Leadership Caffeine—Curing the Leader’s Communication Conundrum

Leading would be easy if it weren’t for the people.

People are complicated, vexing and remarkable all at the same time, and the only way to tame these forces and harness the hearts and minds of the people around you, is to strengthen your effectiveness as a communicator. Every day.

Think for a moment about the nature of your own mission as a senior leader or manager. Your job is simply to navigate the stormy seas of intellect, emotion, pre-established perspectives and biases and complicated team and social dynamics and inspire people who would otherwise not ever know each other to come together and execute for an often unclear mission.

Much easier said than done.

Communication issues are at the core of most daily leadership misfires. The path to success leads right through fighting off or preventing these misfires before they flare up and adversely impact your team.

Remember, your team members don’t see issues as clearly as the ones you’ve processed in your mind and they don’t immediately grasp your ideas or insights, no matter how brilliant they may be. Additionally, your position and your authority ensure that your words carry excess weight and your role practically guarantees that your team members will be uncomfortable asking questions or disagreeing with you and suggesting alternative ideas.

You cannot work hard enough every single day striving for clarity on priorities, strategies and performance. The goal is to create dialog…and then of course, action around the dialog. This is an every day, every conversation type activity

3 Ideas to Help Cure the Leader’s Communication Conundrum:

1. Invest your time to gain understanding. Slow the pace when it comes to ensuring clarity around strategies and goals. Sharing high level issues is interesting, but it doesn’t communicate context and too often, it sounds like orders from on high.

Describing high level issues might make you feel like you are communicating, however, understanding doesn’t start taking root until people begin to process AND ask questions. Silence is the enemy of understanding and agreement.

Instead of focusing your high-level communication activities on outbound, one-way activities, create forums, workshops and one-on-one sessions for people to ask and submit questions. Solicit questions in writing and talk about them live. Allow anonymous questions to eliminate the position bias your presence introduces into live discussions. Strive to address issues and questions without taking them personally or acting defensively. Be big enough to incorporate feedback into your plans.

2. Take the Mystery out of Performance Measures–Create Meaningful Measures. We spend a great deal of time and energy in our organizations to develop and communicate numbers. What’s meaningful to the Board, CFO or top-level executives is often foreign sounding to those driving the programs and projects.

To most team members, the numbers that count are the ones they can influence through their activities. While financial measures are always important for the organization, measures of activity, progress and learning are considerably more valuable to the people doing the work and driving the programs.

Consider letting your project teams and functional groups define measures that you and they can agree are meaningful and indicative of progress in pursuit of the bigger picture goals.

3. Ask More Questions. Questions teach. Questions stimulate thinking. Questions encourage people to cultivate ideas and search for solutions. In the weighting of questions versus statements as tools in a leader’s performance toolkit, questions are considerably more important.

Use as starters: What’s working? What’s not? What should we do about it? What do you need me to do to support your success?

Critical to your wielding of this powerful tool is the need for you to mean it.Ask questions like an interrogator and people will turn and run the other way when they see you coming. Ask questions like you are genuinely curious in their ideas and offer thoughtful comments and suggestions, and you will find people seeking you out after considering your question over night or over the weekend. You’ll have started the right kind of dialog!

The Bottom-Line for Now:

The challenges we have in communicating with each other are staggering. From cultural biases to our own experiences and historical biases, we’re at a disadvantage in the goal to create clarity even before we open our mouths. Once the words start flying, our filters kick into over-drive and unless we as leaders recognize and strive to manage this complexity, we are setting ourselves and our teams up to misfire or even fail. The best leaders work for the cure.

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More Professional Development Reads from Art Petty:

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For more ideas on professional development-one sound bite at a time, check out Art’s latest book: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.