Tips Guides

As a business leader, one of the most important leadership skills you’ll ever demonstrate is knowing how to communicate. When you think about it, most business leadership consists of communication of one sort or another.

You hold meetings with staff or board members or suppliers, you interview potential managers, you meet customers and shareholders, you chat in the corridor or on the phone. All of these formal and informal moments offer you the chance to influence, to enthuse and to inspire.

So how can you make the most of these moments - how can you become a truly successful communicator?

Communication involves a variety of interactions. It involves discussing, and listening, and debating. But communication also often involves a senior executive passing on some information. This may seem a fairly simple task. But it’s amazing how often business leaders don’t give enough information, or shroud it in jargon, or tell the wrong people.

HOW you pass on information can significantly affect what happens next. If you want people (whether your staff or your suppliers or customers) to act on the information, you need to make sure they understand it. And that’s not as simple as it sounds.

There are several lessons we can learn here from people whose whole business is communication. Journalists depend entirely on their words. And journalists are taught a range of tips and techniques for making their information compelling, interesting and easy to understand. Many of these techniques are just as useful for business executives, and are well worth exploring.

I’ve found that thinking about how news stories work in newspapers, for example, can help executives communicate complex messages in a simple, brief and yet memorable way, both in print and in person.

News stories are designed to grab our attention from the opening sentence. They try to tell us the news in simple, easy-to-understand language. And they don’t assume we know much about the subject already. So when you as a business executive have some information to pass on, it’s worth trying to compile it as a news story - that way, you won’t miss out anything vital.

So what makes a good a news story? In an ideal world, the opening paragraph should:

- sum up the story
- have the most important facts first
- be short and punchy and contain only essential facts
- use emotive words early on
- possibly contain an appropriate quote
- appeal to the reader in his or her area, in his or her business, or because it affects his or her pocket or way of life.

That’s a lot to fit into a few lines. So the easiest thing to do is make sure your opening paragraph answers all the questions a reader may have:
Who? What? How? Where? When? Why?

Take an example of a news story from a business newspaper:
Who? Former senior executives at X Corp
What? were arrested
How? by FBI agents
Where? in New York
When? today
Why? on suspicions of tax evasion.

This works equally well when you’re announcing something to your staff (the order in which you answer the questions can vary):
Who? I (John Doe, CEO of Y Company,)
What? want to thank
Where? all of you in our Toronto division
Why? for raising sales an impressive 5 per cent
When? in the fourth quarter
How? and invite you all to a celebration lunch next week.

In a news story, it’s important not to venture your own opinion or comment. The above item may appear to cross this line - it describes the sales increase as ‘impressive’ - but further down in the story (or in the internal memo or in the email to staff) the writer could justify the use of the word ‘impressive’ by comparing it with the target or with increases in previous quarters.

If the fundamental purpose of news is to inform, it’s essential that you allow your readers to make up their own minds on the information you provide. Do not try to sell your own opinion as fact.

To sum up, the crucial point to remember when you’re communicating information is that the most important information should appear first. If you do that, answering all the questions as suggested, there’s a good chance that you’ll get your message across and that everyone will understand it.

If you want the leadership success you deserve, get the leadership training you deserve. Download more free articles and leadership training videos from business journalist Jacqueline Moore and Steven Sonsino, authors of the Amazon bestseller “The Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders”
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My son plays the clarinet. I don’t know if you’ve seen one up close, but it’s a beautiful instrument: a glossy black wooden tube, encrusted with silver stops and levers.

But it takes time to learn how to play. (It takes time to learn how to put it together!) Everything to do with this beautiful instrument takes time.

One thing I found particularly amazing, when my son started learning how to play the clarinet, was the instructions he was given on how to practise. And I thought I’d share them with you because - in terms of getting better as a manager or leader - they could also be useful guidelines for you.

The notes start like this:

1. “Establish a routine,” they suggest. “You can even practise before you go to school.”

How many of us regularly set aside time to become better managers? Not many I guess. So set a routine. Five minutes a day, an hour a week.

2. “Always practise soon after your lesson so that you can remember what you have to do and how the music goes.”

This is a really useful piece of advice for us as managers or leaders. Practise before you forget the lesson. Too often when we’re trying new skills, new tactics, we just don’t practise.

3. “Leave your instrument out at home where you can always see it.”

I love that suggestion. Leave your notes, your books, whatever it is you’re trying to practise, out so that you can see it, so that you can be reminded to try new things. Too often we don’t; we go back to the old ways of doing things.

4. “Practise the bits you can’t play.”

I love this point, too. Practise the bits that you can’t play, not the bits you can. Too many of us get trapped in the routines and rituals of success. The things that made us successful are the things we keep on doing.

You need to practise the elements of leadership that you can’t do.

5. “Learn to do pieces of cake,” the notes say. By that they mean practise the small bits over and over and over again.

So too with your work. There are key elements of your work - hiring people, firing people, motivating people - that you need to be able to do almost without thinking about them. Practise them again and again and again, until you get them right.

6. “Learn how to practise slowly,” the notes suggest.

I think that’s a fabulous piece of advice - practise slowly. Don’t just rush it through, don’t skim-read some notes on a new way of managing or leading. Practise slowly.

7. And the final point, “Remember that some practice is better than none.”

Please don’t assume that you, as a manager, have finished learning. You need to understand that you have to practise leading. Leadership is possibly the most complex interpersonal human skill that there is. You’d better be sure you’re good at it.

Practise. Develop your self. Develop your skills. Develop your style. And remember that some practice is better than none.

If you want the leadership success you deserve, get the leadership training you deserve. Download more free articles and leadership training videos from Steven Sonsino, an international business school professor and author of the Amazon bestseller “The Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders”
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We learn most from our mistakes. It’s true. But problems occur for us when we forget this. Or when we deliberately deny that we made a mistake. And - if we’re honest - most of us do this, from time to time.

So in this article I want to share with you the IMPORTANCE of learning from your mistakes. AND how best to learn from your mistakes.

These ideas were first captured for me in a little known book by Calhoun Wick and Lu Leon way back in 1993, but their thinking on how to learn from mistakes has never been bettered, so I want to share my views on this with you now.

The key point I want to get across is that that success stops you learning. The main suggestion I want to put to you here is that, when we take action and we succeed, we just don’t learn. We don’t bother. We say things like - ‘I always knew I was going to succeed’. Or ‘I’m clearly the best’. Or ‘what’s next in my in-tray?’

This is the case unless you actively build in time to review that success. Most of us, however, prefer to push on to the next challenge, perhaps never being really clear HOW we succeeded. For most of us, just winning is enough.

This mindset creates a major problem for us. Because when we fail at something, when we don’t meet the expectations we set out at the start, it’s a shock, a major setback.

Now the good news is that this sets up the possibility of learning. So the second key message is that, in the same way that success kills learning, failure kickstarts learning.

However, there is a problem; or rather, three problems. There are three things we tend to do when we discover that we made a mistake somewhere along the line. Let’s look at these in sequence.

First, we don’t admit we made a mistake. It’s a natural habit, not to admit we made a mistake. Actually it’s more likely that we can’t believe we made a mistake. Our subconscious mind is trying to protect our ego, to save face. So we just don’t admit we made a mistake. Big mistake.

Secondly, either subconsciously, or worse still consciously, we try to conceal or minimize our mistake. To bury it so no one can find it. Find a shallow grave somewhere…

Now, I’ve seen this in a major restaurant chain. They reported their weekly sales figures to head office and they were rising. But this masked the fact that the number of people attending the restaurant, the number of covers, was actually falling.

To mask the fall in customer numbers someone just increased the menu prices to make up for the shortfall. No one noticed that the number of covers, the people attending each week, was falling off dramatically.

The third problem is blame. If you actually do admit you made a mistake, but then you start a witch-hunt, you’ll kill learning. The sole purpose of a witch-hunt is to blame someone else, to direct attention away from you, to someone in the team or in another department, perhaps. ‘Who did this?’ we say. ‘C’mon, who did this?’

So let’s recap: there are three situations where you have the possibility of learning, but your action - how you respond to the mistake - can kill learning.

1. You can kill learning if you don’t admit you made a mistake.
2. You can kill learning if you try to minimize or conceal the mistake.
3. You can kill learning if you admit there’s been a mistake, but try to blame someone else.

But there’s something even worse just round the corner. If you don’t tackle these three problems, the mistakes won’t be fixed. This could happen all over again tomorrow.

The only surefire way to learn from our mistakes is firstly to admit there’s been a mistake and then to act differently next time.

Don’t waste energy and emotion on finding the culprit to blame them. By all means find the weak link in the chain of command, so you can help, but don’t focus on the past, on what happened in the past.

Instead focus on the future. What needs to happen next time? Then just do it. Act differently in the future.

Successful learning involves analysing the past and present, yes, but it’s mainly about acting differently in the future. Learning is about change. And to lead change successfully you need to accept that we’re human and we make mistakes.

Use the way that you personally deal with mistakes - your own and those that others make - to inspire your team. Don’t blame them - build them up - improve their skills or knowledge for the future. Remember the words from the immortal song - it ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it. That’s what gets results.

Learning - your learning, your team’s learning, your company’s learning - demands change.

How much change are you prepared to embrace when it comes to admitting mistakes? What’s your mistakes policy? If you haven’t got one, get one.

If you want the leadership success you deserve, get the leadership training you deserve. Download more free articles and leadership training videos from Steven Sonsino, an international business school professor and author of the Amazon bestseller “The Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders”
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Put people first. It’s the great cliche, isn’t it? When a business school professor like me asks you ‘what’s the most productive leadership style?’, you know the answer don’t you? Put people first.

But if everyone knows the answer, why aren’t more people doing it? Why aren’t executives focused on motivating and inspiring their people?

The reality is that people put profits first. They focus on the short-term financial gain without realizing that there is a direct link between putting people first and building outrageous profits.

In one of the very few great books on this topic, ‘The Human Equation’, Jeffrey Pfeffer from Stanford Business School paints a simple and striking picture of how to build profits by putting people first. I don’t have a lot of time here to recap the whole book, but if you want some bald statistics, if you need numbers to justify putting people first, then get this book.

Pfeffer tackles head-on some of the sacred cows of many CEOs today - he particularly challenges the view that downsizing, competing on price, and operating globally are really necessary. It’s very thought provoking.

One of the most striking pieces of evidence Pfeffer cites is a study of one thousand large US companies. Pfeffer found that investors place a much higher value on companies that improved their bottom line through revenue growth, rather than cost cutting.

Why? Well, investors want growing companies not shrinking ones. You can only cut cost once, says Pfeffer, or only a limited number of times, before you bite into the muscle of the business. Cut too much and you lose the competitive edge that makes the company great.

You might be wondering at this point, though, isn’t downsizing something that the US does a great deal? And isn’t the US one of the most competitive and innovative countries in the world? You’d be right. So there’s an apparent paradox here.

Not so, says Pfeffer. He reminds us not to confuse success that occurs IN SPITE OF what leaders do, with success that comes BECAUSE OF what leaders do.

I love this idea. That not everything you do leads to financial success. If you are successful enough - and profitable enough - that success will mask some of the mistakes you make.

Probably the most significant practical key of this story is for me captured by a quote from Sir Richard Branson, founder of the UK’s Virgin Group. At Virgin, says Branson, the people come first, the customers second and the shareholders third.

In a speech to the London Institute of Directors, Branson said: ‘In the end, the long-term interests of shareholders are actually damaged by giving them superficial short-term priority.’

And this is the key point, isn’t it? Customer satisfaction generates recommendations and gets our clients back for more. That’s what it’s about, after all.

But to get great customer satisfaction you need great customer service. And to have excellent standards in customer service means having staff who are proud of the company they work for and who respect the managers of the business.

Pfeffer closes the book with a key quote from Sam Walton, who built the Wal-Mart empire. ‘The more you share profits with your people, the more profit will accrue to the company. Why? Because the way management treats its people is exactly how its people will treat the customers.’

If you want some bald statistics, or if you need numbers to justify putting people first, you must get this book. Then convince everyone around you, who isn’t already doing it, to read it too. Let’s really try to put people first. It will be profitable.

If you want the leadership success you deserve, get the leadership training you deserve. Download more free articles and leadership training videos from Steven Sonsino, an international business school professor and author of the Amazon bestseller “The Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders”
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The question I am most often asked by managers is: ‘Why won’t they do what I want?’ This is usually followed by: ‘And why don’t they work harder?’

As leaders and managers, we often assume that, if our employees really wanted to perform better, their performance would just increase. We assume that people’s ability to boost their own performance is totally within their own control.

This is just not true. Decades of research into motivation and performance don’t back this up. Jobs can actually restrict performance, for instance. Think of a production line where the performance of any single worker depends on the speed of the whole line, not on any one individual’s performance.

Second, the systems in place may hamper productivity. In many office and managerial roles, what people do may be restricted by the daily or weekly work cycle or specific technical procedures.

Problems also arise in situations where, to do a better job, people need more materials, resources or authority, or where certain things need to be done in sequence.

But there’s an even more important message motivation research has for us. Frankly, the biggest single hurdle preventing our people from increasing their performance is - us. We, as the leaders and managers of today, have the most deadening impact on the performance of our teams.

For me, the worst leader in the world is the one who adopts the so-called ’scientific’ management style, first described over a century ago but still much in evidence today.

The worst leader’s sole concern is ‘efficiency’. They believe efficiency will drive up performance. This manager finds suitable people for the job and trains them in the most efficient methods for their work. This manager then creates a pay system so that workers can get more money by doing EXACTLY what managers tell them to do as FAST as possible.

This sounds good to the efficiency-focused mind, but takes little account of human psychology. The worst leaders would be surprised to learn that they could get more out of their people.

They assume that people are basically lazy and that work is distasteful to them. They assume that people are motivated by money. They assume that there must be detailed work routines and enforced milestones to ensure anything gets done.

These assumptions lead to the ”What gets measured gets done’ mantra. (I’ll go along with it up to a point, but not to the extremes of the worst leaders in the world.)

Fundamentally, the worst leaders believe that people will perform to the required standard only if they are closely controlled. I call this micro-management and it’s the most debilitating disease ever to afflict managers anywhere. Even if you drag people ‘up to’ the required standard you’ll never get people to over-perform.

Today, in most world class businesses, there is an understanding that money is NOT the primary motivating factor. The worst leaders need to understand exactly how to motivate teams of people. Threats and coercion may win you compliance in the short term, but it also kills commitment.

So what can you do? We know that people largely want to feel useful and important. They want to be recognized as individuals and not as cogs in a machine. They want to feel they belong to a team or unit that has a significant purpose. They want to feel they have meaningful goals that they have had a hand in setting.

Just think about your own motivation for a second. What motivates you? Is it just the money?

What’s worse is that most people could perform at a much higher level in the right environment. They would probably admit that they’re playing well within their limits. And it’s their bosses that are restricting them.

So ask yourself what boundaries do YOU set for YOUR teams?

Are you the worst leader in the world? Do you ask ‘Why don’t they do what I want?’ assuming that it’s your people that have to change? Or are you a great leader, who asks ‘How can I learn more about what motivates people?’

The answer is in your hands.

If you want the leadership success you deserve, get the leadership training you deserve. Download more free articles and leadership training videos from Steven Sonsino, an international business school professor and author of the Amazon bestseller “The Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders”
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Most people could perform at a much higher level than they do if their boss created a suitable environment for them to flourish in. In many instances, it’s the boss who is holding the team back by trying to control it too closely.

So ask yourself, do you set unnecessary boundaries for your teams? If you have no idea, maybe you should ask them. “How am I holding you back?” you could ask.

One useful technique to adopt is a KISS strategy: use it in this discussion and you won’t go far wrong.

Ask your people these four questions:
1) What should I KEEP doing?
2) What do I need to IMPROVE?
3) What should I STOP doing?
4) And what should I START doing?

What else can you do to unleash the potential in your people? It’s about open conversations. I call these ‘No Limits’ conversations.

This is what you should do:
1) Keep your people informed with face-to-face briefings. This helps them feel useful and important. Clear and open communication is critical.

What does this mean? It means you’ve got to make sure you have a great team briefing mechanism in place. The Work Foundation in the UK (formerly the Industrial Society) has a useful team briefing mechanism you should consider. It’s simple, powerful and effective. Visit the Work Foundation’s website for details of ‘Managing Best Practice No 72 Team Communication’.

2) Listen to your people and act on their objections when they have good ideas. Do it graciously and make sure folks know whose the idea was.

If, after listening to the objections, you decide not to change your plans, say why you won’t change them. Try this kind of statement: “I can see that you’re not happy with the process, but until we come up with a better one, I’d like to stick to this one for now. And if you have suggestions that will improve it further, do please let me know.”

3) Let people decide HOW to do what you want. The toughest thing you have to do is let your people exercise as much self-direction and self-control as they can on routine things. You may need to say exactly what you want them to achieve or do, but please let them decide how to deliver it.

If your early indications are that what they’re doing isn’t going to hit the target, ask them whether progress is on target. If it then doesn’t actually work, tell them it didn’t work. Some managers assume their teams will know or find out, but this is not always the case.

Ask them what they’re going to do next time. Ask what they need to do differently.

You’ve probably noticed that my suggestions involve talking to your people. You need to create an open environment, where everyone’s ideas are welcomed and explored. And you do that by starting the conversations yourself. YOU are the one who has to change the way things work.

Your team has to know that you’re interested in what they’re doing, but that you’re willing to let them get on with it.

Structured brainstorming techniques are needed here, not just haphazard ’shouting out’ at meetings. I’ve got a great one I use called Nominal Group Technique but there are hundreds out there.

This ‘No Limits’ conversation policy is based on different assumptions about why people do the things they do. Great leaders assume that people actually want to contribute to their jobs. They know that people are ‘pre-motivated to perform’. The trick is how do you get the performance out?

Secondly, great leaders know that the more people are involved in designing and managing their work, the better they will perform.

And thirdly, great leaders know that good and meaningful performance leads to job satisfaction - which creates an even higher performing team. You create a virtuous circle of performance that reinforces your leadership success and the success of your team.

If you want the leadership success you deserve, get the leadership training you deserve. Download more free articles and leadership training videos from Steven Sonsino, an international business school professor and author of the Amazon bestseller “The Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders”
Get more FREE videos and articles right now: http://www.deathofleadership.com