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No Mystery, Just Practice

Great Communication Secrets of Great Leaders takes the mystery out of communications. These four sections give the leader a complete picture of what it takes to develop, deliver, and sustain a leadership message. The secret is to adopt a leadership perspective, to learn how to craft the message and how to deliver it convincingly so that the message sticks. The ultimate goal of communications is to address immediate concerns and issues, and to open the door to future dialogue, discovery, and engagement. Great Communication Secrets of Great Leaders can help you push that door open so that your ideas and those of others can flow freely back and forth.

Good luck and best wishes.

The Importance of Leadership Communications

Great Communication Secrets of Great Leaders shows how to develop and deliver the leadership message: how to develop it for organizationwide communications, create strong e-communications, and connect with the winning presentation. The book features a multipart communications planner, complete with illustrations, that provides advice and examples on how to craft a powerful presentation, deliver it with style, and create a lasting relationship. This book contains four sections:

• Part I deals with developing the leadership message, which is defined as a communication from the leader that covers a key organizational or business issue and is rooted in the cultural values of the organization. Examples of leadership messages include vision and mission statements, calls for transformational change, and calls to action. The main purpose of a leadership message is to build trust. The effectiveness of the leadership communication depends upon how it is communicated and in what manner it is disseminated-all-employee meetings, face-to-face, video, or email. Developing the message includes planning and proper selection of communication channels. Part I also traces the development of the message by tracking the evolution of a topic from its inception through the stages of an outline, draft, revision, and visualization. Read more »
  
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Many Leaders, Many Styles

Examples of leadership communication form the context and heritage of our culture, past and present. These include

• Winston Churchill becoming prime minister of Great Britain in May 1940. Churchill rallied a nation under siege, inspiring hope and the will to persevere until victory over fascism was achieved.
• Mother Teresa gaining support for her mission to the “poorest of the poor” through her prayers, writing, and public appearances.
• George C. Marshall speaking to Congress on the need for military preparedness. He mobilized our armed forces to defeat fascism and later to rebuild a broken Europe.
• Katherine Graham providing leadership at the Washington Post. Graham’s steady hand on the helm enabled the paper to face down a president and to weather a crippling strike and become a preeminent publishing power.
• Bill Veeck promoting baseball both as a game and as entertainment. Veeck’s promotional outlook stemmed from his values of storytelling, listening to his constituents, and giving back to the fans.
• Rosabeth Moss Kanter demonstrating the role of effective communications during transformational change. Kanter’s writings have provided a roadmap for two generations of managers seeking to cope with and embrace the changes that have swept the management landscape.
• Oprah Winfrey using her own personal stories to make connections with others in ways that dispel prejudice and illuminate and celebrate life.
• Rudy Giuliani taking command at the site of the World Trade Center collapse. He served as the lighting rod for both the grieving and the rebuilding of New York City in the wake of September 11.
• Shelly Lazarus demonstrating a leadership role in advertising management. She exemplifies how women can lead their companies as well as their industries and still lead fulfilled personal lives.
• Peter Drucker writing on the role of management. He invigorated the role of management by providing insight and direction.

What all these leaders have in common is a commitment to a cause larger than themselves. Each of them is using communications to further the leadership message through words and deeds. Each understands that leadership communications binds leader to followers in a partnership that is founded in mutual benefit and cemented by trust.

Leaders need to do more than just stand up and speak. They need to integrate communications into everything they do as leaders so that their communications, both oral and written, emerge from who they are as leaders and within the appropriate cultural context. Leaders who fail in communications will fail to achieve their organizational aims.

Taken From : Great Communication Secrets of Great Leaders

A Failure to Communicate

The chief reason that CEOs fail to achieve their aims is not lack of vision, lack of ambition, or even lack of desire. No, according to a Fortune magazine article, the chief reason leaders fail is lack of execution.^[3] Three years later, Fortune explored why corporations fail. Of the ten reasons cited, four (”see no evil, dysfunctional board, fearing the boss, [and] dangerous culture”) can be attributed to a failure of another sort-a failure of communications.^[4]

Further affirmation of communications as a leadership attribute comes from presidential historian Robert Dallek. He describes five key factors of a successful presidency: “vision, pragmatism, consensus-building, charisma, and trustworthiness.”^{[5 ]}Four of these factors depend heavily upon an ability to communicate on multiple levels. Presidents, like all leaders, need to be able to describe where they are going (vision), persuade people to come along with them (consensus), connect on a personal level (charisma), and demonstrate credibility, i.e., do what they say they will do (trust). Even pragmatism depends on communications. Leaders need to describe the options facing an organization and make tough decisions about those options. It is then their responsibility to communicate the reasoning behind their decisions and the results of those decisions. So in a very real sense, leadership effectiveness, both for presidents and for anyone else in a position of authority, depends to a high degree upon good communication skills.

It is easy to take communications for granted. After all, anyone who has the ability to climb into a position of authority over others can communicate, right? Wrong. Communications is seemingly the easiest of leadership behaviors, but experience tells us that it is often the hardest to carry out consistently. How often do we hear about bosses who fail to set expectations, fail to listen to what people tell them, and in the end fail to achieve the results they were hired to achieve? Communications itself is not difficult. Verbal expression and listening to others are common human behaviors. The reason people find communications difficult is that it takes so much commitment. Often leaders are so busy doing all the other important things related to managing systems and people that they simply run out of time and thus do not communicate effectively. And that’s the reason so many leaders fail at communications. Communications requires discipline, thought, perseverance, and the willingness to do it again and again every day.

Effective leadership, both personal and corporate, is effective communications. Leaders and employees need to be in synch throughout the decision-making and implementation process. Leaders and employees need to understand one another. Leaders and employees also need to be able to exchange ideas in an open and honest way. These things can occur only through communications, in particular through what I refer to in this book as leadership communications.

Great Communication Secrets of Great Leaders is the result of more than 20 years of helping leaders at all levels communicate their messages in ways that reflect their own viewpoints as well as those of the organizations for which they work. Just as there is no single way to lead, there is no single way to communicate-in fact, there are countless ways. What matters most is the willingness to do it, with a consistent message, a constancy of purpose, and a frequency of performance. In other words, leaders communicate all the time and do it willingly in order to convey their goals, gain support for those goals, and demonstrate concern for all who follow them.

Taken From : Great Communication Secrets of Great Leaders

Challenges for Readers

Why You Should Care About Behavioral Differentiation

1. To what extent does your organization think about behavior as an element of competitive strategy? Are you self-conscious about your behavior toward customers, employees, suppliers, partners, and other stakeholders? Are you using behavior as a competitive tool now? What more could you do to make behavior a source of competitive advantage? Read more »
   
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Why You Should Care About Behavioral Differentiation

If we take the most uncomplicated look at business, we see that business leaders can really manage only three things: the products or services they produce; what they charge for those products or services, which is a function of the ability to control costs; and how they behave toward customers. Everything else in business management is a function of these three things: products, price, and behavior.

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The Secret to Creating and Sustaining Behavioral Differentiation

What is the secret to creating and sustaining behavioral differentiation? It’s just this: You have to manage your customers’ experiences from start to finish. You have to think about what they are experiencing at every touch point and then design interactions that surpass what they experience when they interact with your competitors. For your company to achieve this, you may need the operational discipline of an EMC or the strong service-oriented culture of a Ritz-Carlton. You may need the creativity and willingness to take risks that Kim Hansen showed at General American Telecom, and the commitment to employee training and education we saw at Southwest Airlines, Hall Kinion, and Men’s Wearhouse-or the professionalism and disciplined mentoring of a Heidrick & Struggles.

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Lessons Learned from Companies That Exemplify BD

Lessons Learned from Companies That Exemplify BD

The most important lesson we learn from companies like Men’s Wearhouse, SAS, Volvo, and Southwest Airlines is that in exemplary companies BD is not a passing fancy but a deeply rooted idea. It’s one of the governing principles of the organization, and it’s driven by the leaders’ or founders’ convictions about how to treat employees, customers, and other stakeholders. In these exemplary companies, BD is not a program imposed by a new CEO or the head of customer service; it’s a set of core beliefs about how to behave. Those beliefs are embraced at all levels of the organization: They are used to screen candidate employees; they are taught in introductory training programs and corporate universities; they are reinforced in regular meetings of employees; and they are modeled by the organization’s leaders.

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Chapter 12: Creating and Sustaining Behavioral Differentiation

Overview

Will is the master of the world. Those who want something, those who know what they want, even those who want nothing, but want it badly, govern the world.

–Ferdinand Brunetière

Rhetoric is frequently an essential first step toward taking action. But just talking about what to do isn’t enough. Nor is planning for the future enough to produce the future. Something has to get done, and someone has to do it.

–Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, The Knowing-Doing Gap

One of the dangers of business books that discuss real companies is that the exemplary companies cited may later falter, which can appear to disprove the authors’ theses. As many pundits have pointed out, this occurred most famously following the 1984 publication of In Search of Excellence by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., when some of the excellent companies they wrote about later turned in less-than-excellent results. Another book, Lessons from the Top: The Search for America’s Best Business Leaders, published in 1999 by Thomas J. Neff and James M. Citrin, included a section on Ken Lay and Enron in which the authors praised how Lay “aggressively moved Enron into nonregulated businesses”.^[1] We can imagine how the authors must have felt when Enron collapsed in 2001 because of its questionable moves into nonregulated businesses. Read more »

Challenges for Readers

1. Fundamental to Hall Kinion’s culture is a “How can we?” attitude. That attitude helps drive BD by encouraging employees to be creative and to think of solutions instead of barriers and reasons why something can’t be done. What are the underlying behavior attitudes in your company?
2. Hall Kinion strives to create a “Hall Kinion experience” for candidates, consultants, and customers. They are self-conscious about their behaviors and the effects of their behaviors on customers. What kind of experience do your customers have when they work with you? Is that experience uniquely positive in any way? Does that experience differentiate you from your competitors? If not, how could you recraft your customers’ experiences so they do differentiate you?
3. At Heidrick & Struggles, behavioral differentiation occurs in the momentby-moment differences their consultants make. We cited a number of the things H&S consultants do to make a difference. Reflect on your own company. What do your people do, moment by moment, to make a difference with customers?
4. H&S has a number of senior partners like Gerry Roche and John Gardner who model exceptional behaviors for younger consultants. Their collective behavior forms the culture of H&S, and that culture helps ensure that BD is consistent and sustainable across the world. How do your senior people coach and mentor young people and help reinforce and sustain superior behaviors toward customers?
5. Ultimately, BD is about caring. If you don’t care, you won’t go out of your way to treat customers exceptionally well. When you don’t care, it’s just a job. Do your employees care? How does your culture reinforce caring? How do your leaders model caring and inspire others to care?

Taken From : Winning Behavior-What the Smartest, Most Successful Companies Do Differently