Effective leaders must be seen and heard – for their leadership messages to be believed, they must be repeated remorselessly.
Frequency – constant.
Key participants – all staff and partners.
Leadership rating: Leadership7
Leaders are agents of action – they want to achieve, and to be seen to achieve. You know that you will need the support of all your staff, often in confronting difficult circumstances and decisions. You want your colleagues to understand where their business is heading, why and how. You must recognise that this direction and purpose has to be communicated clearly amid the many other messages that staff hear on a day-to-day basis. You must also be realistic that all colleagues bring with them assumptions, or even prejudices, many deeply ingrained.
So as an effective leader you must learn very rapidly that a key instrument in communicating your ambitions, for them to be heard by the crowd and for them to win hearts and minds, is repetition. Constant acts of reinforcement serve two purposes:
As leader you must exceed every expectation you have about communicating your key messages – you will not begin to communicate enough until you feel you are doing too much.
The effective leader is a figurehead. As I have already remarked, your every move is closely scrutinised. As you set the tone for your organisation – from key values to the way you deal with people, be they staff or partners – your words are an exceptionally strong currency. While the most effective leader cannot be anything but natural, you must learn naturally to select words carefully and thoughtfully. What is important is less how much is said, than what is said – and the ‘what’ must be strategic in its own right:
All these features must bear the hallmark of repetition. In other words, you communicate the same message repetitively to achieve the same effect. In this way, your colleagues have a clear business compass on which they can depend and in which they can invest trust.
It is the nature of business structures (of all sizes) that leadership changes. You cannot assume that you have the prospect of longevity in your role to allow you to craft and reinforce your messages over long periods of time. You should also be aware that your teams may become cynical about leadership ‘vision’, since they may have seen leaders – and messages – come and go with increasingly undermining regularity. Change and scepticism thus represent major challenges – do you have the time to sustain a convincing messaging which overcomes natural barriers of suspicion?
You will soon realise that in establishing and maintaining credibility, you face a unique intersection of issues:
The pull of character and circumstance may drive you to be cautious about commitments. The best leaders, however, face down caution with bravery, set out their stall and stick with it.
‘Sticking with it’ is the key. You must have immense self-belief in what you are doing, not only in espousing a clear vision, strategy and set of goals but in saying so. Not only in being a leader, but acting as one.
This means that you take each and every opportunity to repeat and reinforce your key messages.
In truth, you must live the life of the vision, strategy and goals you set so strongly that you come to embody them. This is an intensely personalised leadership that uses the power of your individuality – your charisma, drive and persuasion – to proselytise a view of the future. To some extent this is driven by you alone, it represents risk – but to the very same extent it is the power of personality that truly leads by example.
There is little more dangerous to a leader than confused communication – if business direction is underpinned by a clear vision and strategy, then it can just as easily lose value if it is not understood by everyone. There are four main risks:
These pitfalls reinforce how critical it is for you as leader to be certain about the key messages you want to convey – to communicate with a determination and relentlessness, and always to feel that you are over-communicating.