Business Communication

How Great
Communicate Leaders
by Carmine Gallo
November 23, 2022

master1305/Getty Images

Summary. Transformational leaders are exceptional communicators. In this piece,

the author outlines four communication strategies to help motivate and inspire
your team: 1) Use short words to talk about hard things. 2) Choose sticky
metaphors to reinforce key concepts.... more

In the age of knowledge, ideas are the foundation of success in

almost every field. You can have the greatest idea in the world,
but if you can’t persuade anyone else to follow your vision, your
influence and impact will be greatly diminished. And that’s why
communication is no longer considered a “soft skill” among the
world’s top business leaders. Leaders who reach the top do not
simply pay lip service to the importance of effective
communication. Instead, they study the art in all its forms —
writing, speaking, presenting — and constantly strive to improve
on those skills.

For example, while Jeff Bezos was building Amazon, he put a

premium on writing skills. In the summer of 2004, he surprised
his leadership team and banned PowerPoint. He replaced slides
with “narratively structured memos” that contained titles and full
sentences with verbs and nouns.

Bezos is not alone among top leaders. “You cannot over-invest in

communication skills — written and oral skills,” says former
PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, who now serves on Amazon’s board. “If
you cannot simplify a message and communicate it compellingly,
believe me, you cannot get the masses to follow you.”

During my research for The Bezos Blueprint, I found a number of

common tactics top leaders use when communicating with their
teams. Here are four to try:

1. Use short words to talk about hard things.

Long, complicated sentences make written ideas hard to
understand — they’re mentally draining and demand more
concentration. You’ll win more fans if you replace long words and
sentences with short ones.

“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not
use complex language where simpler language will do,” writes
Nobel prize–winning economist Daniel Kahneman in Thinking,
Fast and Slow. He argues that persuasive speakers and writers do
everything they can to reduce “cognitive strain.”
Software tools like Grammarly assess writing quality by
generating a numerical readability score. The score assigns a
grade level to writing samples. For example, a document written
for a person with at least an eighth-grade education (the average
13-year-old in the U.S.) is considered “very easy to read.” It does
not imply that your writing sounds like an eighth grader wrote it.
It simply means that your sophisticated arguments are easy to
grasp — and ideas that are easy to understand are more
persuasive.

Since writing is a skill, you can sharpen it with practice. Bezos

improved as a writer over time. His first Amazon shareholder
letter in 1997 registered at a tenth-grade level (comparable to The
New York Times). Over the next decade, 85% of his letters were
written for an eighth- or ninth-grade level.

For example, in 2007, Bezos explained the benefits of Amazon’s

newly introduced Kindle in a paragraph a seventh grader could
understand:

If you come across a word you don’t recognize, you can look
it up easily. You can search your books. Your margin notes
and underlinings are stored on the server-side in the “cloud,”
where they can’t be lost. Kindle keeps your place in each of
the books you’re reading, automatically. If your eyes are
tired, you can change the font size. Our vision for Kindle is
every book ever printed in any language, all available in less
than 60 seconds.

Bezos chose short words to talk about hard things. When you
make things simple, you’re not dumbing down the content. You’re
outsmarting the competition.
2. Choose sticky metaphors to reinforce key concepts.
A metaphor is a powerful tool that compares abstract ideas to
familiar concepts. Metaphors bring people on a journey without
ever leaving their seats. Chris Hadfield, a famous Canadian
astronaut, is a talented speaker and TED Talks star who tapped
into the power of metaphor to describe an indescribable event:

Six seconds before launch, suddenly, this beast starts roaring

like a dragon starting to breathe fire. You’re like a little leaf in
a hurricane…As those engines light, you feel like you’re in
the jaws of an enormous dog that is shaking you and
physically pummeling you with power.

Roaring beasts, leaves in a hurricane, the jaws of a dog — these are

all concrete ideas to describe an event that few of us will ever
experience.

In business, metaphors are shortcuts to communicating complex

information in short, catchy phrases. Warren Buffett understands
the power of metaphor. If you watch business news or follow the
stock market, you’ve no doubt heard the phrase “moats and
castles” attributed to companies that dominate an industry that’s
difficult for competitors to enter. Buffett popularized the phrase
at a 1995 Berkshire Hathaway meeting when he said, “The most
important thing we do is to find a business with a wide and long-
lasting moat around it, protecting a terrific economic castle with
an honest lord in charge of the castle.”

The castle metaphor is a concise shortcut, a vivid explanation for

a complex system of data and information that Buffett and his
team use to evaluate potential investments.
When you introduce a new or abstract idea, your audience will
automatically search for something familiar to help them make
sense of it. Introduce a novel metaphor and beat them to the
punch.

3. Humanize data to create value.

The trick to reducing cognitive load and making any data point
interesting is to humanize it by placing the number in
perspective. Showing them PowerPoint slides with statistics and
charts only adds cognitive weight, draining their mental energy.

Any time you introduce numbers, take the extra step to make
them engaging, memorable, and, ultimately, persuasive.

For example, by 2025 scientists expect humans to produce 175

zettabytes of data annually, or one trillion gigabytes. It’s simply
too big a number for most people to wrap their minds around. But
what if I said that if you could store 175 zettabytes of data on
DVDs, the disks would circle the earth 222 times? It’s still a big
number, but the description is more engaging because it paints a
vivid image in your mind’s eye.

Famed astrophysicist and science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson

once told me that the secret to science communication is to
“embed the concept in familiar ground.” In other words, turn data
into language mere humans can understand.

One of Tyson’s famous examples of humanizing data occurred in

1997 when NASA launched the Cassini space probe to explore
Saturn. Skeptics questioned its $3 billion price tag, and so Tyson
appeared on television talk shows to educate the public on the
benefits of the mission. But first, he had to deal with the price
shock, so he pulled a data comparison out of his rhetorical
toolbelt. He explained that the $3 billion would be spread over
eight years. He added that Americans spend more on lip balm
every year than NASA would spend on the mission over that
timeline.

To demonstrate the value of your idea, humanize data and make

it relevant to your listeners.

4. Make mission your mantra to align teams.

In 1957, a power outage knocked out electricity to large parts of
Wisconsin and Minnesota. Earl Bakken, a medical device
repairman working in his garage, saw an opportunity to create
innovations in the field. So he built the first battery-powered
pacemaker that kept working even when the power went out.

At that moment, Bakken’s life took on a purpose beyond just

fixing things. He was on a mission to “alleviate pain, restore
health, and extend life.”

Bakken passed away in 2018, more than 50 years after founding

Medtronic. The company has changed considerably since then.
Its 90,000 employees work across 150 countries and its therapies
touch the lives of two patients every second. But while much has
changed, one thing has stayed the same: Medtronic’s employees
are driven by the same six words that inspired Bakken: alleviate
pain, restore health, extend life.

Bakken was a “repeater in chief,” constantly keeping the

company’s mission front and center. Shortly before Bakken
passed away at the age of 94, he recorded a video for employees.
He repeated the company’s mission and made one request: “I ask
you to live by it every day.”

A mission statement that’s tucked in a drawer and largely

forgotten does little to align teams around a common purpose.
Harvard Business School professor John Kotter found that most
leaders under-communicate their vision by a factor of 10.
“Transformation is impossible unless hundreds or thousands of
people are willing to help, often to the point of making short-term
sacrifices,” Kotter writes.

Transformational leaders overcommunicate. They repeat the

mission so often, it becomes a mantra. A mantra is a statement or
slogan that builds in strength as it’s repeated.
Overcommunication fuels its impact. Your mission should take
center stage. Shine a spotlight on your company’s purpose across
communication channels: memos, emails, presentations, social
media, and marketing material. If your mission stands for
something, then stand up for it.

...

Anything worth accomplishing takes the work of a team, a group

of people dedicated to the passionate pursuit of a dream, a
common vision. While some teams follow leaders who are granted
power through sheer title alone, the most successful teams follow
leaders because they are inspired to do so.

Carmine Gallo is a Harvard University

instructor, keynote speaker, and author of 10
books translated into 40 languages. Gallo is the
author of The Bezos Blueprint: Communication
Secrets of the World’s Greatest Salesman (St.
Martin’s Press).