Effective Communications: Seminar

Avoiding barriers to effective communications is an important leadership skill. Leaders must communication clearly, such as avoiding ambiguity and noise (extraneous communication) while simultaneously being attentive to cultural considerations, such as the role of emotions and creating a hierarchical-driven environment. To communicate effectively, individuals need to lead their communications with an attention to language by asking questions, promoting diverse responses, and eliminating the effect of personal and positional power gradients when communicating. When communicating, leaders must also be attentive to getting heard and being clear in their communications.

“Leading with Language” recognizes the value of all in an organization and invites the collective participation in thinking and doing the organization’s business. This results in an environment that is more collaborative, committed, reflective, and welcoming as all know their voices are heard and they can communicate freely. Leaders need to set the tone in communications that promote such developments, with the overall positive impact on the team. One’s ease with asking open-ended, curiosity-based, and non-biased questions as a conversational technique is a key leadership skill that can build a strong and lead to positive results. To promote viability in communications, leaders mitigate bias, expand opportunities to innovate, and harness the collective wisdom of a group.

Attentiveness to language and communications can also be used to change organizational culture. Immediate and positive commentary are powerful tools to establish and maintain behavior as they allow leaders to reinforce the desirable actions of team members. Leaders are urged to observe and not judge while offering comments to avoid alienation while remaining impartial. Comments should reflect on the behavior of team members and not the outcome, perhaps by questioning key decisions that had to be made, origins of ideas, or a review of challenges that had to be overcome.

Leaders must also be attentive to emotions and the power hierarchy when communicating. With an awareness on managing emotions, communications should be forward-focused (rather than backward looking) and outward focused. Question such as “what should we do next time” and “what can we do to make the project more successful” promote a forward and outward perspective. It is acknowledged that the steeper the power gradient, the more difficult it is for information to flow upward. Leaders should work to flatten the power gradient by admitting their limitations (of knowledge, solutions, and skills), welcoming all by using the word “we” instead of “I” when communicating, focusing on the role of all in problem-solving, and avoid judgmental statements when communicating (and thereby favoring observational statements).