Getting Sticky: Four Ways to Make Your Leading Last

With so many things competing for your team's attention it's difficult to cast a compelling vision or identify priorities for your people in ways that will stick in their minds and hearts. It seems there’s always something more immediate, more personal, or just plain more noisy competing for their attention, and it’s easy for your communication and leadership to slip away in the barrage. The big trick is to make it stick.

I’ve been working on my own stickiness for a while, and I’ve learned that it takes more than meaningful content and a bully pulpit to keep your communication alive and active in the thoughts of your people. In fact, sometimes stickiness actually seems negatively correlated with importance and volume. The vital things you're shouting from the mountaintop wind up having the least shelf life and get swallowed up fastest by the din of competing voices and priorities.  
 
Here are four Secrets to Stickiness that will boost the staying power of your words and ideas...

1. Images Are The Hooks On Which We Hang Ideas. 
Pictures really are worth a thousand words and they are inherently sticky, so choose and use good ones when you communicate. Images engage people differently and in a different place (literally, in a different part of their brains) than logic or information in your pitch or presentation. So, show, rather than tell, people your point. Choose a story, picture, or metaphor that captures the essence of what you want to communicate and spend your best time and effort to make it as vivid as possible before you begin to share the rest of the details or other implications that are on your mind. Once the initial image is strong, its surprisingly sticky, and the nuances and complexity of the additional ideas and applications you attach to it will have greater staying power. Conversely, if the image is weak, too complicated, or too diffuse, the ideas you try to attach to it are likely to slip off into the whirlwind of everything else that's competing for your team’s energy and attention. 

2. Make It Personal, (but not all about you.) 
Things tend to stick when people identify with them, but even the most laudable ideas and meaningful priorities bounce off or slip away when they don’t seem pertinent to the listener's “real” life or personal experience. For most folks, jobs and the expectations of their organizations and bosses are just extra layers they’ve laid on top of their “real lives”. This means your words go deeper and last longer when you connect to experiences beyond the bounds of the workplace. Consider describing or introducing organizational ideas, implications, and priorities outside the actual contexts in which you hope they will be applied. Pick examples and illustrations drawn from family, free time, or fun and draw connections that allow people to appreciate and understand the things you are promoting in contexts that are more personal.

Don’t’ be afraid to speak in the first-person; your own example is compelling and very sticky. Open the door to your own “real life” by describing why an idea matters to you personally or how a priority or practice has made a difference in your own experience. But be wary of one thing: as powerful as it is to make things personal, it is also risky. If you overdo it, you can inadvertently make it seem like it’s all about you, and that’s one of the least-sticky postures on earth for a leader. People are like Teflon to narcissists. So, inoculate yourself against this by being humble and self-deprecating. Instead of portraying yourself as the good example or the hero of the story, consider using your own foibles as examples. Share how the idea or strategy your pitching has helped you overcome your own challenges or realize a new opportunity. That kind of vulnerability resonates with people as undeniably “real”. It’s personal, pertinent, and very sticky.

3. Laughter is Like Primer for Non-Stick Surfaces. 
When it comes to stickiness, humor is magic. In the proper place, it's more precious to your leadership than skills or brilliance because something about laughter disrupts people’s usual non-stick surfaces and lets new ideas and priorities adhere. Sure, a joke at the beginning of your presentation can improve the stickiness of your point, but the real artists out there have a much wider and readier repertoire of good-humor. They manage to be both playful and pointed without devolving into silliness or impropriety. Their words and ideas seem stickier not so much because they’re better words or ideas per se, but because their humor prepares people to receive them better. The personal baggage, private agendas, defensiveness, self-protection and posturing that clothe us all and compose our everyday force fields to the world are temporarily suspended when we laugh. In that moment, however brief it might be, things can get closer to the center of us and stick.
  
4. When the Time is Right, Stick It. 
Sometimes I think being stickier isn’t about being more skilled as much as it is about being more opportunistic. Even the shiniest vision or insightful strategy will slip away if the recipient isn’t primed or at least pervious to it in the first place, and some times are simply not sticky times. I’ve found that stickiness depends largely on the degree to which an idea can command someone’s full attention and be accorded full access. If the rush of life, or the call of other things leads people to entertain your words and ideas at only a cursory level, like just another post or piece of input to be managed, they are far less likely to stick. So, eloquence, charm, insight, etc. are less to be prized than a good sense of timing. Watch for your opening and resist the urge to charge into openings that are fleeting or too small to begin with. A word or two spoken at the right moment will be stickier than all the PowerPoint presentations and pricey production numbers in the world at the wrong one.