Talk Like a Leader

Last week, I discussed speaking accurately. This week, I'll explore accuracy on the other side of communication - listening. Just as speaking accurately moves you towards greater clarity and buy-in, listening accurately moves you towards mutual understanding and trust. When you learn to listen accurately, you can maintain the emotional control needed to respond appropriately without over OR under reacting.

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Striking the balance between overstating and understating a problem or situation depends on accurate speech. In this episode, I'll share thoughts on how to speak more accurately and why it matters.

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This podcast is about more than just talking or sending messages. It's about the broader context of leadership communication. In this episode, I'll share a story with you about what happens when you don't make yourself accessible, some thoughts about what that means to you as a leader, and offer perspective on why it matters.

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As a society, we are now well in to the first shutdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. While I can't foretell the future exactly, it appears that it could happen again before the pandemic runs its course. So, we need to develop skills to help us manage close, long-term contact with the same people day-in and day-out. Learning to recognize, control, and short-circuit transferred aggression is one of those skills.

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When you are confronted with a problem it's easy to drift toward finding the person to blame. A better leadership response is to find the source of the problem and fix that rather than finding the person to blame. In this episode, we'll look at how to focus on fixing the problem rather than on fixing the blame.

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Seeing things from another person's point of view is a key element in Talking Like a Leader. When you can't see your team's environment, it's easy to forget that their behaviors, results, and efficiency are affected by it. If you suddenly find yourself working remotely, remembering that they are no longer in the office is an important thing to remember.

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Leaders frequently need to communicate data in the form of numbers. When you're working with a team of people who know the context you operate in, those numbers probably make sense. But... What if they don't? What if you're communicating data to a person outside your team? What if you're communicating data from outside your team to your team? Does the person or the people with whom you're communicating understand the context of the data? Or, is it just a jumble of numbers with no real connection to the hearer's experience? These are questions to address when you need to communicate data to other people.

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As we confront the stresses and pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic and what we must do to adjust, it's easy to commingle our personal wishes and desires about the way we wish things were with the actual demands of the environment in which we operate. When we commingle these issues, we tend to demand things from others that are personal wishes rather than business demands. In this episode, we'll explore how that can damage leadership communication and what you can do to avoid this trap.

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This conversation with Carl Smith about time perspectives continues this week. This is the third of three episodes related to how people view and communicate about time. In this episode, Carl and I will explore ways that people with a primary people orientation view time, how they can be misunderstood, and how they can improve their communication with people who have a more task-oriented perspective.

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This week, we continue the conversation with Carl Smith about time perspectives that we started two weeks ago. In this episode, Carl and I will explore ways that people with a primary task orientation view time, how they can be misunderstood, and how they can improve their communication with people who have a more people-oriented perspective.

• Take our free DISC Assessment.
• Download our free report, The First 7 Things to Do When You Get Promoted.
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