The Power of Words - Leadership communication in practice

In the past two years, leadership communication as a way of expressing the views of corporate leaders has become more visible for the audiences. This was made by a number of open letters published by the founders, presidents, and CEOs of companies around the globe. Open letters are not an innovative or unusual way of leaders to express their point of view in front of a wider public. However, from 2016 onwards, an interesting trend is observed. Corporate leaders started to raise their voices about controversies that concern the society. They did this in such way that their opinions will reach not only their employees or customers, but other people as well. They started using open letters as an arena where burning topics and crucial subjects are brought in the foreground. Although open letters have been discussed in previous research, this type of leadership communication has not yet been looked at through the lenses of CEO activism. Neither has the language of CEO open letters related to societal issues been examined. Thus, three main research questions were formulated: what are the defining characteristics of CEO open letters; how do CEOs frame the purpose of writing open letters; and what are the rhetorical strategies used in CEO open letters? Considering the aim of the study, a qualitative research approach was selected. Qualitative content analysis of 50 open letters written and published by corporate leaders in the period January 1st, 2016 – December 31st, 2017 was conducted. A deductive approach was used to create a coding frame in accordance with the underlying concepts and analyze the data. Findings showed that, indeed, CEO open letters related to societal issues possess common features such as short length, topics related to recent issues, types of audiences, common geographical location and communication elements. The open letters also utilized a variety of frames for presenting their purpose of communication in a specific way. Finally, the language of CEOs was filled with appeals of ethos, logos, and pathos, which proved institutional rhetoric as the type of rhetoric used in CEO open letters. Overall, this study complements leadership research by drawing a link between framing and purposes for writing an open letter, by showing the open letters as a new way of CEO activism, and by highlighting the importance of language for corporate leaders and their credibility.