You’ve just been promoted into one of your organization’s Big Jobs.
Now you’ve got an impressive office, a hefty budget and vast
expectations about how you will lead dozens or even thousands of people.
Can you stick with the leadership style that brought you this far? Or
do you need to recalibrate your approach, starting with the way you
communicate?
Some fascinating rethinking is under way on exactly that topic. Scholars such as Harvard Business School’s
Boris Groysberg
argue that effective leadership no longer revolves around brilliant
speeches and heroic exhortations. (We can call that the Fidel Castro
approach – and it doesn’t work especially well in either government or
mainstream business.) Instead, Groysberg and co-author Michael Slind
argue in their 2012 book “
Talk Inc.”
that the higher you go in an organization, the more you must engage
other people in conversations, rather than trying to shout them into
submission.
I’m in favor of traveling 70% of the way down that
road with Groysberg and Slind, without becoming so chatty that you lose
the ability to stretch people’s horizons. Over the past 25 years, as a
business-book author and writer for the likes of Forbes, Fast Company
and The Wall Street Journal, I’ve seen a lot of corporate leaders in
action. Here are seven ways that the best leaders increase their
effectiveness by the ways they communicate.
1. Bring the vision to life. Anyone
can write a mission statement, full of lofty words that sound good. But
you aren’t communicating that vision unless you repeatedly signal how
those values translate into concrete actions. What people learn from
your routine decision-making matters far more than what you pack into
your speeches.
A case in point: Jeff Bezos’s insistence that
Amazon.com is “the most customer-centric company in the world.” Nice
slogan. What does it
really mean?
Hang around the Amazon CEO for a while, and you will notice that he
vetoes sassy ads that mock customers. He insists that mid-level meetings
include one person serving solely as the customer advocate – with the
power to veto actions that undermine customers’ interests. And when
Amazon reorganizes departments, which it does fairly often, each
regrouping is justified as a way of serving the customer better.
In the same spirit, bring
your
bedrock values into the daily workplace. Salute other people’s actions
that reinforce what you prize. Call out conduct that doesn’t. And infuse
these principles into other people’s thought patterns by referencing
key values as decisions are being made.
2. Ask smart questions. In his new book, “
To Sell Is Human,”
best-selling author Daniel H. Pink cites studies showing that when you
want to persuade someone, questions can be more powerful than
statements. The reason: you engage another person’s heart and mind more
strongly. You get him or her thinking about the ideal answer – and then
all the steps necessary to get there. By being less dogmatic, you let
people on your team build game plans that they believe in, rather than
trapping them in a helpless state until you issue your next command.
While developing my most recent book, “
The Rare Find,”
I was impressed with the way that David Evans, the former head of the
computer science department at the University of Utah, got great work
out of his graduate students by asking simple but profound questions
that pointed the way to revolutionary advances. He inspired the
engineers who later built Pixar, Adobe and Netscape. Often that could be
done simply by pointing at a big goal on the horizon and saying: “How
would you get there?”
3. Take time to read the room. Once
you’re in senior leadership, you will meet a lot of outsiders that you
hardly know ... but whose support or forbearance is crucial to your
company's success. Do 90% of the talking, and it’s tempting to think
that you carried the day with Washington regulators, Chinese suppliers,
that big customer in Dallas or the investigative reporter from New York.
Guess what? If you don’t know what the other party really wanted, all
that bluster was in vain.
Take a tip from Silicon Valley executive
Meg Whitman, early in her career, when she was building eBay into a
global e-commerce powerhouse. Some of her most important meetings were
with eBay’s Power Sellers. These merchants booked huge amounts of
business on the site, yet for a time they felt the company didn’t
understand their frustrations with fees and service issues. Every few
months, she would visit Power Sellers on their turf, looking for ways to
fix their problems or at least offer sympathy. Her keen ear helped eBay
stay ahead of its competitors.
Don’t fall prey to the belief that
careful listening is only for the little people in the room. When you
listen carefully, you win people’s trust – and that’s crucial to
everything else you want to accomplish. There’s a maxim in the public
speaking business: “The more your audience talks, the more they think
they have learned from you.” Use that sly insight to your advantage.
4. Create a climate where things get done. In
any organization, there's a huge gap between projects that are headed
to the finish line, right now -- and ones that live indefinitely in
limbo, hardly moving forward. Which do you prefer? If you're looking for
results, make sure your employees and front-line managers are
repeatedly aware of your top priorities. Help set interim mileposts. Get
roadblocks out of the way. Walk through the areas where specific tasks
are being done. Even a 10-minute visit by the boss conveys the clear and
uplifting message: "This is important."
Be mindful of how many
"top priorities" your organization can handle successfully. Better to
win two big campaigns a year than to stumble in the midst of 20. I've
seen ambitious but unfocused organizations end up with overcrowded
agendas that create internal strife -- with the unpleasant consequences
of missed deadlines, constant changes of directions and ugly battles for
resources and recognition. The higher up you go in an organization, the
more important it is for you to communicate key goals with clarity and
brevity.
Tim Boyle, the CEO of Columbia Sportswear, is remarkably
good at peeling away the clutter. I’ve chatted with him since 2005, and
he keeps his business centered on three simple concepts: innovation,
enhanced design and compelling marketing. Zoom in on each idea, and
details abound. He’s a remarkably hard-working and well-read boss. Those
core concepts, however, help ensure that Columbia’s 4,000 employees are
pulling in the right direction.
5. Use stories to get your points across. When
you’re at the top of an organization, you can seem pretty distant from
the people on the front lines. Now you’re in a job where it may be
impossible to schedule enough face time with everyone you’d like to
influence. One of your best ways to compensate: sharing teaching
anecdotes, so that even people who hardly know you will still feel they
know your human, authentic side.
Nobody does this better than
Warren Buffett, the 82-year-old chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.
His conglomerate has $143 billion in annual revenue, with interests that
range from insurance to energy, furniture and chocolate. But when you
read Buffett's
annual letters
to shareholders, his dry wit and wise-uncle judgment come through on
every page. Countless investors and managers who have never met him
still feel that they know him – and like him.
You don’t need to be
nearly as polished as Buffett to succeed in this domain. Just think how
you would explain your week’s battles and goals to a neighbor, a spouse
or a college roommate, and you’ll find the right tone.
6. Be mindful of what you don’t know. If
your subordinates are any good at all, you often won’t know the
fine-grain details as well as they do. Expect to be learning constantly
on the job. Find ways that your in-house experts can quietly bring you
up to speed on emerging issues that are catching your eye. You’ve got
vital strengths that other people don’t, particularly in terms of
experience, broad perspectives and judgment. As you work toward
important decisions, make sure your remarks and conversations are
opening the way for other people to keep augmenting your knowledge base.
Two
of the most skillful learners I ever encountered are Sheryl Sandberg
(the chief operating officer of Facebook), and Lou Gerstner, the former
CEO of RJR Nabisco and then IBM. I traveled with Gerstner during his RJR
era as part of a Wall Street Journal front-page profile. He was still
mastering the company’s endless product line, but he got up to speed
shrewdly, calling some meetings on a supermarket floor so he could walk
the aisles as people talked, looking around to see whose brands
dominated each category.
7. Make people feel they work for a winner.
Can you single-handedly improve your organization’s morale – in ways
that genuinely translate into better performance and innovation? That’s
one of the great mysteries of leadership. Some executives try smothering
their employees in perks. Others praise good work, hoping that it will
lead to greater doings in the future. Still others scold slackers and
kick out the weakest performers, believing that some situations call for
toughness.
Any of those approaches can work; yet I’ve seen
executives try all three and still come up short. A memorable insight
here came from John Young, who was CEO of Hewlett Packard for many years
during its prime. We chatted after his retirement, and he contended
that what shapes morale the most is employees’ conviction that they are
working for the best company in their field. Earn that honor, he said,
and you gain a level of employee commitment that cash and perks alone
can’t buy.
All the other six techniques in this article point
toward this final priority. If you’re conveying a clear vision, asking
good questions, setting the right priorities and so on, you’re creating
that winners’ aura that is the ultimate reward for great leadership
communication.
For more great posts like this, follow LinkedIn's Leadership & Management channel.