have an annual event or a number of events that you attend in order to showcase certain aspects of your services. You might have a newsletter, you might have a social media channel or two. You might be putting out short or long form videos. You might be inviting yourself or seeking invitations to go present at other organizations meetings, go talk at the weekly rotary meeting, those kinds of things. So you have a wealth of tools available to you and you need to think through what are the right tools to use for the messages that I want to send and for the situation that I wanna communicate about. And before we jump into kind of some more detail on those tools, I wanna start philosophically with this idea that I think a lot of folks who are leaders but not communications professionals have their preferred communication methods and they kind of think of well, once I've communicated it, it's like I can dust my hands of it. I wrote my newsletter, I sent out my staff message, like I have communicated what was important and now I'm done with that and I can move on. And the reality is in today's busy world, if you are motivated to share a message, it behooves you to put some thought into what's the best tool or tools to help me get that message across.
J. Marie
Research keeps changing on this point, but I imagine many of you have heard that old adage that you really have to communicate something seven times in order to break through kind of the receivers, the audience members, kind of mental clutter of all the other things they're thinking about and being all the other messages they're being bombarded with and that you have to communicate at least seven times in order for your message to get through to somebody. That research is a good 50 or 60 years old, more recent research, the number just keeps going up. When I worked for the American Red Cross and their communications office at a local chapter, we understood that we had to reach out to donors and volunteers at least 10 times a year if we wanted to maintain an ongoing kind of conversation relationship with them. More recently, I've heard 13 or even 18 different touches are necessary if you want to break through the clutter. And that makes sense because we're all bombarded with so much more information than was normal one, two, three generations ago. So it makes sense that the number of times that you have to share your message in order to break through that mass of communications, that number is going up. So there is no silver bullet. There is no one communication tool that you can do that when you're done with that, you can like pat yourself on the back or dust your hands and say, well, I've, I've communicated that thing that I needed to communicate. The reality is you're going to need to communicate the same thing multiple ways in multiple different methods. One of the tools that communications professionals use to help organize those, those communication tools is this model called the communications pyramid.
[00:04:11:14 - 00:04:27:03]
J. Marie
And so in your own mind, you know, imagine a triangle or draw it on a piece of paper, draw a triangle and every single form of communication, every single communication tool that you have available to you will fit somewhere on this triangle.
J. Marie
And up at that top spot, the one-to-one conversation, that's where you have literally a personal conversation with one other person. Slightly below that would be where you could put your small group meetings, you know, your staff meetings, your leadership team meetings, your volunteer meetings, those kinds of things, anything that's a relatively small group would go next. You might put your emails to staff or to other small groups could go in there kind of towards the top of the pyramid. The tools that you would put further down the pyramid are tools that reach more and more people. So then you have larger group meetings, you have going to other organizations and speaking to those groups where they already are gathered. You have your newsletter, which that would be very, get very close to the bottom, right? That's, you might send that out to all of your constituents, maybe even your entire community down towards the bottom of the pyramid would also be things like your communication with mass media. So if you ever are working with your local newspaper or if there are local TV stations in your area and you're working with them, those would be mass communication tools. They reach out to large numbers of people indiscriminately. Your website would be down at the bottom of this pyramid. You know, it is open to literally anybody with an internet connection. It's not in any way targeted. So you put all of your communication tools that you can think of onto this triangle, onto this pyramid with smallest group outreach up towards the top, mass communications down towards the bottom. And the reason that we organize the communication tools this way is it helps you think about the different strengths and weaknesses of each tool. So when you think about the communications activities that are up at the top of that pyramid and let's go all the way to the one-to-one conversation, that is the place where you can actually change hearts and minds. That's where you can advocate for a new way of doing things or a new program or advocate to change the way something is done or ask someone to change their mind. The gold standard of communications activities and motives is that people you are communicating with be different as a result of your communications. The place where you can do that is in one-to-one or small group conversations. And the reason for that is when you are meeting with just one person, you aren't just spouting information at them. You are engaged in a dialogue with them. You can see their body language. You can see when they lean in and want more information about something. You can see when they cross their arms and sit back. You can see perhaps when they look offended or challenged by something that you might share, which gives you the opportunity to pause, to ask them about that, to seek their response, their input, their perspective. When you're talking with just one person or with a small group, you can know something about their values of the topic that you're talking about. You can identify the points that are most important to that person or to that small group so you can really customize your communications. You can be much more impactful. You can actually advocate and change people's minds up there. The downside to that, you know, there's a lot of great things about those small groups and one-to-one conversations from a communications efficacy and effectiveness standpoint. But the downside is it takes a lot of time and mental effort to customize your message to a particular person or a small group. And quite frankly, let's use a public library as an example. You don't have time to go have a one-on-one conversation with every single constituent in your community, unless you have a very small community. But if you're serving a city or town, you don't have time to go have a personal conversation with all 10,000 or 50,000 or 1.2 million people. So you have to decide who are the people that it's worth my time to invest that kind of time and effort in these smaller conversations. And so you might focus on those people that other people look to for kind of opinion-setters. So who are the leaders in your community, both formal and informal? Those are the people that you would ask to sit down and have a coffee with to talk about this new initiative or this ballot measure or this program or this thing where you want to do something different. Or your staff leaders, your association and labor leaders would be those are all people where you would spend your time in a one-to-one or small group conversation. You invest in them so that they fully understand, so that they've had a chance to get their questions answered. And then they go out and they can help spread the word further from there. But since you don't have time to have a one-on-one conversation with everybody, you need these other communication tools as well, the smaller group or the larger groups, the emails, the newsletters and so on. Because the mass communications, those tools that reach more people, the downside is you can't change people's hearts and minds with printed material or not very often, not unless someone's already kind of primed to change their mind. Are you likely to send out something in a newsletter that people go, "Oh, now I was going to vote no, but now I'm going to vote yes." That's very unlikely to happen. But you need to develop grassroots awareness about the issue so that those smaller conversations can spread out throughout your community and form kind of like a community-level dialogue or an engagement around the topic. While the downside of mass communications is you can't change people's hearts and minds with it, the upside is you write it once and 10,000 people, 50,000 people, maybe a million people read it and gain some new information that supports the cause that is then also supported through those other more personal communication tools.
J. Marie
When you're thinking about developing out a communications plan, keep in mind this idea of the communications pyramid, the idea that you need a variety of communication tools in order to reach out to the breadth of your audiences in ways that will actually help shift the conversation, shift the work, help make those big ideas that you want to move forward help make all of that possible.
J. Marie
All right, friends, thank you for nerding out with me today on a little bit of a niche topic within the communications and leadership field. I hope it has been helpful to you. I hope you remember that who you are and what you do matters.
J. Marie
And I hope you take really good care of yourself. Be well, friends.