Leadership Communication

What does it truly take to be a great leader? Clearly, the definition of an exceptional leader in today’s business environment has changed quite a bit over the past few years. One of the biggest changes is that the pandemic has caused many people to reexamine their life priorities, including what they want from work – and from their leaders.

Amid the Great Resignation and employees quitting their jobs in unprecedented numbers, the power has clearly shifted from senior leadership to employees. That means leaders need to focus more than ever on truly listening to what their employees want and need, and build a far more genuine and authentic connection than they might have aspired to in the past.

The Top 11 Attributes of Great Leaders

Employee engagement falling. People leaving their jobs in record numbers. Burned out employees seeking a new sense of purpose in their work. All these major trends can often be traced back to a lack of one key ingredient in work culture – trust in leadership.  

In our newly revised eBook, 7 Critical Traits for Building Trust Inside Companies, we offer new data, examine the trust problem and offer leaders a go-to playbook for how to reverse these trends and build a powerful new level of trust within the culture. 

Savvy business leaders have seen firsthand the power of good communication with employees, and how it can drive business success from the inside out.

While good internal communication gets the message out, great internal communication helps employees connect the dots between the business strategy and their role. In other words, when it’s good, it informs; when it’s great, it engages employees and moves them to action. Quite simply, it helps people and organizations be even better.

Since you’re communicating with or without intention, you might as well get good at it.

10 Tips for Effective Leadership Communication

When asked, communication professionals identified their top strategic priorities, challenges and questions for 2022. The common attributions of mission-critical priorities included improving their use of communications tools and channels, aligning staff and skills to support business priorities, and driving reputation and building trust according to a recent survey from Gartner.

Top challenges included:

In today’s digitally connected yet often geographically distributed workplace, it’s especially important that leaders cut through the clutter and ensure their messages are effectively reaching their employees.

Even then, the work doesn’t stop with ensuring messages are simply received. Effective communications also means that the messages are understood.

How Leaders Can Ensure Messages Have Meaning

While there is no single formula to ensure the one-two punch of receipt and comprehension, there are some specific strategies a leader can use to cut through the clutter and turn messages into meaning:

In advertising and communications, effective frequency is the number of times a person must be exposed to a message before a response is made. Theories have ranged from three to twenty times, leading to countless spirited discussions amongst academics and practitioners alike looking to identify the magic number.

Whatever the answer, and it varies by person, the fact remains that recipients of a message can only retain a limited amount of information per exposure and it often takes someone hearing a message multiple times to transition that person from awareness to understanding, and finally, to action.

That’s why development of clear, concise, credible and compelling messages is critical to effective communications. Stopping there, however, is like ending a sentence without a period…you must be consistent with your messages to effectively close the loop.

Whether or not you’ve spent some quality-time with a child as of late, you’re likely familiar with the “why” game. No matter the topic at hand, the adult shares information and the child responds with “why?”—it can be a never-ending and sometimes maddening exchange. Still, it does serve an important purpose in development for both children and in the workplace as well.

Change is hard for organizations, for employees asked to change, and for leaders responsible for guiding employees through the change. Each person must process their own feelings and work through the stages of change in their own way. However, leaders have an important role in the process.

As a leader, you not only must provide guidance and information to employees; it’s equally important that you listen to people’s concerns, show support, and serve as an anchor for them throughout the process.

Serving as the Change Navigator

Following are tips to remember as you help members of your team successfully navigate change:

The “big quit” continues to accelerate in the U.S., with another 4.4 million workers reported to have resigned from their jobs in September, bringing the total to more than 24 million since April 2021. This historic departure of workers isn’t expected to abate any time soon—a recent McKinsey & Company survey found that 40% of employees are at least somewhat likely to leave their employer in the next three to six months. Perhaps even more telling, it identified a disconnect between employers’ perceptions and the actual reasons why employees are leaving.

What is most important to employees? Being valued by their manager and organization; a sense of belonging, and yes, work-life balance. The study showed employees were more likely to prioritize these and other relational factors of work life, including caring and trusting teammates and potential for advancement, while employers looked more at the transactional aspects such as workload and compensation.

When the pandemic hit, leadership teams figured out really quickly that effective communication was essential to business continuity and helping employees through the transition to the new reality.

Part of why companies were so successful during the early days of the pandemic is because communications were hugely focused; what wasn’t critical was stopped to make way for the most important communication about the business and plans for the pandemic. Leadership communication was purposeful and relevant, and therefore, positively influenced engagement, including on critical topics like the safety and well-being of employees.

For as much as has changed in the past 19 months, in some ways little has changed. Organizations and employees are still going through tremendous change and the communications team, working closely with leaders, will continue to be essential to leading employees through the change to the new reality. They need to remain focused and resourced as such.