But that’s not what I meant…

Earlier this week, I presented on the topic of "Why you need to think about leadership as an art, not just a science" for the Central Delaware Chamber of Commerce Coffee Caching session.  During the introductory discussion, we talked about some of the challenges those leaders face that make leadership feel hard. One of the topics that came up was when people perceive the message we communicated differently than we intended.  I believe this is a common challenge that we all face in our personal and professional lives.

We have a message we want to communicate - how some thing went well, or something that didn’t go well, or the direction we’re going to take.  Whatever it is we know what we want to say.  The  question is if we always think about the other parts of communicating:

• how do we want people to receive the message?

• what do we want them to do about it?

• how it might make them feel?

• what might their concerns be?

When we prepare in advance, we can then customize the message in a way that is most likely to be received the way we intend it.  We can’t control how people receive the messages we deliver however; we can be prepared by considering the words we use, our tone of voice, the timing of the messaging,  and how we lead up to it.  I was listening to a Simon Sinek podcast episode yesterday and the speaker and he were discussing preparing for difficult feedback discussions and the different styles they use or prefer.

In some cases, someone may want the direct approach, just cutting to the chase whereas another person wants that moment to prepare by first hearing, "I have a difficult message I need to deliver to you."  This more personalized approach works when we need to work with someone 1:1, but the concept still makes sense for delivering group messages.  We need to think about our audience, what we know about how they might receive the message, and what questions they may have so that we end up with the best possible outcome. 

Like so many other components of leading people well, it starts with intention--what’s the intention behind delivering this message? What’s the outcome that I want from this? How do I want someone to feel as a result of hearing this?

I made the mistake once of assuming a group would be happy with a change in a benefit offering.  Many were, but I wasn't prepared for the group who had some valid concerns on the impact that it would make for them.  Had I taken a bit more time to be prepared for the reaction, I may have adjusted how and when the information was communicated.  We can't avoid people misunderstanding our intention or perceiving the message different than we assumed they would, but we can prepare more fully than we may think we need to.

What communication do you need to think differently about today?