Sen. Hillary Clinton’s smart move to conversational communications
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s new “Let’s begin the conversation” style bodes well for her presidential election chances.
Last year as I finished writing my upcoming book, Beyond Buzz, I held Sen. Clinton up as a brilliant leader with a poor, “learned lecture” communications style, a lawyerly tone that tends to be more off-putting than sincerely engaging.
Yet in announcing her run for U.S. President this past weekend, Clinton showed that she has radically changed her communications style, from learned lecture to conversational. This is a very smart and critical strategy for creating an emotional and intellectual bond with voters.
As part of her announcement Clinton released a video where she sat in her cozy living room and talked about how she was “beginning a conversation with you and the country,” and wants to “start a dialogue about your ideas and mine.” She also said she’d be starting live online video “chats” this week to talk with people about their views and hers. Brilliant move.This new style, combined with a message that together Americans can still achieve the promise of a better life, is hugely refreshing from the current administration’s style of dictating one-way messages about uncertainty and fear, and “we know best.”We are the we. And Clinton seems ready to invite us into the conversation.
Moving forward she will need to carefully scale this style, and be sure she really listens and recognizes what people have to say. Real conversational communications is two parts listening, one part talking.
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July 23rd, 2007 at 1:18 pm
Allnurses reports that Ms. Clinton is concerned about the nursing shortage. Please notify her that age discrimination caused by employers’ healthcare insurance carriers’ huge increases in monthly premiums for those over 55 years of age
encumbers that problem. Little known but lethal to careers of excellent nurses with the greatest education and experience.
I am one of them, having been fired 3 times, just 2 weeks before healthcare benefits would have commenced. I have been extremely successful, having climbed the career ladder. now I am humiliated by state of the art firing procedures that treat employees who are terminated like criminals. Few want to expose what happened to them, or their hurt/anguish over the premature end to a satisfying career!