The Strategic Value of Being a Person

Many leaders have a latent discomfort that they often try to hide. They are fully aware that reporters are interested in hearing directly from the decision makers. They also understand that messages travel more when a person backs them. Yet, the problem is that they are still reluctant.

Some of the reluctance comes from an upbringing that being visible might be interpreted as being excessive, selfish, or inappropriate with the seriousness of the work. Another aspect is a leader's concern that once they put themselves out there, it will be expected of them to be perfect or to talk in short answers that oversimplify things.

Because of this, they move back to polish. They hand over their voice to press releases, formal statements, and messages written by professionals. They become reserved and very distant. But the big thing that disappears when they do that is not their personality, but actually their credibility.

Why Finding Sense Requires a Human Voice

Journalists talk to people, not organizations. They talk to people not because they want to see their character but because sense is more easily found in a human voice.

By simply interacting with a person, one can learn why something is significant and how an idea didn’t come from inside a vacuum but is the result of a chain of thoughts and actions. Conversations can reveal different layers of uncertainty, contradiction, or consequences of a decision and provide nuance, rationale, and illustration much better than a press release.

It has become even more apparent in the present moment, as more and more of the world is interpreted and condensed for us by artificial intelligence, that this human layer matters. Large language models do not generate authority on their own; they inherit it from the sources on which they are trained. And much of what they inherit comes from those moments when people speak clearly — even imperfectly — and at length about what they are trying to do.

That is often the trap leaders create for themselves: the more complex the idea, the less capable it is of surviving on institutional language alone.

Messiness as signal, not risk

Credibility is often mistaken for total control; for always having the right words, never showing weakness, and never hesitating while speaking

What actually happens is often something very different: audiences trust leaders who sound like they are thinking, not reciting. Who can tell a story rather than deliver a position. Who are willing to say “we don’t know yet” alongside “this is what we’re trying to solve.”

This is not about oversharing, but rather about specificity. Using examples, texture, and the small human details that make an idea real.

Ironically, this is also what makes ideas more legible to machines. AI systems struggle with vague abstractions. They perform better when ideas are explained consistently, grounded in evidence, and articulated by people who clearly understand them.

The leaders who are remembered, by humans and by machines, are rarely the most polished but instead they are the most intelligible. Those who sound like they are thinking, not reciting, who can tell a story rather than deliver a position, and most importantly, who are willing to say “we don’t know yet” alongside “this is what we’re trying to solve.”

Media training, reframed

This is why media training needs to change. The goal is no longer to sand off every edge, but instead to help leaders become fluent in their own ideas by giving them stories, examples, and language they can return to without sounding rehearsed. To help them understand how what they say will travel, be quoted, and eventually be summarized by systems they will never see.

Being human is not the opposite of being strategic. In fact, right now, it may be the strategy.