Editorial Note: This article has been slightly modified to focus on trial courts. The adaptations are minor and do not change its overall significance vis-à-vis the role and function of a leader whether in a public or private organizational setting.
If you had to choose the one indispensable power of a leader, which would you pick? Would it be probing intelligence? Boundless energy? Or perhaps just being lucky? One ability may not come to mind for many but really should. For if there is a talent that every leader needs to master, it’s the ability to say the same thing over and over and over again without seeming bored.
You don’t have to spend a lot of time with organization leaders to hear repeated words and phrases. They might be drumming home the critical elements of their strategy to the public. They might be reciting talking-points with the media. They might be inculcating the organization’s culture at town halls or recounting a court’s purposes and values for the thousandth time. What they are not doing is starting afresh every time.
When Kevin Lobo first became the chief executive of Stryker, a medical-technology firm in Michigan, his team drew up a mission statement — “Together with our customers, we are driven to make health care better” — that he used at the start of every presentation he gave. He says that the combination of simplicity and repetition helped it to spread organically: Presentations within Stryker now routinely start with its mission. Anyone who takes on a leadership role at Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharma firm behind Wegovy, a weight-loss drug, will head to Copenhagen to hear Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen, the CEO, give a talk about the firm’s enduring values.
If Amazon’s culture is coupled to certain ideas, such as its “day one,” never-settle, mentality, it’s largely because of repetition. The firm always reattaches its first shareholder letter, where the term is prominent, to its most recent one, for instance. Likewise, if you associate JPMorgan Chase with a “fortress balance-sheet,” it’s probably because Jamie Dimon, the bank’s boss, has been saying it for 20 years straight.
Repetition is partly a function of time constraints: in the same way that many politicians have a stump speech they can give at every rally, most leaders are too busy to craft their messages from scratch every time. But mainly it’s to do with the way that people remember things and absorb ideas.
Repetition makes things stick, as every schoolchild knows. That’s true in offices, and beyond. David Gergen, a master of American political communications, advised candidates in debates to pick the three or four points they wanted to drive home. Songwriters do something similar. One analysis, by Joseph Nunes of the University of Southern California and his co-authors, found that songs with more repetitive lyrics were more likely to make it into the top 40 singles chart. Another study, by Emilia Parada- Cabaleiro and Maximilian Mayerl of Nuremberg University of Music and their co-authors, concluded that lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive over the past five decades. If it works for Fatboy Slim, why not the senior leadership team?
Repetition helps persuade people that something is correct, a phenomenon known as the illusory truth effect. In various studies, people have been given a list of plausible statements whose veracity they are asked to judge. They are then shown more statements, some new and some repeated. The more times someone is exposed to a statement the more likely they are to say it is true.
Repetition is harder on speakers than listeners. It takes time for anyone to realize that they are hearing the same thing over and over. Workers are in any case likely to be forgiving. In a recent paper, Francis Flynn and Chelsea Lide of Stanford University looked at the comments people made about leaders in an archive of 360-degree assessments. Less than a quarter of leaders were judged to have got communication right. The miscreants were nearly ten times more likely to be criticized for under-communicating than over-communicating.
Repetition may even be a positive sign for employees. In autocratic organizations, leaders may rely on fear to make people attentive. In more decentralized, loosely coupled organizations like trial courts, leaders need to find other, more subtle ways to guide behavior.
The burden falls more heavily on the repeaters. But if Mr. Lobo has had enough of reciting his mission statement or Mr. Dimon is fed up of the word “fortress,” you would not know it. There is more to leadership than repetition. But it is still a singular part of the job.