Stories | 6 min read
You’re in Public Affairs Now. Nobody Told You.
The all-hands that changed nothing. The text that landed wrong at home. The room that goes quiet when you walk in. The public affairs training I got in the Marine Corps taught me why: a message is not decoration. Somebody always acts on it.
The short version
Leadership communication isn’t polish you add after the real decisions. Every email, all-hands, text and silence is an instrument: your people act on it, at work and at home. When a message fails, the cause is usually one of three: it wasn’t true enough, it wasn’t clear enough, or it reached the wrong people in the wrong order.
The all-hands went perfectly. Then nothing changed.
You prepped it all weekend. Tight slides, a clean story. Monday morning you gave it everything. No questions. A couple of people even said great talk.
Three weeks later, the same problem is back on your desk. Somebody asks a question you answered on slide four.
It’s late, the office is empty, and you’re rewriting the first line of an email for the sixth time. You soften it, then soften it again, until it’s safe enough to send and says almost nothing.
Between meetings, from the parking garage, you text someone at home: “Fine. Do whatever you think.” You meant I trust you. It landed as I don’t care. The house was quiet when you got in, and it took you a day to work out why.
And there’s the one you never say out loud. You walk into a meeting and the laughing stops. A laptop closes. Everybody’s suddenly busy with their coffee.
You talk all day. So why does so little of it land the way you meant it?
There’s a check for any message that matters. It’s three questions long, and you’ll have it before the end.
An instructor called it a curse. He was half right.
I joined the Marine Corps in 1995. In 1996 the Corps trained me in public affairs at the Defense Information School. The discipline was getting the true message to the right people, in places where getting it wrong mattered.
I remember what an instructor told us that year. He said the training would be a curse. The way we were being trained, we’d be able to see everything that was going on in the market.
He wasn’t wrong. Once you learn how a message is built, you can’t stop seeing it. You see the parts, and you see what they’re pointed at.
Here’s how I took it: “It was a curse, but I looked at it as a blessing in the respect that I was able to take those powers and actually use them for good.”
A message is an instrument. Somebody pays for where you point it.
As I’ve written before:
In that world, a message is not decoration. It is not a vibe. It is not a growth hack. A message is an instrument that moves real people to do real things in the real world.
Spin a message to serve yourself and somebody else pays for it. I learned communication in a place where words carried weight, and I never put that weight down. To me, everything comes down to communication.
Your team reads the silence too
You might be thinking, I’m not in public affairs. I run a company.
You’re in it whether you signed up or not. Every email, every all-hands, every hallway comment is a message. So is your face in the elevator after a hard board call. So are the two days you said nothing after bad news because you didn’t have all the facts yet.
Your people filled that silence for you, and their version was worse than the truth. Leave the page blank and people write the worst draft.
That room that goes quiet when you walk in? They’re reading you. Your mood is the most important memo in the building, and you never sent it on purpose.
Home runs on the same law. The person across the table reads the phone you check at dinner, the half-answer you give while reading a text, the sigh at the door. You can lead a whole company and still not be heard in your own kitchen. If that’s the part nobody knows about, I wrote about why it gets lonely at the top.
Turning up the volume is how the message gets lost
You came up in a world that treated communication like decoration, something to polish after the real decisions. So when pressure hits, you do what that world taught you. You turn up the volume: more meetings, more updates, more urgency in the subject line. And your people end up more confused than before.
A second megaphone won’t fix a message aimed at the wrong target. Volume was the only tool that world handed you. Aim is the one that works.
Never dress up bad news to protect yourself. People can handle a hard truth. What they can’t handle is finding out you shaded it.
I’ve seen the same tools pointed the wrong way
After the uniform, for a lot of years I worked behind other people’s names. I saw how easily the same skill could be pointed at things that weren’t true. The skill was neutral. What mattered was what you pointed it at.
So I drew a line, and I still hold it: “I won’t be illegal, dishonest, deceptive, unethical, because all money ain’t good money. And I’ve actually walked away from many a gigs who want to play that way.”
Hold the same line with your team and at home: true words, aimed on purpose.
Two fair doubts before you click
“I don’t need someone asking how I feel about it.” Good, because that’s not how I work. You’ll get a straight read on what I see and what I’d do in your seat.
“This turns into a sales call.” The next page sells nothing. You mark the rooms yourself, it stays on your screen, and nothing gets saved or sent anywhere.
The three-question check, before your next hard message
Here’s the check I promised. Before the email, the all-hands or the text from the parking garage:
- Is it true? Would it hold up if the person reading it already knew everything you know?
- Is it clear? Could they act on it without asking you what you meant?
- Is it going to the right people, in the right order? The ones who’ll carry it hear it first, from you, before the hallway does.
If any answer is no, fix that before you hit send. It’s the oldest thing I know about leading, and the most useful.
Words are the pipes between the rooms of your life. When a message breaks at the office, it rarely stays there. It shows up at dinner, on the drive home, at 1 a.m. with one more decision still running.
The next page walks you through the ten rooms of the house you built, with a scorecard at the end. It takes about ten honest minutes.
From there, if a room stings, you can book The First Call. It’s a free fifteen minutes with me or someone on my team, and nothing’s sold or paid on it.
Common questions
How can I communicate better as a leader?
Treat every message as an instrument. Decide what’s true before you decide how to say it. Say it plainly, once, to the people who’ll carry it, before they hear it somewhere else.
How should a leader deliver bad news to the team?
Early, plainly and from you. Wait days for every fact and your people will fill the silence with a worse version. Say what you know, what you don't yet, and when you'll say more.
Why does my team go quiet when I walk into the room?
Usually because they're reading you. A leader's mood, face and silences carry more weight than any memo. Ask what message you're sending without meaning to.
Find out where the message stopped landing
You talk all day, and some of it still isn’t landing where it matters most. Walk the ten rooms and see which ones your words stopped reaching.
My coaching, facilitation, training and development aren’t therapy or medical care, and they aren’t legal, tax or financial advice. Nothing here promises an outcome. If you’re in crisis in the US, call or text 988.
Lead your power.
You’ve chosen every word for everyone else
Years of getting the message right for the team, the clients, the people at home. Let someone sit across from you while you say the one you haven’t said yet.
Start small. Walk the ten rooms, mark what you find, and if one stings, pick fifteen minutes on the calendar.