Leadership Demands Clear Communication

In this world of sound bites, emails, text messages and twitter, the art of communicating information in a succinct way is being championed. I, myself, love it. However, it seems that many of us leaders have allowed this to influence how we communicate to our teams.

We all think that we communicate well, but we do not get the final say on how well we communicate. The judge of the effectiveness of our communication is the one who receives it. It’s like the old question “if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?” Well, the answer to that question is easy if you think about it. The tree only makes a sound if someone hears it. Likewise, you’ve only really communicated to someone if they hear you. And, they only really hear you if they understand completely what you’ve communicated.

Short form or electronic communication increases the likelihood that you won’t be heard. If a leader is not heard he or she becomes frustrated… and so does their team.

A frustrated team is an ineffective team and the root cause of the frustration a team faces is most likely a lack of clear communication from the leader. A leader must communicate clearly and a leader must be very comfortable with the clearest form of communication… face to face.

The further away we get from face to face conversations the closer we get to frustration.

I love email, text and twitter. I pride myself on the ability to say more with fewer characters. These ways of communication can save time and energy and keep things moving when we just don’t have the time to spare for a face to face conversation. Unfortunately, though, too many of us rely upon these short, detached forms of communication to say things that are of great importance. That is a problem and that is poor leadership.

We should never exchange the ease hitting “enter” over the tension (and clarity) of looking someone in the eye and saying what needs to be said. This takes time and this takes a willingness to put our organization or ministry AND the people we lead ahead of our own personal comfort.

Clear communication demands leadership.

Leadership Demands Confrontation

There are a lot of things that a leader can avoid or not be good at and still be able to lead effectively. Confrontation is not one of those things. Confrontation is essential to good leadership.

If the person leading you isn’t confronting you about something, then you’re not being led well.

If you are not confronting the people you lead on a regular basis, then you are not really leading.

A leader challenges. A leader challenges the process AND the people. He or she has to do that. We all are inclined to drift off course or become complacent and we NEED someone to confront us and place us back on course. Every process can be refined and every person is in need of being refined… This never ends.

When confrontation ends so does growth and so does effectiveness.

Too many people I encounter who have leadership roles (or just call themselves leaders) are afraid to confront issues with their people or a process. Why?

The reason is that it is a difficult thing to do. Pride gets in our way. You may be viewed as overbearing or unappreciative. You may not be liked or even avoided. Because we can’t control how someone will respond to our confronting them, we sometimes avoid the issue altogether. When handled properly… fully exercising the fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23)… the exact opposite happens. When handled in the right way, confronting is seen and received as caring. Maybe not initially, but eventually.

Those who don’t care don’t confront.

See if this rings true to you… If there is an issue that you know needs to be confronted and it isn’t, how often does the one not confronting end up talking ABOUT the person or situation that needs to be challenged instead of TO the person or persons that need to be confronted? My experience is that it happens about 100% of the time. If I’m not mistaken, talking ABOUT someone instead of TO someone is called gossip… or more clearly, sin. (God considers gossip a pretty big deal here but provides us a method to deal with it here.)

When a supposed leader does this I believe the sin is magnified exponentially. Leaders can’t be gossips about the people they lead and really be a leader. A true leader is passionate about his people which means he/she cares about them which means they confront them when it is needed. Unfortunately, it seems that many “leader’s” pride and lack of fortitude prevents them from carrying out the ministry of confrontation. I see this in both the market place and in ministry.

If you follow Jesus then you follow a leader that confronted. Almost his whole human existence was a love filled and mercy laden confrontation… all the way to the point where he confronted our sin problem on the cross.

When in doubt about if it is time to confront… err on the side of confronting. The only down side is that any communication gap that caused the doubt will be resolved. It is time for leaders to quit gossiping about their people, sack up, leave their pride behind and lovingly confront.

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever your view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods ‘where they get off’, you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

The first step is to recognize the fact that your moods change. The next is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious readings and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. And as a matter of fact, if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?

C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity

What we know will be in continuous battle with what we feel. We may strive to figure out what God is doing but too often our conclusions will be flawed by our emotions. God’s ways cannot always be known, but His Truth can be held onto.

1 Corinthians 2:16
“For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

The idea of living in the unresolved place between living as Christ and death being gain and the quandry of faith that Lewis writes of is but an echo of how Paul charged Timothy (notice the hope and how it is held onto by what we know about our Lord):

II Timothy 3:10-17
You, however, know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecutions, sufferings—what kinds of things happened to me in Antioch, Iconium and Lystra, the persecutions I endured. Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them. In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil men and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

When we’re in the most unresolved place and our emotions/mood/feelings are getting the best of us and we are ready to quit (and best) or run away (at worst), there is hope in who we know. Hope in the One who persevered for us and who knew us all the while.