I read this post about Residual Communication written by the British advertiser Dave Trott and it left a deep impression on me. You can read his post here.
The idea is pretty simple – what do people remember from what we said, long after we said it.
As a leader, I believe that we should obsess about residual communication. What do people remember the most after we had done sharing our vision, strategy or any idea. Our effectiveness as a leader depends on this.
We will move on to other meetings and to other tasks expecting our people to act on what we communicated.
If they don’t even remember the core of our communication, did we really communicate?
If they remember the wrong thing from our communication, did we really communicate?
If they remember the right thing but don’t act on it, did we really communicate?
It is only when they remember the right things, relevant to them and act on it that we succeeded with our communication.
This means that we would benefit by learning to communicate from some of the best communicators – the advertising creatives and the story tellers (movies, novels, etc).
We need to obsess about our communication as much as a creative in an advertisement agency obsesses about their ads. Specially, when it is an important piece of communication.
Every time, we come across an impressive piece of communication, it would be interesting to dissect the piece and try and learn as much as we can from the same.
We can listen to and learn from ad-men and storytellers about their strategies, tricks and tips, tools and frameworks that they use to make their communication leave the right kind of residual communication.
One trick that I have seen work really well is using Maxims or metaphors. Metaphors when used well, can connect something that people remember and know well to something that we want them to remember. The connection helps.
Every language and every medium provides us with tools, techniques and tips to leverage it to make our communication stick.
As leaders, the question we need to ask ourselves is this –
- Do we know what is the residual communication that we leave in the minds of our audience?
- Do we obsess about what we want to communicate and how we communicate it?
- How much time, energy and effort do we spend on improving our craft of effective communication?
- Do we ever test what is the residual communication that we leave our teams with?
In conclusion, all I can say is that leadership is difficult because it is multi-faceted. There is a lot of aspects that we need to think about and there is a lot of things that we need to learn and get better at. Being able to communicate effectively is one such skill and it is a meta skill. If we get better at this, a lot of other skills become easier to learn and implement.
PS: Here are some examples that come to mind which have left an indelible impression on me:
- Steve Jobs announcing a 1000 songs (or your entire music library in your pocket). You can watch his announcement here.
- Steve jobs taking out MacBook Air from an envelope. You can watch it here.
- The advertisement campaign of Skoda Hostel in Russia (Watch here)
- Musical steps to make it fun taking the stairs. (Watch here). I still remember it even though I watched it almost 10 years ago.
- Oreo Kintsugi campaign. Watch it here.
- Fevicol ads (You can watch them here, here, here, here, here and here).
- Great quotes serve the same purpose.
Do you remember any piece of communication that has left an indelible mark on your memory? What can you learn from it? Have we ever said something that has left an indelible mark on our teams?
