Leadership Communication

Yet the fastest way to lose employees’ confidence and trust is to make them feel their opinions don’t matter. We all need to resist our egos.

You might have the most compelling vision for your organization, but if you can’t get it out of your head and get others to see it and believe in it, it might as well not even exist.

Just because the strategy makes sense to you doesn’t mean it will take only an instant for others to see it like you do. We often think that others think as we do, that others see the world as we do, but it’s more likely that there’s a lot of ground to cover between their perspective and yours. Employees come to their jobs with their own context, and it’s the leader’s job to help them understand the collective context, including how you see the marketplace today, and how that led to your strategy.

Disengaged employees have a staggering effect on business. Studies have shown that lower productivity has an estimated economic impact in the U.S. of $483 billion to $605 billion per year, while increased workplace injury, illness, turnover, absence and fraud have an even higher economic impact, according to Gallup. This is felt around the world at a global level, but it also has very personal and immediate effects on organizations, departments, teams and, as a result, individual employees.

As a leader, you know that engaging employees and helping connect them to your business goals can directly impact the bottom line. Your internal communication plan can include two-way communication vehicles like feedback channels and listening sessions to help accomplish this. 

Leaders in any organization and at all levels are held to high standards and judged by their performance in important areas impacting the business: sales, operations, marketing, efficiency, and development of their people, to name a few. But many are not held accountable for communicating with employees, which is arguably the foundation for success for everything else.

Over the course of my career many leaders have lamented this: “Little I say seems to be resonating!?!?”

Although this can be very frustrating, it certainly does not mean that you should just stop communicating (as I’ve also heard…)

We all know how technology enables communication – email, voicemail, text message, instant message, Twitter . . . the list goes on. There are more than enough ways to communicate, and too often they add up to message overload for employees.

That’s why when something is important, nothing compares to face-to-face communication. When a leader needs to inspire people—or move them to action—the best way to do it is to look people in the eye and tell them exactly what they need to know.