Jan Richards

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communication

Great communication is the lifeblood of great leadership

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Great leaders are great communicators.

Leaders’ effectiveness depends on their ability to inspire, engage, and activate many people to reach for and work for a shared vision, meet common goals, and create significant results together.

Being a great communicator is one of top ten characteristics of great leaders.

Powerful, effective leaders know when and how to communicate, no matter what’s going on with their teams or organizations.

Leaders may face many different emotions at different times in the teams that they lead (and, by the way, in themselves). Some people are excited and energetic, others feel fear, pressure, confusion, and at times, weariness or boredom on the long path to a major goal.

Great leaders know when to observe, when to listen, when to talk, when to show.

And they use all the vital communication skills of leadership effectively.

They also know that the most powerful communication of all is their attitude and their actions – far more than what they say in any circumstance.

Imagine any of the world’s great leaders and what might have been different, had they been an average communicator, at best.

For example, think of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King or any of many other world leaders without their powerful oratorical and other communication skills.

Leaders face different communication needs and challenges, depending on the circumstances in which they’re leading their organizations. Here are a few of the main ones:

1. Normal, predictable cycles of operations

These circumstances involve vision-setting, planning, regular action, follow-up, problem-solving and process improvements.

During these times, great communication focuses a team or organization on goals, the path and processes to reach them, roles, consistent check-in points, the ways that progress is evaluated and ensured.

2. Major change or improvement efforts

These circumstances may involve reorganizations or mergers and acquisitions, very rapid growth, major improvements and other types of significant change.

During these times, great communication focuses on what is or will be different, how the change will be achieved, ways of evaluating and communicating progress, as well as how to sustain momentum as change proceeds.

It is essential that leadership communications and processes at these times keep people focused, energized, engaged and encouraged as they go through the often very difficult work of change.

3. High-stress or emergency communications

These include natural disasters, such as earthquakes or hurricanes, and man-made disasters, such as on 9/11/01 in the US, and during stressful times when US and world financial markets lurched wildly in 2008, and the recovery period afterwards.

During these times, great communication is focused on providing clear directions so people can try to meet their immediate and then longer-term health, safety, security and other needs.

In addition, there’s often a strong need for community in high stress times, with ways for people to share, express and process their often-frightening, yet memorable, shared experiences. (These are the conversations that begin with questions such as, “Where were you when you heard the news?” or “Where were you when it happened?”).

No matter what type of circumstance leaders and their organizations are in, most of the same stages of communication must be successfully addressed:

Focus

Earn and hold the attention of their audience.

Connect

Reach people in a personally significant way so that they can relate to what is being communicated, “enroll,” and take appropriate action.

Direct

Create a clear path for the many individual actions needed to achieve shared or individual goals.

Persist

Inspire people to draw on – and continue to draw on – persistence, if it is necessary to see a difficult effort through to completion.

Check/correct

Ensure that actions are moving along as needed in order to reach goals and significant milestones.

Achieve

Coordinate efforts and information so that people can reach goals, solve problems, and create success, hopefully, in the easiest, clearest, most effective way.

Celebrate/Complete

Acknowledge that major goals have been achieved, and create closure in a valued, positive way.

Leadership excellence: How to use clarity to cut confusion

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Clarity is one of the top characteristics of leaders who excel.

These are the leaders about whom inspiring stories are told for years, long after they’ve led their organizations through extreme circumstances or uncertainty, and met great challenges honorably.

Why is leadership clarity so important? It’s because people can’t follow what they don’t understand.

And because circumstances are constantly changing, ensuring clarity, as a leader, is a never-ending job.

Think of leadership clarity this way. Trying to follow a person who’s not clear about where he or she is leading a group is like trying to follow someone while driving in thick fog.

People on a team, in such a case, don’t know where the road is, or if there’s one at all. They don’t know where the dangers are, or how to handle them. They don’t know if, in that fog, they’re still traveling as a team, or eventually, on their own.

Teams immersed in uncertainty proceed nervously, slowly, trying to move as safely as they can. Or, metaphorically speaking, they may pull over to the side of the road, waiting for the fog to lift, the way to become clear, safety to be ensured.

In the meantime, time and opportunities are lost. Costs increase. Profits fall. Team cohesion falls apart.

Being clear, as a leader, may sound easy to achieve. It’s not.

It requires clear thinking in every circumstance – when the best way forward is apparent, as well as when the best path is not yet known and must be created, as you and the team move forward.

To reach this level of clarity, a leader and his or her team need good information, effective collaboration, clear and effective processes for prioritizing and decision-making. They also need a strong and accurate sense of who their customers are, and what those customers need and want.

Great leaders build strong organizations, which may include many people.

The work of everyone involved must be integrated and coordinated in some way. That may be done loosely, organically, or it may be accomplished in much more formal, structured ways.

The net effect, however it’s done, is that with the right direction, information, and other signposts along the way, individual employees can make the right decisions and choose the right actions in their daily flow of their work to create progress on shared company goals.

Combined with the other top characteristics of great leaders, leadership clarity turns good intentions, and precious limited resources into the best results possible for customers, and all company stakeholders.

Seven ways to delegate well

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I’ll explain this photo in a moment.

Before I do, consider this common burden for many managers:

“What’s the hardest thing for me, at work? Delegation, definitely!”

Does that sound familiar?

I’ve heard this same frustration from entrepreneurs and managers at many companies during my career as a business consultant. It came up again at lunch with a couple of friends this past week.

How about you? Do you need to improve your ability – and comfort – with delegation, too?

Start with these ideas:

1. Be clear about the goal

Often, when you ask people what their goal is for a particular piece of work, or a project, they’re not exactly sure.

What they usually know with great certainty, however, is what they DON’T want.

You’ll improve the quality of work you delegate when you provide clear goals to the person who’s doing the work.

Make sure you know, too, whether you plan to delegate this work temporarily or permanently.

This may affect how you hand off the task.

For example, if you’re delegating the work permanently, you may need to do more training and followup than if you’re delegating the work for a one-time project.

2. Be selective about who you delegate the work to 

The friend who was frustrated by recent attempts to delegate, even though she’s very experienced with delegation, believes she’s been trying to give them work that they don’t have the right skills to do.

She’s leading a team hired by a prior manager for jobs that have since changed.

“I give up! I’ve tried EVERYTHING!” she said as she described the situation.

Her team’s customers now require financial advice on business decisions they’re trying to make, in addition to the solid accounting support the team has always provided.

My friend has been trying to train and coach her employees to fill the expanded roles.

Coaching simply hasn’t worked.

If she were hiring now, she would screen for the skills her team currently needs, and skills they’re likely to need as their customers’ needs continue to change.

3. Set measures that focus attention and action

Decide how you’ll monitor the quality of the work you’re delegating. Then be ready to communicate those measures, and how you’ll use them, to the people doing the work.

In a simple, low-risk example of why this is important, our daughter, now a young adult, was about ten when she was helping organize the many colors of paper I needed for gift notepads I was creating for clients.

Anne normally works very carefully, and takes pride in doing very high quality work. I understood that she wanted to do the (frankly) boring task while she watched a TV show she liked.

When I checked the quality of her work soon after she started, I was surprised. Somehow, she was accidentally creasing some of the paper.

Before I corrected her approach, I asked myself if I’d given her the right instructions, resources, time and space to do the job right?

I had.

The one thing I had not done, I realized, was to let her know the quality standards for the work.

My customers, used to high quality work, would expect the same quality in gifts I gave them. That meant the paper…and soon, the notepads…needed to be crisp, the paper unbent, the work of gift quality.

And that meant that Anne needed to work more attentively.

She wasn’t happy, of course, that I needed her to start again, and to do the work more attentively. But we’d caught it early, and that was good.

Once she knew the quality standards and paid more attention, her work improved, as did her speed.

And, yes, it all worked with TV.

4. Communicate clearly

Communicating clearly is easy to advise, but can be deceptively hard to do.

Provide the following information, at a minimum, to the people doing the work for you:

  • Goals for the work (deadline, budget, and any other constraints)
  • Customers for the work
  • What successful completion of the work looks like to these customers
  • How you’ll monitor and assess the quality of the work
  • Instructions for doing the work, as necessary
  • Where people can get more information, if needed, while they work

Clarity and focus upfront helps prevent wasted time and rework – incorrect work that has to be done again – and hard feelings about it later.

5. Train as needed

If the person, or people, who will be doing the work have prior experience with it, they may need little training or supervision from you.

If they’re inexperienced, however, they may need detailed instructions, as well as regular feedback and coaching as they learn to do the work well, and build confidence with it.

And this leads me to the story about the photo I included with this post.

The photographer in this case was our son, Matt (who does photography and film work as part of his job and career). Now a young adult, he was about about four when he took this picture.

I’m the person who’s stretching and trying to reach Matt…and the camera. I was laughing as I tried to catch him, but also nervous that he might fall off the wall where he was running, snapping pictures as he ran.

(Anne and my husband, Gary, watch in the background with amusement and curiosity as they wait to see how this interaction will play out).

The picture makes me laugh now when I recall the moment.

Matt didn’t fall. He didn’t drop the camera. He got this amusing shot.

And in fact, letting him use my camera in the future…with training, and AFTER asking permission to do so…and then encouraging him to learn more through experiments and projects with a camera we bought for him when he was ready for it, turned out to be a good move.

It was a gradual process of delegated and self-directed learning and growth. We encouraged both our kids to learn by doing, and through experimentation and projects, in their own areas of interest.

It can be a very successful way to delegate work, as well.

Learning by doing, and through self-directed experiments, can be very successful, if the work you’re delegating is compatible with that approach.

6. Keep your team focused on your customers’ needs

In case there’s uncertainty or a debate about the quality standards for work you’ve delegated, use your customers’ requirements to find the answer.

In the example of my friend’s frustration with recent delegation attempts, her employees are proficient with what their customers used to need: timely and accurate accounting.

Their customers’ business requires more of them now, so the quality standards for their work continue to change, too.

7. Check in, follow up

Make time to check in periodically to see how the work you’ve delegated is going.

Be prepared to check in more frequently than you expect will be necessary, at least initially.

You may find that the people to whom you’ve delegated work have questions you did not expect.

Or there may be skills, knowledge, or confidence that they do not have yet, and which you need to help them grow.

That’s enough delegation advice for now.

These seven ideas give you plenty to work with if you’re trying to improve your delegation skills and confidence.

Practice, pay attention to what you’re learning, continue to improve.

You’ll find that delegation, once mastered, is an invaluable skill.