Good communication skills are essential for any leader. As a leader you may have the most insightful and groundbreaking vision the world has ever seen, but if you can’t articulate it then it will never happen. Even if you can, to a degree, articulate your vision, if you don’t know how to inspire, develop, motivate, and support your followers it will still not be translated into reality. As I said in my previous post on Being a Leader, the key components of good communication skills are, listening, questioning, reframing, storytelling, presenting, and inspiring others.
In leadership roles you will interact with a lot of different people, investors, board members, colleagues, staff, customers and suppliers. The purpose of your interactions will vary, you could be selling, buying, motivating, supporting, coaching, or advising. You may be talking to one person or a room full of people. The first step in all these interactions is listening. Simply having someone who properly listens to you is therapeutic. Listening properly is about making a conscious effort to understand what is going on in someone else’s experience. It includes paying attention to emotions, either through body language or words, and showing empathy. It includes summarising and reflecting back what you have heard to verify and to demonstrate your understanding. This is why questioning is closely associated with listening. When I am listening to someone else, I am attempting to recreate in my own mind a representation of what the speaker is experiencing. If I can do that, then I’ve got the best chance of having a positive interaction with them. Remember what is on the surface is not necessarily what is really going on with someone. If you are curious about the experience of others, then your questioning will flow intuitively to help you build that understanding. As you do so make sure the words you use in your questions do not suggest any judgement, nor should your tone of voice. Focus on using open questions, by doing so the person you are with will do most of the talking and you can do the listening.
Frames are language constructs which set a context or meaning around a topic or situation. For example, an agenda ‘frames’ what a meeting is about. Reframing is then changing the context or meaning around a topic or situation. Reframing is used extensively in marketing, politics, comedy, and coaching. In essence it is a language tool of influencing. This is why it’s an essential tool for leaders, because a significant part of their role is influencing others. A simple but useful reframe is, there is no failure only feedback. What is being said here is, treat any situation that looks like you didn’t succeed as an opportunity to learn something. This doesn’t mean you will never be faced with situations that look like failure, you will. But instead of focusing on failure, focus on what you can learn. This way you never fail, you either succeed or learn. To use reframing effectively all you need to know is that no experience comes with a built-in meaning, so we get to choose what things mean.
People learn best when the information is delivered through story structure. This is because storytelling is a human archetype and as such it is innate in all people. As a speaker if you use some of this story-structure to construct your content it will resonate better with your audience, and thereby it’s more likely to lodge in their consciousness. Storytelling also enriches your delivery, it can help you to connect more with your audience, and it can be used as a metaphor to provide positive suggestions for your listeners’ unconscious mind too.
Storytelling is part of the art of presenting. But there is more to presenting than just being able to tell a good story. You need to be able to connect with your audience, organise your material in a manner that is easy for the listener to follow, inspire them, and use whatever space you have on stage effectively too. As a presenter, as with leadership generally it is important to be yourself. Have some structure, use some of the presenters art, but most importantly let the real you shine through.
Whether you’re presenting or not it is essential for leaders to understand how to inspire their followers. To do so you need to be able to understand them, get right inside their model of the world, and know what is important to them. The best way to motivate yourself is to have a specific, achievable goal that you are working towards. When you want to motivate a bunch of people you will need something that they can all, at some level, relate to and connect with. If you fully understand the context you are leading in, if you know your followers, and if you understand the structure of language, you can do this every time.
At the heart of NLP are all the tools necessary to be a good communicator. But remember, communication is not an end in itself. Real leadership is about empowering others to succeed, but you need good communication skills to be able to do that.
“When the best leader’s work is done the people say, ‘We did it ourselves’” Lao Tzu
