You spend hours as a management team working tirelessly on your organization’s strategic plan. Data points are reviewed, the future is envisioned, and words are carefully chosen to describe where you go from here.

You leave your two-day meeting confident in your strategic plan and energized about your path forward.

But what do you really have? A document summarizing your management meeting.

It might contain your strategic plan, but it’s just another document until it is shared and activated through your employees.

It can be tempting at times to adopt a leadership style that you appreciate in a boss.

Want to be that amazing motivational leader who delivers killer presentations at the sales conference? Or the CEO with a knack for sizing up the numbers in a moment’s notice? Or how about that executive with the classic, outgoing style that has everyone circling around him or her?

We’re a few months into 2021, a year that couldn’t come soon enough for many, and we wanted to take a look at what content has resonated most with you – our readers – so far this year. There’s a great variety of posts to help you lead and communicate. Top content from Q1 ranges from how to show your employees you care and ways to smile more, to how to differentiate communication from information and effectively plan your next communication in 5 minutes. There’s also guidance on how to create a line of sight to the strategy for your employees, building feedback channels, strategic messaging, and more.

So, in case you missed any of these, here’s the top content others found most helpful in Q1 of 2021.

10 Most-Read Leadership & Communication Blogs in Q1 2021

I remember the day well. I began working with a leader who was promoted to join the senior management team and had taken on significant new responsibilities. This was an incredibly smart, capable, and deserving leader. 

As we were talking about his new position, I shared with him what I’ve learned from working with other leaders in the same situation who, with the best intentions, pushed forward without considering some of the new skills needed to succeed in this transition.

New Leadership Role, New Skills

A senior executive once commented to me about the repetition of her messages. “I’m tired of sharing these same messages and stories,” she lamented after the umpteenth communication on a crucial topic.

My response – “I hear you. That’s progress. Since it means you’re being consistent across a myriad of audiences.”

Now more than ever, leaders play a pivotal role in connecting, calming and inspiring their teams. Even as you and your organization are challenged during this time of uncertainty and change, employees also have a lot on their minds, and often a mix of emotions about themselves, their families and their work situation. A little empathy and thoughtful communication can go a long way to help employees know you care.

Here are some simple, yet powerful, steps you can take to show employees they are cared for:

The employee engagement journey is a continuous one and isn’t the result of an “event”. You must work every day at it, and when employees see you making that extra effort, they’ll do the same.

Here are two tips that you can work on today to help you drive engagement:

To drive engagement, help employees personalize strategy and understand how they fit in.

I've written before about research from a myriad of sources that shows that employees overall don’t understand company strategy. Said another way, they don’t get how they fit in. And that’s a missed opportunity.

This “fit” is often called line of sight. Put simply, line of sight means that employees can see the connection between their goals and the organization’s goals.

Every employee comes into the workplace with his or her own context. It’s a mix of our upbringing, culture, religion, memories, and experiences, along with our other cues and clues from the individual communicating the message. Context influences how we interpret information. It’s the glasses through which we look at and understand the world. For example, without context, our business plan is simply words on a page with little if any meaning. 

A Leader’s Role