How to be “Presidential”
I find the Presidential race in our country interesting, not because I’m particularly interested in civics or feel the outcome will have an enormous impact on my daily life. Rather, I’m interested in it as a study of how politicians successfully manage interpersonal relationships with millions of people.
I first took note of this about seven years ago when I had the opportunity to have lunch with Seattle’s mayor at the Columbia Tower Club. What struck me about him was how quickly he was able to create a rapport with each person in the room in only a few seconds (the length of a handshake). He did this by showing interest in each person - usually by asking a question to gain some information - and then genuinely relating to that bit of information he gained. To this day, I remember that the mayor’s sister lives in Kirkland and that he thinks the marina is quite lovely. This is amazing considering that I couldn’t tell you why we were there. Richmond PR won an award maybe?
A few years later, I had the opportunity to host a press conference for several outdoor industry executives at a stump speech by the then vice-presidential candidate John Edwards. This afforded me a front-row opportunity to watch a top-level public speaker at work. He’d probably given his speech a hundred times, but I was struck at how fresh the speech sounded and how he interacted with the audience. I realized then that outstanding public speaking requires not just a good speech but the skills of an actor as well. He’d clearly practiced the speech many, many times. Like an actor every hand gesture, every turn of the head, every raise of the eyebrows were choreographed to make you feel like YOU were the first person he’d ever told this to. Now that’s acting! Even more interesting, though, was that his comfort with the speech gave him the freedom to listen to the audience - really listen to them, like an actor would another person on stage or the audience - and feed off of them as a means to guide the flow of his speech. The effect was astounding. By the end of his speech he had upwards of 3,000 people eating out of his hands. He could have told them to vote for the purple-people eater and they probably would have said “okay!”
This brings me back to the current presidential race and my newest revelation about how politicians compete to win - show your strength even if you’ve failed. Here are a few examples:
Hillary Clinton. When asked about her failed attempt at universal health care during her husband’s first presidential term, she is always strong. She points out the positives: her intention to help others, what she learned, and how it will help her succeed in the future.
(Dad, you should probably sit down for this next one. I’m going to praise a Republican.)
Mike Huckabee. In a recent Republican debate, when Romney pointed out Huckabee’s “failure” of giving aid to illegal immigrants’ children, Huckabee’s answer was pure strength, “In all due respect, we’re a better country than to punish children for what their parents did. We’re a better country than that.” He didn’t apologize for spending taxpayer money on something the voters probably would not have agreed with. He re-framed what he did according to beliefs his voters could side with, “America is a good country” and “don’t punish children for parent’s mistakes.”
Consider the opposite approach: being overly apologetic.
John Kerry. He was so close to beating George Bush (and who knows exactly why he lost), but one thing is for sure, when talking about his vote for the Iraq invasion he did not have a position that sounded strong. He didn’t get “crushed,” but he certainly lost a key promotion, power and respect.
My takeaway: Avoid overly apologizing for failures. When talking about your failures, your message doesn’t have to say you were right, but it does need to re-frame your actions in a light of good intentions, thoughtful deliberations, logical reasoning, lessons learned, and common ground beliefs. When you have a big error, your goal should be to move on to future successes both in your actions and in your conversations.
Comments:
GREAT post!
America is unique in the entire world in that Americans have the freedom to fail without prejudice. This is untrue in most of the world where failure constitutes a stigma for life.
In America, you can stand up and say I failed, and then reframe the discussion with what you’ve learned, how you’ll use the lesson to succeed next time and so on.
In fact, how a person deals with adversity and failure reveals their character and if they have a strong character, can leave them more powerful, more influential, and more successful than they otherwise might have been.
I hate it when people act the victim when they fail: society was stacked against me, I was poor growing up, or someone should have protected me (often from myself.) How much more powerful learning from failures and moving on? How much more interesting to know the optimist charging forward after a failure, than the pessimist feeling powerless and sorry for themselves?
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