Personality in leadership

Steve Roesler has an excellent example of how leaders should be using authenticity and personality.

Whether it's a marketing/PR message, or an announcement to your people, it's not enough to just give the facts. Humans are emotional as well as rational creatures and so we have to give credence to both.

Comments

[Alistair Birch]

Thanks for the reminder about this, Tom, it's so easy to get focussed on communicating the process, the tasks and The Big Plan and forget that we all want to connect personally and know that others understand us and what we feel about what's going on.

I have a key presentation to give to a big local charity tomorrow night about their Web 2.0-ish infrastructure changes - it will be way different because of this. Thanks : )

Interestingly, re people relating to you on an emotional level, a while back a very experienced charity manager was speaking to me about leadership, talking about the temptation as a leader to always present an "I've got it together" front. He said, "Al, I've found that people relate to you out of weakness, not out of strength." He'd found that a willingness to be vulnerable about his feelings, weaknesses and struggles engendered empathy and a sense of identification in those he was leading, rather than it undermining his position.

This sounds obvious when you state it like this, but was very helpful advice for me at the time.