Communicators long for “a seat at the table.” In this episode of “On the Same Page,” the internal communications podcast, Shel and Steve share their perspectives on this age-old aspiration and discuss the real ways to be consequential and wield influence with senior executives.

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Raw Transcript

Shel Holtz: So Steve, I have a request. This is something that really rubs me the wrong way. I want the internal communications community to stop asking for the seat at the freaking table.

Steve Crescenzo: Hey, preach, brother, preach.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, you know what they sound like? They sound like the older kids at Thanksgiving. You know, the 13-year-old who says, “Why do I have to sit at the kids’ table? I want to sit at the grown-up table.” You know what? There is no table. There’s never been a table. There’s no one in the C-suite sitting around this polished mahogany slab thinking, “You know what would really make this strategic discussion complete? Having the person who runs the intranet here.” The table has become a metaphor for a participation trophy, and chasing it has made us sound needier than an MBA candidate at a networking happy hour. What we should be asking for isn’t proximity to power, it’s consequence. It’s doing work that’s so useful that the leaders come find you because they can’t make the decision without getting your input first. That’s more important than a seat in a chair that, let’s face it, isn’t all that comfortable and that can be taken away as quickly as it was given to you.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. You know, this table, they treat it like it’s the Knights of the Round Table and Camelot, King Arthur. There’s no table, it’s musical chairs up there. Everyone’s yanking chairs out for everybody. It just bothers me so much, Shel. And you’re right, it makes us sound pathetic—whiny, little, needy people, like we sit here in the basement and write our newsletters and ask why we can’t get up there and sit at the big table. We don’t need a table. We don’t need a seat. You know what we need? We need influence. We need access and we need respect. And you know how you get those? You earn it. You don’t earn it by doing a good newsletter, even. You don’t do it by having great tactics. You do it by speaking truth to power, by letting leadership know that you can provide counsel—that you can tell them their baby’s ugly. “You know what? Your blog is too stiff, it’s too formal, your messages aren’t landing. Why are you doing a nine-minute video when nobody’s watching a nine-minute video?” That’s how you get respect and access and influence. You don’t do it by whining for it or mooching around for it. So yeah, let’s be done with the table.

Shel Holtz: So, Steve, today we’re going to look at how communicators can become consequential and influential. This fits neatly in the consultation segment of the outer ring of the On the Same Page framework. The items in the outer ring are the things that we do every day, all the time, and providing counsel is one of those things. We can provide counsel to departments, to teams, to business units. I have great examples of all of these things, but today let’s hone in on providing counsel to the company’s leadership, the C-suite.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, well, you know, Shel, that’s how you get a seat at the table—just kidding. But it is how you can get influence and access and all the stuff we’re talking about. Be a counselor, which means it’s hard work, Shel. Everyone thinks it’s easy, but it means telling people hard truths sometimes. It means being a reality check for leaders, which they don’t always like. They don’t always like being told stuff, but that’s what we have to be if we want to have that respect.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I mean, helping CEOs and leaders build trust should be at the top of the list that we’re counseling them about. Here’s a data point. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found 70% of respondents saying that CEOs are obligated to help bridge trust divides, but only 44% actually do it well. That’s a 29-point leadership credibility gap. And according to a leadership presence report from Ketchum, executives are two and a half times more likely than frontline employees to trust their CEO to tell the truth about what’s happening within their organizations. So Steve, how do you counsel a CEO who wants to build trust? And how do you counsel a CEO who doesn’t think he needs to?

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, you know what, Shel, it’s a great topic, and I’m glad we’re talking about it. I think one of the biggest mistakes communicators and leadership make is assuming trust is a communications problem. Most trust problems are behavior problems, right? There are very few CEOs—or any kind of leader—who are being as transparent as possible, acting ethically, treating employees the right way, telling them the truth all the time, and explaining why when they can’t say something, and doing all the right things, and still have a trust problem because they sent the wrong email or because their blog isn’t that interesting. If they don’t have trust, it usually comes down to missteps or something that’s happened. So I would say to leaders, and I would say to communicators: where is the trust issue coming from? If the CEO or the leadership are building a culture and paying attention to their values and doing everything they should be doing, trust will flow naturally. If they’re not, it doesn’t matter how much you communicate. You’re just yelling into a well. So I would look back at behaviors—maybe do some focus groups with employees. Not a survey; I think focus groups would be much more effective. Find out where this lack of trust is coming from. It usually doesn’t come down to communication issues. It comes down to missteps, to things they’ve done in the past. It comes down to: you put out these values and this mission statement, and then everything doesn’t align with what you’re doing. You’re not walking the talk, to use a bad cliché. I just don’t think you can communicate your way out of a credibility problem.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I think one of those data points that really provides some insight into where trust might come from is the fact that executives trust the leaders in the C-suite more than the front line does. And yeah, if you think about the executives in a company, they have more visibility with those leaders. They’re meeting with them all the time. They’re seeing them in the C-suite, which is a physical place where the leadership sits. There are a lot of leaders who don’t get out and meet face-to-face with employees very often. I remember—this was years and years ago, maybe 35 or 40 years ago—it was a Ragan conference at the Fairmont in Chicago, where they all used to be in those days. They had, I think it was the CEO of Avon, the cosmetics company, as one of the keynote speakers. And he said—

Steve Crescenzo: Those were a time. I remember this.

Shel Holtz: You remember him? Yeah, he said that he used to get out to the factory floor at least once a month to remind himself that these folks were all grown-ups. He would chat with them, and, you know, somebody operating a film machine was also the scoutmaster of a Boy Scout troop, or ran a side business with his spouse, or was the treasurer for the local Elks organization, or whatever it might be. These are smart people, and you didn’t need to treat them like children, which was a habit executives got into. He didn’t mention this, but at the same time, employees were seeing him come out there and talk to them. You’re bound to trust somebody that you see more often than somebody who’s just up there in the C-suite, maybe doing a quarterly video or something like that. That visibility is really important.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, I think—a tale of two leaders, I can do that. We worked about 20 years ago for a huge defense company, maybe the largest, for one of their divisions. And I interviewed all their executives for the audit, and they were all on the seventh floor, in what the employees called “rug row.” And they never left the seventh floor. Their food was up there; they never left. And employees hated them—no trust, never saw them. Saw them maybe at a town hall once a quarter or once a year, I forget what it was. And morale, we did focus groups, was in the toilet—no trust, bad culture, all that stuff. The other tale is Schreiber Foods up in Wisconsin. It’s the biggest company nobody’s ever heard of. They’re a dairy company. They make all the cheese for McDonald’s and Burger King. They are global. They’ve got manufacturing plants everywhere. The CEO there was such a fantastic guy. He was on the same floor that we were meeting with the communicators on. And every time I walked out to go to the bathroom, he was never at his desk or in his office. He was sitting at somebody else’s desk talking to them. He knew everybody. And he said to me when I interviewed him, “I try not to answer any work emails till I get home at seven o’clock. My time here in the office should be spent talking to my people. I’ve got to be in meetings, I’ve got to do strategic work, I’ve got to do all that.” But communication wasn’t an effort for him. It wasn’t a checklist item; it was just a constant part of his job. To him, the CEO not worrying about communication was like a CEO saying, “I’m not going to worry about finances.” And it made a huge difference. End of the story, Shel: we took an Uber to the airport, and the Uber driver was a retired former Schreiber employee. He talked about the CEO and how much he liked him. We get into this little airport in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and we go up to the bar, of course, because that’s what we do. And the bartender’s this 60-year-old woman who’s a Schreiber retiree. We say who we’re working with, and she goes, “Mike! Mike’s my buddy. How’s my buddy doing?” First of all, she worked at Schreiber. Secondly, every time the CEO walked through the airport, he made a point of going to the airport bar to say hi to her. I don’t know if that’s inbred, if you have that skill or not. But even if you don’t, even if you’re an introvert, you’ve got to find the middle ground somewhere. You’ve got to be out there meeting with your employees, talking to them a little bit at least.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, there are definitely introvert CEOs out there. I’ve met a CEO who said his worst nightmare is having to work a room. But you’ve got to work a room. And if you just can’t—if that just terrifies you—then your number two should be somebody who can do that in your place. I remember I did some work, this has to be 20 years ago, for the International Monetary Fund. So nobody who was in leadership at that time is still there; the directors are all appointed.

Steve Crescenzo: Exactly. Yeah.

Shel Holtz: And they never came down and met with employees. The employees really resented this and had a very cynical view of the leadership—except for one, who ate in the lunchroom with everyone else. I was talking to a group at lunch and they were explaining this to me, and they said, “except him,” and they pointed at the guy with his tray. He was at the cashier, chatting with her. And they said, “Not only is he chatting with her, but he knows her by name. And he’ll come here and just sit down with a random group of people who work here and chat with them. Everyone in this organization would follow him into battle. The rest of them? Nah, forget it.”

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, I think most leaders think communication is something they do. Employees think communication is something leaders are. They see real people. They don’t say, “My God, he’s a great communicator.” They see him and say, “What a great guy. What a great woman.” And I’m seeing the same thing with our work with PG&E—Patti Poppe’s the CEO there. Same way: just accessible, transparent as all get-out, honest, and people would run through fire for her. And I don’t think you have to be Johnny Carson. I don’t think you have to be a huge extrovert. Be yourself, whoever that is, and make an effort to get out a little bit.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, find your strength and leverage it. I mean, PwC’s Trust in US Business Survey found 53% of business executives say they trust the senior leadership team to a great extent. Only 38% of entry-level staff say the same. Entry-level staff don’t know the leadership. I’ll tell you a great story. This was at Mattel, somewhere between 1985 and 1986, when I was doing communication there. The CEO at the time led sort of a town hall. It was in the cafeteria, but the cafeteria wasn’t big enough to accommodate everyone at headquarters, so it was manager-and-above who came to this meeting. Everyone else was excluded. And I kept pushing. I said, “We need to get everybody in. I know it’s not big enough, so let’s just do two of them and invite half the people to one and half to the other.” Finally they decided to do this, but he said, “We’re not just going to make it half and half. We’re going to have managers and above at one and everybody below at the other.” So we held the one with everybody below. The CEO gets up, makes his remarks, they do the presentations, and afterwards a group of admins comes up to him. He says, “So what did you all think?” And they said, “This was wonderful. It was great hearing what’s going on. It explains so much of the work that we’re doing that we didn’t understand. We just have one question: who are you?” He didn’t introduce himself. He just assumed that everybody knew who he was. He was the CEO, but they had no clue at that level.

Steve Crescenzo: That’s fantastic. That is great. What I would tell executives is that a lot of them say they have no time for visibility—no time to be out there. But visibility doesn’t mean being everywhere. It just means being somewhere consistently. Employees don’t expect omnipresence. What they do expect is evidence that this guy’s around, this woman’s around, that they care about us—that he’s not sitting up in a suite somewhere making decisions that are unrelated to what we do down here, where we’re doing all the work. They just want evidence of that. They don’t expect him to be at all places at all times, and they don’t expect him to be Mike from Green Bay, going through the airport asking about people’s vacations. The fact that that guy did it was fantastic. But that’s not what they expect.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. John Chambers, who used to be the CEO at Cisco, did a couple of things. First of all, they wanted him to do a CEO blog on the intranet. He was dyslexic, and writing was torture for him. You may remember that Cisco acquired the Flip cam—that little camera that had the USB that flipped out of it. You’d shoot your video and then just plug the camera right in.

Steve Crescenzo: I remember I used to use that little Flip cam, yeah.

Shel Holtz: Because they acquired that company, he would take that Flip cam and do selfie videos before the word “selfie” was even out there. Anything that popped into his mind—it was unscripted, top of his head—he would put on his blog. And people loved it. It was like he was looking them in the eye and talking about what was on his mind, what he was hoping they would do, what he was looking for feedback on. The other thing he did was everybody having a birthday that month would get together—I can’t remember if it was breakfast or lunch—with him. He would just wander around and chat with everybody. He couldn’t do this worldwide, but still the stories got around about him doing this.

Steve Crescenzo: That’s funny. You know, Shel, the more things change, the more they stay the same. We’re counseling all of our executives right now to do selfies with an iPhone, just like this. Thirty seconds, check in. And I always counsel them to just have one point—say one thing. It’s 45 seconds, it’s a minute, stick to one thing, do it once a week, once a month, twice a month, twice a week—whatever you’re comfortable with. But we don’t need a film crew, we don’t need a script, we don’t need a teleprompter, we don’t need lighting, we don’t need any of that. We just need a little bit of effort.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I think the authenticity of doing that is a big deal. And, you know, the 45-second, the 60-second clip—we know the younger audience is going to look at that. On my other podcast, For Immediate Release, we talked about the clipping economy and the fact that all of these clips people are doing are what people are watching, not the full-length video. So I’ve started doing clips of this podcast. If you want to reach that younger audience, do those 45-second videos.

Steve Crescenzo: Without a doubt. My son Zach, the third partner of Crescenzo Communications, just did a half-hour presentation in our master class about the younger generation. All that data is there. They’re a TikTok generation. They do reels, they do clips—30 seconds, 45 seconds.

Shel Holtz: Clips, yeah. YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and TikToks.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. And that takes some coaching, though, Shel, if we’re being honest. That’s way out of people’s comfort zones. They’re used to a script, they’re used to perfect lighting, perfect everything. You know what? If there’s no evidence that an actual human being was involved, they’d rather hear the guy stutter and say, “Well, I don’t know about that—let me get back to you.” They want a human being, and that’s becoming more and more important than any kind of polish or corporateness or formality or slickness.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. Now, if you talk to executives, they’ll tell you that the number one thing they want from internal communications—the reason they fund internal communications—is alignment. They’re looking for alignment between employees and executives, between the employee population and the company’s business plan, its strategic plan, its goals, its values. Yet Axios did an annual report and found only 27% of leaders think their staff are entirely aligned with the business goals. And worse, only 9% of employees agree that they’re aligned. Eighty percent of leaders think their internal communications are helpful and relevant and provide the context teams need to do their jobs. Only 53% of employees agree. And that’s because executives are saying, “Here’s what you need to tell employees,” and nobody’s asking employees, “What do we need to know? What do we need to hear? What do we need to be exposed to in order to be aligned with what the organization’s doing?”

Steve Crescenzo: Well, first of all, I’ve got to ask you, Shel—as the buzzword hunter—when did “alignment” become the dominant buzzword of corporate communications and leadership communications?

Shel Holtz: I can’t pick a timeline for that, but I know that Zora Artis and Wayne Aspland out of Australia have done a ton of research on this. There’s a body of research from them that’s pretty good.

Steve Crescenzo: Is it really? I’ll have to take a look at that. I just taught a workshop out on the East Coast, a live writing workshop. When I do my writing workshops, I get all their data, all their information—newsletters, executive comms—and I thought I was at a chiropractors’ convention. Everything was about alignment: getting aligned, aligned, aligned, alignment. At some point, when you beat a word to death like that, it loses all power and it starts to just mean everything. So let me ask you, Shel—you’re the smartest guy I know—does alignment mean agreement? Is that the same thing?

Shel Holtz: I think it means that we’re in sync, that we’re working toward the goals that you’ve established.

Steve Crescenzo: So you could say, “I understand exactly where we’re going. I may not agree with it, but I understand it and I’ll help make it happen.” That’s the difference. You’re not going to get everybody in agreement, but you can get them aligned on the direction of the business. I think there’s a misunderstanding between alignment and agreement, and that’s something we need to discuss.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and I think that’s important. I’ve always said it’s not our job to make employees happy. I’ll tell you a great CEO-counsel story—another experience that I had. I won’t name the company, because this guy’s still kicking around and I don’t want to hear from him. I’ll tell you when we’re done recording. He was the president of the company, and the company was laying off 10% of its headquarters staff. If you look at layoffs today, by and large they’re done pretty horribly, but they’re not sprung on employees. It’s not that employees wake up, go to work, and suddenly there’s a layoff. The companies are signaling this—a week in advance, two weeks in advance. “We’re going to be cutting…” Even Zuckerberg and Facebook will signal that they’re going to cut 10% of their staff at the beginning of the fall, or whatever. But this guy didn’t want to tell anybody. He just wanted everybody to show up, and somebody would come to the desk of the affected employee, take them to HR, explain what was happening, and then have them escorted out of the building. And the employees sitting next to them—they’re friends, they’ve been colleagues for all these years—they’d be watching and wondering what’s going on, and this person wouldn’t come back. What would that do to morale? And what would that do to trust? Everybody would be waiting for the other shoe to drop: “When’s this going to happen to me?” Productivity would tank after that. So I made the case that we needed to explain to employees what was coming. He didn’t want to do that. He said, “If we do that, it’s going to get into the press.” And I said, “Well, this is a Fortune 500 company in a metropolitan area. You think this is going to escape the notice of the press somehow?” So we finally convinced him to do a desk-drop memo. This was before email, before employees had computers on their desks, so it was printed in the print shop and distributed desk to desk. It was waiting for employees when they came in that morning, so at least everybody knew what was about to come down in the next few minutes. And of course, the local newspaper got their hands on it and ran a story. The president came into my office, slammed the newspaper down on my desk, and said, “I told you this was going to get into the press.” I said, “I told you I knew it was going to, but look what it says in the lead. It says what we said in that memo. If we hadn’t distributed that, if the press hadn’t had that, they would have called somebody who’d been laid off, or they would have called the CEO who retired three years ago, or the senior VP who’s now running a turquoise shop in a strip mall. It’s not like they’re going to say, ‘We don’t have an official announcement from the president of the company, so we won’t write about this.’ Information abhors a vacuum. They’re going to go after those secondary and tertiary sources of information and write the story.”

Steve Crescenzo: They’re going to get their information, and they’re going to be right. It’s just a lack of common sense. It really is. It’s a fear of the story getting out. You know, “Don’t communicate anything that you don’t want to see on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.” That phrase has done more damage to employee communications, I think, than almost any other phrase. It’s going to get out, especially with social media now. Things are going to happen.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, you can’t control the narrative. Press releases were this fantasy that we were controlling the narrative, as though the reporters weren’t going to get their hands on the press release and write whatever they wanted to.

Steve Crescenzo: God, yeah. You know, is it just me, Shel, or has there just been a rash of horrible, horrible layoff announcements lately? What was the one that was done accidentally—somebody in HR sent it out before she was supposed to? That was just recently in the news. Nike’s message was just awful. I’m seeing layoffs happen everywhere. Layoffs are a part of life. Get out in front of them, communicate them well, and whatever story does come out won’t make you look bad. But when you communicate it horribly—people hear about an email that morning and everyone’s out the door by noon—it just makes the company look bad.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, transparency is just a given these days. The fact that the leaders of the organization aren’t saying something, or they say something that makes employees roll their eyes—what do they do? They go to Reddit, they go to Glassdoor, they talk to their fellow employees on Slack or Teams. If the job of communication used to be crafting the message, today it’s really pressure-testing whether the message is going to survive contact with employees’ actual day-to-day experiences.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. I think the old job was crafting messages. The new job is sort of helping leaders survive contact with reality. One of our clients is doing a fun thing: before every major announcement, they try to assign somebody to play Reddit. Somebody’s going to play Reddit. “You’re an employee on Reddit right now. Here’s the message. What are they going to be talking about out there?” Or Facebook, or whatever—pick your social media channel. Somebody should be playing the employee on social media. We spend so much time asking, “How should we say this?” instead of, “Should we say it at all? Does it need to be said? Who does it need to be said to?” We’re so worried about crafting the perfect message. You know what? You can’t dodge it anymore. You can’t dodge reality. People are going to take it, they might misconstrue it, they’re still going to talk about it. That’s the way of life these days.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, there are a lot of other things we can talk about when it comes to counseling leadership. One that I want to cover before we wrap up here is the channels that they use to communicate, because there are a number of studies that find executives gravitate to the channels they feel comfortable with or think are efficient for them. They’ll do email blasts or all-staff memos, or the really polished, scripted, rehearsed town halls. But employees, especially frontline employees, want something more human. Executives tend to default to email, the intranet article their internal comms people write for them. Employees want face-to-face. They want those short, unpolished videos we were talking about. Anything two-way—an ask-me-anything, or text if they prefer it—would work really well.

Steve Crescenzo: Yep, absolutely. You know what? I’ve always found that leaders choose channels based on convenience, and employees choose channels based on trust. It’s easy for a leader to have the communicator craft an email, have it come from his office, approve it, and hit send. It’s the old saying, Shel: the biggest danger of communication is the illusion that it happened, right? These leaders need to be told that. Just because you’re the CEO and you hit send on an email because it’s convenient for you doesn’t mean you’ve communicated. Don’t pick the most convenient channel. Pick the channel that employees will respond to the most, that they’ll trust the most.

Shel Holtz: Pick the one that works. There’s a thought. So, Steve, when you walk into a CEO’s office to provide counsel to them for a client, what’s the one thing you’ve found they’re most resistant to hearing about their own communication style? And how do you get them past that?

Steve Crescenzo: Well, that’s a great question, Shel. I think the thing they’re most resistant to is, unfortunately, adjusting to the fact that times have changed. And this is more true with older leaders, but attention spans have changed. Expectations of leadership have changed. This is not 1960 or 1970, where you went to work, you worked 50 years, you got a gold watch, and you went home. People want more information; they want more transparency. The good side of that is they want less corporate polish. Nobody’s ever said, “You know, I wish our CEO communicated less often but with better lighting,” or, “I wish she used a teleprompter.” The hardest part is getting them to understand that authenticity and being human matter more than being scripted and polished. We were working with a client—I won’t say the name because he’s still there—and this was a guy you’d sit in the room with and he was fantastic. Then he’d do his video and it was like he got paralyzed somehow. So we videotaped him one way with a script and a teleprompter, and the other way just talking, with the ums and the ahs and the stutters and the imperfections. And I said, “Which one do you like better?” And he goes, “Go with yours. Go with that one.” And he did, and it was a huge success. So it’s hard to get them to understand that they don’t have to be perfect. Employees don’t want perfect. They want human. Nobody’s perfect. Imperfection is perfection—I guess that’s one way to say it. I just made that up.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, they shouldn’t be perfect. So, like I say, there are all kinds of other things we can provide counsel on. We touched on some of them at the beginning. If they’re telling you to communicate something, don’t just go out and communicate it. Tell them, “This is not going to land with employees. I don’t know why you made this decision, but no one’s going to get behind this.”

Steve Crescenzo: That’s what I said in the beginning—that’s why communicators don’t have that seat at the table: because they don’t speak truth to power enough. They take the message from the CEO and they don’t go in there and say, “This is not going to land.” What we should be is their pipeline into the workforce, and we should be willing to bring harsh truths back to them. “Hey, that last town hall: too much PowerPoint, not enough dialogue. People didn’t get their questions answered.” “Hey, that last email you sent out—wow, you took three paragraphs to get to the point.” We need to be the pipeline, and we need to be an ongoing focus group for leadership into the workforce, so that we can constantly give them good advice. And not enough communicators do that, in my opinion.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. The listening element is in the outer ring of the framework model. But the point of listening isn’t just so you know—you have to do something with that. Mark Schumann used to run this great program when he was at Sabre, the software company that does the ticket reservation system. He called it the Culture Club. He had hundreds of volunteers around the company, around the world, and once a month—I think it was once a month—he would pull them together in a focus group, usually over Zoom, because it was a global company, but occasionally in person in Texas, where it was headquartered. He would pick one element of the culture and talk to them about it, and then he would record about a three-minute audio file summarizing what he heard and send that to the executive team. So on a regular basis, all they had to do was click play, and in three minutes—sometimes what they heard made them very uncomfortable.

Steve Crescenzo: That is a brilliant idea. Of course, Schumann is brilliant. Love Mark Schumann. Schumann is great.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, he definitely is. But that listening—and feeding back what you’ve heard from employees to leaders so they know how their decisions are going to land—I think is vital.

Steve Crescenzo: Exactly. That is exactly what a communicator should be doing. But you know what? That takes guts, and it takes work, and you just have to do it. Could it be, Shel—sort of a closing thought—that maybe leadership communication isn’t really that complicated? Less performance, more presence. Less messaging, more conversation. Less talking, more listening. Less acting like a CEO and more acting like a human being. I don’t think employees want perfect leaders. They want believable leaders. And that takes some coaching, because these people are hardwired to think they have to be perfect and have all the answers, because otherwise they’ll lose confidence and credibility. No—you have credibility when you admit you don’t have all the answers and when you’re a human being about it.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and trust employees to act like adults. If you treat people like adults, they tend to act like it. If you treat them like children, they’ll act like that. So we would love to hear from you, listeners—any examples you have of providing counsel to leadership, or your effort to get that seat at the table. Whatever you want to share with us, share with us.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, a hundred percent, Shel.

Shel Holtz: Send email to [email protected]. Leave a comment in the show notes on the FIR Podcast Network website, or on LinkedIn or Facebook, or wherever you found out about this podcast. Send us a note. Tell us how counseling executives in your organization has been going, or any great stories you have to share. We’ll share those on the next episode.

Steve Crescenzo: Shel, I always feel a little bit smarter after talking to you.

Shel Holtz: I feel the same way after talking to you, Steve. Look forward to the next one.

Steve Crescenzo: All right, well, I’m off to happy hour. My God, it’s 2:36 my time. I’m late.

Shel Holtz: It’s wine time now. Okay, I’ll talk to you next time.

Steve Crescenzo: All right, talk to you, Shel.

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