Let Me Be Clear…The Great Challenge of Leadership

Creating clarity with a large, diverse team is one of the huge challenges that any leader is faced with.  And what I was coached and how I was advised and what I finally fully accepted is if you want to communicate with the team you first have to connect with them.  They have to want to hear from you and they have to believe that you mean what you say.  And once you connect with them, now you have the potential of communicating effectively with respect to vision, values, strategy, objectives, tactics and how we’re going to work.  

But you first must connect and that’s where I think the advent of social media and the advent of the technology platforms that are available enables connecting with 180,000 people in 153 different countries in ways when before that just simply was only something you could dream of. But today, you can actually do that with the electronic platforms available.  

So once you connect, you then have the potential of communicating and now clarity becomes not just simply an ambition, it becomes an objective you can accomplish and people can understand the strategy of the enterprise and their role in executing it, which is essential for an organization to have that kind of clarity if you want “as one” behavior from that organization.

60 Second Reads is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

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