How Leaders Communicate Part 2: 5 Ways Leaders Influence

Leaders Influence

Impressing someone changes what he or she thinks about you. Influencing them changes what they do because of you. Leaders care little about the impressions they make. Instead, they strive to influence others to take positive action.

Here’s how to influence every time you communicate:

1)    Start with a question

“What do I want the person I’m communicating with to think, feel and do when I’m done?”

Be clear on what you want. If there was ever a time to “begin with the end in mind,” it is when you communicate. Leaders communicate intentionally. That means that know what they want every conversation, email, phone call, or speech to accomplish. Then they design how and what they communicate to achieve it.

2)    Focus on quality, not quantity

Ever heard it said—or say it yourself—that “things would be better if we just communicated more?” Often communicating just creates more problems.

Good communication is about quality, not quantity.

3) Speak the truth with compassion

Don’t tell people what they want to hear. Tell them what they need to hear. Just make sure you tell them in such a way that they’ll listen.

Too often, out of a fear of conflict or disagreement, the partial truth is told or the message deflected away from what really needs to be said. Telling the truth in a way that minimizes conflict creates a number of benefits. It saves time, energizes the relationship, builds trust, and gets to the point.

Leaders aren’t always right, but they are clear about what they believe. In the process of expressing your unique point of view, remember that others often have a different perspective. One of the biggest obstacles to effective communication is discounting another’s point of view.

There is your view and their view, and often the best point of view lies somewhere in-between.

4) Focus on the listener, not the communicator

There are three modes of communicating. They are being:

 

Self-centered

Message-centered

Listener-centered

To be listener-centered requires that you put personal needs aside and become so familiar with the message you are trying to communicate that you can focus on and respond empathically to the listener.

Either consciously or unconsciously, as most people listen they ask themselves, “What does this mean to me?”

Good communication answers that question by making it easy for the listener to understand the message’s impact.

5) De-complicate the message

Several years ago I spoke at a one-day leadership symposium for a telecommunications company. Using PowerPoint slides, upper leadership shared 138 leadership imperatives with those assembled. I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time remembering seven-digit phone numbers.

What chance of success do you think those leaders had when they returned to their teams and said, “Good news! There are only 138 things we’ve got to do every day to succeed.”?

Leaders are boil-down artists. They de-complicate the world and make it easy to understand. De-complicating means giving context to what you’re asking another person to do. It takes her or his personal view of the world and fits it into your view of the world for the shared and the bigger view of the world at large.

The only thing people have less of today than disposable income or time is attention. With excessive demands on limited attention, effective communicators harness the power of the sound byte. They make concepts easy to understand and repeat. 


In the first part of the "How Leaders Communicate" series, I wrote about how leaders sell. In the next 3 parts in the series, I'll examine in detail 5 more ways leaders influence. Visit http://www.marksanborn.com/ for more resources.