What communicators know that other people don't know (Part I)

Speechwriters and other communicators are often accused of putting on an air of superiority. They are often guilty.

"I've tried to tell the CEO that people don't want to hear him yammer for 45 minutes during a one-hour town hall meeting," the speechwriter will harrumph. "He just doesn't get it."

Or, as Edelman Public Relations' CEO Richard Edelman put it in his blog recently, "[Communicators] are in touch with dissonant voices such as non-governmental organizations. We can balance the needs of global marketing and local culture. We value the input of employees as partners in building great companies. We have a different mindset, in which relationships and listening are more important than selling and marketing. In short, we are the soft power advocates (to use a phrase invented by Prof. Joseph Nye at Harvard), who believe in attraction and persuasion rather than the hard power attributes of force and compulsion."

Have you ever heard such insufferable boorishness in your life? Of course you have: In every keynote speech of every communication conference you've ever attended.

As for the people who hire communicators and the colleagues from other disciplines who have to work with us, they don't give a rat's ass about "soft power" and "hard power." They respond to our arrogance with a question: "What is it exactly that communicators 'get' that other people don't?"

Here's the honest answer: Communicators know who Nelson Algren is. They know how to format a press release. They know how to write that press release in a way that won't embarrass the organization before those other undeserving snobs: journalists.

But of course that's not the reason communicators are arrogant. They are arrogant because they believe熔r are thought to believe葉hat they are the only people in the organization who know how to communicate.

I think what we fail to understand is that, no matter how we express that particular belief謡hether by words or by actions擁t is deeply offensive to all "non-communicators."

Every single person in the world spends most of his or her psychic energy trying, with varying levels of success, to communicate. With husbands or wives, kids and neighbors. With bosses, with underlings, with dotted-line reports. With store clerks and car salesmen, handymen, house-sitters and dog-walkers, not to mention the dog himself.

It is psychologically impossible for a person to get through the day thinking of him- or herself as a rotten communicator.

Hence, nobody wants to cede to you the title of superior communicator. Nobody wants to and nobody will.

Instead, they want to trap you in the slightest miscommunication or misunderstanding and they want to snort, "Ha! She's a professional communicator and she can't even communicate."

Communication is not a core competency that any engineer, accountant, lawyer or even marketing executive will respect as worthy of the same hundred thousand that he or she makes.

In short, communicators start the game behind the eight ball.

Now: Why do some communicators win the game anyway? I'll weigh in on that in my next post. Meanwhile, I'm eager to hear your ideas.