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Communication
10 Communication Patterns Used by Great Leaders
Whether you’re leading a meeting, a team, or a company, your ability to communicate can set you apart as a leader.
The skill of bringing others along with you, managing difficult situations, and expressing yourself clearly can take a lifetime to master.
Communication goes far beyond ‘choosing the right words’. It involves understanding your audience, actively listening, and being able to empathise with people. It also requires good facilitation skills, the ability to control your body language, and a lot of intuition too. But clearly, word choice is critically important.
For the last 10 years, I’ve been collecting techniques that help me communicate more effectively as a leader. Here are some of the most useful ones I’ve discovered:
1. To convince, start with ‘why’.
Imagine you’re presenting an important decision to your team. One way to do it is to simply state your decision and then explain why you took it. However, a split second after you’ve stated it, your listeners make an intuitive judgement call on whether they think it’s good or bad. If they don’t like it, the explanations you give for taking that decision can sound like excuses.
Reversing the order of the information — and leading with the reasons that motivated your decision — enables you to take your listeners on a journey, in which your answer is the logical conclusion.
2. To win hearts and minds, show vulnerability, then vision.
Have you ever met someone with an answer for everything? It’s a charade that doesn’t last long — especially if you manage people. So what should you do when the team are looking to you for direction?
Vulnerability and vision are a magic combination. Showing vulnerability — by admitting that you don’t have all the answers, or that you too are scared sometimes — can foster a sense of connection . . . and hearts love connection. Then, your vision can provide direction for the team . . . and minds love a clear direction.
