By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to help you reinforce management-employee relations. Reading time: 3:34.

The Chief Executive Officer is standing on a balcony overlooking the industry’s most comprehensive research facility. A photographer from The New York Times is setting up to take the CEO’s picture commemorating the $111 million facility’s official opening.

The company’s Public Relations guy is thrilled with the national exposure, thrilled to have interested a significant media outlet to come half way across the country to cover this event.

But suddenly there’s a snag. There’s technical issue with the photographer’s lighting. The photographer asks for time to fix the lighting.

The PR guy finds himself in an awkward situation: alone with the CEO with no particular meeting agenda, no proposal to be made or decision to be approved. The taciturn CEO was at ease in the silence. However, the PR guy felt the eerie silence as if it were weight on his shoulders.

But then the PR guy’s own chest began to swell with great pride, thrusting that weight off his shoulders and throwing himself head first into a few minutes of rare face time with the CEO.

Here was his chance to impress the CEO with some gambit of pithy conversation, some insight into his expertise as the company’s spokesperson, or at least some other side of his personality that would crack the CEO’s wall of silence. But instead the CEO unveiled a more revealing side of his own personality. And in the process Continue reading →