Leadership Communication Inc.

05/24/2026

What makes messages persuasive?

University of Pennsylvania psychology researchers tested three kinds of message:

1.
What someone thinks about a product (“I liked it”)

2.
What they did (“I bought it”)

3.
Both combined (“I liked buying it”)

The combination won, and the reason matters.

Messages that fuse belief with action let the reader mentally simulate doing the thing themselves. Imagined action moves real action.

The implication for corporate and leadership communication is direct. Too many institutional narratives stay abstract: values without behaviour, positioning absent action, aspiration unmatched by reality. Too much messaging is churned out that gives audiences something to agree with, but nothing to picture themselves actually doing.

If the research extrapolates – and I think it does – then communication tied to observable conduct and lived experience will out-persuade detached institutional language.

In an age of AI-generated content and eroding trust in institutions, messaging that feels – and is – behaviourally real becomes a public relations persuasion advantage.

05/20/2026

"Here’s the challenge: in an era of increased scrutiny, where AI can generate perfectly polished corporate-speak in seconds, the impulse for companies is to push for the high-gloss statements that cover every angle. Stakeholders have become expert BS detectors. They’ve seen enough algorithm-optimized messaging to know when they’re being managed rather than leveled with. AI is challenging our notions of authenticity, which makes a real human connection even more important."

https://chiefexecutive.net/leadership-transitions-demand-honesty-not-just-press-releases/

Handled well, a leadership transition is less a single announcement than a series of deliberate, human moments that rebuild trust one interaction at a time.

05/13/2026

A webinar this morning co-hosted by KRG Advisors and Ipsos on "The Paradox of Strategic Silence: When to speak; What to say; How to Listen" provided some provocative PR data points. Note the 57% of the public who agree that "If a corporation takes a stand on an issue, they should stick by their decision, even if it makes some consumers angry."

05/01/2026

"Vertical stripes are slimming."

It's one of the oldest pieces of conventional wisdom in professional dress. It also appears to be wrong, and has been contested in peer-reviewed research for over a decade.

The belief itself dates to at least 1813, when researchers traced it to a Japanese beauty handbook from the late Edo period. Two hundred years on, perception scientists keep finding the opposite. A 2011 study in Perception showed that horizontal stripes can make a figure appear narrower, not wider, by a measurable margin. Replications across body sizes have largely held. New 2026 research refines the picture further: pattern spacing, stripe type, and even viewing angle from front to back can flip the result.

The fashion is incidental. The interesting question is how a piece of received wisdom hardens into truth and gets repeated for two centuries without anyone testing it.

Leadership communication is full of these. Always lead with the ask. Never read from notes. Open with a joke. Mirror the room. Wear the power colour. Some of it holds up under scrutiny. Much of it is folklore in a good suit.

Medium matters too. A pinstripe that reads as authoritative across a boardroom table can shimmer and crawl on camera — the moiré effect — turning a deliberate choice into an unintended distraction. Newscasters are coached to avoid the patterns that cause it. The same outfit, in two settings, sends two different signals.

Image is read quickly, and largely below the level of conscious thought. The small details do move perceptions of authority and credibility. Which is precisely why executives should not outsource those details to clichés.

Resonant image has to belong to the leader, not the playbook. An image that isn't the leader's own will read as costume.

https://www.psypost.org/science-debunks-the-fashion-myth-that-vertical-stripes-are-always-slimming/

04/06/2026

Too many leaders say to their stakeholders — especially their own employees — that they're going to be "brutally honest" before communicating what is often deceptive, harsh and manipulative information.

"Research shows that individuals who self-identify as 'brutally honest' often exhibit low empathy and aggressive communication styles, which can harm relationships and hinder effective communication. This makes sense when you think about it. If you truly care about someone, you'll find a way to tell them difficult truths without destroying them in the process."

03/20/2026

A study just published in the academic journal ‘Computers in Human Behavior’ finds that each smartphone notification we receive steals about seven seconds of our focused cognition. And we get an average of 100+ notifications every day.

Most communications strategies abstractly assume an available and rational audience. That kind of audience doesn’t really exist (if it ever did).

The new research finds that distraction isn’t driven by how much time people spend on their phones; instead, it’s driven by notification frequency and how often they check. Fragmented habits, not just screen time, are destroying attention.

And the fragmentation is cumulative: seven seconds of cognitive disruption, repeated dozens or hundreds of times a day, compounds into something far more serious than momentary distraction. It degrades memory, resets emotional state, and reduces the capacity to focus on anything that demands sustained thought.

That’s not just a productivity problem. It’s also a communications conundrum.

PR pros have learned to program electronic notifications as communications delivery systems: timing alerts, embedding messages, optimizing the angle for open rates, etc. But we haven’t reckoned with what notifications do to the mind before messages are even read.

The same mechanism that disrupts an audience’s attention is being used to deliver messages into these same distracted minds.

A recent study in Computers in Human Behavior provides evidence that a single smartphone pop-up derails mental focus for seven seconds. Researchers found that fragmented digital habits cause more cognitive disruption than the total hours spent on devices.

03/20/2026

“Leadership communication cannot be occasional or reactive; it has to be thoughtful, credible and continuous. Leaders will need to navigate these expectations carefully while remaining anchored in business fundamentals.”

https://www.exchange4media.com/pr-and-corporate-communication-news/leadership-communication-has-to-be-thoughtful-credible-and-continuous-153052.html

03/19/2026

Most communications campaign strategies assume the information environment is human. That assumption is becoming increasingly incorrect and outmoded.

A recent paper in the Journal of Public Relations Research shows social bots are now acting as agenda-builders: shaping what gains salience and how issues are framed (especially in tone). Not just amplification.

The finding that should concern every communications leader: bots were the strongest influencers of framing, driving negative sentiment into organizational messaging more powerfully than the press or the public could counter.

They didn't control what was discussed. They controlled tone, and that may be a more dangerous lever.

If you're relying on social listening to read the situation, it's worth questioning what you're actually hearing (and seeing). Some of that signal may be manufactured or strategically amplified, which means you may be prioritizing the wrong issues, reacting to the wrong pressures, and misreading the true temperature of your stakeholders.

This is also a leadership conundrum. Distorted inputs produce distorted decisions (on timing, positioning, and risk). The task now is not just to communicate clearly. It's to decide what is real enough to act on.

The asymmetry is stark: a small network of automated accounts can systematically degrade the messaging environment of well-funded organizations.

In my hard experience confronting state-directed information operations, these actors seem to understand this better than most corporate communications leaders.

Campaigns, corporations, and institutions pour resources into earned and paid media. How much is lost to signal distortion they cannot see?

The study sensibly recommends stronger media relationships, better bot-detection investment, and a return to traditional polling as a corrective.

But diagnosing the problem from the outside is different from having operated inside it. Hands-on combat experience versus synthetic competitors in contested environments is now extremely important.

Some communications leaders are still fighting the last war. This new research explains new possibilities for the modern PR battleground.

03/12/2026

Leaders are rarely judged by how they deliver good news. The real test comes when the news is bad, and most leaders are less prepared for it than they think.

This piece from the MIT Sloan Management Review examines what happens when leaders must communicate candidly about difficult decisions — fixing something that has gone wrong, responding to an external shock, shutting down an initiative, or admitting that a strategy has run its course.

In practice, many leaders instinctively try to soften or delay challenging communication. They surround them with qualifiers, euphemisms, and carefully engineered language. That approach usually backfires. People sense the truth quickly, and trust erodes if communication feels evasive.

In difficult moments, people are not just listening for clarity. They are judging competence, character, candor and sincerity. Does the leader understand the situation? Is s/he being honest about it? And does the leader have a credible way forward?

Delivering bad news well does not make the news pleasant. Nor should it be sugarcoated. But handled properly, it preserves credibility — and credibility is the foundation of leadership communication when circumstances turn difficult.

When a situation goes wrong, leaders need to decide whether to fix it, bounce back, shut it down, or move on.

03/02/2026

To avoid unhelpful headlines, CEOs should refrain from communicating remarks like this: "So many things happen every morning it’s scary."

Media tend to put fear statements into their headlines to attract attention and sell advertising. The FT, in particular, has a reputation for doing this with business features and news.

A candid communications style is refreshing, but when comments are undisciplined, a sense of overwhelmed uncertainty can result.

In volatile times, leaders are expected to absorb turbulence, not amplify it.