How Self-Interest is Good for Leaders, Communication, and Outcomes

In any communication, the most important person is you. Whatever role you have in this work—approval, creation, delivery, or all of it—clarity about how it benefits you is critical. You have to stop treating yourself like a background character in your own communication work.

This is where many executives and leaders get sideways. They build messages around everyone else first: the audience, the customer, the board, the team, the sponsor, the critic, or the person most likely to complain. Throw in other stakeholders, advocacy groups, politicians, and various “interested parties.” Those people may matter. But they do not matter more than the person accountable for the win condition. Do they matter more than you? If you are responsible for the outcome in some part or in totality, your interests, standards, risks, and objectives belong near the center of the work.

That leads to two uncomfortable questions:

If you are not communicating for your benefit in some meaningful way, who is the primary beneficiary of your work?

Why would you serve that person’s interests if doing so minimizes or eliminates your own?

This is usually the part where people start complaining, clutching pearls, or accusing the argument of promoting selfishness. Fine. Let’s deal with that directly. You should be selfish—at least enough to know what you are trying to get from a communication activity. Doing work that gives you no benefit, no protection, no leverage, no clarity, and no progress is not noble. It is a bad operating model.

Do the math. Add up the hours you work in a week: in the office, out of the office, answering messages, responding to emails, taking calls, thinking through problems, cleaning up ambiguity, and carrying decisions after everyone else has logged off. For executives and senior leaders, that number usually exceeds forty hours. Sometimes by a lot. For high-performing talent, the situation may not be much different.

So why should leaders and committed professionals not expect their communication to help them get what they want out of their work? That does not mean exploiting people. It means being honest about the exchange. Your communication should advance your organization, serve its audience, and move work forward. It should also protect and advance your legitimate interests.

There should be some element of self-interest in what you do. You should expect the same from your talent, especially if they are contributing to your goals. People do better work when they can see how the work benefits them, not only how it benefits an institution.

Self-interest is not evil. Pretending it does not exist is dangerous. In leadership, that pretense becomes borderline malpractice. Denying self-interest—or worse, manipulating people into hiding it—damages trust, weakens the work product, and drives away critical talent, customers, and partners.

Rarely will anyone achieve one hundred percent of their goal. Even C-suite leaders. This is even less likely for all contributors to a communication effort. For your top contributors, what matters is that they believe they are meaningfully recognized for their work in a way that advances their goals. The standard is simple for a leader: name the desired outcome, identify critical contributors, and make sure each person contributing to its success benefits from this work in a meaningful way.

For more on executive communication skills and advice, visit www.executivecommunicationadvisory.com.