The Cornerstone: Strong Leadership Communications
A Two-Part Invention
Our last post on the director of communications role was signal-boosted by InspirED School Marketers (thank you!). I wanted to pause and welcome all the new subscribers. Below is the link to the post I wrote when I had the first wave of new subscribers a few weeks ago.
Included in that post, is a link to a communications professionals specific poll about topics for us to write about and consulting services to offer you might find helpful in your work.
TL;DR - here’s the link if you don’t want to read the whole welcome post. Interest poll
So glad you have all joined us!
And now, on to a new Mission Critical Communications post, co-authored by me and Lauren Castagnola, Director of Communications and Advancement Project Strategy at the University of New Haven. The first part is me because, in case you were wondering, because I am an Old.
Where We Were; Where We Are
I had to hop into the WayBack Machine to start this post, and let me tell you, it was quite a trip. So gather round the fire, my friends, toast a marshmallow and make a s’more as we travel in our minds back to 2002 and reflect on the face-flattening speed of change in school communications over the past twenty years.
In 2002, my first year as academic dean, I was still writing memos and putting them in faculty mailboxes. I think I had dial-up internet at home and a personal email for a few years by then. There was no such thing as “work email” at most schools. I remember the school getting a domain name and how it was a thing that it was a “.org” and not a “.edu.” There were six Macs locked in a tiny windowless room in the back of the library.
It’s pretty astonishing to think about how we were successfully operating a school. I have no idea how I was communicating on a regular basis with parents. I guess I wasn’t? And they didn’t expect it? I do remember carefully timed marathon sessions mailing out grades and comments and the triplicate form we used to send out progress reports detailing any between-grading period concerns so that a copy went into the student file, a copy to the advisor and the original to the parent. I remember the faculty meeting discussion when we decided the advisor should give the student a copy. That’s how casual it all was.
The head of the history department became the first part-time IT guy. Remember when that was a thing, fellow olds?
And to be fair, I do remember a lot more phone conversations with parents back in the day, and it seems conflictual ones were more common - but it could also be that my accumulating administrative experience and running of an increasingly tighter ship helped reduce those interactions as well. Hard to tell when you’re just meandering down memory lane.
Centralized email - First Class - came in around 2002/2003, and it seemed like such a miracle at first and then rapidly aged into unwieldy and frustrating (except for that sweet, sweet unsend feature that early Gmail did not have). Walnut Hill was then an early adopter of Gmail, and I remember using baby Google Docs and not having a cut-and-paste pull-down menu option. But the idea that you could collaborate on a doc remotely and not send a Word doc back and forth, remembering to turn on Track Changes or rename the file - amazing.
Then there was the Battle of Facebook. Facebook was the Great Enemy that was going to rot the children’s brains and/or be a predator gateway. So many faculty meeting hours were spent fretting over Facebook. (Though honestly, there is truth to the suspicion that social media was not a force for good for kids or anyone else.) But it was unstoppable. We would ban it, and then the kids would use proxy servers, and then the IT director spent all his time chasing down the use of proxy servers. By then, we proudly had a beautiful computer lab in a renovated academic building and one increasingly overextended professional IT director.
And then I went to a PD session by a renegade tech guy who asked us why we had all the computers locked into one room, like some kind of prison.
The iPhone burst on the scene around 2007, and here we are, a computer in every pocket, a Facebook account many of us know to check only occasionally, but lots and lots of texts.
Now it’s all routine, all part of the background noise. It’s easy to forget how fundamentally communication has changed in such a short amount of time; really, it took place in less than ten years. It is breathtaking when you think that residential telephones started to become common in the 1920s and reigned for over 75 years. I was recently deciding how to reconnect with an old friend, and I had to decide: email, snail mail card, text, social media DM? What is least likely to get buried in a mountain of other communication? And a cold phone call just wasn’t even on the list. Who picks up a call they aren’t expecting?
In 2023, instead of manifesting the fear that email and social media were going to be the end of English as we knew it - the end of reading and writing as we knew it - writing is more important now than ever and being sensitive to the nature of the delivery system has become almost as important. It is the continuing manifestation of the old Marshall McLuhan “the medium is the message.”
Once you see this laid out, I think it is tough to argue that schools do not need professionals to navigate through this still rapidly changing environment.
So twenty years ago, leadership communications used to be roughly two things: leaders in front of crowds, usually at structured and scheduled events ranging from required weekly school meeting times to faculty meetings to family weekend, graduation and other celebrations, writing up the strategic plan every five years, and letters - the cover letter to grades and comments, the cover letter to the re-enrollment contract, the summer welcome back to the new year, the welcome letter in the view book, etc.
Here we are at The Future
Now heads are not just expected to do all of the above, but to write regular notes to parents (at Westover, we did Thursday and Sunday night communications), regular emails to the internal adult community, an alumnae e-newsletter. And then there are the increasingly not-infrequent times where heads are required to unexpectedly step up and create a statement responding to a school, regional, or national crisis moment.
And while all organizations need to be upping their communications game, it is particularly urgent for schools and higher ed. Schools are about life itself. It is an extension of family and some people view it as an idealized version of humans in community. For most people, the experience of attending school is a foundational ingredient in their sense of self. Whether it relates to hopes and dreams about their child’s future or as alums, that the institution either reflects their values or provides a slate of priorities to be rejected - or a combo platter - people are looking to their schools for some kind of continuity. And we think this has just intensified as fewer Americans attend organized religious services and don’t have that community in their lives.
So in the modern world, what is leadership communications and why is it so important to a successful school communications strategy?
First of all, we feel compelled to say what it is not, and we say this without exception.
Effective leadership communication, and powerful school communications strategy, have nothing to do with whether or not the head of school is a “good” writer.
An inordinate number of heads (at least used to) come up through teaching English and history. (Julie: guilty here - English teacher, undergrad history major). I suspect a lot of heads who came up this way are proud of their writing skills and their powers of articulation.
JULIE SIDEBAR
I would count myself among them. I’ve been scribbling away at stories since I was a kid and I fervently identified with the Jo March character in Little Women. I spent honest to goodness student loan money to get an MFA in Creative Writing, training for which there are no jobs. (And this is not a humble brag - it was not one of the highly sought after, competitive programs.I didn’t get into those.) Although I have drifted away from creative writing at certain points in my life, what I have discovered over the past ten months is that being a writer is a core part of my identity and I am confident in my ability. (Although looking at old writing always, always brings along a deep cringe factor…and by “old writing,” I mean from last July.)
END SIDEBAR
We also suspect when people describe themselves as “good writers,” they aspire to be inspired and powerful writers with real talent for crafting a lyrical turn of phrase and the work ethic to take native talent and elevate it to prose that is special and memorable. Prose that might mean as much to someone else as certain pieces of writing have meant to them.
There are of course wonderful advantages to possessing this talent as a head of school and I’m sure this is where many memorable charges to the graduates are born. And it’s nice to feel like people appreciate the time you put into crafting your messages.
But it is a wonderful quality that has little to do with a powerful and effective school communications strategy.
Strong leadership communications controls and shapes the messages about the institution as it stands, as well as the future direction. It is clear and timely. It inspires through simple, direct precision about principles rather than rhetorical flourish. It is a consistent voice that reassures and asserts with a mild but discernible authority. It resonates as the words of the leader and the words of the institution.
It is a marriage of thoughtful and authentic brand messaging, head of school vision and institutional values brought together through the craft and skill of the director of communications.
The voice of the head informs this institutional voice but the voices are not one and the same.
And one other “not” - leadership communication is not synonymous with crisis communications. Crisis comms is part of it, and having an in-house team that is capable of triaging smaller crises is, I think, an undervalued asset in schools. But leadership comms is really about advancement at all levels.
And strong leadership communications are a differentiator. It sets the tone and the agenda for all other internal and external communications. Maybe you have a comfortable endowment and a waitlist and a steady Annual Fund that The Flood couldn’t disrupt. Then it’s important but not so crucial.
But for the rest of us, it is a marker of deeply caring, deeply invested stewardship of an institution that people are taking the time to craft these messages and convey what the school truly prioritizes and stands for.
So what elements go into strong leadership communications?
A skilled director of communications who can see the big picture, who is empathetic, and can make connections with people to draw them out, who is invested in really getting to understand the leader of the organization and observing and developing insights into where the organization is and where it is going.
A head of school needs time to think about the context of the world in which the school exists - whether that is the neighborhood, the city, the region, the country or the world. It is given that to be effective at her job, a head has to be attuned to where the school is and where it is going and have some sense of how to work within the culture to move it forward. But to excel at leadership comms, the head needs to develop a point of view on issues outside of school life and how school life relates.
The head of school and director of communications need to switch back and forth between who is conducting the orchestra and who is the first violin. There needs to be mutual respect and a certain degree of humility in approaching the relationship.
The head needs to learn to genuinely seek the director of communications’ input and listen.
JULIE SIDEBAR
Here’s the thing about managing people who have the expertise you do not, and this includes the school attorney. At the end of the day, you are getting valuable input, but it is up to you to make the decision. This means you need to take the time to understand what you don’t understand, and in the case of finance, legal issues, or communication strategy, what you don’t understand may be a lot.
END SIDEBAR
It is a given you’re the decision maker, but to make the best decision and to have a truly powerful partnership with a director of comms, you need to be humble and be relentless about what you don’t know and seek it out. And that means also knowing when to hand the baton over to the director of comms and take your seat as the first violin. You are still indispensable as the leader, but in certain situations, your role may be different.
And again, this is not just about crisis management. This could be about brand messaging, magazine redesign, or your remarks on revisit day. There are times you need to listen to the director of comms and then perform your role as only you can.
The director of comms needs to refine the message so school branding is woven in so articulately and craftily that the listener or reader won’t feel like the brand is being forced fed. This isn’t something that comes easily or quickly. And it doesn’t mean that you end every message with your tagline or school motto. But a very strong messaging platform will provide plenty of material for you to work with. Being able to utilize this talent is why hiring and retaining talented communications professionals is critical. ChatGPT can’t do this for you.
It’s more than grammar or “correct” language. Now don’t get us wrong, grammar is important. And as was mentioned earlier, many heads will pride themselves on properly crafted sentences, paragraphs, and inspired persuasive essays. But what are you really saying? What are people walking away with and feeling? This is where a really great director of comms has the knowledge and has earned the trust to be a true collaborator on messaging. You can craft a 500-word speech for the opening of the school year, but if you never tell a story that is relevant to your audience or craft a vision that guides your community through the year or acknowledges all that is happening in the world around us, then… what are you really saying?
Learn the head of school’s voice. And not just in critical situations. Be around her socially and in formal situations to learn how she frames her sentences, injects humor, and interacts with people. Watch her interact with different constituencies. This will be immensely helpful when crafting any message in order to make it feel authentic. Because nothing quite kills a message like a whiff of inauthenticity. Once you smell it, that scent is stuck in your nose (and brain) and frankly, the message is dead.
LAUREN SIDEBAR
Being authentic doesn’t mean “being yourself” at the expense of your audience. Authentic messaging isn’t brutal, unfiltered honesty or hastily crafted jokes or is overly emotional (MillerKnoll CEO Andi Owen’s recent “pity city” message is a good example of this). Authentic messaging should resonate with your audience. They don’t have to like what you are saying, but your message should move them along to rethinking a prior belief or considering a new position on an issue or problem.
END OF SIDEBAR
You will have to put yourself aside to write for someone else. We’re not saying that the head of school and the director of comms are in lock-step on every position. And each person deserves the time and space to have their own opinions. There are too many issues in the world right now to think that everyone will agree on all fronts. As we said earlier, the head of school is the decision maker, but the director of comms shouldn’t be a tail-wagging Golden Retriever who obeys commands. Healthy discussion and disagreement that may include the viewpoints of more than just the head of school and the comms director, are critical to developing quality leadership communications. But to write for someone else, to kind of worm into their brain, takes a considerable amount of energy. I (Lauren) find now that when I’m in the zone and writing for a leader, and I am interrupted, I find it utterly jarring. Discover what you need to be successful and then take steps to create the optimal environment, like creating boundaries to mitigate interruptions. Be sure to care for yourself as you write for someone else.
This is all about trust. Trust that the head of school is keeping the institution's best interest at the center of their decision-making. Trust that the director of communications is tending to the brand in all the ways we communicate to our various constituencies. And a good rapport is a foundation for such trust so that you can push back on each other and still enjoy the energy of a collaboration that has substantial results, a collaboration that matters. The joy of the rapport will also come through in the messaging.
Because when the head and the director of communications are in a groove, it informs the strategy and the content for all other school communications. Institutional elevation is the result.
Phew, this was fun! Clearly, we are still working out our collaboration energy in this context, so we wanted to say thanks for coming along for the ride. We are quite sure there are some incorrect constructions that remain in this piece after we’ve both been fiddling, but we think the joy’s in there too.
We look forward to diving into more topics in the weeks to come. Enjoy the weekend!
Julie and Lauren