Not Going Back by Paul Blum

Author:Paul Blum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Published: 2022-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

Sharing Your Vision

Develop and Communicate Your Priorities

Up to this point, our work has been twofold: developing self-awareness and becoming more inclusive of others to create and lead a diverse team. The next step is to bring these two worlds—the inner world of the self and the outer world of your community—together to create an integrated whole. This is made possible by what is perhaps the most important, yet most overlooked, leadership skill: communication.

It seems so obvious on the surface that leaders need to be strong communicators to be effective, so why do so many struggle with this basic skill?

It all stems from the way leaders were developed in the past. In most large organizations, leaders were high performers who were promoted from within. For example, perhaps a great software engineer would be made the lead engineer for a whole company. The logic of this system relies on the assumption that the best performer would just naturally level up the performance of an entire department or organization.

But the mechanism by which that would occur was never fully developed. Would that leader simply improve things by being an outstanding example of success? Are they the hardest working, and therefore would be able to muscle through any problem by sheer intellectual force? In practice, this leader’s education and natural inclinations had, perhaps for decades, all been focused on the single task of software engineering, and no additional leadership training would be provided.

This set up a very high-stakes, sink-or-swim system in which new leaders were thrown into the work with no support. And without understanding how to develop and communicate their vision to their teams, they would often struggle, leading to many of the common issues we see today in corporate culture: inefficiency, low morale, interpersonal conflict, and an inability to change course in the face of change.

Of course, it’s not just engineers who struggle with the demands of leadership. Entrepreneurs with a great idea, floor nurses who become hospital managers, and brilliant salespeople will all struggle to lead if they haven’t been trained to communicate with their communities.

This old model of leadership development is unsustainable, both for the organization and the individual tapped to step up. Businesses will suffer from lower productivity as leaders try to get up to speed, and leaders themselves will burn out because they lack the skills they need to work with increasingly diverse teams. In the past, leaders without strong communication skills could succeed simply because their teams were so homogenous that their ideas were rarely challenged. Hiring for “fit” meant that leaders were working with groups that were so much like them that they didn’t have to work too hard to make their ideas understood.

But in today’s world, diversity, not homogeneity, is the strength to develop. Leaders who want to develop a culture of inclusivity need highly developed communication skills that allow them to bring together diverse members to work together toward a common, well-understood vision.

A Story: The Merchant

Back in 2019, I was brought in to consult with a women’s sportswear company.

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