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
Objective
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:
- they grab mindshare and attention – your messages are heard;
- they win credibility – you are heard so often that you are taken seriously.
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.
Context
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:
- it supports the vision and strategy;
- it is clear and interpretable;
- it is consistent and unambiguous;
- it is actionable;
- it can be related to everyday work.
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.
Challenge
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:
- legacy – the position left by your predecessor, and especially its impact on your team’s willingness to embrace the vision;
- time – the need to make rapid impacts in a potentially volatile environment;
- style – your ability to communicate effectively and quickly;
- vision – your readiness to share your intelligible but stretching view of the future;
- stamina – your ability to communicate relentlessly but without loss of enthusiasm;
- change – how you face change but communicate consistently.
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.
Success
‘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.
- Strategic and annual plans include a restatement of the core vision, strategy and goals.
- Intranet and internet websites broadcast key messages to a wide partner and public audience.
- Every management, team or staff meeting is seen as a forum for messages to be repeated.
- Memos or announcements sent to colleagues link core goals to advertised developments or changes.
- 121s link personal development objectives to broader goals.
- External events (conference speeches, stands) and media events (interviews, articles) enable public reinforcement of corporate goals and 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.
Leaders’ measures of success
- Vision, strategy and goals are referred to in all strategy plans, staff meetings, team meetings and 121s.
- You refer to vision, strategy and goals at least once a day.
- You listen to hear vision, strategy and goals being repeated by your team unprompted – the more they do this, the more it has all sunk in!
Pitfalls
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:
- weak messages – a lack of reinforcement will render messages unimportant and undifferentiated, and the audience will be unable to identify what is significant and special;
- too many messages – irrespective of how frequently they are reinforced, too many different messages will confuse an audience because focus and prioritisation will be ambiguous;
- changing messages – if key messages change, the audience will ‘learn’ to ignore future messages because they will lack belief in the substance of messaging;
- infrequent messages – infrequency presents a real peril. No message – however clear and well articulated – will gain business currency if it is lost in the noise of daily chatter.
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.
Leaders’ checklist
- Always remember that you are a personal representation of the vision, strategy and goals you have created or support – your demeanour counts!
- Remember, too, that you are also a personification of values – the way you act and the way you speak will say as much about your values as any published memo on values ever can.
- Distil your vision, strategy and goals into key messages to be reinforced throughout your business life.
- Understand that you have to take each and every opportunity to communicate your key messages, and know that you will feel you are doing this too much – if you don’t feel this, you are definitely communicating too little!
- Know that your time may be limited – so communicate regularly and clearly from day one in the job, even if at the start you are communicating values and laying the groundwork for more definitive statements later.
- Make staff feel good for collaborating and be seen to reward it.