by Stephanie Bickel
How can you work on your leadership communication skills?
Focus on your personal style, message structure, and communication strategy. Practice thoughts and commit to strengthening your day-to-day communication habits.
QUESTION: "I want to develop ways to raise my profile with clients and be seen as a more senior member of the team. In addition, I need to portray more fire in the belly attitude vs. being more calm and measured. I need leadership communication skills."
ANSWER: It is great to know how to be calm and measured. Team members and clients all appreciate someone who has poise under pressure. The opposite delivery style is effective when used selectively to show conviction and urgency. To have effective communication in leadership means being consistently clear and compelling.
1. Your personal style should amplify who you are at your core.
You cannot have effective communication in leadership if you are trying to be someone else. Studying other leaders you admire is great leadership communication skills training in itself. Increase your personal intensity, use contrast in messaging, and sincerely connect to the topic. Learn how to control your voice so you can easily dial up your volume to be heard and then control it under pressure.
2. Help your listeners digest your ideas so fast that they can repeat them with a clear message structure.
Your ideas need to be crystal clear when you are giving a recommendation, telling a story, or sharing a vision. One of our favorite exercises in our leadership communication skills training is teaching people to deliver an executive summary in 3 minutes or less. You want to get comfortable with "shock and awe" messaging. Your messages will blow the hair back on audiences when they are clearly structured. Take out the ramp-ups into messages and around your messages.
3. The ultimate signal that your leadership communication skills are tip-top, is how you employ communication strategies when there is pushback.
Can you handle questions, objections, and tricky personality types? Do you know how to respond in a way that influences others to be open to ideas they have resisted before? Being able to disagree diplomatically can help move audiences toward your ideas without offending them.
When you look and sound like a leader, communicate clearly, and control yourself - you stand out as the obvious leader.
Great leaders and speakers start with Speak by Design. Learn the techniques and build the skills with us. Speak by Design University is the only leadership communication program in the world that gives you access to self-paced learning, group coaching and training and, most importantly, private one-on-one coaching. Learn more and register.