Withering heights

Industry comms guru Hayley Wood begins her intrepid column odyssey with a candid look at honesty

Someone called me ‘searingly honest’ recently. Being a language nerd, the use of ‘searing’ is a strange one to interpret – other than ‘a heat verging on the intensity of the sun’, its literal other meaning is ‘scathing’ or ‘savage’. Even ‘withering’. Yikes.

Compliment or otherwise, it did make me think about how brutally honest communication in our area of work is essential and yet is frequently bizarrely handled, even in crisis situations.

I sense that the perception of communications’ counsel is perhaps prejudiced by how we, as the communicators, perceive ourselves. Am I actually ‘withering’?

Having decided to take ‘searingly honest’ as a badge of honour, I reflected on my roles to date, wearing the jaded spectacles that a lengthy tenure in the pharma industry tells me I can get away with and still rock (think Elton John specs, but with a few diamantes missing and a screw loose in one arm).

Oddly enough, talking about honesty here, I won’t be covering AI and add to the maelstrom of discussions about how ChatGPT can be used to enhance our communications. I’m looking at old-fashioned plain speaking here.

In my kaleidoscope of a career, I recall difficult situations where colleagues or clients just wanted validation that ‘Yes, of course you’re right, this is absolutely the right thing to say/do’ even when better options may not have been tried before.

I pondered on demands to ‘challenge me’, but without being able to offer an immediate statistical analysis of the potential outcome of the communications, the counsel falls on deaf ears. I play back scenarios where ‘poor communication’ is offered up as an easy scapegoat when numbers don’t hit targets.

I replay being invited to honest discussions where an innate ability to carefully read people brings an almost savant overview of the situation – but being told that ‘feelings’ aren’t enough in commerce.

I revisit patient-focused campaigns that ended too soon, and I didn’t speak my mind with enough gumption because, well, because of egos. Why didn’t I speak up?

In each scenario, the confident, experienced communicator can present in one of two ways – with honesty or say nothing. Confidence is often misunderstood as being overbearing whereas honesty is just one thing – the truth.

It is impossible to misinterpret honesty because it is as pure as air, as fundamental as breathing. It is our integrity.

Put the two together, however, and the confidence of delivery can override the virtue of honesty. By this I mean that a confident communicator, perhaps searingly honest in the moment, can be misunderstood and dismissed. Why are we even in the room if we are ‘yes people’?!

I hit my 50s last year and with that distinct honour the scales fell from my eyes and my filter for truisms and cliched rulebooks destroyed.

I couldn’t feel more liberated to be that confident, honest communicator that I know I have always been, throwing my withering looks around the place – but the world we work in needs to sit up a little bit.

I don’t just mean to listen to the blisteringly obvious from me, but to the words and true insights of the people in your teams, in your businesses, who are paid to put their confidence on the line to deliver the searing truths you actually need to hear, every day.

It might just be about how the next corporate volunteering day is publicised in your team – best to be honest about needing wellies – or it could be as fundamentally crucial to the business as advice on a product stock issue, a delayed licence or launch, pipeline failure or the impact of VPAG or the Windsor Framework.

Be honest, communications are about more than fluffing press releases. We only need to read Emily Brontë really: ‘Honest people don’t hide their deeds.’ (Wuthering Heights, 1847).