The recent May Day Rally, delivered by Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, was not far from the recent Budget 2016 speech by our finance minister, just a month or so back. Naturally, both messages needed to be aligned to give a cohesive and coherent message to the public.
Yet, despite being similar in pushing the national message, the tone and approach for each was a little different. Same same, but different.
In both speeches, the call to transform the economy was the main takeaway. Mr Heng Swee Keat’s approach in delivering the Budget was clear, objective driven and straight to the point, speaking to members in the cabinet. A majority of the speech was spent to go into detail the objectives and goals for the next five years moving forward, and outlining concrete steps and policies to achieve them.
You could say that the Budget speech took on a more yellow-blue-green approach – giving the big picture (conceptual), expressing the objectives (analytical) and outlining concrete steps (structural). These were needed to deliver the message straight and it has served the purpose right.
PM Lee’s speech however, took on a more ‘red’ approach – that is to say, he appealed to the more human aspects of what ‘transforming the economy’ entails and what does it mean to a person. His speech was peppered with anecdotes, real case studies with real relatable names and situations.
Why? The May Day Rally, though ultimately consumed by the public, was held to speak to the NTUC – National Trade and Union Congress of Singapore. Effectively, he was speaking to the Labour Movement, whose main interests are the people. His communication thus had to be about the people and for the people.
Both were good speeches, and both had served a coherent and congruent message.
That is the beauty of alignment. It is not about one way being better than the other, or one being more important than the other. It is about being complementary pieces in a large jigsaw puzzle.
So what can we learn? We learn that to communicate effectively, we need to:
- Understand who our audience is
- Understand what is the message we are trying to bring across
- Communicate in a way they are able to understand and comprehend
- Know that there is more than one way to deliver a message
We don’t know what Mr Heng or PM Lee’s Emergenetics Profiles are like (though we would love to know!) However, we do know that their methods in tackling communicating their vision and mission very much took on an Emergenetics approach.
Emergenetics is not just a tool to understand a person better, but it is also a framework for communication. Even if it is not a personal preference, the framework is a great tool to make sure you have your bases covered.
By Naweera Sidik, Assistant Manager, Marketing Communications, Emergenetics International – Asia Pacific
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