People, you’ve got the power over what we do
You can sit there and wait
Or you can pull us through
Come along, sing this song
You know that you can't go wrong
Jackson Browne
Let me tell you about this truth my friend Jeff laid on me a few weeks ago. Jeff is a serial entrepreneur and all-around wise man, and he observed, “in any communication, the listener has all the power.” That profundity has been tumbling around in my head ever since. It’s a great way for leaders to think about communication. When it comes to a delivered message, the ear has it all over the mouth.
When we talk about power in relation to listeners, we usually refer to active listening, listening to understand, and other leadership listening techniques. That’s all great stuff but not what Jeff was getting at. The truth is that when you communicate, whether through speaking or writing, you give all the power over your message to the audience. They then can receive it, reject it, overlook it, distort it, interpret it, misinterpret it, or whatever they want! They can love it, or they can hate it, and you can do very little about the situation even if you are the boss! Once you have delivered your message, it is no longer yours to control. Importantly, though, while you have lost control, you still have ownership over the message. You are still responsible for it no matter how it is received!
Let’s call this the messaging paradox, the idea that no matter how much care you take in crafting a message, you own it but never will control it.
Oh, so you want an example? Take this very piece. My goal is to hook you with my ideas and my writing and engage you in an intellectual exchange. As an author, I have a degree of authority by definition, but that authority is but vapor the moment I hit the button to publish because at that moment—or, more precisely, at the moment you read this—my authority evaporates. The rules of copyright aside, you have the power. You get to decide what to do with my piece from there. You can read it and just forget what I say or willfully misrepresent what you read. You can read something in it that I never intended. You can get caught up in the thrill of my prose and never even bother to suss out my meaning, or you can just move onto something else without a thought. You could just stop reading right here!
…Hey! Happy you’re still with me!
Worse still, your reading itself can change! You can hear it one way today and another tomorrow. In the end, the success of delivering my message depends less on my skill and rhetoric than it does on some lucky guesses about you, the audience. Your mood, interests, biases all shape your interpretation, and I have no sure control over any of that. Once my message is out there with you—in the wild, so to speak—my direct influence is pretty much at an end. Sure, some people find great success manipulating audiences through communication, but there are no guarantees. Once they deliver their message, all they can really do is hope. All I have is hope. And trying to reassert control over the meaning of my message is as likely to go sideways as it is to hit home.
Let me give you a great example of that. The country singer Jason Aldean has stirred up a humdinger of a controversy with a new music video for his shitkicker ditty “Try That in a Small Town.” The song extolls the saintly virtues of “good ol' boys, raised up right” while the video runs footage of rioting urban protestors. The apparent suggestion is that, unlike country folk, city folk are just not “raised up right.” Given the video’s imagery and the association of urbanity with African Americans, some have seen the song as racist, which Aldean denies. Predictably, having now delivered and thereby lost control of his message, his efforts to regain control over it have backfired as actual racists now defend the song. It also doesn’t help his cause much that the concert portion of the video was filmed on the site of a notorious lynching. Nor did he do himself any favors by lying about about the sources of his video montage, by claiming “there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage.” Nonsense! In a tweet, he defended himself by saying that his song is intended to evoke “the feeling of a community that I had growing up,” which is itself misleading since his was largely raised in Macon, Georgia, not exactly a “small town.” At this point, he would be wise to accept that while he forever owns his message and the controversy he has generated, he has no control over his message and never will. But wisdom is not his strong suit.
My point here is not to razz Aldean. He’s generated enough trouble for himself. If the intent of his song was not racist, he demolished that argument by releasing the video. He has a lot of explaining to do. Don’t feel too bad for him, though. He has not, as some wags will claim, been cancelled, not by a long shot. According to Forbes magazine, he is making a bundle from the controversy surrounding this objectively terrible song and its racist dog whistle of a video.
If Aldean is sincere about his message, he would do better to learn to wield what I call the perception-reality razor: always assume that another’s perception is valid for them.
In short: Perception is a person’s reality. By grasping this truth, Aldean could have avoided this whole mess or at least mitigated the worst of it. Of course he would be a little less wealthy then too. Whatever the case, Aldean may someday grow up and come to understand the messaging paradox.
Of course, embracing that truth requires humility, which—ta-da!—is what this piece is really all about. Great leaders understand and embrace the humility of not being in total control while recognizing that they are responsible for the repercussions of their messaging.
So, the next time you have something on your mind you want to share, the next time you have something you want to get off your chest, the next time you have some pearls of wisdom to impart, remember my friend Jeff’s wise words: the listener has all the power. It’s the ear over the mouth every time! You lose control the second you speak, but you still own the consequences. That’s the messaging paradox. Your audience controls your message. You now control my message.
That, my friends, is a powerful message in itself.
How often do you consider the messaging paradox? How readily do you embrace the ramifications of your messaging?
To be a great leader, you must develop the discipline to own your message even though you don’t control it, and I can help.
If you want to learn more about how to become a great leader in this world of bad bosses, visit GuidanceForGreatness.com.
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The Ear Is Mightier than the Mouth: The Messaging Paradox