Conveying Key Messages With Clarity

Communication is an incredibly important element of leadership. How you talk to your team, how you deliver a presentation when you’re in a room full of important people, and how well you connect one-on-one with your direct reports can all have a huge bearing on your performance, and your personal credibility.

Knowing how to convey complex information in a manner that’s tailored for your audience is critical. Most of us don’t think a lot about people’s listening and learning styles—we tend to just communicate the way we prefer to communicate.

The better we understand something, the more likely we are to get our point across effectively… communication begins here! There were many occasions over the course of my corporate career where I had to put significant effort into gaining a genuine depth of understanding on a particular subject.

People would occasionally say to me, “Gee Marty, you’re so smart. I wish I was like that.” I would just smile to myself, because I knew the real truth. There were heaps of people who were way smarter than me… I just did the work. 

Here are my top 7 tips for ensuring your communication is clear, simple, and impactful.

1. Understand what you’re communicating. When I say this, I mean understand it at a level that enables you to answer any question confidently, concisely, and without resorting to jargon 
2. Position your communication as a story. Don’t just communicate the facts at hand… provide color and context. Learn to tell stories in a relatable way, as if you were at a BBQ on a Saturday afternoon, and someone asked you a casual question about that topic.
3. Test it out before you go too far. Before you have to do it for real, run it past someone who’s representative of the audience you’ll be communicating with. Ask them to pepper you with questions, explain it back to you, and interpret it for their context, just to make sure you’ve got it right.
4. If you have leaders below you, make sure they know what to do. It’s one thing for you to be incredibly clear in your communication, but how do you set up leaders below you to communicate effectively to their people? As a leader, you need to be able to say “This is what it is, and this is what it means to you”… and that goes for every leader at every level below you!
5. Tailor it for your audience. You want any communication to be in language that makes it easy for your audience to assimilate it. Delivering the same message to multiple audiences may require you to word it completely differently for each. For example, communicating your corporate strategy to the Board is very different from communicating it to your front line workers…. Which is very different from communicating it to the investment analysts who rate your stock!
6. Use multiple channels. A crisp but comprehensive email from the corner office may be necessary, but it’s certainly not sufficient. People view the world through the eyes of their direct boss. So if you’re higher up in an organization, use everything at your disposal: Email, the intranet, group meetings, 1:1 meetings, maybe a video or blog from the desk of the CEO. Whatever channels you have to communicate something important, don’t ever think it’s overkill
7. Don’t be afraid to be repetitive. We feel foolish when we say the same thing over and over, but marketing research tells us that any message has to be seen or heard at least 7 times before the target of that message will take action.

As a leader, you’ll often be expected to just know instinctively how to communicate something. But it takes work… work to understand the content, to craft the message, and to deliver it in a way that reaches your audience.