10 promises PR leaders must make to their teams

No matter the medium, your ability to motivate and persuade rests on your ability to communicate. This is common advice. It’s not common practice.

Poor communication stunts great ideas.

Your leadership and your team’s effectiveness suffer when your best ideas disappear in five-page emails or three-hour meetings. Make these 10 promises to your team to ensure your great ideas don’t get lost:

1. I promise to tell more stories to communicate.

The easiest way to make a talk forgettable: Include nothing more than data and information. Even new policies can be enlivened by using hypothetical story-form examples of what to do and what not to do. When communicating a point, ask yourself, “Will a story get this idea across?”

2. I promise to drop vogue words and clichés.

Stand out from your colleagues: Refusing to write the tired, boring words that soak up white space on memos, words that fill the gaps between great ideas in many speeches. Ban the following words and phrases: Disrupt, low-hanging fruit, circle back, deep dive, synergy, move the needle, drill down … you get the idea.

3. I promise to cut communication—written or spoken—by two thirds.