Media training for CEOs – five common pitfalls

Media Training for CEOs is unlike media training for the C-suite generally. It’s not just that chief executives are very busy people who often can’t afford to spend a day, even half a day doing Media Training. We know that they need to pack it into a couple of hours of their tight schedule – and we create our media coaching courses for CEOs to reflect this reality.

No, media training for CEOs is different because media interviews for CEOs are different. Chief executives will be asked questions that most of their colleagues won’t face. Doing media interviews can be particularly stressful for CEOs because of the attention that they create and the higher stakes that these interviews involve. One slip or badly judged phrase can wipe millions off the share price and force the PR function into full-on damage limitation mode.

That’s why a growing number of PR consultants and in-house communications teams are asking us to provide bespoke, intensive, one-to-one media training courses for their chief executives.

Here are five ways in which a public relations company or in house media relations team can ensure that their CEO is well prepared for a media interview. 

1. Identify the one key message that you want the journalist to take away 

All of our media trainers are working journalists, providing media training under strict NDAs. They’ve interviewed a number of CEOs and very often, they’ll tell you, during these conversations, they’ll be bombarded with facts, figures, statistics and insights. These are all very useful, but the problem is that they leave the journalist trying to work out what the story is here. “It’s clear that they’ve got a line to take on every issue,” explains Simon Brooke, one of our senior trainers. “The problem is that as a journalist, I’m struggling to find a ‘news line’, in other words one theme for my article or report.”

This scatter gun approach doesn’t work for a CEO and their comms team either. It means that they lose control. As the journalist takes one of these many messages and makes this the focus of the article – the problem is that this might not be the main point that the CEO wanted to get across.

Concentrating, instead, on one central idea or key theme and then finding different ways to explain and prove it gives the CEO and their communications experts more control over the final product.

2. Include your vision for the business early on 

Again, the big picture for the organisation is what journalists expect to hear from a CEO.

The word “narrative,” is a bit of a cliché these days but the fact is that stories are how people understand things. You can inspire and engage your teams as well as investors and others if you have a compelling narrative.

In our media training for CEOs, we work closely with their PR support to help them to identify their vision and organisation’s narrative. We provide message development and testing. This means that we can ensure that this big picture idea will pass the “So what?” test and will work for a naturally sceptical reporter.

As part of this narrative for the organisation, CEOs should also think about their own personal story. Why did they want to lead the organisation? How has their professional experience so far built up to this moment? We did a great media training course for the CEO of a major house builder. Halfway through the course he mentioned that he had started on a building site as a hod carrier. “Do you think journalists will really want to know this?” he asked us. Our answer was emphatic: “They absolutely will.” 

Identifying your personal story and being ready to introduce it in a way that sounds natural and relevant is a key part of the preparation that we help senior leaders do in our media coaching interview for CEOs.

3. Add some stories and examples.

The personal and corporate narrative are both great, but we need some little anecdotes and stories to bring them to life. This might include Eureka moments as well as times of challenge and difficulty.

Examples perform two essential functions in media interviews, as they do in all communication. First, they illustrate what you’re talking about. How many times in our everyday conversations do we use a phrase such as “For instance…” or “Just imagine…”. If a CEO is talking about their sustainable supply chain or innovative talent recruitment and management strategy, for instance, they will have to include some examples to illustrate their points here. If these examples are based on their own experience of what they’ve seen with their own eyes, then that’s even more convincing. It also ticks the “human interest” box.

And being convincing is another key point about an example. Call them “proof points” if you want. But if, as a CEO doing a media interview, you make a claim, you’d better have an example or proof point to back it up. 

As we all know, the best business communicators are those that tell the best stories. 

4. Don’t’ wait for the right question to come up – be proactive. 

We were brought in recently to provide media interview training for a CEO because he had just done an interview with a major business publication, but he and his comms team had been disappointed by the resulting article. This, they said, was because he hadn’t managed to land his key message. 

“Why was that, do you think?” we asked him.

“I didn’t get a chance to get my point across,” he explained. “The right question didn’t come up.”

We hear this so often. The point is that the journalist will probably not know what the “right” question is. They’ll be thinking of what their audience wants to know and drawing on their knowledge of the organisation and the sector. This will be supplemented with a quick Google search. That’s right – you’d be horrified to hear how little research a manically busy business reporter does these days.

As we say to CEOs, don’t forget, you are the expert. You will almost certainly know more about your business and the sector than the journalist who is interviewing you. This is the case with any spokesperson in the organisation but it’s especially true of the CEO. In our media training courses for chief executives, we encourage them to take the initiative. Rather than waiting for the right question to come up we show how they can take more control of the interview and set out the agenda right at the start.

Our working journalists/media trainers are normally happy for an interviewee to do this, provided that what the interviewee is saying is relevant and newsworthy.

5. Be ready for difficult questions

In our media training courses, we help anyone doing a media interview to prepare for difficult questions. We have various techniques to allow them to manage these nasties and to get back onto their key agenda.

Because their interviews tend to be more wide-ranging and they’re seen as being in charge of the entire organisation, CEOs are more likely to get difficult or apparently irrelevant questions than anyone else.

What are the difficult questions that a CEO might be asked in a media interview? The short answer is: “How long have you got?” But here are some examples: 

• “How are you going to do things differently from your predecessor? What mistakes did they make?” 
• “Do you think the regulator made the right decision when they said X?”
• “Who would be best for your business – Labour, Tory, Reform, Green or Lib Dem?”
• “Why are you paid X times more than the prime minister? Are you X times more important than them?”
• “Your competitor has said/done X. Are they right?”

Enough with the scary questions, but you can see how important it is for a CEO to go into an interview forearmed. 

Media training for CEOs requires a particular approach and but we’ve worked with some of the biggest names over the years to help them to gain greater control over media and produce positive coverage. 

Media interview coaching for CEOs 

Now we’re ready to help you.

Come and talk to us about media interview coaching for CEOs. You can follow us on LinkedIn here.