Effective leadership communication is essential to the success of any leader or organization. It doesn’t matter if you have the greatest ideas and the greatest vision if you cannot communicate those things to the team. Practicing communication in a way that leads to the most effective leadership communication is vital.
How do we do that?
We start by understanding what leadership communication consists of.
What is Leadership Communication?
Leadership communication is essentially the way information is relayed to a team or group by a leader. The company values, goals, vision, mission, and various other components must be shared with the team in some manner. That is leadership communication. Developing effective leadership communication should be a goal for all leaders.
Why Does Leadership Communication Matter?
What makes communication so important in leadership? Have you ever worked with someone that was simply terrible at communicating? You never know what they want, expect, need, or are aiming for. It is impossible to work alongside someone well when you cannot adequately understand their goals.
Leadership communication matters because poor communication can be the downfall of any organization or team. All of the other components of leadership are irrelevant if they cannot be communicated to the group. Communication is key.
What is Included in Leadership Communication Skills?
Communication is such a broad topic it can be challenging to determine which leadership communication skills are most vital. Let’s break down the specifics needed for effective leadership communication.
Empathetic Behaviors
Communication without empathy is lacking understanding. You can hear someone share an experience with you, but unless you fully understand the emotions they felt, it is not quite understood. As leadership communication becomes more skilled, empathetic behaviors will be more enhanced.
Active Listening
Read any kind of article or blog post on communication and you’ll read about active listening. Active listening is essential to communication – without it, communicators are likely doing more planning for what they’ll say next than actually listening to understand the full implications, intentions, and meaning behind the words.
Active listening requires a leader to be totally present in the conversation or communication. This means no texting or emailing simultaneously, no flagging down a taxi, and no ordering a drink mid-conversation. You must be there – fully. You must also ask good questions for clarification purposes, maintain steady eye contact, and read and utilize body language and tone.
Active listening is a skill that requires practice as much as know-how. Put it to good use and you’ll find your communication improving.
Body Language and Tone
Body language is a component of active listening, but it also has to do with the messages you’re sending, as well. When you’re communicating with someone or a group of people with your shoulders slouched, you will likely come across as bored or lacking confidence. There are a number of interpretations for various forms of body language that can completely change your message.
Tone is another component of communication that is imperative. For instance, as a teenager, I was so sarcastic it was nearly impossible to discern if I was being serious or not. It led to a couple of misunderstandings that required me to get a better grasp on how much tone impacts your statements.
Self-Awareness and Reading People
Leadership communication skills require self-awareness and reading others. Why? If you don’t know yourself well, you can give off impressions that you don’t realize.
Imagine Tom, a new supervisor who thinks he is a fantastic communicator. Unfortunately, Tom mumbles a lot, causing stress and confusion within the group. Because of Tom’s incorrect belief regarding his communication skills, he refuses to take any communication classes offered by his employer because he believes he knows the material already.
If Tom were aware of his misgivings and knew how to read when people were struggling to understand him, he could correct his mumblings and reduce confusion. He could also take a few of those communication classes and improve his skill set.
Without self-awareness and reading others in leadership communication skills, leaders would fail to improve and be stuck making the same mistakes over and over again.
Being Positive
Positivity is crucial to any leader, but also within leadership communication. When messages sent out to the team are continually negative or depressing, it can be hard to rally the team and get things moving. Positivity is a driver for action. With a positive attitude and tone, leadership communication can inspire greater things.
Delegating
Delegating tasks and responsibilities is a massive component of leadership communication because leaders cannot do it all themselves. Sorry, people! We all need a little help from time to time. While especially small businesses might require leaders to wear various hats, delegating tasks is a component of leadership communication that cannot be ignored.
Leadership communication and delegating goes hand in hand because it is impossible to pass along a task to someone else without proper communication. Could you take over a big task for your boss if you didn’t have any details regarding the project? Probably not. Could you do an important component of your boss’s job without being asked? Probably not. Delegating requires top notch leadership communication skills.
Inspiring Others
A leader’s role is to inspire others to do greater things. Leaders raise up leaders, who raise up leaders, who raise up leaders. Leaders must inspire. To inspire, you must be a skilled communicator. By improving your inspirational communications, you can improve your leadership communication.
Adaptability
Leaders are adaptable – there are some days they have no choice but to fly by the seat of their pants. To be adaptable requires exceptional leadership communication skills. Adaptability is, in itself, a leadership communication skill.
Can you change up what you had planned to say to the team without much notice? You must. Can you audible the drafted email when something throws a wrench into the plans? You must. Adaptability is vital to leadership communication.
Open Mindedness
Leadership communication often means conversing with people who have wildly different views than you. As a leader, it is never a good idea to shut someone down the moment you hear their views differing from your own. Could you imagine that?
“I want to do community work with the homeless as our outreach program this summer.”
“Nope, they’re all drug addicts. Next idea?”
Hear out the ideas of others, even if they have ideas that you’d never imagine. If you shut people down without thought, your leadership communication will be lacking.
Storytelling
Can you tell a good story? Do others think you can tell a good story? Leadership communication skills involve the ability to tell a story that people actually want to listen to. I don’t mean the polite listening, I mean when they want to hear more and more.
Improve your storytelling skills and you’ll see your leadership communication skills evolve.
Leadership Communication Tips
How do you become better at leadership communication? There are several ways to improve – and they will take practice and time.
1. Live the Mission
It can be challenging to communicate ideas and thoughts when you don’t really believe in the mission. Let’s use my mission as an example. I want to elevate leaders to inspire passion and empathy in the world. It would be especially difficult to communicate well if I were lacking empathy and passion.
What if I were hateful and bored and living the complete opposite of my mission? Would you think it to be simple communicating the mission to others? By believing in the mission and living it out, I can share that passion and empathy by modeling it and then talking about it.
Do what you say. Say what you do. Live the mission.
2. Clarify Your Goals and Expectations
When you know exactly what you expect the team to accomplish and how to get there, it gets simpler to communicate. Leadership communication can be tricky, but not so much when there is greater clarity in the goals. If there is confusion regarding your goals, it is going to be difficult to communicate well with the team. There will likely be a lot of questions that you hadn’t planned for and unexpected misunderstandings. Be sure your goals and expectations are known and understood by all involved.
3. Be Straightforward – Shorter is Better
Have you ever worked with someone who took 10 minutes to explain something that could have been explained in 2? It can be hard to follow when there are tangents and beating around the bush. Be straightforward in your leadership communication and you’ll find it’s easier to grasp.
4. Authenticity and Transparency Matters
Communicating inauthentically always takes more work. Of course, if your authentic self drops an F bomb every other word, you may need to practice speaking appropriately for the conference room. However, when you’re being real and true to yourself, you don’t have to focus on playing a part or communicating how someone else would. Communicate like you.
Transparency is also important in leadership communication. Trying to hide details can be exhausting and trying. Have you ever tried not to say something when you’re speaking? Usually, when you are trying to avoid saying something, that’s all you can think about. Transparency removes that challenge from the conversation.
While you should protect the privacy of team members and keep some things to yourself, being transparent about the things that you should ethically and morally be transparent about is vital to easier communication.
5. Observe Listeners
When you speak to people, do you watch the people listening to you? Whether you’re giving a speech in front of hundreds or just ten or even conversing with a single person, you should be observing them to see if they’re picking up what you’re putting down.
Are a few people in the audience snoring? How many notepads can you see with doodles on them? Is the listener engaged, twiddling their thumbs, or looking out the window? What the listener is doing is imperative to understanding how your communicating is going.
If the listener isn’t engaged, it may be time to shock them or call an audible. Capturing attention can be difficult when speaking. Observing people can teach you what you’re doing right or wrong.
6. Accessibility is Essential
Leadership communication is only possible when the leader is accessible to communicate with. Do team members know how to contact you? Do they expect you to respond quickly? Being accessible requires leaders to remove themselves from the pedestal they (or others) have put them on to be able to develop relationships with coworkers.
I’m not saying that leaders must always be accessible to everyone. There are boundaries that should be set and kept, such as no work on weekends. However, if team members can never get in touch with you, they will never be able to talk to you. Leadership communication must be a two way street – not only when you want to talk to the team.
7. Erase the “Um.”
Whether it’s a bad habit or a nervous tick, the “um” is getting in the way. Personally, this is one of my public speaking habits because I hate the silence when I’m gathering my thoughts. I’m learning that silence can be effective to build up the audience for a captivating thought or comment.
Nonetheless, work on deleting “um” or “uh” or similar words from your vocabulary. Your leadership communication skills will thank you.
8. Paint a Picture with Words
Have you ever read a book or listened to a speaker that made you feel like you could see the scene in your mind? Descriptive words can be vital to leadership communication. Of course, it is a skill that requires practice.
Learn how to tell a good story and you’ll find that people want to listen to you speak. They’ll want to read your words or watch you on stage or talk with you one on one. Yes, telling a story can make the communication a bit longer, but if you do it well, people will appreciate the extra imagery.
9. Prepare, Prepare, Prepare
So often, leaders are afraid to over prepare because the speech will come out sounding rehearsed. While it is possible to over prepare, it is also possible to prepare without sounding like you’re reading a script. How? By implementing many of the tips already discussed.
Be an active listener and you won’t sound so rehearsed. Read the audience and change things up – you definitely won’t sound rehearsed.
A lack of preparation can be a disaster. Preparedness results in better leadership communication.
10. Be the One to Start the Tough Conversations
Leadership communication can be tough because it isn’t always rainbows and butterflies. It requires some hard conversations and choices. Avoiding those conversations does nothing for your leadership communication skills. Be the one to begin those conversations and you may find it easier to approach with more experience.
11. Ask for Responses
Have you ever asked your audience for a response? I’ve seen a lot of rhetorical questions, which can get people thinking, but what about questions that require an answer? Speakers who ask the listeners for a response to a question are speakers who have a more engaged audience. This is true for large audiences or small, even a single person.
When leadership communication allows give and take, both parties are getting something out of the exchange. For instance, when a leader gives instructions to a team member and then asks, “How much experience do you have with this software?” The listener will be more likely to listen to everything else being said because they don’t want to miss a question.
Furthermore, the leader gains knowledge and can determine how much assistance might be required the first few times the team member takes on the task. Leadership communication cannot be one sided – both parties must have a voice and an ear.
12. Change Tactics for Different Audiences
What would you do if you walked into a building expecting to give a speech to 100 middle aged business executives and discovered you were actually speaking to a group of high school students? I’ll tell you this: DO NOT give the same speech in the same way you had planned for the old people. It will not resonate with a teenage crowd and no one will learn much of anything.
Learn how to communicate with Brad, the outgoing socialite salesman, differently than you communicate with Sarah, the introverted and quiet finance guru. With Brad, you might be loud and energetic. With Sarah, you might calm your tone and try to put her at ease.
You don’t have to pretend to be someone you’re not in these instances. However, it is a great leadership communication skill to alter your approach slightly based on the audience.
13. Ask Better Questions
What qualifies as a great question? It must be open ended, clear, and require some thought. If you approached the most influential person in your life – someone you don’t get to speak to often (or ever) – would you waste the opportunity to ask a great question?
Close your eyes and think about someone you would love to meet. You get the time to ask one question – but just one. Would you ask, “Do you like your job?”
I hope not! Asking better questions allows leaders to get to know others on a deeper level. It also grants the ability for greater thinking, innovative ideas, and creativity, in general.
14. Feedback is Critical
Feedback should not be restricted to job performance. Seek out feedback in your communication skills. Ask team members you trust to be honest with you, “Do I communicate clearly in emails?” You might even ask, “What are your honest thoughts on my presentation?”
Ask for feedback and invite team members to provide feedback even when not asked. It can help you improve your leadership communication tenfold.
15. Speak and Then Act
Leadership communication goes beyond simply saying what you’re doing. You must then do it. Even better, you’ve already been doing it before you communicated it. To speak something that goes unfollowed with action is to lose credibility and trustworthiness. Communication without trust is ineffective. Speak and then act, leaders.
16. Honesty is the Best Policy
Always be honest, even when it’s hard. It’s that simple.
17. Treat the Team as their Individual Selves
You cannot treat each team member as though they were one conglomerate of the team. Leadership communication means knowing each individual person within the team and how they best learn and receive information. It might seem like extra work to some – and I can understand that point of view – but it is imperative to know people as individuals.
If you were to deliver an announcement in person to a team of 20, that might work well for 15 of the group. Some team members are not auditory learners, but learn by reading. In that case, a follow up email stating what was said might be essential to ensure each individual.
18. Spread the Love
Kindness is always the answer. Leadership communication sometimes means that you have to communicate hard topics. It also means that people might hear what they don’t want to hear. That does not mean that leaders should be rude, mean, or unkind. Empathy is imperative in communication, just as it is in leadership.
Treat people with empathy and respect and love. Leadership communication requires leaders to listen to and empathize with team members just as much as they speak love into them.
Let’s spread the love, shall we?
19. Confidence is Key
It can be hard to listen to someone who struggles with a lack of confidence because it sounds like they don’t believe what they’re saying. Effective leadership communication means feeling confident in the message and yourself to deliver it well. Working toward confidence is a long process for someone who lacks it, but it is necessary.
Become a Leadership Communication Pro
Are you ready to dive into the betterment of your communication? Effective leadership communication can start today – you just need to take on the challenge. Let’s be better communicators, leaders!