The Sanford Berenberg Experience: Message of the Day - Leadership without Communication

Good Morning,

Leadership is a pretty well known and well studied topic. Not to mention it is all the rage in business and organizational circles these last few decades. All you need to do to see that is look at the vast endless array of book titles showering the bookshelves in bookstores, libraries and on the web. Add to that the nearly limitless leadership trainings and seminars available in person, via telecast, the web and on CD or other medium.

Yet, no matter how well versed someone is in leadership, how many courses they take, how large a team they lead, no matter what resources are at their disposal, one huge roadblock can short-circuit this crucial skill in its tracks.

Lack of effective communication.

How is that?

A leader shares their vision with their team, gets them to buy in and helps them grow and develop while achieving their shared goal, while developing the team to be leaders in and of themselves.

The communication is riddled throughout this. A leader shares a vision, communication. A leader gets the team to buy in, communication. A leader helps the team grow and develop, communication.

What if a member of the team simply does not get it?

What if the leader is a visual person and their team are mostly tactile learners. Showing without the holding, touching and feeling is not true communication to those tactile learning team members.

What if the leader picks us new concepts immediately, and their team need to mostly sleep on the training and can run with it in a day or two. That leader will have a hard team training and going.

What if the leader and teams are from different cultures and the method of communication used by the leader is not valued or even understood by the team members?

What if leader sees the big picture of the goals, yet the team members only see themselves and their personal goals? They see the vision, but from their own perspective, and not the leaders.

These and many more examples can be shown to stop a leader in their tracks. Unless there is clear communication from end to end, there is room for failure in leadership. Just having a vision and sharing it, or giving direction to a team are meaningless unless there is true communication where everyone is on the same page. Likewise, re-explaining a point over and over again where the leader and the team member are not in agreement is not going to solve the problem.

The leader and their team need understand the same baseline information, and this can often be accomplished by simply asking questions, ask the team members what the goals mean to them, finding out what are their best learning styles, what the values mean to them, what their cultural viewpoints are.

By effectively communicating, and having free-flowing information in a form everyone understands, where everyone KNOWS what is expected of them, why, how, etc. a leader can truly lead.

Leadership, no matter how good, without effective communication is worthless. Just someone up front spouting off words.

Enjoy!

Sanford Berenberg
Sanford@berenberg.net
http://www.berenberg.net

http://sanfordberenberg.blogspot.com/
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