Regardless of your particular discipline, I believe that there’s much about communications – applicable to today – that we can learn from Mr. Lincoln:
1. Getting to the point – The Gettysburg Address is one of the most famous speeches ever delivered. It consisted of 10 sentences and took a little more than two minutes to deliver (by way of comparison, President Obama’s recent State of the Union address lasted well over an hour including the applause breaks). In the time he spoke, Lincoln invoked the principles of human equality as set forth by the Declaration of Independence and redefined the Civil War as a struggle not merely for the Union, but as “a new birth of freedom” that would bring true equality to all of its citizens, and that would also create a unified nation.
All of President Lincoln’s hopes to end the Civil War and the entire future of his presidency and, for that matter, the entire nation, rested on his shoulders at that moment. Yet he did not allow the importance of the moment to complicate his message, and that speaks volumes about Lincoln’s gift as a communicator.
By now, it is widely known that Mr. Lincoln labored mightily with this speech as opposed to the commonly-held belief that it was hurriedly written on the back of envelop in ten minutes. In choosing his words carefully, Mr. Lincoln delivered his messages cogently and succinctly (and, of course, without the aid of PowerPoint).
2. Listening – How often do we forget that listening is an important part of the communications process? Clearly Mr. Lincoln was a listener and this trait informed his opinions and shaped his understanding of the people he was elected to govern. He spent hours sitting and talking with people, asking questions and getting to know others. He talked with soldiers, widows of fallen soldiers, common people and more. Although known as a great storyteller, he was also known to take the time to hear complaints from people and listen to their stories. It’s hard for leaders of significant importance to take the time to slow down and listen, but it’s critically important.
3. Crisis communications – Given that Mr. Lincoln presided over a war torn country, he came to be an expert at crisis communications. More than telling the American public why the war was worth fighting, he gave them a sense of hope during a time when hundreds of thousands were dying in the Civil War. And he gave Americans a sense of purpose, that it was their duty to honor the dead by ensuring government “of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Read full article by Gene Marback at ThereforeIAM
