You can’t lead if you can’t communicate. And while all the 12 primary verbal communication skills are essential, these six leadership skills are necessary if you wish to influence in group settings.
6 Types of Group Communications Skills Needed For Effective Leadership
This list does not contain the interpersonal communication skills. But these six are especially useful skills that increase our ability to lead effectively. The are:
- Cultural Communication
- Facilitation skills
- Organizational information flows
- Feedback
- Persuasion
- Public Speaking (Live and Video)
Learn Leadership Communication Skills
Six Communication Skills Leaders Need
Without the right communication skills, complex leadership styles. or success models such as John Wooden’s Pyramid are impossible.
1. Organizational Communication
“Communication works for those who work at it.” — John Powell
“The first function of an executive is to develop and maintain a system of communication.” — Chester Bernard, 1886-1961 President, USO: The Functions of the Executive (Harvard, 1938
The skilled manager worries about how information flows inside the organization. Before the use of the internet, organizational communication consisted of four communication channels:
· Upward
· Downward
· Lateral, and
· Rumor control.
In the past, only leaders performed in an environment of information overload. Now, all levels of the organization experience that problem.
Today, managers have to worry about the traditional channel plus electronic communication mediums such as telepresence, virtual meetings, SMS, voice mail, emails, wikis, etc. These new media create both opportunities and problems.
For while email is a great communication tool; it’s becoming a burden for many. Really, who wants to spend 4 hours a day composing and answering emails? That’s not anyone’s definition of a good time.
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2. Group Facilitator Skills
A little girl and a little boy were at daycare one day. The girl approaches the boy and says, “Hey Stevie, wanna play house?” He says, “Sure! What do you want me to do?” The girl replies, “I want you to communicate.” He says to her, “that word is too big. I have no idea what it means.” The little girl smirks and says, “Perfect. You can be the husband.”
An old nun who was living in a convent next to a Brooklyn construction site noticed the coarse language of the workers and decided to spend some time with them to correct their ways. She decided she would take her lunch, sit with the workers and talk with them. She put her sandwich in a brown bag and walked over to the spot where the men were eating. She walked up to the group and with a big smile said: “Do you men know Jesus Christ?” One of the workers looked up into the steelwork and yelled, “Anybody up there knows Jesus Christ?” One of the steelworkers yelled down a “Yea. Why”? The worker yelled back “His wife’s here with his lunch.
Leadership communication strategies as a group adds a whole new level of complexity. That’s because three major processes run at the same time:
- A meeting process,
- A problem-solving process and
- A communication process.
Communication Roles. Besides focusing on the task and maintaining good relationships, a meeting leader must deal with self-orientated roles. These destructive behaviors prevent action on the task resulting in immense frustration. This results in a comment frequently heard after a meeting that goes, “Another tremendous waste of time.”
To complicate matters further, the person running a meeting plays either a leadership or a facilitator role. The leadership role is more direct, typically making use of statements. The facilitator role is more indirect, requiring the use of questions.
Communication roles played in groups break into three categories:
- Relationship,
- Task, and
- Self-oriented.
Task roles get the job done, relationship roles maintain harmony and good feelings. However, when people pay self-oriented roles, it leads to all sorts of problems.
3. The Pitch: Structuring a Great Presentation
“Communication is the real work of leadership.” — Nitin Nohria
Since most presentations in government and business tend to be boring and monotonous, your greatest challenge in most business presentations is to stay awake. The typical business presentation should be advertised as a cure for insomnia.
Public speaking is a common fear of the common man (or woman). Mostly it’s anticipatory anxiety, in which someone imagines an upcoming catastrophe that fails to materialize (thankfully).
Few in leadership positions know how to speak in public. And since most presentations in government and business tend to be boring and monotonous, your greatest challenge in most business presentations is to stay awake. The typical business presentation should be advertised as a cure for insomnia.
Paradoxically, people slave over the visuals and devote less time to the presentation’s verbal and nonverbal elements. This produces business presentations that can be characterized as pretty but boring, usually shortened into pretty boring.
4. Cultural Communication Skills
The French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans. The Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans. The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans. CONCLUSION: Eat and drink what you like. Speaking English is apparently what kills you.
Individuals in business and government need to learn how to adapt their verbal communication patterns to consider cultural communication differences. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the verbal communication rituals needed to form a positive first impression.
Impression management is technically a series of verbal and nonverbal techniques that come into play when we first meet someone. It’s culturally specific in that all cultures have a greeting ritual performed when people meet. To do so, you must be culturally congruent. So rather than shake hands, you might use a wai in Thailand, a bow in Japan, and a kiss in Brazil and France.
That ritual can be modified when it comes to meeting someone from a foreign culture. For example, when two Koreans meet each other, the two will go to the bow. However, when a Korean businessman meets a Western one, it becomes something I call “the half-bow with a handshake.”
5. Persuasive Skills: A Must Have
“Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.” — Napoleon Hill
“I frequently lose arguments with myself.” — Explanation used to explain why a person ate another chocolate just after saying that they were not going to eat anymore.
One leadership communication strategy that you can’t do without is to learn how to be more persuasive. Of course, persuasion is built into copywriting and completely absent from what goes into scholarly journals.
At one time in my life, I thought that ideas were accepted since the rational mind carefully weighs the costs and the benefits. I admit I was delusional, but it was what the ALL THE ECONOMISTS in b-schools were saying. That humans rational make buy decisions.
I clung to this delusion until I took my first cognitive psychology class. And this was backed up by personal experience at work, where my rational argument was accepted only sometimes.
So if one is serious about leading, you need to become more persuasive.
6. Using Feedback To Influence
“Few managers want to deliver it; most subordinates don’t want to receive it. Yet, there is little improvement without it.” — M. Johannsen.
“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” — Unknown
Those with a high need to achieve and constantly seek to perform at their best and improve their skills understand the need for feedback. Therefore, they often ask for it.
But these are a small minority. The vast majority want to live in the “ignorance bubble” reinforced by getting an occasional “attagirl” or an” attaboy.”
Cynics might say that we don’t want champions; we want workers at work. True, True. Still, one shouldn’t keep workers in the dark about their performance.
Too often, we hear someone at work frustrated with a bad performance appraisal, seemingly blindsided by an arbitrary and capricious manager who seems to be out to get them. But, in reality, it is simply a case that the manager did not give enough feedback. After all, one should not be surprised at what the appraisal says.