Right, so I'm pretty chuffed with myself, and pretty annoyed at the same time. Over the last few weeks, I've been watching with awe as an Irish man won the U.S. Open Golf Championships.
I watched him fail at try to hold his lead in the Masters, saw it dissolve, and wondered how, at 21 years of age, you hold your nerve with an audience of millions. I wondered how, having lost your nerve, you can possibly re-build it again, under such public scrutiny.
So, I whooped and cheered with all the rest when he made the most comeback-ish of comebacks at the Open. And, his comments about how he made it happen made me think. On foot of a general election campaign just over five months ago, the tactics he used to get himself together to win sounded to me like the best and most concise list of pointers for running a political campaign that I had ever heard.
And, here's why I am chuffed - my thoughts must have fairly on the mark, because the Republicans in the US seem to agree with me (regardless of your political outlook, you can’t deny that they know how to win campaigns). And, here's why I am annoyed - why on earth didn't I write it down at the time. Why file it away for another time?
So, while my tea was brewing yesterday, I got my brain brewing too. It occurred to me that McIlroy's winning tactics were the ammunition for a great political campaign, but they would also apply to any communications or PR plan. I'm going to outline how what he did works.
McIlroy’s 9 Commandments
1. Decide what you want.
Establish your end goal. What are the fundamentals of any campaign – what are the objectives; who do we want to reach; what is the bottom line. Decide what political/PR objective you have and chart the sensible way to get there.
Put the bottom line on a card, tape it to your desk or someplace you can see it very easily (the front of the folder for the project, the notice board). The end goal should be summarised in one sentence – I want to win the US Open; I want to get coverage in 4 national media outlets for my event; I want to increase our market share by 3% by using social media; I want to put a plan in place that can reduce reputational damage in the event of a communications crisis. If you know the aim of the project in one sentence, you can filter the important from the irrelevant, and prioritise the work.
Sticking to decisions is a less fraught experience when you are the decision-maker – you call the shots. We have all experienced the hair-tearingly frustrating scenario of a colleague, or client, or boss who simply cannot buy into the process. Worse still is someone who has bought in the whole way through the project and changes the direction at the last minute. While every instance of this cannot be eliminated, it can be easier to manage that person if you have your simple one sentence summary – you can say, so this aim that we had established as the fundamental reason for undertaking the work – has that changed now? Be able to go back to that decision and reiterate the original goal. With succinctness comes clear thinking. The most uncertain of people can become re-certained when they are reminded of the clear direction you had when you started the project.
2. Be cocky.
McIlroy’s number two commandment seems to emanate from his conversations with Jack Nicklaus. He has always had a cocky way of playing – at age 10, age 14, and at age 22. People have tried to dampen this, tame it. And, it seems, there have been times that he has allowed that to happen. But, McIlroy decided in light of the US Masters to once again play that style of golf, the mental style of a winner at the Open. Nicklaus encouraged him to play to win, to put pressure on himself to be a winner. And that pressure and desire to win had to come from himself, not from any external source.
I think it must operate the same way for any project but particularly for any communications project: you have to want the tender to work for it and to win it; you have to want to win the election to make it happen; you have to want to win those new customers by communicating your new product.
I don’t mean that you should be an unbearable person who believes that they are the best. I mean that you should be cocky, walk the walk, talk the talk, play the golf. Be sure of yourself and your plan, know that you have the stuff to get the job done.
3. Know your stuff.
When you listen to McIlroy talk about his victory, he is talking about very specific things, he knows every hole on the golf course, talks about the line of a ball, the distance to a particular bunker, the difficulty of any given putt. He has put in the work, he knows the course.
We should all be thinking this way about any project. For a client, we should know what caused problems when we worked for them before, we should know their strengths and weaknesses, we should know their competitors strengths and weaknesses. In our own business, we should know who in a company derailed a project and who resurrected it, who will speak up and who will stay silent, we should already know the hard questions and how to find the answers to them.
McIlroy knows his stuff, his research is done, the has played the course, watched the videos of it, listened to the weather forecast, picked his clothes the night before…
Preparation is a tool in communications that people feel is endless. You cannot prepare for every eventuality or research every imaginable question or issue or crisis. I’ve been considering crisis communications plans lately in relation to politics. All along, I had thought that they can’t be of as much use in politics as they can be in food production, or film production where the potential crises are more predictable (i.e. what is our plan if we have to do a product recall, or if the weather prevents a week of filming). Now, I think that there is no room for that way of thinking any more in politics or in crisis communications. Things simply move too fast to allow us expect to be able to deal with instantaneous issues blown in to crisis. We need to have the coping skills to deal with a crisis and the communication is part of those coping skills. If your crisis communications plan outlines the essential steps to take if an education issue goes wrong, and a health issue, and an economic issue, and a company safety issue, you will find that the core actions in any of these plans remain the same. By planning and researching and learning a skill-set, or in this case, by doing a crisis communications plan, you will know your stuff and it puts you in control.
4. Don’t look at the leaderboard.
This one kind of rocked me to the core. It seemed to me to smack of the kind of belief few people can operate on. And, I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
If you had been where McIlroy was during the Masters, watching the leaderboard, seeing every birdie for every other golfer as a fresh and piercing defeat, you would have been slowly losing the tournament with every shot by every other golfer without playing even one shot of your own. It seemed suddenly so obvious to me. You play your own game, or you lose.
In communications, or politics, if you are only reactionary, you will lose. In sports, if you are looking the leaderboard, you are already losing. Why would you be checking the leaderboard, when you already have your next shot planned, and the one after that, and the one after that? If you focus on others, you are not focusing on yourself and channelling your energy as powerfully as possible. Brian Cody, the Kilkenny hurling manager summed it up when he said: “Ignore the opposition, do what you are doing and do it well.”
5. Mini-goals = gold.
Break it down.
McIlroy wanted to win the Open, that was his over-arching goal in a sentence.
McIlroy broke down each day’s play, he wanted to have four rounds with with a nice round sixties score each day.
McIlroy broke down each hole’s play, he wanted a birdie on the 9th hole, or the 10th.
McIlroy broke down each shot, he wanted to be on the green near the water, or ten feet from the putt.
Any communications plan, or PR campaign, or political campaign can be broken down into McIlroy’s golden mini-goals. Any campaign should be a series of lists in order manageable in any case. If someone is sick, or fired, or promoted or demoted, another person is handed the list and the project can be carried out. Project management is the science of lists – a list of key messages, a list of events to meet people to deliver those messages, a list of physical things you need to do have at each event, a list of the key components to putting those materials together, a list of media contacts.
Conquer the lists and you have conquered McIlroy’s golden mini-goals.
6. Do not dwell on mistakes or negatives.
Analyse the mistakes, understand why you made them, figure out what you omitted, what you didn’t prepare enough, what you can work to fix for the next time. But, don’t let the mistakes or the analysis rule you or control you. Learn from the mistakes, counteract the negative and then let it go.
In any communications plan, you need to be able to tinker with the messages, take on board changing situations in the company, in the larger world, but allowing mistakes or negativity to reproduce is not helpful. Feeling defeated breeds defeat.
If you have not properly dealt with the issues that have arisen, then listen to the negative feeling and go back to Commandment 3. Know your stuff, do your research, find out who has solved a problem like this before, adopt their techniques, their rationale and fix the problem.
If you have properly dealt with the issue that has arisen, then the negative feelings are simply not necessary. Flush.
Learn about yourself. Learn when you are being negative because there is a kernel of a problem with your project, and also when you are being negative because you are worrier.
7. Take a breather.
Open your eyes to the big universe and welcome some perspective. There has been much criticism levelled at McIlroy’s off-week plans in recent days. People have criticised him and his coach, pointing at the Wimbledon trip, trips home, celebrations with family and friends, media work, even the trip to Haiti.
But, I think it stands at the core of his success. McIlroy is 22 and if submerged in the game of golf, he plays with total focus and it is part of his daily routine.
But, he needs switch-off time. He is capable of taking time off, replenishing his energy and enthusiasm so that he can be fresh when he goes back on the course. Taking time off in itself helps with concentration, but especially when you combine it with something fulfilling or captivating.
Who is to say exactly what Haiti offered McIlroy, or what Wimbledon offered him – those are personal moments in his life where he should not be obliged to tell his fans every golf or non-golf thing. He should have nights out, and nights in and normality.
And, so should we all. Rest and perspective have to be parts of any project and campaign and, like McIlroy, we have to be able to see bigger things in the Universe, and realize that failure or success were not the only things in the world to consider. That sense of the largeness of the world around you has to be a part of sport and of work, or any defeat would disarm and demotivate you.
8. Take the positivity where you find it.
McIlroy was not listening to the media saying his career was over, comparing him to Novotna, another sportsperson disarmed by defeat. He was listening to his family and his coaches and his fans and his own inner belief telling him he was great and he could do it.
Take heed of the people providing solutions, and support, and smiles, and tea. All of those things get you to the end-point in a project. Think of one of the people you most care about, imagine them pointing a finger at you, and saying: “You can do it, I just know you can."
Is that not so much more motivating and empowering than negativity?
9. ENJOY it.
McIlroy blogged the week before the US Open that he was looking forward to the Open. After everything he had been through in the US Masters (the criticism, scrutiny and disappointment), he wanted to play and wanted to win too, but most importantly, he just wanted to play.
The McIlroy walk is a thing to watch, you cannot help but smile when you watch him walk down the green, following the ball as fast as he can. We should all have such a walk to work.
Forget about wanting to win, just want to play.
