The test of leadership communications isn’t when there is good news. That’s easy. Great communicators show their mettle when they have to share the uncomfortable, own up to mistakes or wrong doing, or admit to failure.
The past few months have seen a number of failures of leadership communications and I’m not talking just about the rollout of healthcare.gov. The New York Times today reported that the online calculator created to help doctors determine risks and then treatment for lowering cholesterol appears to be seriously flawed, causing one of America’s leading cardiologists to call for people to stop using them and prompting an emergency session at the meeting of the American Heart Association, which jointly published the guidelines with the American Society of Cardiologists.
Convey and Confirm
A year ago, two Harvard Medical School professors identified problems when they each received drafts of the guidelines to review independently. Both noted that the calculator wasn’t accurate when used with the populations the guidelines-makers were testing. Somehow there was a mix-up and the committee overseeing the development thought that the researchers had received and reviewed the professors’ concerns. It would seem they violated one of the five basic rules of leadership communications—convey and confirm. Don’t assume that folks have read, seen or heard your communications. Confirm that it was received and heard.
The mix-up defense on these guidelines raises more questions. Did no one bother to check with the professors because they didn’t want to hear what they had to say? The trouble with that line of reasoning is that eventually—and in this case rather quickly—the truth will come out. And now they will have to deal with a reputational cloud hanging over them. The professors will publish their concerns in the respected British medical journal, The Lancet.
Prompt Action
One of the cardinal rules of crisis communications is that when you have bad news, you get it out there quickly and then show how you are going to deal with the situation. Over and over again, it seems that smart people—good professional people—bury their heads in the sand, hoping that a flawed clinical trial, a website that isn’t ready for prime time, or misdeeds that hurt others will somehow go away. They don’t. It’s hard to admit failure, especially in our culture where winning is everything and, as Will Farrell’s character noted in the movie Talladega Nights, “if you aren’t first you’re last.” But we aren’t going to be successful all the time. To be human is to err. To be a leader is to own up to mistakes, to admit that something you thought would work doesn’t, and then deal with these situations honestly and forthrightly. That is leadership communications.
