Leadership Requires Communication Skills

While writing is important, it's really the focus on verbal skills that makes the difference when it comes to leadership. That's because the written word primarily appeals to reason and logic, however, speaking appeals to logic and reason, AND arouses emotions, motivates and persuades.

In the area of communication abilities required to lead, we have a six different leadership communication competencies to build through communication skills classes practice.

These are: organizational, feedback, small group communication roles, persuasion, self-talk, and public speaking.

 

In the old days, organizational communication was limited to four types of information flows: upward, downward, lateral and rumors. Today, managers have to worry about verbal communication through these four channel plus electronic communication mediums such as telepresense, virtual meetings, SMS, voice mail, emails, wikis, etc.

The skilled manager focuses on organizational leadership communication. Organizational communication flows is absolutely essential skill for anyone who occupies a leadership role in the organization.

Prior to the use of the internet, it consisted of four major communication flows:

• Upward
• Downward
• Lateral, and
• Rumor control.

Now, however, there are new electronic communication mediums, mediums creating both opportunities and problems. For example, email is great communication tool for many. For too many, however, it is becoming a burden.

It used to be, that only leaders functioned in an environment of information overload. Today, all levels of the organization have that problem.

Communicating to provide feedback is necessary if one is to improve performance. Those with a high need to achieve, those who constantly seek to perform at their best and improve their skills, understand the need for feedback. In fact, they often ask for it.

But these are a small minority. The vast majority want to live in the "ignorance bubble" — getting an "attagirl" or an" attiboy" on occasion, but deathly afraid of hearing about mistakes and screw-ups.

Cynics might say that at work, we don't want champions, we want workers. True, True. Still, one shouldn't keep the workers in the dark about their own performance. Too many times we hear someone at work frustrated with a bad performance appraisal, seemingly blind sided by an arbitrary and capricious manager who seems to be out to get them. In reality, it simply a case that the manager did not give enough feedback. After all, one should not be surprised at what the appraisal says.

In systems theory, there is two types of feedback, positive and negative. Both are absolutely essential if you are to have high levels of performance. But bosses find it difficult to give negative feedback and subordinates find it hard to receive it.

To improve skilled communication in groups, one must take a very different approach compared to that used in interpersonal communication. If you think about it, business and government is just another stage—one in which you play a role. You may be a bit player, but most everyone gets some type of title. For example, the role played by the vice-president of a small bank is similar to supervisor in a manufacturing firm, although VP title sounds better.

Besides focusing on the task and maintaining good relationships, a meeting leader must also deal with a number of self-orientated roles. These are largely destructive behaviors that prevent the group from doing what it supposed to do while creating a great deal of frustration. Thus, the all too common comment heard after the meeting is over that it was, "It was a tremendous waste of time."

Communication in a group adds a whole new level of complexity to leadership. That's due the fact that in many meetings, there are three major processes running at the same time:

• a meeting process,
• a problem solving process and
• a communication processes.

To complicate matters further, the person running the group can play either the classic leadership role or a facilitator role. While both make use of same communication microroles, they are used in a different manner. The leadership role is more directive, typically making use of many statements. The communication style for the facilitator role, on the other hand, is more indirect, requiring as it does the use of questions.

To be a meeting leader in groups, you must learn how to play communication roles. There is over 25 of these roles. They can be broken out into three categories:

• Relationship,
• Task and
• Self-oriented.

Task roles get the job done, relationship roles maintain harmony and good feelings. However, when people pay self-oriented roles, it leads to all sorts of problems. So effective group communication boils down to playing the right task and relationship roles while minimizing the disruption caused by self-oriented roles.

One of our most important communication skills is that of persuasion. We live in a persuasive age. Someone, somewhere at this very moment is scheming to relieve you of your hard earned cash. They won't steal it, nothing so primitive as that.

They will skillfully persuade you, and you will willingly hand the money over thinking that you made a smart decision, not even realizing the you had been manipulated by these unseen individuals to perform your primary function according to the marketing professors—to buy and consume. In fact, a primary role in life is to be a "consumer."

Long the serious study of sales people everywhere, those who wish to lead must get good at this verbal communication skill. After all, you can't order your boss to do something, you must persuade. And peers don't accept your idea because it's better, they accept because it was verbally sold.

I once asked a leadership communication class this simple question, "How many of you are in sales?" Out of twenty individuals, only two raised their hands (and of course, they were in sales.)

The rest failed to realize that no matter what their job description. they must sell if they want their ideas to be accepted by the boss and peers. They fundamentally failed to realize an important truth, "Leadership is about selling ideas."

Of course, many will say, "My mama didn't raise me to be a salesman." They have a point. But humans are less rational than the economists assume. Logic alone is not enough to insure that a new idea gets adapted.

A tool that we commonly use is a model called Margerison's Persuasive Continuum. This model focuses on how someone responses to a persuasive communication message.

It's been said that the most common fear of the common man (or woman) is public speaking. Most of that fear is really anticipatory anxiety, where someone imagines an upcoming catastrophe that fails to materialize.

The art of mastering the platform consists of getting good at improving verbal communication skills in:

• The verbal content and visual elements projected on a screen, and
• The nonverbal elements of the presentation.

But paradoxically, people slave over the visuals and devote less time to the verbal and the nonverbal elements. This produces business presentation which can be characterized as pretty but boring, usually shortened into pretty boring.

Few in leadership positions know how to speak in public. And since most presentations in government and business tend to be boring and monotonous, your greatest challenge in most business presentations is to stay awake. The typical business presentation should be advertised as a cure for insomnia.

Great leadership speeches have a structure. The structure has long been known, but few business presentations use it.

It's long been known by psychologists there is an internal verbal dialog occurring within the mind that's incredibly important to improve. Yet, most of us pay it no mind.

Even good communication skills texts rarely mention that importance of improving the communication between the Ego and the Unconscious. They fail to understand that skilled lines of communication need to be cultivated or you see a lot of, "I don’t do what I’m supposed to do; and do what I shouldn't do.”

The miscommunication between the Ego and the Unconscious means the mind functions like a young child with two legs that can't work together. Consequently, you see "drunken walks" and frequent falls. And too often, one goes two steps forward, but three steps back.

You might ask, why self-talk is included in leadership communication? Good question. Most would say that leadership is essentially about influence—how we can influence other others. Yet, if we fail to engage in the right kind of self-talk, our ability to lead, to communicate the proper words in the moment will be severely compromised.

Partly this is due to the power of expectations. It has long been known that what we expect tends to occur. The great writer Ovid in his Metamorphosis wrote this into the story of Pygmalion, the poor sculptor in search of true love. In this case, the power of belief was a positive one and there was a typical Hollywood happy ending. However, people sometimes talk themselves into many unhappy endings. And lets face it, people are not going to follow someone who is not in charge of their own mind.

Self-talk is typically what the Ego thinks about. It's the internal thoughts that we hold inside and don't share. So while a leader might project an image of self-confidence, in their own thinking they may have many doubts, doubts that prevent them from taking the right actions.

Resources

You never get too good at something things, and you never get too good at interpersonal communication. And no matter how good you are now, you can always get better.

Suggested Communication Textbooks

Tubbs, Stewart (2009). Human Communication, Principles and Contexts, 12th Edition. New York: Prentice Hall. This is one of our teaching texts for our online communication classes.

Burley-Allen (1995). Listening: The Forgotten Skill. 2nd Edition. Wiley. Another textbook that we often use.

Resources On the Net

Communication Skills Test. This site (called Queendom) has many different types of assessments, many offered for free.

This article has a number of communication tips—over 55 of them. These form the basis for something called heuristics—the ability to make a good decision based on available. 

Tapscott, Don (1998). Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Baron-Cohen, Simon (2004). The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male and Female Brain. New York: Basic Books.

Bate, Barbara & Taylor (Eds.) (1988). Women Communicating. Norwood, NJ: Ablex