MANAGERPORT®: Your harbour for professional management growth
Join the community. Share your wisdom - lessons Lesson or link Link or a question Question .
Back to List
Lesson
51

How working with Israel's Prime Minister helped me learn about communication?

by Dikla Lev Katz

Success Problem

After graduating Politics and Diplomacy I was fortunate to start working as a PA for the former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. On my first day of work, I went to his room to sing some papers. I said "Mr. Olmert…" but soon he stopped me, looked into my eyes and said "You can call me Ehud". From that day I always watched carefully how he communicate with every person that came to our office, or even when we walked on the street. No matter if it was a Prime Minister from another country, a CEO of a big company, an executive leader or just someone that came to ask for help. Every time his approach was to treat that person respectfully and genuinely, without making him feel that he is above nor inferior.

Impact

'Eye level communication' is an important aspect of effective communication, as it helps to convey respect, establish a connection, convey confidence, and improve the effectiveness of communication.

Recommendation

Here are my three tips for better communication: 1. Eye contact- the most powerful nonverbal communication that involves maintaining eye contact. It can help to grab and hold the attention of the person you are communicating with. 2. Active listening- means empathetically listening, without judging or imposing your own views. Just being present while someone else is talking. 3. Genuine and authentic communicating: This can lead to better understanding and more productive and positive interactions

Category

Upvote post

3 Comments

  1. That's how you know a leader become a leader for the right reasons. He is respectful and listens to even the people with zero power or influence. He recognizes that everyone has something of value to give and makes him/her feel like they are the center of his universe, even just for a minute. That is true wisdom and leadership
    Reply Upvote post

    1. Thank you, I appreciate your response and truly agree with every word you say. As you wrote, that is the wisdom of leadership. There are people that are smart or people that can 'copy-paste' from the books, but that wisdom belongs to just a few, and I was fortunate to learn from one of them
      Reply Upvote post

  2. Thank you for sharing, we don't get to hear and learn from PMs' PAs that often :)
    Reply Upvote post

Forgot Password?

Don’t have account? Register here!

Please read the Terms of Use and Privacy Notice

User Agreement:
Check here to indicate that you have

We have sent an email with a confirmation link to your email address. In order to complete the registration, please click the confirmation link.

​

The link expires within the next 14 days.

Please check, whether the email is in the junk folder, since confirmation mails with backlinks are sometimes classified as spam.

Please press the button.
Save All Changes.