You would think that organisations choose their leaders because they are skilled in communication. What is the job after all, but communicating with the team to make sure everyone is clear about what they have to do and to encourage them to do it? Well you would be wrong! Leaders are usually selected for promotion because they are very good, often the best, at their current job. It is assumed that they will be the best person to lead the team on that basis.
Just as we know that the talented sports person doesn’t necessarily migrate those skills into leadership roles as a successful coach, neither does the talented functional specialist transform into a successful leader. The gun sales rep doesn’t become a great sales team leader. The best architect doesn’t make the best choice to lead other draftsmen and women. The list just goes on and on and we wonder why we keep repeating the same errors? One aspect of that difficulty is that it is hard to see the immediate results of leadership, unless they really screw things up and people start quitting in droves.
There is the rub. In the “goode olde days”, it didn’t matter. You just lose one and simply get a replacement. In the 1990s, I remember getting twenty or thirty resumes to go through, to fill a sales position. Now, if you can find anyone, you feel blessed. The competition for talent is a remorseless zero-sum game. As leaders, if we cannot communicate well with our people, we will face irreconcilable supply and demand issues. We will have to spend a lot of time and money to rectify our mistakes as our people will vote with their feet and leave the organisation.
How can leaders improve their communication skills? There are tons of things to work on, but let’s look at two specific items.
1. I try to synchronise with the staff member when they are speaking by putting myself in their shoes.
Bosses have poor memories. They conveniently forget about how they were at the same age and stage as their staff. They imagine they were perfectly formed and with no blemishes when they were coming up through the ranks. Not true. Like everyone working for us, we also made a host of mistakes in our careers, and that is how we educated ourselves.
Rather than putting on the superior boss hat when speaking to staff, let’s try to cast our mind back to our own shortcomings and inadequacies at the same point in our career. This is a humbling exercise and bound to make us more sympathetic with the people who work for us, rather than getting annoyed with their work progress.
We can change the tone of how we speak with them to be less abrupt. We can be more keen to have them relax with us, so that they can feel confident sharing their ideas or issues. We can stop telling them what to do and how to do it. Instead, we can ask them for their opinion on what and how we should do things around here.
We don’t cut them off when they are talking and we will encourage them to try things, even though we doubt that it is going to work. We do this because we know that is how we learnt. We tried stuff and then sorted out the successes from the failures. We are communicating a lot of trust when we do it this way, rather than micro-managing the hell out of the team.
2. I observe the staff member for non-verbal clues
Busy bosses are prone to shortcut everything. They are moving from meeting to meeting, trying to squeeze in their own emails between slots and generally feeling frustrated with the overload. Feeling totally time poor, they like to get to the meat of the issues straight away. They want to cut out any down time, like having to listen to a detailed explanation from staff, when they could get the summary much faster. This tends to become an internal dialogue between the boss and themselves, where they are concentrated on their frustration with their own lack of time and not with the person with whom they are speaking.
This self-absorption means they are stuck with hearing the words of the staff but are not conscious of the non-verbal messages. In professional card games, they talk about the players having “tics”. These are patterns of unconscious behaviour that are linked to attitudes and thoughts. The successful card players read their opponents in detail, looking for these clues as predictors of decision-making. Bosses need to do the same.
We should slow down and carefully look for patterns in our staff beyond the words we hear. We have all experienced this. When we said something, we noticed they winced or moved in a certain way. Their body language was saying “I don’t like what you just said or you”, but there were no words coming out of their mouth.
When we are busy laying down orders like a mad pirate captain, we can miss the verbal clues and continue on our merry way, oblivious to the carnage we leave in our wake. We may not have meant what we said to come across the way it did, but if we don’t spot the negative reaction, we cannot go into damage control. In this war for talent, if we continue to make these types of mistakes, then we will try to fill job posts far too often, as people simply pull up stakes and leave.
Communication is a skill and it must be mastered. The worst time in Japan to be a boss is today and the bad news is that it will only get even more diabolical. We have to face the reality and gear up accordingly. If we don’t, then we will be the one leaving and not of our own volition.
