Tag Archives: Hillary Clinton

Why Hillary Clinton Fails to Communicate

First, the facts: Hillary Clinton made history as the first woman to win the Iowa Caucuses. She won by a razor thin margin, which may have been disappointing to her, her team and her supporters, but that’s all you ever need to win, whether you’re running for President of the PTA or the USA. So let’s give her that, at least.

Second, unlike a lot of people, it didn’t surprise me to see Hillary Clinton do less well than expected in this first contest of the election season.

For candidates at this level to win (or win big), they have to inspire voters through 5 communication channels:

  • Message
  • Personal narrative (your formation story, hero journey, etc.)
  • Presentation
  • Interpersonal skills, and
  • Spouse (yep, your partner — or lack thereof — makes a difference)

These don’t all need to be nailed down, just the majority. Some (message and presentation) hold more weight than others. And they don’t have to be perfect or even great… just better than the opposition.

So you’d think after 25 years in the public eye, after running for president – not once, but twice – on a scale of 1-10, Hillary Clinton would be a 10! At least an 8 or a 9. Instead, she’s somewhere around a 6, give or take. And that won’t be enough to win this thing. So what’s going wrong? Well, a few things.

1.  Muddled message. What is her slogan? If you cannot answer that, you see the problem. Now Sanders doesn’t have a good slogan either. He has a chant, “Feel the Bern” (which I find kind of icky, but I can see where his supporters might like it). And he’s testing out a slogan that he lifted from Obama’s campaign. (They all steal stuff from other successful campaigns, by the way. There are only so many words that will do the trick. But this Obama slogan feels too recent to me for stealing. We’ll see if he sticks with it.) Slogans need to be aspirational, about the future, which is why Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and Rubio’s “A New American Century” have such great power. They also have to be easy to remember and have a ring to them when you say them. They make you feel good. The first thing I saw when I went to Clinton’s website after the big night was: “I’m with her.” Huh? People will only connect with you if your message is aspirational and gives them hope.

2.  Personal narrative: We haven’t heard much about her story and what we already know, we don’t necessary feel inspired by. There is a compelling story in there somewhere. How do I know? Because everyone has one and no, it doesn’t have to be “I was homeless and now I’m running for president.” Everyone has struggles. We need to hear about hers. BTW, we haven’t really heard much about Bernie’s struggles, either, so note to Bernie. Whose have we heard? Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are two great examples. Go read John Kasich’s. They’re compelling and make these guys more relatable. A compelling personal narrative tells people you’re like them, you get them, you have walked in their shoes in some ways.

3.  Presentation: Mostly she screws this up with her voice. (Click here to read yesterday’s New York Times on this exact topic in which I was quoted.) Now some of the criticisms out there are sexist – this culture doesn’t tolerate what it perceives as power displays by women. Beyond sexism, there is an entire new generation of voters who’ve never heard a woman’s voice in campaign mode at this level; men’s voices have been the gold standard by which women’s voices are measured. Still, she could do better vocally. She mistakes volume for expression. So instead of using the wide range of pitch in her speaking voice to make us lean in and listen, she increases her volume, which paradoxically limits her ability to be expressive. This translates as yelling and we’ve already got one of those in Sanders, whose voice is very unpleasant to listen to. And don’t head over to Cruz’s videos for any good examples of vocal expressiveness. His level of expression is so wide, so practiced, and so calculated, it sounds phony. He needs to go run a mega-church or something. Rubio, on the other hand, has this nonverbal code nailed for the most part. Definitely listen to him for a sound that is very pleasing and fluent. And I know he’s a man, but women’s voices can be pleasing and fluent, too.

The final two, interpersonal skills and spouse, will become more important as the campaign progresses and the candidates culled. Interpersonally, I think she’s pretty good. The spouse issue brings up a lot of stuff, a lot of it not necessarily favorable, but would be history-making, so get ready for that onslaught.

In the meantime, here’s what you can learn by observing this master class in public communication:

  1. Get very clear on your message and repeat it until you can’t stand it any more.
  2. Develop your personal story and practice telling it so people can discern your core values and philosophy to feel more connected with you.
  3. Work on your presentation skills. This is the biggest, most important thing you can do.

Becoming a great public communicator, the best marketing spend you can make, will return dividends far beyond your wildest dreams.

Hillary Clinton & the Professional Woman’s Double Bind

Now that Hillary Clinton has announced her run for president, it’s just a matter of time before the sexist comments and criticisms appear. They’ll be transparent and obvious by the red-meat hosts of political talk radio. Though I wish they didn’t exist, those don’t concern me. The ones that do are the comments that are more subtle and accepted as the “conventional wisdom.”

Many times people don’t even recognize their criticisms would not be applied to a man in a similar position. It’s unconscious, born of years of socialization about women’s traditional place in society. Furthermore, many of the offenders are women, themselves. We are hard on each other.

I’ve made a list below of some of the more common ones that we all need to watch out for…

She’s too ambitious.
I’ll never forget when a man said this to me the first time she ran. As if a woman with her resume should step aside for someone like Barack Obama, who, at the time, had a resume that was quite thin. Being ambitious is never a bad thing for a man, nor should it be for a woman.

She’s too old.
I’ve already heard this one. Someone just compared her to Ronald Reagan, our oldest president, and the sad fact he ended up having Alzheimer’s disease, which was probably present in the latter years of his presidency. The standard for women when it comes to aging is impossible to meet. Instead, think about it this way: She’s old and she knows a lot. When I think about what I knew when I was 40 and what I know now, it’s hard to believe the volume of information, wisdom, and mastery that I’ve gained.

What in the world is she wearing?
If she is elected, she’ll be able to shine because women have tremendous latitude when it comes to looking elegant and leader-like. Until then, she’ll be relegated to boring clothes. Male candidates certainly dress in a boring way. (Can you say khakis and oxford shirts with rolled up sleeves?) While women are held to a different standard, as a candidate, conservative dress and adornment are good things.

She needs a makeover.
Women’s faces reflect the stress and lack of sleep associated with a run of this magnitude more than men’s. Our skin is thinner (literally, not figuratively) so the lines and wrinkles and bags and circles are more obvious. Women are also expected to wear makeup and have styled hair at all times in public. We cannot always look perfectly styled and it cannot be helped. So please, cut her — and the rest of us professional women — some slack.

She sounds shrill. (She cackles, sounds like a witch, etc.)
Voices are critical for candidates, as well as in speaking and communicating for all professionals. And Hillary doesn’t have the best speaking voice, especially in the big arenas and venues. That being said, all voices get tired and even damaged from overuse. No one ever criticized Bill Clinton’s hoarse, raspy voice. In fact, it became a kind of “country lawyer” -ish trait. Women’s vocal chords  (like their skin) thinner and smaller and, therefore, naturally about an octave or so higher than men’s. To compare women’s voices to men’s is apples and oranges.

She’s not a good mother (or wife or grandmother).
This is one of the worst criticisms you can lob at a woman, if she has kids, that is. (If she doesn’t, she’s disqualified from becoming president, which is totally ridiculous on its face, and fodder for another time.). Because of the lingering prejudice that insists women’s place is in the home, anyone who doesn’t conform is still suspect (See: Mommy Wars). Men are rarely evaluated on their fatherhood or penalized if they don’t conform.

She’s got baggage.
Yes, that’s true. Lots of it. Some of it self-inflicted. And there will probably be more. So does every, single man who’s ever held the office.

She’s too aggressive.
This is one of the hardest things professional women have to deal with. It’s tough out there and you have to be tough and play tough. This is what we’re advised, to toughen up, develop a thicker skin. Yet, when we act in exactly that way, people label us as unlikeable or bitches. And this penalty is levied by both men and other women. Whoever becomes president will have to be aggressive, decisive and very, very tough.

I want to make something very clear: You don’t have to be a Hillary Clinton supporter to be mindful this is a real issue for all professional women. Social norms and messages are incredibly powerful and difficult to resist. We all harbor biases to varying degrees.

So, how do you know if you’re being sexist? That’s easy: if you wouldn’t apply the critique to a man, don’t apply it to a woman, whether that woman is a Democrat or a Republican, whether that woman is Hillary Clinton, your mother, your wife, or your daughter.