Becoming a great communicator takes learning, practice, and forging on, even (and especially) when you reach your personal “growth edge.”

For example, many people – including many leaders – have an extreme fear of public speaking. Yet this is an essential part of management communications.

Others have a very difficult time listening well, and want to jump ahead to get things done before they fully understand a problem or challenge and its causes.

If you’d like stronger communication skills, here are a few places to start to build or enhance them:

1. Observe and listen

Get feedback on your observational and listening skills. Resist the urge to jump in, run off, or check e-mail when others talk.

Stop. Watch. Listen. Learn.

2. Synthesize

Practice taking in information from multiple sources and summarizing it. This often leads to more informed and better decisions or outcomes than does “sole-sourcing” your information.

3. Write and speak

Seek out opportunities to write and speak, especially if you dread it. Go where the discomfort is high and get rid of it through learning, practice and experience.

If you’re in a leadership position, you need to have comfort and proficiency with these two vital communication skills.

4. Study experts

Find a few people who excel at the skill that presently eludes you or one with which you don’t have as much confidence as you’d like. Study these experts and figure out what they do especially well. Then start to practice. Step by step, you’ll improve.

5. Seek coaching and feedback

Find a good coach and get focused feedback and improvement advice. Then implement it.

6. Coach someone else in the skills you’re trying to master

Often we learn more when we teach others. After you’ve practiced a new skill for a while, help someone else who’s newer to the learning curve.

This will help you realize how much you’ve learned and improved, while it also helps someone else (and that’s always a good thing, for many reasons).

7. Review and reflect

Learning is enhanced with regular, high-quality reflective time. Take your share, regularly.

Reinforce and accelerate your learning through periodic review of your progress. It will help deepen your skills and your confidence.

Great leaders are great communicators.

Leaders’ effectiveness depends on their ability to inspire, engage, and activate many people to reach for a shared vision, meet common goals, and create significant results together.

Being a great communicator is one of top ten characteristics of great leaders.

Powerful, effective leaders know when and how to communicate, no matter what’s going on with their teams or organizations.

Leaders may face many different emotions at different times in the teams that they lead. Some people are excited and energetic, others feel fear, pressure, confusion, and at times, weariness or boredom on the long path to a major goal.

Great leaders know when to observe, when to listen, when to talk, when to show.

And they use all the vital communication skills of leadership effectively.

They also know that the most powerful communication of all is their attitude and their actions – far more than what they say in any circumstance.

Imagine any of the world’s great leaders and what might have been different, had they been an average communicator, at best.

For example, think of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King or any of many other world leaders without their powerful oratorical and other communication skills.

Leaders face different communication needs and challenges, depending on the circumstances in which they’re leading their organizations. Here are a few of the main ones:

1. Normal, predictable cycles of operations

These circumstances involve vision-setting, planning, regular action, follow-up, problem-solving and process improvements.

During these times, communication focuses a team or organization on goals, the path and processes to reach them, roles, consistent check-in points, the ways that progress is evaluated and ensured.

2. Major change or improvement efforts

These circumstances may involve reorganizations or mergers and acquisitions, very rapid growth, major improvements and other types of significant change.

During these times, communication focuses on what is or will be different, how the change will be achieved, ways of evaluating and communicating progress, as well as how to sustain momentum as change proceeds.

It is essential that leadership communications and processes at these times keep people focused, energized, engaged and encouraged as they go through the often very difficult work of change.

3. High-stress or emergency communications

These include natural disasters, such as earthquakes or hurricanes, and man-made disasters, such as the various emergencies created on 9/11/01 in the US, and during stressful times when US and world financial markets lurched wildly in the past year.

During these times, communication needs to focus on providing clear directions so people can try to meet their immediate and then longer-term health, safety, security and other needs.

In addition, there’s often a strong need for community in high stress times, with ways for people to share, express and process their often-frightening, yet memorable, shared experiences. (These are the conversations that begin with questions such as, “Where were you when you heard the news?” or “Where were you when it happened?”).

No matter what type of circumstance leaders and their organizations are in, most of the same stages of communication must be successfully addressed:

Focus
Earn and hold the attention of their audience.

Connect
Reach people in a personally significant way so that they can relate to what is being communicated, “enroll,” and take appropriate action.

Direct
Create a clear path for the many individual actions needed to achieve shared or individual goals.

Persist
Inspire people to draw on – and continue to draw on – persistence, if it is necessary to see a difficult effort through to completion.

Check/correct
Ensure that actions are moving along as needed in order to reach goals and significant milestones.

Achieve
Coordinate efforts and information so that people can reach goals, solve problems, and create success, hopefully, in the easiest, clearest, most effective way.

Celebrate/Complete
Acknowledge that major goals have been achieved, and create closure in a valued, positive way.

In the next post, I’ll address a few ways you can begin to improve your communication skills.

Does your success depend on strong “hard skills” or “soft skills”?

You might be surprised.

Hard skills – tangible, measurable, analytical, often with clear right or wrong answers – are what many people think of as the backbone of success.

These include skills related to math and science proficiency, such as engineering and scientific work of various types, accounting, programming, and various technical and administrative skills.

Excel with these, and your success is guaranteed, right?

Not so fast.

People whose hard skills are strong sometimes don’t value soft skills, and view them as easy to get – “IF they wanted them.” They may mistakenly see strong soft skills as an indication of a lack of competitiveness.

And for a variety of reasons, they may chide, deride, or make fun of soft skills, saying they’re non-essential for success.

A quick visit to a LinkedIn forum where a question about hard skills vs. soft skills very rapidly proved this point.

This lack of respect for soft skills by some whose expertise is in hard skills can be aggravated if their priority is the approval (or perhaps envy) of peers and others whose technical admiration they seek, to the detriment of what the customers of their work think.

Ultimately, whatever they do, it is surely being funded and paid for by someone other than those with whom they compete.

In the LinkedIn forum where the “hard skills” vs. “soft skills” debate was being waged, others asserted that “hard skills get you the job and soft skills allow you to keep it.”

Soft skills are far less measurable in practice. And in that way, they’re hard to teach, reinforce and master.

They include such things as effectiveness in leading and working with others, an essential factor for success in any group of people.

More specifically, soft skills include leadership skills, effective communication skills, being able to motivate others in all types of circumstances, working well on a team, and providing effective and timely feedback, among other things.

While less observable and measurable in practice, the positive impact of strong soft skills is, eventually, very apparent.

It shows up in some of the following ways:

- High employee and workplace morale

- High and growing productivity

- High and increasing sales

- Low or declining errors and rework

- High and growing profitability

The net effect of strong soft skills is to create a workplace where customers and employees want to be, and to do business with.

Ultimately, what’s the best work environment of all, where effectiveness – and profitability – is high, and morale is, as well?

That’s the workplace where both hard skills and soft skills are strong, and there’s high respect for each type of strength, from all members of the organization or team.

The ability to inspire others is an important part of being – and becoming – an excellent leader.

If you’d like to increase your ability to inspire others, here are eleven ways you can start:

1. Know – or clarify – what you stand for, what you value.

Use your values as a guide for making the tough calls of leadership. And tough calls go with the leadership job. Get used to them.

2. Become clear about your goals, and why they’re important.

And if you’re not sure why your goals are important, exactly, talk to some of the customers of your work, and that of your team or organization. They’ll help you clarify this very quickly.

3. Immerse yourself in your customer-focused vision of success.

Review it often. Create a one-page summary or large scale graphic of the vision, and the path ahead. Use your vision to stay focused when times get tough, distractions are high, and the “what,” “why” and “how” of the work ahead fade under pressure.

4. Anticipate the tough decisions you may have to make and prepare for them.

Understand concerns, complaints and objections you may hear. Be prepared to listen fully to these concerns, take the information in, and then make the tough calls. Prepare yourself, also, to communicate them effectively.

5. Step up to the plate.

Fully own your leader’s role and responsibilities. It’s not an easy job, but you can do it.

6. Listen.

Get feedback on your listening abilities from people who will be honest with you. Excellent listening skills are seriously important for all aspects of leadership – and many other things, as well.

7. Be – or become – accessible.

Make yourself reachable, and easy to understand.

8. Show appreciation.

Let people on your team know that you’re grateful for all that they do on the team’s behalf.

Catch them doing things well, making the extra effort, going the extra mile. Let them know that you see their good work, or have heard about their good efforts and results.

9. Learn more about leaders who inspire you.

Let their most admirable actions and how they handled their most important decisions provide you a model of things you can do to respond effectively under many different circumstances as a leader.

10. Make time to reflect.

What’s going well? What’s not? What’s proving to be a barrier to success for challenges you’ve not met yet?

It’s only by taking the time to step back and get some distance from the stresses of the day-to-day action that patterns and opportunities can be fully seen and understood.

11. Keep learning.

Keep your “learning muscles” tuned up, your ability to develop new skills and strengthen others fresh.

This is a good practice as a leader, of course – you need to model what you want others to do – and it’s a good practice for life.

You can strengthen your ability to inspire. In many ways, it comes from “owning” the leadership role more fully, and growing your confidence as a leader.

Admiration. Emulation. Stories told about great challenge, well-met.

Does your leadership inspire this type of respect?

It can.

Leadership that inspires respect is one of the top ten characteristics of great leaders.

Not everyone wants the pressure and responsibility of a high-profile leadership role.

Leadership of all types – some more than others – brings with it a very bright spotlight.

If you’re in a leadership position, people watch you very closely to see if you mean what you say, and and hold yourself to the same standards you hold others to.

What your employees or team members discover about your honesty and integrity has a lot to do with their decision about whether or not to throw their full effort and loyalty your way.

For example, imagine a leader who says he values customer input.

He gets a vigorous complaint from a frustrated customer about the failure of his company’s flagship product.

What’s his next action? Does he:

1. Use the complaint for positive action, perhaps leading to process improvements that make the product better, reduce rework and the need for customer relationship repair, ultimately improving profitability?

If this leader views customer complaints as valuable – customer research he didn’t seek but now has, and can now use to good effect – this response is a winning one.

2. Or does he ignore it, laugh it off, or in other ways try to get rid of the feedback? Or worse, does he belittle the customer who made the complaint, especially in front of employees?

That action, however fleeting, speaks volumes in a very negative sense.

Leaders who inspire respect do these things, among others:

1. Make tough calls with an eye to the future, as well to the demands of the moment.

2. Know their values – what they stand for and what they are against.

They make decisions and take actions based on their values and those of their company or team.

3. Set high standards and lead by meeting those standards themselves.

Leaders who inspire others don’t just assert or expect – they also set positive examples, themselves.

4. Set clear boundaries for what’s acceptable behavior and what’s out of bounds.

5. Treat others, both inside and outside the company, with respect.

6. Incite positive, powerful action. Especially during difficult times, they shine in this aspect of leadership. Top leaders can shift a team’s focus from “We can’t,” “I’m afraid,” or “This isn’t really important,” to “We can, we will, here’s why it’s important,” and “Here’s how we’ll get things done. Let’s get moving.”

7. Expect success, and create the work systems and support that make it possible, no matter what they’re faced with at the moment.

8. Communicate well. They give and take information effectively.

Integrity, and being an inspiration to others cannot be “faked,” ordered, or added at the last minute, like a fresh coat of paint.

I’ll provide ideas in the next post about things you can do to increase your skills as an inspirational leader.

Resilience can grow. If you’d like to increase your own, here are a few places to start:

1. Get good information and use it well

Good information, well-designed and well-used, is a vital management tool in the best of times.

It’s vital for anticipating and preventing problems. Good information can provide an early warning system about change in its earliest stages.

If you’re in circumstances that require resilience, you also need good information to stay focused as you learn, adapt and create a better situation for yourself and your team.

2. Create an open, honest, collaborative, creative environment

Resilience requires honesty and creativity, at least as much as it requires persistence, and a refusal to be defeated by circumstances.

In such an environment, you and your team are better able to gather yourselves to face and accept current conditions.

Then, in a creative and collaborative frame of mind, you and your team can see alternatives you might have missed had fear and disappointment filled your mind, imagination and sights.

3. Learn from decisions you made previously

If resilience is called for, new decisions are inevitable.

Decisions may not have been easy to make in the first place. Now, under pressure, the process may be doubly difficult.

You have the benefit of additional information this time around. Like an inventor who was not successful in his or her first attempt at creating a new product, you know something that did not work. Hopefully, you also know why, and can use that information to your benefit.

As you prepare for decision-making, consider what’s different now. Have changes occurred in these or any other areas?

- Customers’ needs and priorities
- Company or team priorities
- Goals
- Resources
- Your abilities, or those of your team
- Timeline

Also, what is an optimal outcome now, compared to what it was when you started this project?

4. Strengthen your focus on  your ultimate purpose and goal

Let the long-term view and perspective help drive or pull you through uncertain times.

Where you arrive, and how, may not work out exactly as planned – as you know (it has already changed, or you wouldn’t be thinking about the need for resilience and focused, effective flexibility).

What’s essential is envisioning yourself successfully making your way – however you ultimately do – through the uncertainty ahead. And then delivering on that expectation.

5. Create a stable base of operations…ideally, before the need for resilience arises

Create, streamline, simplify your daily operations so you can count on them for solid, predictable outcomes, every time.

What if you don’t?

You could be very distracted, and miss both day-to-day and long-term goals, if you have to siphon off precious time, attention and creative energy to get things done that should, by now, be easy, efficient, effective, predictable.

Great leaders are driven by a vision.

Yet it’s their ability to lead successfully over, around and through uncertainty and barriers they encounter that often leads to legendary tales of leadership.

Not surprisingly, resilience is one of the top ten characteristics of great leaders.

Think of a leader you admire.

Inevitably, there’s at least one experience in his or her past that required great resilience to ensure success.

That experience may have built battle scars, but resilience for any of us grows largely from knowing that we have survived earlier challenges, and can do so again.

As one successful long-time leader explained, “There have been times when I came out of a situation and thought, ‘I CAN’T go back in there tomorrow.’”

“But I woke up the next day and thought, ‘Hey! We can try it THIS way!‘ Usually, it worked – and I hadn’t done nearly as badly as I thought when I was discouraged. ”

And, he added, “Sometimes the things that look like obstacles, ultimately, are not obstacles at all.”

If you are resilient, it means you’re able to:

- Bounce back
- Stay the course
- Be creative under pressure and create or see a new path you didn’t even notice before

It’s akin to a river changing course in response to a barrier or boulder in its path.

The water continues to move, even so, powerfully carving a new route.

If the need for resiliency is high enough, you may, at first, go through a period of denial or disbelief that you’re caught in dire or difficult circumstances.

If there’s nothing you can do to change the conditions you find yourself in, face them directly.

As you do, at some point, adrenalin and creativity will kick in. You’ll soon find or create a solution to the new circumstances, and will be on your way once again.

In the next blog post I’ll cover things you can do to grow strengthen your resilience, or that of people in your company or team.

To grow, you must expose yourself – or at least be open to – new ideas, new methods, new skills, and often, new people, as well.

To grow, you must take chances.

To grow, you must let go.

Here are others’ thoughts on growing – on not staying the same – when that is your goal:

The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year.
John Foster Dulles

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
Howard Thurman

Begin growing from where you are – not from where others think you ought to be by now.
Steven Douglas Lawrence

Impossible is a word humans use far too often.
Jeri Ryan

We must walk consciously only part way towards our goal, and then leap in
the dark to our success.
Thoreau

Start by doing what’s necessary, then what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
St. Francis of Assisi

To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream, not only plan, but also believe.
Anatole France

Like any skill or ability, leadership strength can increase with learning, practice, experimentation and experience in stretching the boundaries of your comfort zone and proficiency.

If you’re ready to become a stronger leader, here are a few actions you can take to start to do that:

1. Select a leader you admire and emulate his or her strengths.

Keep this person in mind as a guide, or target to learn from as you experiment, build and refine your strength as a leader.

2. Get feedback on your leadership.

Seek information about your strengths and areas for improvement from peers and direct reports, in addition to your manager’s feedback.

The information, if honestly provided and viewed, may be eye-opening and humbling, in laudatory as well as instructive ways.

3. Know where you’re going.

These types of skills and ideas have been covered in earlier blog posts. Use approaches that work for you to keep your eyes, intentions and actions aligned with the long-term goals for your team.

Tools you can use for this include visioning and simple but consistent and effective follow-up practices.

4. Listen and observe.

You may not like what you hear and see when you check in to see how things are going, but you need to know what’s really going on to be able to lead, respond, and adapt effectively, producing desired results.

5. Improve the ways you get your work done.

Make your work life easier, your results more predictable through process improvements and effective process management.

Simplify and improve the processes, measures, feedback and follow-up practices you use, in whatever ways you can.

6. Build bench strength.

This gives you greater capacity and adaptability, as a team.

It also extends your leadership reach and effectiveness. You can’t be everywhere, all the time, after all.

And you are simply more effective as a leader if you create processes, measurements, and good practices for your team to be able to monitor, manage and correct their own actions, as much as possible.

A big part of your job as a leader is to create and manage the system that makes that possible, paving the way to be able to reach your company or team’s biggest, most important, most energizing and audacious goals.

Leadership strength is much more than what most people think it is.

One of the top ten characteristics of great leaders, leadership strength certainly incorporates the classic signs and skills needed for effective use of leadership power. Many of these characteristics are covered in other posts on this blog.

Among these skills and inclinations are initiative, the ability to engage people in a vision of the future and to motivate them to move forward.

Leadership strength also includes persistence, or the ability to push through barriers that would discourage people with far less fortitude.

In addition, leadership strength includes – yes – sensitivity and humility.

Excellent leaders are able to listen to, observe and learn from the many people who are involved in creating success.

The groups an excellent leader needs to be well tuned into include direct reports, managers, peers, as well as customers, of course.

Leadership strength also includes humility. It means being able to say, “I don’t know the answer to that question,” or “We made a mistake and we are doing everything we can to correct it. Here’s how…”

That’s because honesty and integrity are very significant parts of a leader’s strength and power.

The people around a leader know if he or she is being honest, and it definitely affects that person’s ability to lead, in many ways.

When I asked professional colleagues for examples of strong leaders, the following are just a few of the people they cited, along with their descriptions of the strengths they saw in these individuals:

Alvin Ailey was an American choreographer who started a dance company in New York that bears his name.

Said the person who suggested him as a strong and effective leader, “He’s been gone for 20 years, yet his dancers still feel like it’s his company. He was nurturing, creative, generous, ambitious, kind, appreciative.”

Golda Meir was the Israeli prime minister in the early 70′s.

She was noted by one person because, “She was strong, reassuring, straight-talking, determined.”

Mahatma Gandhi was an Indian political and spiritual leader who led through non-violence.

The colleague who suggested Gandhi as a powerful example of strong leader said, “He had the willingness to take on huge goals and then work persistently to find allies and to communicate his key points not only in words but in actions.”

“He was also able to admit mistakes (“though not always,” she added) and then to look for a better way to accomplish goals. Most of all I admire his insistence that there are no short cuts to the goal, that the path taken is also the goal, itself.”

What do you think the signs of leadership strength are?