Communication tips for leaders

By Alex Ogundadegbe
If you take time to review the speeches of American Presidents of time past and heads of multinational conglomerates, you are likely to arrive at the conclusion that communication is power. Those who have mastered the effective use of communication can change their experience of the world and the world’s experience of them. Author and speaker Anthony Robbins naled the essence of communication with that quote. Many people do not know how important what you feel, say and gesture are and how inherently important to you success in life all the communication efforts are. In a class of bankers and regulators, recently the power of communication was established and at the end of it all, participants begun to commit themselves to improving their communication abiity.
Every leader needs to know how to use words and gestures. Leaders of nations, corporations and organizations are increasingly beginning to understand that they need to grasp the essence of communication in order to succeed at their work. If you have the greatest vision, goal and strategy the world has ever known, if your policy ideas or plan of action is brilliant and all inclusive, without being able to communicate it effectively you stand little or no chance of succeeding at what you do. Leaders need people to succeed. They need to be able to express themselves adequately to those people, carry them along in difficult situations and circumstances and take timing setting and climate into consideration before they even begin to espouse on their vision.
One common mistake we make is the erection, whether consciously or otherwise of barriers. Barriers originate from the leader when he communicates via a perceptal filter. He has bias in mind. The bias could involve gender, class, race or ethnicity. If any of these preferences take root, naturally, his audience which would be made up of a diverse group of people, will be offended and thereby erect a barrier of non compliance and disgust between themselves and their leader. Barriers can be channel related. A malfunctioning system not only hinders smooth passage of a message, it can also distort meaning. The channel and the message have to match. Inappropriate channels wll always diminish the power of the message. If I wish to communicate with nursing mothers or mothers who are raising young children, I need to find a way to reach them appropriately. It would be error to assume that any popular news media would do the job. In choosing a channel to address any audience, we really must be strategic. The world has become so complex that there are various messages being tranmitted and the last thing we want is for ours to get lost in the crowd. The could also be a source of barriers. These are barriers that the receiver may deliberately or inadvertently erect.Three of these barriers are explained by a “selective process” of the audience. Selective exposure is when people choose which communication they may receive or reject. If you are not on the same page with your listeners, they pick your address to shreds and turn it into something else. Selective perception occurs when people choose to understand some parts of your communication effort and misunderstand others and selective retention is when people you communicate with choose to retain in their memory, certain messages they like and wipe off their minds those they don’t like. If your associates or workers choose to forget your message then you can’t influence them!
So there are certain strategies we must employ to ensure that we are always communicating properly: Empathize with and know your audience. A general understanding of their demographics and their desires will serve you greately. Listen to them any chance you get. You need to know them. It will help you speak to them properly. Whether you are telling them something good, bad or ugly; whether what you are sending across is dull or boring, you must find a way to express yourself to impress your audience. You cannot afford to hold back and be subtle and slow. Hit them hard with the information you have. Let it sink deep into them and get the required reaction. Talking about reactions, you have to speak with feedback in mind. What feedback do you require from the people you are talking to? You must anticipate what responses you want from them even before you begin to speak. It will guide on what you want to say and how you should say it. We must also be able to employ the appropriate language for the dicussion. It is not all about what you say alone, but how you say it. Which words are you choosing? Are they rude, arrogant, complex or jargon of a particular field? The words you use will to large extent affect the responses you get from the people you speak to. So choose your words carefully. Make sure the language you are speaking is acceptable and understandable to those you are speaking to. Your words should compliment your action and vice versa. Never be caught saying one thing and doing the complete opposite. It will betray trust. Though it has been estimated that communication occupies between 50% and 90% of a manager’s time, research has revealed that as much as 70% of all business communications fail to achieve their intended purpose. As people who want to succeed at whatever we are doing we must make our communication clear, remove barriers and make sure we are understood at all times.
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