As a leader, if you can figure out how to effectively communicate with your employees, clients, constituents, or stakeholders one hundred percent of the time, you have found the Holy Grail. Bottle it and sell it immediately!
Communication actually isn’t hard at all. We are communicating even when we aren’t talking. Our followers watch our body language, our facial expressions, what we are doing… anything to get a clue of what we are thinking. There are no moments off when in public. Effective communication is what leaders desire, though, and it’s a little more difficult to achieve.
I will send out an email to explain a new procedure at our school, and I get five emails back, either correcting me or asking for clarification. I send another email with clarification and any needed corrections, and I get two back telling me that no clarification was needed! If I were to employ the device that lets me know who read my emails, I would probably find that only those seven people actually opened my email. Lol!
Transparency in the workplace is vital to good relations, and it is manifested through communication from the leadership. I seek to be very transparent, and most of the time, the benefits are great. Sometimes, though, I run the risk of tiring everyone with so much communication. I’m always afraid, though, that the one time I don’t share exactly what I’m thinking will be the one time that makes everybody mad because they don’t understand my intent. So, I write… and I leave it up to the parents to decide if they want to know the “why” or not.
According to John Maxwell in his book The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader, this may be where I am making a mistake. He says that when communicating, I should simplify the message, see the person, show the truth, and seek a response. Obviously, I could use some work on the “simplifying” part, and I am seeing the “person” (although “the person” is about three hundred parents of students as young as three and as old as eighteen). I always relay the truth. That’s the point of transparency. But I am not necessarily seeking a response.
Well… that’s not completely true. If I write to tell everyone that money is due for t-shirts or a trip or such, I am expecting them to pay that amount by the due date. If I’m writing to explain what portion of a costume I need a parent to provide and what portion I will provide, I expect the child to be sent in the appropriate wear. I guess problems arise with when I decide to communicate at times. For instance, if I’ve decided to communicate a new procedure without the benefit of any input from anyone else. At those times, I’m not really soliciting a response. I’m dictating the procedure, and no one likes to have things dictated!
While people involved with public relations have been around since the beginning of time, many universities still didn’t offer a PR degree in the year 2000. Now, many colleges offer this degree, and many more jobs in PR have sprouted up because of the massive amount of communication out there due to social media. Critics pour over words emotionally tapped out by thumbs in the heat of a reaction, and leaders write manifestos of their visions in an effort to be transparent. We are bombarded daily with communication from texts and posts and alerts. Our weatherperson makes normal stormy days into ‘Weather Alert” days, and we carry our phone everywhere in case we miss an important update to the “weather danger.” Our car tells us that there’s construction on a side road we aren’t even considering entering, and our refrigerator informs us that we haven’t changed our water filter in twenty-nine days! Now more than ever, a public relationist’s job is more about getting us to actually pay attention to his communication when he knows we are swamped with too much information.
So, what’s a leader to do? When at all possible, good old face-to-face communication is always the best solution. The listener has the benefit of seeing the body language and facial expressions, and the attempt at transparency is appreciated as truth. I say all this through a written communication…. Oh, well. I mean well!
- Michelle