The leader is a communicator

Is effective communication important in business organizations? You bet it is.

Look at this old piece on communications and its effect.

From: Managing Director | To: Vice President

• “Tomorrow morning, there will be a total eclipse of the sun at nine o’clock. This is something which we cannot see every day. So let all employees line up outside, in their best clothes to watch it. To mark the occasion of this rare occurrence, I will personally explain the phenomenon to them. If it is raining, we will not be able to see it very well and in that case the employees should assemble in the canteen.”

From: Vice President | To: General Manager

• “By order of the Managing Director, there will be a total eclipse of the sun at nine o’ clock tomorrow morning. If it is raining we will not be able to see it in our best clothes, on the site. In this case the disappearance of the sun will be followed through in the canteen. This is something we cannot see happening every day.”

From: General Managers | To: Industry Managers

• “By order of the Managing Director, we shall follow the disappearance of the sun in our best clothes, in the canteen at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. The Managing Director will tell us whether it is going to rain. This is something which we cannot see happen every day.”

From: Industry Managers | To: Location Heads

• “If it is raining in the canteen tomorrow morning, which is something that we cannot see happen every day, the Managing Director in his best clothes, will disappear at nine o’clock.”

From: Location Heads | To: Marketing Executives

• “Tomorrow morning at nine o’ clock, the Managing Director will disappear without his clothes. It’s a pity that we can’t see this happen every day.”

I will be closing the year with more than 300 keynotes, talks and seminars combined. I will finish this year with 260 radio segments, 104 column materials, and a new book. When people ask me what it is that I basically do, I simply tell them I am a communicator. I run a few businesses and I lead the enterprise by communicating and persuading my people to do things and achieve goals. That is what a leader does. In other words, a leader communicates, and the leader is in the business of persuasion.

A key part of your job as a leader involves changing peo­ple’s minds, something that is incredibly hard to do.  This is not the same as “motivating” people. It requires more than just firing up people’s emotions, but it goes deeper than that. To be able to persuade people, you may need to change their minds and alter processes.

Harvard University professor Howard Gardner, an expert on how people learn and deal with change, offers five spe­cific ideas to help you engage with your employees to make the change process go more smoothly”

• Connect with your audience. “Resonance,” says Gardner, “is a union of reliability and trustworthiness. “You can’t con­trol whether  employees will like you, but you can and must do everything in your power to be trustworthy.

• Level them with logic. Connecting with your audience is good, but you need to successfully make your case as well. Lay out your argument step by step, being as clear as humanly possible.

• Know what you are up against. “It is essential for any leader to be aware of resistances,” says Gardner.

• Offer the carrot-cautiously. Reward the people who help promote the changes you want. But obviously, you need to be aware of false loyalty. “Rewards rarely change minds per­manently,” says Gardner.

• Communicate widely and often. Present your message in a variety of forms and forums. Says Gardner, “The more representations you use, the more likely one will click.”

Many change initiatives in business organizations do not work because while the leaders are so engrossed in changing policies, systems and processes, they fail on one fundamental thing — to change their people’s mind first. You must first attain the “buy-in” of the people before you can affect the needed change in the organization. And one more thing, leaders repeat the message.

I attended a conference once and heard an expert in the area of executive communications say, “Today, it takes seven repetitions just to get a message across.”

It’s impossible to overcommunicate. Former chairman and CEO, Florida Power and Light says “It’s virtually impossible to communicate too much. I’ve never heard any employee anywhere complain that he or she was being kept too informed:”

One executive of many years ago explains why repetition works: “The first time you say something, it’s heard. The second time, it’s recognized, and the third time, it’s learned:” But this was long before the tonnage of information overload hit the millennials of today so I would go back to the 7-times repetition model.

Leaders communicate. Leaders persuade. And perhaps, I will end here by repeating these seven more times just to get the message across?  But I guess you’ve got it.

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