Use Your Message to Inspire

One day long ago, an architect visited the worksite of his project and saw three bricklayers busy at work. He asked each of them what they were doing. The first worker brusquely replied, “I’m working. I’m laying bricks.”

The second cooly answered, “I’m building a wall.”

The architect turned to the last bricklayer, who was the most productive of the bunch. The worker smiled, stood tall, and said, “I’m building a great cathedral.”

All three bricklayers were doing the same thing. But different framings resulted in different outlooks and behaviors. When communicating as leaders, it’s vital to get the framing right.

If you’ve used a camera with a lens that you can swap out, you’ll know how this works. Lenses of different focal lengths can dramatically change how your photo looks. Sometimes you view the big picture, and sometimes you zoom in on the details.

Correspondingly, leadership communication can be sorted into two categories: inspired or directed. One isn’t necessarily superior to the other, but to become most effective, you need to use the right one in the right circumstance.

Inspired and Directed Messages

Inspired messaging speaks to goals, ambitions, and shared values. We inspire our team by speaking of whatever our version of a “cathedral” is—Google doesn’t make a search engine; it organizes the world’s information, and Coca-Cola doesn’t make beverages; it refreshes the world.

When pitching big ideas, use your camera lens to zoom out. It’s not about the task. It’s about the goal.

Psychologists have found that our most difficult goals can elicit our highest levels of effort and performance. These lofty ambitions outperform vague “do your best” instructions, partly because our best is subjective and we don’t even know what it is. We know when the cathedral is built, but do we know if we really did our “best” in laying bricks? The inspired goal organizes our efforts around something we can all agree on.

This is not to say that directed messaging has no purpose in our work. You wouldn’t tell a cab driver to “follow their heart” when driving you home, and you need to document specific requirements with suppliers. We’ve all been in situations where we’re frustrated by the lack of direction from a higher-up. Leadership calls for more inspired messaging, but management calls for more directed messaging.

This distinction maps closely to something you learn in sales: the difference between features and benefits. People don’t buy features, they buy benefits—how does this thing make life better? Theodore Levitt, a former Harvard Business School professor, best summarized this idea when he said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”

Inspired Leadership in Action

Like the bricklayers, there’s a similar fable of U.S. President John F. Kennedy touring a NASA facility, where he stopped to ask a janitor what his job was. The janitor responded, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.”

Kennedy used a big-picture vision and inspired wording in his 1962 speech that led to that man on the moon, and that speech is a brilliant example of selling the hole instead of the drill, of inspiring rather than directing.

At the time, the polls showed a majority of the public was not supportive of this literal moonshot. But one moment in his speech changed everything. Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

This speech is effective as rhetoric and as a sales pitch. Kennedy also spoke about rocket engines, guidance systems, and salaries and facility costs. But that’s not the part that is remembered. Instead, the part that stirred hearts was about the benefits—the reason why: landing on the moon would mean a “win.”

The message worked. Over the next few years, the U.S. committed over 25 billion toward the Apollo program—one of the most expensive projects ever undertaken. On July 20, 1969, all that money, motivation, and engineering paid off as the first humans set foot on the moon’s surface.

When he needed to motivate and persuade, Kennedy zoomed out and spoke in the language of inspiration, not direction. That’s why the janitor wasn’t just a janitor—he was part of the space race. That was Kennedy’s “cathedral.” What’s yours?

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