Leaders Must Communicate Effectively

In April of this year, technology mogul Elon Musk tweeted out that “people are overrated.” While he would later explain that he was referring to the power of robotics and the emerging technology in both robotics and artificial intelligence, I can’t help but think of how destructive that nineteen-character tweet was to his organization? Musk worked diligently to surround himself with really bright and intelligent people that spend a considerable amount of time and energy on his research and engineering projects. Robotics maybe an emerging technology but people are not overrated. I learned long ago that words have meaning; your words as a leader have immense power. Words send a strong message to the people who work with and for you in your organization.

Here is a fundamental truth about organizational performance. The majority of people you know, yourself included, desire highly effective, functional relationships – personal, familial, and professional. Here is the reality check. Few people are willing to do the hard work at the essential level to sustain and create those relationships. One of the key ways we, as leaders, can develop and maintain highly effective relationships, is to learn to communicate effectively with the people around us.

Communicating with other people is a life essential. Effective communication, as Simon Sinek might say, is a tribal instinct essential to appropriate bonding within a host of relationships. We communicate everyday—all day—with people in our workplaces, our friends, our families, and strangers in a host of communal locations. The point of this discussion is simple: to add meaning, value, and purpose to our lives, we need to be able to have effective communication with people in a variety of roles in our lives.  Stephen R. Covey may have said it best in 7 Habits when he advised that we are to “seek to understand before we demand to be understood.” 

History is replete with failure in execution in a host of examples from business, politics, health care, and the military related to ineffective, incomplete, and unclear communication. The reality is that your ability to communicate as leader is of critical importance. In a recent survey of recruiters from companies with more than 50,000 employees, communication skills were cited as the single most important decisive factor in choosing managers. The survey, conducted by the University of Pittsburgh's Katz Business School, points out that communication skills, including written and oral presentations, as well as an ability to work with others, are the main factors contributing to job success. Once again we see that behavior is a key contributing factor to performance excellence and communication is certainly a behavior skill if nothing else.

 We have all been taught that the key to communication is listening. This is true, but you first must care before you can listen to understand effectively. Effective communication, as a highly influential trust behavior, requires caring first, and seeking to understand before demanding to be understood. An old adage is applicable here: I do not care in how much you know, until you demonstrate to me how much you care. Displaying behavior of compassion to another person opens their brain up to a willingness to listen. When people make a decision to shut you out of their lives because of your behavior, effective communication with those people ceases.

As we work with people of a variety of organizations, at all levels, in all kinds of relationships, we continue to be profoundly affected at how difficult it is for people to communicate. One of the downsides to the advancements in mobile technology is that people’s verbal skills are actually decreasing as a result of constant emailing and texting. Whatever the fundamental driver that inhibits and prohibits people from being able to communicate effectively, whether CEO or new hire in the mail room, such a refusal perpetuates ill will and wreaks havoc in workplace engagement, productivity, and performance. When we begin to examine the nature of relationships in our organizations we can gain understanding as to the value and the power of being able express ourselves, our intentions, and our shared values to connect with peers and subordinates to drive engagement and peak organizational performance. None of that can occur until individual leaders are willing to put in the effort to effectively communicate with those around them. As leaders, we may think we have the best ideas, vision, and direction to take our organizations to higher levels of performance. If leaders cannot effectively communicate that vision or direction, and if they do not manage  how fast they try to communicate in a complex and chaotic work environment, they will be unable to translate those ideas from strategy to an operational reality. Remember, performance is as much about the people and their ability to execute a good plan as it is about the plan itself.

Learning to communicate effectively as leaders is all about becoming aware of the diversity of talent we have around us, and then engaging in methodical and consistent efforts to connect with people in a positive, emotional connection to create engagement of their talent. Doing so improves your effectiveness in key relationships, increases your level of leadership influence, and ultimately drives peak performance in your organization.

The Hierarchy of Organization Behavioral Needs

In 1943 Abraham Maslow developed what many of us know as “Maslow's hierarchy of needs.” His theory is that human psychology revolves around a five-tier model of human needs, often depicted as hierarchical levels within a pyramid. 

As you may know, lover level needs in the hierarchy must be satisfied before individuals can attend to needs higher up. From the bottom of the hierarchy upwards, the needs are: physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization. The truth is that in your organizations there exists a hierarchy of behavioral needs of your employees. Our research at The Frisina Group and The Center for Influential Leadership has identified that within all organizations employees want to be treated with respect by their leadership in behavior that communicates physical and emotional safety. When leaders fulfill the fundamental needs for trust and safety, the brains of people are readily able to move from the security part of the brain physiologically to the performance part of the brain. This is brain biology not psychology. Once people are able to focus on work from their performance brain, they become more engaged and connect to the meaning and value of their work at higher levels of performance. The ability of a leader to communicate trust and safety to their team members creates an upward spiral of performance potential. The opposite of this brain biology fact is equally true. Create a toxic work culture. Behave as a leader in ways that undermine the tenets of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and you do so at your own performance peril and the performance outcomes of your team.

So often we hear in leadership education that we are to “lead by example.” Too often this translates to leaders that if I want my employees to work as hard as I do, than that means I have to demonstrate it through my own initiative. Sadly this concept gets oversimplified. When leaders want employees to work longer hours, they think that they set that example by staying at work the longest. The reality is if you really want to impact your workforce and lead by example, start caring for the emotional and physical wellbeing of your people. Start appealing to the hierarchy of organizational behaviors that do exist in your workplace. Start respecting your people, start clearly and effectively communicating with your employees and start demonstrating to them that their work is creating lasting meaning and has purpose.

If you want a robust and dynamic workplace that is achieving high marks in performance and excellence, then lead by example absolutely; start showing and demonstrating these behaviors to your people. People cannot proceed in the direction you want them too without clear guidance and communication. Likewise, who wants to work in an environment where individual efforts are diminished by leadership? What person, you included wants to invest more time and effort in work when both you, as a person, and your work are not valued or respected by leaders of the organization. To prove this point, think about how children express themselves when answering the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Most often children identify nurses, fireman, paramedics, astronauts, doctors. They identify professions that demonstrate s sense of meaning and purpose. They demonstrate a value to others and of working to a purpose that exceeds their own individual desires. What about your own experiences, with your own children? Every hear a child say they want to be like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons or Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life?”  People, regardless of their profession, want to know that what they are doing is providing value and a purpose to their lives and the lives of others. We may not be what we once wrote down in grade school but regardless, as leaders, we ought to be doing everything in our ability to translate to our people that what they are doing in our workplaces is providing lasting meaning and purpose. It’s our job as leaders to lead by example, to ensure we are meeting and encouraging these behavioral needs of our people. We choose to lead or follow. In either choice, behavior as a whole and communication specifically, becomes the fundamental factor in how we connect effectively with others. Highly effective relationships are essential for you to achieve your own sense of meaning and purpose. No one wins alone. That’s worth thinking about today.