Getting the ‘Bottom Line Up Front’ in Your Leadership Communications

As a leader, your job is to drive performance. Whether you’re the CEO of a global enterprise or an emerging leader within your organization, your effectiveness as a leader hinges on how well you can get results from others. The more effectively you can drive results through other people, and the faster you do it, the more successful you’ll be as a leader. This requires an entirely different communications mindset than what most leaders are accustomed to today. To be effective, we need to stop thinking about our communications primarily as branding and PR opportunities and instead focus on driving performance with every communication we produce: from our speeches and articles to our one-on-one meeting discussions, memos, videos, social media posts, and everything in between.

Why the bottom line is so important

Many of the communication challenges we’re facing today result from leaders not being clear about what they want from the people they lead. When leaders don’t make their bottom line clear, people spend a lot of time and energy trying to figure out what the leader wants, and as a result, they don’t have the power to create positive outcomes. This is a large part of why so many leaders are ineffective and why organizations struggle so much to get results. Contrary to what many leaders believe, branding and PR efforts don’t address the core issue of why so many leaders are ineffective and why they struggle to drive results. The pressing issue is that they aren’t clear about what they want and how people can get it done. Until this problem is addressed, all the PR and branding in the world won’t make a difference.

Make people confident you’ll get results

The essence of a bottom-line leadership communications approach is making other people confident that you can get the results you promise. We don’t make promises lightly, but we promise what’s necessary to achieve our desired outcomes. Leaders who can make people confident about their ability to get results know precisely what they want to happen, why it’s essential, and have a plan for getting there. Rather than confusing people with layers and layers of messaging, a bottom-line communications approach makes your communications very clear. For example, you should have a simple conversation when you have a one-on-one discussion with a direct report. You start by making it clear what results you need from that person (“I need you to create three new sales leads this month”), and you follow that up by making it equally clear how they can get there (“you can do this by reaching out to three new prospects every week”)—no hidden agendas. There are no layers of messaging, just two simple facts essential to making the relationship work.

Show what you’re going to do and why

The next part of a bottom-line communications approach is showing people what you will do to accomplish what you said you would do. This is the part of the conversation where many leaders get stuck. They are so concerned with presenting themselves in the best possible light that they neglect to show what they’re going to do to get the results they’re promising. For example, many leaders are eager to talk about what they’ve done in the past to create results. This is a mistake. It’s not about what you’ve done; it’s about what you’re going to do. Presenting your past achievements doesn’t help you get future results — it doesn’t create confidence in your ability to get those same results again.

Show the path to results

What you do to get the results you promise is just as important as the promises you make. At this stage of a bottom-line communications approach, you’re making sure people understand what you’re going to do to drive the results you’ve promised. Most leaders, when they get stuck showing what they’re going to do, simply revert to talking about how they do things. They talk about how they manage their time, how they like to be organized, and what systems they use to drive results. While this might interest you and me, it doesn’t do anything to make people confident in your ability to get results. It doesn’t show them the path to getting those results. It’s important to show people the way to the results you’re promising them. This is especially true if your approach to getting results differs from the norm in your organization or industry. You need to be very clear about what you’re going to do, even if it means explaining how you like to do things. This is the only way to give people confidence in your ability to get results.

How to get the ‘bottom line up front’

The last part of a bottom-line communications approach is to get the ‘bottom line up front.’ This means you must ensure the bottom line is part of your communications at the beginning of any relationship. You can’t wait for an important meeting or one-on-one discussion to clarify the bottom line. You can’t hope that people will magically know what you want or the results you’re after. You must be proactive about making the bottom line clear from the beginning of your relationship with others. You do this by verbally clarifying the bottom line when you start a relationship with someone. You do this by ensuring the first thing you say to anyone — in a meeting, a conference call, a social media exchange, etc. — is to get the bottom line out as soon as possible.

Conclusion

When you approach your leadership communications, everything you do becomes focused on getting results. Every interaction becomes a real opportunity to drive the outcomes you want. When you make the bottom line clear upfront and follow up with a clear action plan, people understand exactly what you want from them and how they can get there. This approach isn’t easy because it forces you to shift your mindset from simply trying to create good impressions and make people like you to making people confident that you can get the desired results. It takes practice to get comfortable with that, but once you do, your effectiveness as a leader goes through the roof.

Go out and lead!