Leader Communication Skills - What’s The Value?
Managers are uniquely placed to impact on a business. So, the way they communicate with their people is a vital part of the package. If you want to ensure that you are successful in your business, the way you get information over as well as the skills you use every day with your employees will make or break you. By making the effort to learn and enhance your skills for talking and listening to anyone, you will take a big step forward.
Using great delving questions can get to the bottom of many challenging issues for managers. If progress is being held back because of some problem with processes for example, getting to the bottom of them might be critical for success and above all profitability. Utilizing excellent communication skills to present facts and show team members what’s going on and what isn’t, may well be the way forward. A really good manager will more than adequately demonstrate this capability.
Whilst special communication situations are important, it is likely to be just a small part of the manager’s role, compared with the need to interact with their people on a regular day-to-day basis. Good managers talk to their people all the time, getting to know them well and building great rapport as they go. Understanding how important this is, helps those managers who care for success to decide just how they are going to develop this skillset to the full.
Typically common and damaging effects of poor communication skills are how misunderstandings develop. These can drive employees mad and managers to the edge of despair, especially when actions don’t happen as they should. If a manager doesn’t clearly understand the needs of the audience they are speaking with, then their efforts may well be in vain. Taking the time to ascertain whether those listening are ‘getting it’, will create instant feedback so that whatever is being said can be adapted ‘on-the-fly’.
When your people have come up with a problem, you might have felt that you understood all it’s complex twists and turns. Trust me; you are not the only one to misinterpret what you thought you understood - it’s so easy! When people are given a problem, they divert their attention towards finding a solution to it and in doing so they fail to understand the various aspects that the particular issue involves. By listening very carefully to the problem, by paying close attention to the detail and asking incisive questions, you will ensure there is little home for misunderstanding. This is a really effective way of getting into a problem and resolving it.
All the decisions you take might not be right but you can cut down on the number of wrong decisions. If you write down all possibilities and evaluate their various pros and cons, you will, without doubt make better decisions. Also, if you want to put into effect the decision you have taken, it’s worth thinking also from the recipient’s point of view in advance.
Teamwork, with all the interlinked dynamics associated there, requires special attention. The challenge here, is that with several members involved at a time, if you are not careful any message gets misinterpreted as it is passed around. Having the sense to clarify as a group, with questions and feedback altogether, might well be a constructive and focused way to ensure that you get it right with your people, all of them, every time. Remember, the power of a well engineered team is impressive - the potential for downsides equally so if you get it wrong!
When you are keen to ensure any communication processes that you have in place are effective, it’s pretty important to adequately source relevant materials to deliver all that you need to. There can be few managers who haven’t got circumstances wrong at some time in their career. Once it happens you don’t easily forget when a piece of vital equipment fails, or your laptop battery died at just the wrong moment. Sometimes it’s just as challenging when you can’t find a flipchart pad. On an even more an informal basis, it can be a bit embarrassing when you haven’t got a bit of paper in your pocket to take a note or two down!
Developing your personal communication skill is one of the most important tactics in your management development toolkit. It has the potential to catalyze great success. Only you can do it!
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