Let’s argue you are already well-versed in effective communication skills as a leader. You’ve cultivated self-awareness and emotional intelligence. You listen actively. You are mindful of body language and nonverbal cues. You consider different perspectives. You ask open-ended questions to encourage dialogue and paraphrase to ensure understanding.
You begin with clear communication objectives. You know your audience and your context and hone your communications strategy. You lead with the point rather than bury it. You are clear and concise, as well as conscientious of tone. You substantiate your argument. You bring in storytelling. You anticipate questions, challenges, and counter-arguments.
You cultivate psychological safety. You set clear objectives, priorities, agendas, and roles. You steward the conversation and invite and encourage feedback through different avenues. You ensure all team members are clear on decisions, actions, responsibilities, and timing.
So far so good, right? Undoubtedly, you can witness areas where you could improve your command of these skills. And let’s go further. Because powerful communication also involves how effectively you convey leadership, including how you shape the quality of conversations happening around you.
1. Leverage the Pause
One of the quickest ways you can diminish the power of your voice or your stance is to steal the space immediately after you made a point. Because truth needs room to land.
There is leadership gravitas in the pause that can happen before, between, or after your words, but too often we are the first to steal it out of discomfort with silence. Let your words land. Holding your presence through the pause conveys being grounded in your leadership without seeking immediate validation, slipping in caveats, or rushing to move on.
If you’re opening the room for questions, a ten second pause (far longer than may feel comfortable) can even activate engagement. It shows executive composure and provides processing time for others to formulate better thoughts.
Equally, practice letting the words of others land for you. That pause before response conveys emotional intelligence and has the potential to improve decisions.
2. Cultivate the Language of Candor Around You
“As you arrive to a real senior level, you will start to understand that people are going to have a hard time disagreeing with you. They tend to give you filtered information,” advised Geline Midouin. “If you know that, you can be much more deliberate and intentional in terms of how you ask questions, to make sure that you’re getting the real story and understanding different perspectives.”
Not everyone has the guts to speak truth to power, so as you rise as a leader, try to become aware of how others edit themselves around you. Who used to challenge you and no longer does? Who no longer shares their half-baked ideas? What assumptions are not scrutinized?
Recognize that people may contort in subtle ways to stay in your favor. At this juncture in your journey, you have an opportunity to elevate communication to improve the quality of ideas, thoughts, and opinions that circulate in your presence.
In HBR’s “How the Best Leaders Shape Conversations,” authors Alison Wood Brooks and Andy Atkins iterate the importance of building an environment that invites candor: “Leaders play a critical role in creating the conditions for candid conversation. They model intellectual humility, invite disagreement, acknowledge uncertainty, and respond thoughtfully when others raise difficult issues.”
As a leader, you set the norm for asking questions that draw out unvoiced perspectives, dissenting points of view, and concerns brewing beneath the surface. Equally, how you respond to difficult and challenging perspectives matters.
Responding with curiosity sets a tone that invites people to raise and share diverse or controversial viewpoints: shutting them down or responding with defensiveness discourages the sharing that leads to fertile friction.
“The most consequential leadership failures are often not caused by bad ideas—they’re caused by important truths that never get voiced,” writes Brooks and Atkins.
Example phrases to encourage disagreement or candor may include:
- “What viewpoints are we missing?”
- “What would be a contrary point of view?”
- “What evidence would change our current approach?”
- “The risk I would see with that approach is…”
- “Can anyone make a counter-argument against my recommendation?”
3. Become Aware of Your “Sender” and “Receiver” Tendencies
No matter how good of a speaker or listener you may perceive yourself to be, and listening skills are one place where we often overestimate ourselves, here’s a newsflash: nobody (yes, nobody) comes to communication from a neutral place.
At the very least, you are oriented to the tendencies and biases of your particular behavioral DISC profile, which may alter by context. You may be prone to decisiveness and impatient for the punchline. You may be socially expressive and driven by relationship influence. You may be inclined to avoid confrontation and seek harmony. You may be oriented to prioritizing details and analysis.
You are most likely a mix of qualities, but your prevalent tendencies have both strengths and pitfalls, both as a speaker and equally—if not more crucially as you rise up the ranks—as a recipient of incoming information. For example, perhaps you are inclined to dismiss a good idea for the way its packaged, and that’s a blindspot.
Becoming self-aware of your behavioral profile and communication style, and knowing how your inclinations intensify under stress, is critical for leaders who oversee team dynamics.
Try out these receiver challenges:
- When someone says something you disagree with, don’t formulate your response until you can state their argument in a way they’d say is fair.
- Next time you hear what you perceive to be a bad idea, ask what value could be harvested from the thinking.
- When you receive criticism you don’t like, ask whether there’s anything useful to glean
4. Demonstrate the Difference Between Influence And “Airtime”
The most powerful contribution in the room is not always the one that dominated the conversation or occupied the most airtime. In fact, as you rise in leadership, your success depends more on your ability to listen, to distill, to discern, to diffuse, and to direct. Steering the dialogue and drawing out necessary viewpoints from the team is an art.
While it should arguably always be so, the value of your voice in the room is not measured by how much you contributed to a discussion, but what changed as a result of your contribution. Communicative effectiveness is not about performance but impact.
How well did you set the objectives and parameters to stay on topic? How did you provoke thought? How did you elevate the quality of the conversation? How did you steer through conflict and complexity to innovative thinking and solutions?
Questions are helpful to gather information and insight, but they can also be leveraged as a leadership instrument. The ability to formulate a powerful question is invaluable to steering teams, and indeed can even become part of your leadership brand.
Examples of questions that may open and redirect:
- What would have to be true for this idea to work?
- What assumptions are we making here?
- What potential outcomes are we not considering?
As you rise in leadership, your communication sets a cultural tone and model for others, not only in how they approach you, but in catalyzing how conversations unfold all around you.
By: Aimee Hansen is a writer, facilitator, and co-author of This Book Is a Retreat. She has contributed to The Glass Hammer for over a decade.
