Being a Captain of Industry shouldn’t mean looking down on the crew from the Upper Deck.
As businessman Jeff Haden wrote in a recent columnin Inc. Magazine, he saw a company he had admired “in a different, less positive light” after being summoned, and then dissed, by the CEO at his company’s event in New York City.
Wrote Baden, “I wasn’t bothered by the fact that he didn’t seem interested in talking tome; after all, who am I? I was bothered by the fact that he asked to talk to me…and then came across distracted and disinterested and glad to get rid of me.”
Conversely, on the same trip to New York, Baden writes that he found himself lost and decided he had to hail a cab, which was proving more difficult than he imagined. Suddenly a tall, handsome man took pity on Baden, asked him a few questions, gave him directions, hailed a cab for him, and wished him a good stay. Even though he recognized him in a flash, the tongue-tied Baden was too shocked to ask the man — star actor Hugh Jackman — for his autograph.
In his column Baden notes what we at CommCore tell our C-Suite clients: As Communicator-in-Chief of a company and a brand, an effective CEO requires good people skills and complementary good communication skills with employees, stakeholders and the media. A good first step is CEO self-confidence and self-awareness to find and then fix their Achilles Heel.
If Hugh Jackman can do it, so can a CEO who thinks the world of him or herself. As Baden concludes in his plea to CEOs, “That is the ‘you’ that other people deserve — and will see as a star.”