Will Leaders Dare Comfort Their Afflicted Now?
January 16, 2025
Five years ago, CEOs and university presidents tried to fill a national leadership void. In the age of "institutional restraint," who will step up now?
As the new administration approaches the gates, people who help institutional leaders communicate are trying to figure out which way the wind will blow (and whether it will blow hard enough erase lines drawn in the sand). Others are helping brainstorm names for their DEI programs and ESG programs that donโt sound like โDEI programsโ and โESG programs.โ โThatโs the game weโre playing,โ a communicator told me the other day.
And at least one exec comms pro I know is looking to position the corporation and its leadersโinternally, at least, to disoriented and upset employeesโas a port in the storm, the Thing That Can Be Relied Upon in uncertain times, a coherent sub-society insulated from a roiling nation and world by corporate mores and values.
That impulse sounds familiar. A little too familiar.
In June of 2020, I made a speech at a virtual summit convened by the Executive Communication Council. I said that for most of its history, exec comms had essentially been a socially useful form of window dressing. Leaders were invited to high-profile events in order to say the expected things on the usual subjects: global trade, sustainability, technology. And say the expected things, they did. And if they said those things with a little extra verve or a vivid metaphor, that was called โthought leadership.โ
But then there had come a more emotive, more seemingly substantive kind of executive communication during the insanely transformative calendar year between Fall 2019 and Summer 2020. Survivors will recall that that was the period that saw the change in the official Purpose of a Corporation from shareholder primacy to the more democratic stakeholder capitalism. That then saw the empathetic corporate rhetoric of COVID. And that then saw the emotional break in the wake of George Floyd. All in the run-up to what became a chaotic and ultimately violent national election.
Providentially, my organization founded the Executive Communication Council smack in the middle of that year. Over and over during that time, I pointed out that people need leadership and will take it where they can find it. And if the president of the nation doesnโt have broad enough credibility and accountability to console or reassure most Americans, then people will turn to the president of the university they attend, or the CEO of the company they work for. And when people turned to CEOs back then, many CEOs responded.
President Obama had cried after Sandy Hook โฆ
โฆ and Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg cried after George Floyd.
That and other heartfelt CEO expressions aside, I donโt think corporate leaders are, generally, the proper leaders of our culture. Theyโre useful in times of great turmoil, because they share with the rest of us common interest in social and economic stability. Beyond that, they should mostly tend their own gardens, which if sufficiently broadly defined, are complex enough societies in and of themselvesโas many CEOs and other institutional leaders have publicly come to agree, issuing eloquent statements about their new commitment to โinstitutional restraintโ and hoping to avoid the attention of college cow-tippers like Bill Ackman and corporate cow-tippers like Robby Starbuck.
But if the next iteration of executive communication will retain any of the qualitative advances itโs made since the window-dressing days, itโll still have to be done under the proviso offered this week by my friend and frequent exec comms correspondent Justine Adelizzi, founder of the aptly named firmย FearlessComms: โStop thinking thereโs something you can say that no one will criticize you for. It doesnโt existโand the search for it is keeping you from saying anything at all.โ
Whatโll it be, folks? Weโll (all) be watching.