The commonest piece of leadership communication advice is to say it like you mean it.
It is also the only part of the advice that cannot be rehearsed.
Everything else can. Pace. Pauses. Cutting the filler words. All of that is worth doing, and none of it touches what people are actually listening for.
What Rogers left out, and why
Carl Rogers noticed the problem in 1959. When he set out the conditions he believed therapy required, he deliberately left out any statement that the therapist communicates warmth or understanding to the client. He omitted it, he wrote, “only after much consideration”, and he gave two reasons.
“It is not enough for the therapist to communicate, since the communication must be received… to be effective.”
“It is not essential that the therapist intend such communication, since often it is by some casual remark, or involuntary facial expression, that the communication is actually achieved.”
Read those two sentences as claims about leadership and they describe two things that are outside a leader’s control at the moment of speaking.
The first is that what a leader transmits is partly involuntary: a casual remark, something crossing their face. The second is that whether the message lands is not the leader’s call. Reception belongs to the people listening.
So no, meaning it cannot be rehearsed.
Cannot be rehearsed is not the same as cannot be built
What is trainable sits upstream of the sentence. Four things, in particular:
- Knowing what you actually value. Not what you are supposed to value, or what the strategy document says.
- Wanting it for your own reasons rather than the reasons you were handed.
- Holding direction when things go wrong, which is when people are watching most closely.
- Whether your actions have matched your words for long enough that your words carry weight before you speak. This is the one people skip.
None of those four is delivery. All of them are preparation, and all of them can be worked on.
Which is why the honest word for the result is influence rather than control. A leader who does the upstream work is more likely to come across as meaning what they say. Not guaranteed to. Anyone promising a guarantee is selling delivery training.
How would you know if you had?
Then comes the harder question: how would a leader know whether they had come across as meaning it?
From the inside, mostly they would not. The psychotherapy research has an awkward finding in it. In a 2018 meta-analysis of empathy and outcome, measures of whether clients felt understood predicted outcome better than measures of whether the therapist had accurately read the client. That is an association rather than proof of cause, and I would rather say so. But it points in an uncomfortable direction: having meant something is no evidence of having been received as meaning it.
Leaders are worse placed than therapists here, because fewer people tell them.
So the test is not the leader’s own sense of sincerity, and it is not in the room. The test is whether anything changed afterwards:
- Did anyone act differently?
- Did anyone ask a real question, rather than a clarifying one?
- Who stopped bringing you things?
The commonest failure is an unfunded sentence
The commonest failure is not flat delivery. It is saying something you have not decided to pay for.
“We take wellbeing seriously,” said by someone who has not worked out what they would give up for it. The sentence is unfunded, the body knows, and the room reads it correctly.
You cannot say something with meaning until you have decided what it costs you. That decision happens long before you speak.
Where this came from
This piece came out of a conversation with Dr Miro Bada, who made the point that communication techniques only matter if the thing being said is meant. That is where I got stuck, and this is what came of it.
A question to sit with: what is the last thing you heard a leader say that you believed, and what made you believe it?
A worksheet to go with this
Before You Say It is a free worksheet that takes one sentence you say to the people you lead and works through whether you value it, whose reasons you are acting on, what it will cost you, and what changed afterwards. No sign-up needed. There are more like it on the free worksheets page.
References
Elliott, R., Bohart, A. C., Watson, J. C., & Murphy, D. (2018). Therapist empathy and client outcome: An updated meta-analysis. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 399–410.
Rogers, C. R. (1959). A theory of therapy, personality, and interpersonal relationships, as developed in the client-centered framework. In S. Koch (Ed.), Psychology: A study of a science. Vol. 3: Formulations of the person and the social context (pp. 184–256). McGraw-Hill.