Why Can’t All Leaders Communicate Like Jeff Bezos?
The media world was abuzz today at the announcement that Jeff Bezos, found of Amazon is purchasing the Washington Post. My faculty colleague Butch Ward (seen here with me in a seminar session) and I teach the topic of change management, and we both emphasize the importance of the leader's communication in times of change.
It shouldn't have surprised us, then, to discover that we both reacted in the same way when we read the memo Bezos sent to the Post staff about the historic news. We were so impressed that we wrote about it for our Institute's website, Poynter.org. Our editor combined them into one column that looks at the effectiveness of Bezos' words and why they are so much better than many management memos. I wrote:
When I’m teaching about leadership and change, one of the key change “accelerators” I invoke is communication. It’s a skill that many managers — even those in media — take for granted. At a time when emotions and uncertainty are high, when people are learning new things and letting go of the old, when people on the outside are questioning and the people on the inside want to believe they know the right answers — they turn to their leaders. Too often, they get management-speak that’s aimed at boardrooms, not boiler rooms, and certainly not to newsrooms filled with people who write for a living and know fluff when they read it.Butch wrote:
I don’t know what lies in store for The Washington Post. Maybe one day journalists will be quoting this memo for stories about failed strategies. But for today, it stands as an example of what to say when you want a room filled with nervous employees to believe.To see the Bezos memo -- and my paragraph by paragraph critique, just click on this link.
