Good at what you do, but struggling with your communication skills? Igotchu! 😎
Stop digging Nigel…
|
There is an old adage that when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging! Mis-Communicator of the Week Award goes to Nigel Farage for his terrible almost comical response to direct questioning about the £5m gift he received from crypto billionaire, Christopher Harborne. Normally a very sure-footed communicator, Farage has lost a step in recent weeks. He was roundly and soundly criticised for calling for ‘pure cold rage’ by contrast to the dignified calls for calm by the parents of the murdered student Henry Novak. He put forward a terrible candidate for the Makerfield by-election and then disappeared rather than campaign for him. And now, when questioned by journalists about why he accepted a £5m payment from a Thailandbased billionaire and then failed to declare, he has been unable to keep his story straight: It was to pay for my security. No, it was a gift for campaigning for Brexit. No it wasn’t to pay for a house and even if it was, so what? I could spend it on Ferraris and horses if I want. I haven’t spent any of it. It’s not of your business anyway. It’s not the public’s business at all. Give it back!!? No. Telling you what I’ve done with it could put me in danager so I won’t answer. Oooh, Nigel. Stop digging, bro! The first rule of crisis management is to stop the rot. Identify the problem, stop repeating it. Then take a clear, swift, decisive, public stance that is so far away from the problem that it leaves no doubt about where you stand now. Take the famous example in 2018 when KFC ran out of chicken across the country. Instead of giving 20 different reasons about logistics etc, it acknowledged its mistake and published a full page advert showing its iconic bucket with the letters rearranged to read ‘FCK’…. People loved it and… you guessed it, sales of its chicken increased That’s crisis management. Far be it from me to give beer drinking, cigar smoking, man o’ the people Nigel, any advice, but when you receive a gift that is 125 times the national annnual salary, telling people it’s none of your business and I might spend it on Ferraris, is not likely to work. Until he stops digging, I suspect this story will get worse for him… and it comes at a bad time with Labour potentially finally getting an effective communicator of their own in Andy Burnham. Let’s see. Kolarele |
Build your Communication SuperSkills
Good at what you do, but struggling with your communication skills? Igotchu! 😎
The temptation to be perfect is often based on the fear of failure, but perfection is not all it's cracked up to be, and failure is never as fatal as feared. Communicator of the Week Award goes to US broadcaster Dominique Dillon. In a clip that has now gone viral, the cameras cut back to Dillon in the news studio, but she had dozed off, and the world saw it. If you are asking yourself how and why a screw-up can possibly be an example of good communication, you are asking the right question....
Sure, it's naive to think that sports should always be a bastion of pure competition, untainted by greed, but when someone just rubs the corporatism in your face, it's always going to go down badly. MisCommunicator of the Week Award goes to FIFA President (at least for now), Gianni Infantino, for his ridiculous proposal to sell a stake in the World Cup to private investors. Let's be honest. Corruption has always been a feature of world sport. But usually it is kept below the surface, so that...
Maybe it’s just that I’m old school, but I remember a time (pre-social media) when even politicians were capable of disagreeing without being disagreeable; when the purpose of speech was to persuade, not just to go viral; and the humanity behind the politics was common, not rare. Communicator of the Week Award, goes to PMQs and the entire House of Commons for the respectful, dare I say, reverent manner in which it held Sir Keir Starmer’s final appearance at the despatch box. Starmer was...