Wasn’t it refreshing to hear Obama say, “I screwed up” earlier this week? “I’ve got to own up to my mistake…,” he continued, addressing the breakdown in the vetting process for administration nominees.
While having grasped the attention of the listener with this admission, he then skilfully stayed on message: “…ultimately my job is to get this thing back on track because what we need to focus on is a deteriorating economy and getting people back to work.”
Obama is certainly leading, what he himself has coined, “this new era of responsibility.” Can you picture Prime Minister Harper saying he made a mistake? Or Pope Benedict, who recently revoked the excommunications of a bishop who denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers? Obama is defining the qualities of the new leader – defined by honesty and integrity while showing a human face. This is, after all, what we want from our leaders.
As a PR professional, how do we embrace this new era of honesty? How do we guide our clients and company leaders to speak with this level of candour? It takes a leader with lots of self-confidence and a sincere belief that truthfulness and openness will be rewarded. It requires a faith in the public. This mindset is what we are currently observing on the Internet – forced upon by the rise of social media – whether we like it or not. (It is no coincidence, then, that Twitter and Facebook have been incorporated into Obama’s world, or that he gets to keep his Blackberry while in office, albeit with limited use.)
For resisting business leaders who refuse to have these frank conversations with the media, their employees and their customers — preferring instead to stay on the corporate message track — they will miss out. A new bar has been raised by Obama, and the public will be less and less likely to respond to a leader who lacks that authenticity. And it will be up to us, PR professionals, to give this level of counsel to our clients, spokespeople and company leaders.
