Seth Dobbs (he/him): How well do you think the people you lead understand your vision and the outcomes that you’re driving towards? How well prepared is your team to take ownership and carry your vision forward? And how do you define success for communication? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs, and this is the Principle Driven Leadership Podcast where I share principles of leadership, along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be.

These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building teams and organizations, and in coaching others to become leaders themselves. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential for helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact.

And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results. And leadership is a journey. The step we’re taking today involves getting a better understanding of what it takes to effectively communicate your vision so that the people you lead can embrace it and drive it forward.

Now, over the past few seasons, I’ve emphasized the importance of having a vision, how it’s the core of leadership, and how a clear vision underpins an organization through alignment, along with a whole bunch of other benefits. But as seen in many of the stories that I’ve told, you don’t just reach alignment by simply having a vision in mind.

No matter how great your vision is, it doesn’t matter if you can’t actually get people on board with it. So as clear as it might be to you, if you can’t make it clear to others, you’re not gonna be an effective leader.

In episode three of this season, I talked about how as a leader, you own both understanding and being understood. Today’s episode really focuses more on that second part on being understood. Now there’s numerous strategies and tactics that help with successful communication. For this episode, I want to focus on a few key concepts that really work for me.

First, I’ll talk about what communication is and isn’t. Second, I’ll talk a bit about how to structure communicating your vision. And third, we’ll talk about the concept of repeat, repeat, repeat. So first, what communication is and isn’t. It’s an interesting question, I think. What is communication? To me, it isn’t just speaking.

It’s not just typing or writing or what have you. In other words, it isn’t just words being transmitted through one medium or another. For the purposes of leadership, I’d like to use the definition that communication is the imparting or interchange of thoughts, opinions, and or information, and perhaps more specifically in the context of our work as leaders,

Communication has a purpose, which means it should have a desired outcome. And so the success or failure of your communication is measured in part by the realization of those outcomes, not simply the existence of words, be they spoken, written, what have you. So good communication skills involve being able to impart ideas, to create new understanding, to build alignment, to drive forward motion to drive action, and so forth.

Now one of the biggest contrary forces working against us as leaders is the illusion of communication. And this occurs when we don’t perceive a disconnect, even though there is one. In other words, we think we’ve successfully communicated when in fact we haven’t. Now, how often do you leave a meeting confident that everyone had the same understanding of what was discussed?

In my experience, it’s rare that people feel this way, that they’re confident, not just that they believe everyone had the same understanding, not just hoping, but are actually confident that everyone walked away with the same understanding. And when it does happen, it’s not by accident. It’s usually through deliberate, mindful action.

And when it doesn’t happen, and we know that’s often, why do we let that happen? The signs of the illusion of communication come out quickly because you find yourself saying things like: “well, those people were in the room when we discussed it”, or “it was in an email, it’s on the wiki”, or ” I already told them that.

I don’t know why they don’t understand it”. All of those kinds of things are indicators that the illusion of communication has occurred, that you may have felt you’ve communicated just fine, but that in fact you haven’t successfully imparted ideas. So successfully communicating vision then is more than just some quick sloganeering, a poster on the wall or something like that.

As I’ve discussed throughout the past seasons, a good vision should drive forward motion and enable the people you lead to make decisions on their own that are in alignment with your goals, your objectives, your desired outcomes. You certainly don’t want to find out that people are inadvertently operating against your vision, and I’m sure you won’t be satisfied to shrug and say: “well, even so, it was in an email.

I’ve done my part.” So communication in general has an outcome, and communicating a vision has some pretty specific desired outcomes, typically involving changing behavior, driving new decision making, and spurring others to take action in a way that realizes your vision.

So the measure of good communication skills then is your ability to achieve that. It’s not easy, but you can get better at it with the right methodologies and with practice. Which brings us to topic number two for today. Structuring communication. So again, the outcome of communicating your vision is to garner commitment to a direction with a sense of purpose and clarity that drives forward motion.

In this context, commitment represents a true and genuine interest in seeing the vision come to life.

Before describing a method for structuring communication, I want to point out that you may have multiple stakeholders, which may require communicating in different ways. I’ll cover the details of that another day, but I just wanted to note that what you might communicate to an investor, for example, would be different than what you might communicate to someone buying your product, which again, might be slightly different from a potential employee, a partner, a donor, and so forth.

This doesn’t mean you’re just telling them randomly different things. Your vision remains the same, but the way you talk about it to each of these different constituencies might differ to help them make their connection.

Now, there are a lot of different ways to structure communication. I think a powerful approach is what I think of as the traditional newspaper approach, which is you start with a headline, a main concept, and then spiral into more and more elaborate details. That could be in the form of just a few sentences, or it might be a few minutes to explain, or this could even apply to an hour long presentation.

But regardless, you have three main components to consider in this communication. First is the purpose. It’s often best to start by sharing your aspirations. This is the rallying cry of why you are taking on whatever it is you’re taking on and gives people the reason to continue listening or reading.

Consuming through whatever means makes sense. You may also want to talk about the business, the team, the mission, the project context, whatever your scope may be to make clear where it is that you’re coming from in this vision. Second is the direction.

This is where you provide clarity on where you’re going by explaining the outcomes that you want to reach, and sometimes the outcomes that you want to avoid. But by explaining your purpose first, your audience now has a context to understand why these outcomes are important. And again, you can provide background to help folks understand what each point means.

This is also a good place to include communicating what’s in it for them, whoever your particular audience is. That helps create buy-in when they understand their connection to what you’re telling them. And then third are the guardrails. These typically are best embodied through guiding principles.

Depending on the nature and medium of communication, they may or might not be necessary, but I find they often help bring further clarity in your vision and therefore further clarity in future decision making. Now just to drive the point home, none of this is about how you reach the vision. You’re enlisting others to apply their expertise, their resources, or whatever else that they may be able to provide to help you reach your outcomes.

And this can be done through presentations, emails, online documentation, town halls, workshops, whatever it might be. And in fact, you may need to use some combination of many of these, if not all of these formats over time to be successful. And that brings us to the third topic for today, which is repeat, repeat, repeat.

Communicating a vision is far more complex than just asking someone to go pick up a loaf of bread on the way home from work. You might want to believe that you’re so articulate, inspiring that one event, one email, one poster, one town hall is all that’s needed to inspire everyone to carry on your vision.

Sometimes this can be the heart of the illusion of communication, the desire to be understood the first time, or you might simply think that you shouldn’t have to repeat yourself. You’ve said it once. You’ve written it once, whatever. The information’s out there. Why do you need to say it again?

People can go and find it. The thing is, if you’re anything like me, even for as simple an action as picking up a loaf of bread on the way home from work, you often need more than one reminder, especially when it requires taking a different action than your normal trip home, or in the case of work, different action than what people were currently on the path of.

And that’s the thing, you’re communicating your vision to create change and often changing behaviors in far more complex ways than simply running an errand. So there’s a concept known as the Marketing Rule of seven, which dates back, I believe, to the 1930s movie industry and but is still used today. The general concept is that due to noise and other forces working against a marketer, it can take seven or more exposures to a message for it to take hold with buyers.

In other words, it can take up to seven communications to move an idea from short-term memory to long-term memory into acceptance. If you think about the context of your vision, especially a vision that is driving change, there are many structural forces that may be working against you, and one of the biggest of these forces is organizational inertia.

That is organizational motion, that will require a major force to disrupt. The larger the organization, sometimes the greater the resistance to change might be. This is in part why the purpose component is so important. People need a reason to change their ways. Another contrary force is simply apathy. This often exists in the absence of true vision and true leadership commitment.

People will be cynical that you’re just talking about another new thing and they’re going to sit back and wait for you to go away. So repeated, consistent exposure to your vision will start breaking down that kind of resistance and help demonstrate that you really mean it.

Now these are among many reasons why it’s insufficient to just jot the vision down in an email and hope for the best. Also, note that this rule does not mean you should say the same thing each time. We need to adapt to our audience to make sure they’re getting it. You need to own being understood. Now, you can use a few simple questions to find out what is and isn’t understood, and help break through the illusion of communication in the process.

You can ask things like: “in your own words, what is the purpose of our vision”, or, “which outcomes are most impactful to you and why?”, and “what principles are you worried others will not remember, and why?”

Each of these approaches push people to rephrase things in their own words or to articulate a deeper understanding than simple, rote repetition of the words you said. It’ll help them better understand you and help you understand what might be misunderstood. Vision isn’t a one-time event.

It’s the engine that runs what you lead. If your vision is important, and it should be, it bears repeating, it needs reinforcement, and this is how you steer your team. “Leaders Provide Vision” is the first core principle of Principle Driven Leadership, because providing vision is central to leadership. This is how you provide direction, how you maintain alignment, how you motivate, and how you create forward motion. A vision can’t just sit on a shelf, on a webpage, in an email, on a poster, on a wall, in a video.

Communicating vision is in a way, the continuous act of leadership.. I’d like you to reflect on this episode’s material and think how often do you experience the illusion of communication and what can you do differently starting today to ensure you have more effective communication?

Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe, follow, comment, and share with a friend if you liked it. Send feedback and questions to contact@pdlpodcast.com and I’ll try to address a few before the end of the season and join me next time where I’ll talk about how to prioritize problems and determine what should and shouldn’t be addressed.