In Norman Mailer’s monumental novel The Naked and the Dead, a character named General Cummings gives to his troops a short talk that is an interesting example of leadership communication.
The General addresses his troops during a storm on an island in the Pacific. The wind and rain have blown away their tents, and driven the men to take cover behind the tanks in the motor pool. They are soaked, frozen, and covered with foul-smelling mud.
“You men, you men here,” the General shouted as he came near them, “how do you feel…wet?”
The men laughed. “It’s all right,” he shouted, “you’re not made of sugar.”
Then in a more normal tone to a major and lieutenant who were with him, “I do believe the rain’s about to halt. I just telephoned Washington, and the War Department assured me it was bound to stop.” The two officers laughed. Some of the men smiled: The General was a swell guy, a perfect example of an officer.
The General warns them of an imminent attack by the Japanese, tells them they’ll be marching all night through the jungle to reach the front lines before dawn, gets in his Jeep and leaves. The men spit out their opinions: swell guy, son-of-a-bitch, okay for my money, and then one of the men says, “He’s a crowd pleaser, that’s all he is.”
In this fictional context, what does that phrase mean—crowd pleaser? Is crowd pleasing good or bad in leadership communication? In this instance, the soldier seems to be saying that he doesn’t trust the General—that the General is a phony, more show than substance, that he cares more about being liked than standing up for something important.
But isn’t being a crowd pleaser a good thing? After all, if you can’t please your crowd by keeping things on their level, clear, and understandable, with a few good stories and examples, and a little humor to make your material come to life, then the crowd won’t listen to you, and you’ll be wasting your breath and their time.
So when in leadership communication does crowd pleasing go over the line and become something else, and what is the point at which there is not enough crowd pleasing to keep the audience interested in what you have to say?
Audience and context
Let’s take a look at the role of audience and context in leadership communication. If you and I were planning a big sales meeting, and looking for a top notch speaker, and I said, “I know who we should get: Bobbie Vendiletta. He’s a real crowd pleaser,” you might ask me about his qualifications, but the fact that I consider him a crowd pleaser would be positive.
However, if we had to select an internal speaker to present a complex and controversial change-management process to the board in order to save the company, and I said, “We should get Bobbie to do it. He’s a real crowd-pleaser,” you’d probably look at me with a degree of concern.
Leadership communication: Good and bad
So let’s look at the negative side of crowd pleasing in leadership communication.
Pandering
Pandering is telling the audience what they want to hear, flattering them, or trying to get them to like you by nodding, smiling, and telling irrelevant jokes.
I remember seeing James Carville speaking to a convention of CFOs. He began his talk with a litany of one-liners, until someone in the crowd with hands cupped around his mouth, shouted, “Get on with it.” The hand-cupper had concluded that Carville was pandering—Democrat to Republican CFOs—in an effort to soften them up before he sang the battle hymn of the democratic party.
Or how about a presidential candidate telling the American Pork Association that he loves pork chops more than apple pie. That’s pandering with a capital P!
Grandstanding
Grandstanding is exaggerating, pontificating, and putting on a display that is too showy for the venue. The word probably comes from the effort speakers make to be heard in larger forums—to reach the grandstands. Shouting, speaking in rhythmical, intoned phrases, and gesturing in an overly dramatic manner are just some of the ways speakers can offend the sensibilities of some audiences.
General Cummings was not grandstanding, but he was ingratiating himself to his audience in an effort to soften the bad news of his announcement. Mailer portrays some soldiers admiring the General, and others being contemptuous, so the softening up did please a portion of the crowd.
Boasting
Whenever you give yourself a compliment in front of an audience, you run the risk of being seen in a negative light.
For instance, at cocktail parties, making sure that everyone knows you went to Harvard is a sure way to get yourself derogated when the party is over. Going to Harvard is great, but feeling the need to tell people about it is a sign of unattractive emotional needs.
Telling stories that make you look heroic, even if they are true, is not a wise action. It will only make your audience think you have no social graces, and are in desperate need of approval.
It’s interesting to note that when a speaker makes himself big and important by boasting, many in the audience will deem him small. But when he pokes fun at himself, thereby belittling himself, the same people will consider him large in character for his humility.
Crowd pleasing as a positive in leadership communication
What truly pleases a crowd? Ted Sorensen, President Kennedy’s main speech writer, said, “Brevity, levity, and charity.”
Brevity is generally a crowd pleaser, as long as the subject is not overly simplified. But structure, drama, and the development of an idea (strengths and weaknesses) can be just as pleasing as brevity, and perhaps even more so.
Levity is almost always a crowd pleaser. Humor gives a speaker an unfair advantage. It changes the chemistry of the room. Charles Strobel, a professor at Yale, proved that when we smile or laugh we literally change the enzymes in our brains. And PS: the best humor is self-effacing humor—as mentioned above. (By the way, the General got people to laugh and he was brief. However, some characters in the crowd thought his humor inappropriate.)
Charity allows us to avoid intemperate speech, to give all parties the benefit of the doubt, and to dwell in the world of possibility. Recently, during the debate over the raising of the debt ceiling (the summer of 2011) the importance of civility in public speech was conspicuous by its absence.
Personally, I like leadership communication to be relaxed and authentic. I like speakers who are prepared, who don’t draw attention to themselves, and who have something original and insightful to say.
The take-away from the debate about General Cummings, his leadership communication skills, and his status as a crowd pleaser? You need a baseline of crowd pleasing in your leadership communication, if only because the human mind needs to be engaged in your talk. Some leaders please some audiences by being tough as nails, others by being personable, and others by sticking to the facts. An audience of Wall Street analysts are different from the riled up sales force.
But leadership communication can’t make pleasing its primary purpose. If I may be so bold, leadership needs to challenge us, to move us from where we are to where we could be, and by doing so, encourage us to go beyond what we currently believe to be our best.