Bell Pottinger’s David Wilson says it’s vital for business leaders to be inspiring communicators

The career of any business leader has never before survived on such a knife-edge. Say the wrong thing and you may either create an issue or make a crisis more difficult. Whether this represents a “Gerald Ratner moment” for trashing (even as a joke) the company’s products, or the “BP Tony Hayward effect” for miss-judging the operating environment to simply make matters worse; the danger of delivering a foot-in-mouth moment has never been more real.

From the lonely (yet rewarding) seat of the executive office, today’s transparent digital world provides intense scrutiny and risk, day in, day out. Yet business leaders cannot remain in a barricaded office. CEOs and other business executives still need to walk the floor and communicate more effectively than they have ever done before.

The radical transparency of our fast-changing digital landscape means there has never been a more critical time for business leaders to be inspiring communicators. This is the only way that they are able to build intangible assets such as relationships and trust, which are now so crucial to success.

This represents the key finding of a new book on leadership, The Language of Leaders, written by my boss Kevin Murray, chairman of the Bell Pottinger Group, and which is published this month. Drawing on interviews with more than 60 leaders of globally-recognised organisations and companies, the book examines how leaders must now communicate in order to inspire, influence and achieve results.

Few leaders are actually taught (and in some cases might ever be able to effectively learn) the skills that can enable them to be inspiring communicators, yet the difference between competent and inspiring communication can be the difference between poor performance and outstanding results.

It’s time to recognise that great communication is just not a nice-to-have skill, but an absolute must-have ability for today’s leaders. The model for what constitutes a good leader has changed, leaving the ability to motivate, understand and inspire others as a vital characteristic for people in leadership positions.

Top business leaders have responded to a fundamental shift in how brands and businesses communicate. Also military leaders have had to change their approach with time. Each speaks of the new world of transparency and scrutiny, the need for perpetual communication and the importance of passion, authenticity and a distinct point of view.

Expectations of good corporate behaviour have been ramped up as empowered consumers and communities have changed the very nature of leadership. CEOs now focus on building trust, because trust is a prerequisite of successful leadership.

Trust is increasingly viewed as the hidden asset on a balance sheet, and so if organisations want to survive and thrive, they must put the building of trust at the heart of their strategies.

Key principles that all leaders or aspiring leaders should use to think about how they are engaging with their audiences include being authentic, listening to audiences and having a clear point to communicate. The days of simply delivering great oratory with super slick delivery of marketing messages has disappeared. Today, modern CEOs put a much greater emphasis on softer skills such as empathy and relationship-building to inspire audiences inside and outside the company or organisation.