A
Th e
Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$er
January 2020 #12246 Page #28
Are You Communicating the Same Old Message? Ben Hershey 4Ward Consulting Group, LLC
H
ere we are at the start of 2020 — Happy New Year! As we begin the year, we’ll likely have times when we look at the past and then look forward, as we plan our strategy and set the tone for our teams and work with our colleagues.
But… there are others who will trod out the same old message over and over, using different words and different tactics while trying to communicate some message they have taken from another play book. This can make us wonder — if you keep talking about the same thing, only using different words, are you reaching your team or those you are trying to communicate with, or just talking about yourself or to yourself? How we communicate and what we say are very important. As we start the new year, it bears remembering that, as leaders, we are far more visible than we realize, and we are sending signals to followers all the time. And, while sending the right signals to our followers is important at any time, it is especially important during times of strategic change. These critical times include when followers are trying to make sense of a new “ask” from the organization, in the context of all of the existing asks they are grappling with or at the beginning of the year when we set new goals and initiatives for the year. Why, then, is it so hard for leaders to send clear, effective signals to followers? In my experience of working with leaders of organizations, and in my side-by-side work with those “on the ground employees” asking what they need during times of strategic change, there are three main ways in which leaders too often send confusing signals to their organizations. If we can get them right, you can communicate clearly and effectively; fail to pay attention to how and what you are communicating in these three modes, and you will have confusion at best — and at worst, the opposite of the strategic changes you’re attempting to achieve.
Signal No. 1: Telling your organization what you want You’d think this would be the easy bit, but too often this is where leaders most shortchange their organizations. We have heard time and again from employees tasked with delivering strategic change that their leaders weren’t clear enough about what change they should achieve or what it would entail. It seems the reasons for this are twofold: Leaders too often express what they want in terms not of outcomes, but of tasks, and they rarely, if ever, make clear the full extent of the change they are asking for. Many leadership teams shortchange the questions of what they want the change to achieve, and why.
Continued next page
PHONE: 800-289-5627
Read/Subscribe online at www.componentadvertiser.com
FAX: 800-524-4982