If you can't communicate with high, positive impact, you won't be an effective leader. Focusing on your communication skills is the fastest way to improve your standing with your team and making progress towards your goals.

Read on: blog.WednesdayWin.com​

Read time: 5 minutes

Effective business communication requires messages be:

• consistent with your mission,
• delivered with emotion, and
• backed by action.

Let's break that down.

Obviously, when you ask your team to move contrary to your stated mission and purpose for the team and the company, you'll have problems. Make sure what you say fits into the overall priorities.

When I say, "delivered with emotion," I don't mean every message needs to be like a football halftime speech, but you need to deliver important messages with the gravity the request requires. Show that you care about your team and the mission, and the message will get through.

Finally, your messages need to be consistent with your action and that of your team. You need to walk the walk and not just talk the talk.

Let's look at the four key strategies for making this happen and being an effective communicator:

1. Good communication is a prerequisite for effective leadership

If you haven't ever taken a formal course in communications, you may not have ever really reflected on what makes up good communication.

At its core, all communications involve a sender, a receiver, and the message being sent.

Things can, and often do, breakdown at each step much like the child's game of telephone:

• The sender has one thing in mind, but doesn't necessary fully encapsulate all of those ideas into an expressed message
• The message may be garbled in transmission or have other deficiencies like written text with the missing context of intonation or body language
• The receiver may have a different understanding of the meaning of certain words or tone of voice and they come away with a completely different understanding of the message than what was intended by the sender

The variations are endless, but it's important to recognize that no matter how brief or verbose, how much eye contact you have, whether or not the other person repeats what you said, or any other apparent levels of confirmation, there's opportunity for your messages to be misunderstood.

That's why you need to always be looking for clues as to whether you are properly understood.

I had to learn a hard lesson in this early in my professional career. I was leading my first large engineering group with multiple managers reporting to me. I was shocked to receive negative feedback from my boss in a review on my communication. I have never before or since felt in the moment that the feedback was so off-base.

It took me a long time to really hear the feedback and understand where my method communication (honed during years of engineering school) wasn't always the best for the situation. I needed to develop new skills to align my message to the context: the audience, the medium, and the purpose.

2. Know your audience

To really be effective, you need to tailor your message to your audience. Each person has an optimal frequency, mode, and style of communication and the more you can align your effort to that best form, the more effective it will be.

I took over an engineering team and quickly realized I was over-managing the team with lots of check-ins and detailed reporting. Over the course of a few weeks, I scaled back to a level where productivity stayed high, but the team felt less pestered. It worked well for nearly all except for one engineer who clearly was struggling. Unlike the others, he really thrived when he had at least a daily check-in that validated his plans and approach. He needed that validation. I rarely suggested changes to his plan, but my regular thumbs up massively increased his productivity with only a tiny price to pay in mine.

• How should you customize your communication for your team? Your peers? Your boss?
• Who needs more or less attention and oversight?
• Who thrives on emotion? Facts? Needs 'bad' news first? Or last?
• Build your empathy through experience and figure out what works best for each

This one lesson has probably done the more for my direct reports over the years than any other one thing I could have done.

Feeling understood can massively improve team productivity and team member job satisfaction.

3. Don't avoid the difficult topics

One of the most common communication traps for managers is to avoid the difficult conversation. You need to be honest with your team and professionally tackle those topics.

Being a manager is hard and this is one of the toughest aspects. You might encounter just about anything from a team member's work performance, personal grooming, unprofessional behavior, communication, unreasonable requests, company financial condition, or any other imaginable problem related to human interactions.

The good news is that there are more resources than ever before to handle these topics with class and hopefully with a pathway to a good outcome. Titles like Difficult Conversations from the Harvard Negotiation Project and Crucial Conversations have great examples on how to dive into those murky waters and emerge with your and your colleagues' integrity and self-respect intact.

4. Unlock your team's super powers with effective 2-way communication

Now, it's time to really fire up your team. Not only do you want to help drive your team forward by what you say and write, but you have an opportunity to help them improve their communication, too.

• Empower them by giving them the agenda-setting power for their one-on-one meetings with you
• Gently coach them on communication styles and effective collaboration with peers
• Lead by example and celebrate examples of effective communication-driven collaboration by members of the team

As a leader, listen far more than you talk and help your team learn how to combine data, insights, intuition, and understanding into a cohesive message and recommendations for action.

Action Summary

Recall where we started: effective business communication requires messages be consistent with your mission, delivered with emotion, and backed by action.

• Understand the role of sender, receiver, and the message itself
• Learn to tailor your messages and modes of communication to your audience
• Don't hide from the difficult topics. You are a leader so address them with respect
• Turn your team into a powerhouse by helping them improve their communications and benefit from the 2-way flow of ideas and insights

Learning how to reach each team member and receive proper and comprehensive feedback will elevate your team and your effectiveness as a leader faster than any other pursuit.

What do you think? Reply to this email and let me know.

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To your success,

Christopher

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P.S. Like this one? You'll probably want to check out this earlier Wednesday Win essay on minimizing regret to live well, too.

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