How Leaders Communicate Effectively

Communication. It’s a simple word meaning to exchange information. We’ve been practicing this skill since infancy. By the time we reach high school, we’ve solidified our approach to communicating with our peers. Maybe not our parents, however. That comes much later in life. If you’ve been fortunate enough to go through a higher education system, you were taught how to communicate through written means and maybe had a course in public speaking. Studies show that the average 18-year-old has about 22,000 words in their vocabulary. By the age of 30, the average American has accumulated about 29,000 words in their linguistic repertoire. That’s where the vocabulary learning curve begins to flatten out.¹

But here’s the bad news: as a society, we are getting worse at communicating effectively. The top issues currently affecting speakers are when the receiver of their message either lacks empathy, is passive-aggressive, assumes what they mean instead of asking, talks about themselves constantly, or is overly emotional. And, if we generously assume that the average speaker possesses similar characteristics as
their listeners, this points to significant problems in understanding each other. And it gets worse. An article by language training experts Preply suggested that 40% of Americans have experienced a miscommunication over cultural differences at their place of employment. Common workplace miscommunication issues experienced included a lack of feedback (69%) and poorly written communication (64%).² As a leader, these statistics should make you sit up and pay attention.

For a majority of people entering the workforce or those in a mid-career shift, it’s a challenge to re-learn how to effectively communicate in the unique cultures that comprise today’s corporate world. Most people think they are effective communicators because they’ve sailed through their English courses in high school or college. But communicating isn’t just understanding and practicing proper spelling, grammar, and syntax. It’s not just being able to write a clear, concise email that states your objective,
provides queries or solutions to an identified issue or problem, and offers cogent solutions. Nor is it simply being able to stand in front of a group of people and confidently express sometimes controversial ideas or changing policies with clarity, authority, and inspiration (and maybe a touch of panache). Nor is effective communication just being able to speak on a telephone and linguistically expressing your thoughts and ideas in a meaningful manner. As a leader, these basics of communication are already deep-rooted requirements in the real world.

But let’s be honest – how many employees, and especially leaders, are effective communicators? I’m sure everyone has horror stories of trying to decipher the intent of a poorly worded email from your boss or employee. Or wading through a written report from a colleague and trying to find any semblance of clear and concise recommendations. Or listening to a stream-of-consciousness manifesto masquerading as a voicemail that ends with no contact name or phone number. Or held hostage on a
late Friday afternoon in an insufferably hot boardroom watching a painfully long PowerPoint Presentation that qualifies as your annual eye exam. Or watching an unprepared speaker talk to the screen, or their shoes, or just mumbling into the ether. The list goes on and on. And yet, we accept this substandard of communication as the norm. But why do we do this? Here’s the reality – if we can’t communicate effectively with our followers (i.e. they can’t understand us), then that means we can’t effectively lead them. Period. Game over.

By now, you’ve likely already made the link between the smart phone and our precipitous fall from grace in the world of effective communications. True, we spend more time staring at our phones than the world around us. At the high school and college levels, students now rely heavily on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to write their papers for them. It can be argued that writing is but one expressed form of thinking. Consequently, it’s no leap to see that our next generation of leaders has unwittingly
surrendered their critical thinking skills to AI. The existential impact of this issue is only just becoming evident as industries and professions experience an influx of college graduates significantly lacking in critical thinking skills.³ No matter how you measure⁴ it, the negative impact on today’s workforce, and perhaps for generations to come, doesn’t look promising for the development of effective leadership based on critical thinking.

If you want to become an effective leader, start by acknowledging the problem with today’s approach to communications. As a leader, you are expected to be a master in adaptive communication – or at least working on improving your skills. As an effective leader, the how, why, and what we think are forever limited to our skills in delivering those ideas and directives to our followers, colleagues, and supervisors.

Ineffective communication equals ineffective leadership. Ignore this fact at your peril.

Understanding the efficacy of your communication methodology is key to becoming an effective leader. As humans, we use metacommunication, or the nonverbal signals that modify the meaning of verbal expressions, as our modus operandi in our daily lives.⁵ And that’s estimated to be over 93% of the time. So that leaves little room for error when leaders deliver their messages via written or spoken format.

When leaders speak, they need to be clear, concise, and convincing. They need to convey honesty, integrity, trust, and congeniality. Their messages need to strike effective tones, cadences, and terminologies with their respective audiences, or they risk shouting jargon and technobabble into the ether surrounding their disaffected followers. Similarly, if leader’s emails have resorted to partial sound bites from executive talking points, they’d better regroup – their followers can likely see right through their intent to simply parrot the top boss’ last briefing notes, and they will begin to question their leader’s critical thinking skills. At that point, leaders risk losing the trust of their followers. Without trust, you can say goodbye to effective leadership.

Effective leadership means communicating with timely facts, relevant context and meaning, and passion. This requires using verified data, strung together in a format incorporating a respectful and warm greeting, a contextualized introduction, a sequenced or chronological body of facts or data, courses of action, recommendations, a summary or conclusion, and feedback such as questions and answers. Not just ambiguous word salads that leave employees scratching their heads in confusion. It’s
harder to fake effective communications in person, but the recent advent of online communication platforms has allowed poor leaders to frequently hide behind their computer screens while failing to capitalize on the real-time feedback that comes with the energized environment of face-to-face employee meetings or discussions.

If leaders know (or suspect) they are lacking in written and spoken communication skills, it’s incumbent upon them to improve. Rare is a leader who does not fear public speaking to some degree – it’s long been recognized as one of the world’s biggest fears. Communication is a perishable skill. It needs constant practice to perfect and maintain. And no two audiences are ever the same. Venue, date, time, audience demographics including culture, age, gender, message delivery methodologies, speaker experience, and many more considerations – all come into play when considering verbal and written communications. An effective leader must recognize and appreciate their audience and resources, and plan accordingly. Here’s where an independent opinion can help as a sounding board and constructive guide. As a leader, if your communication skills are holding you back, now is the time to seek out professional leadership coaching.

Your ability to clearly communicate your written and spoken ideas to your followers is critical to your success as an effective leader. So, do you want to learn how to write effectively? Do you want to learn how to speak effectively? Do you want to learn how to put it all together and communicate effectively? That’s what Leadership Coaching can do for you.

Dr. David Ballinger
The Leadership Coach

References

¹ https://wordsrated.com/how-many-words-does-the-average-person-know/
² https://preply.com/en/blog/bad-communication-habits/
³ https://www.fierce-network.com/teaching-learning/students-graduating-critical-thinking-deficiencies
⁴ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/emip.12120
⁵ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/9781118766804.wbiect232