Chapter 2: Leadership Communication Purpose, Strategy, and Structure

Chapter 2: Leadership Communication Purpose, Strategy, and Structure

In this chapter you will learn that Strategy consists of two actions:

1. Determining the purpose, goals, or vision of what we want to achieve.

2. Developing how best to achieve the purpose, goals, or visions.

And you will learn to apply communication strategy to achieve your communication goals. Effecting leadership communication depends on your thinking and planning strategically, understanding your audience, and structuring your communication for different situations.

In professional communication, we have four goals: to inform, to persuade, to instruct, and to engage. In this chapter you will learn how to generating ideas by brainstorming, Idea mapping, and the journalist’s questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? , and the decision tree. Strategy framework, we need to consider each of the components in the framework: the purpose, messages, media/forum, timing, and communicator. We may have one overall purpose or many, depending on the complexity of the communication situation. Our overall purpose and overarching message should be consistent from group to group. Analyzing audience is fundamental to any communication strategy. There are four approaches to analyzing an audience are by expertise, by decision-making style, by medium, and by organizational context.

This chapter has focused on clarifying messages and developing a communication strategy, both essential skills for anyone wanting to master leadership communication. And the general rule for professional communication is our purpose for writing or speaking usually comes first.

Question

1. How to establish a clear communication purpose?

Good Leaders, Good Communicators. There’s no mystery here. Regardless of whether you’re talking about business, politics, sports or the military, the best leaders are first-rate communicators. Their values are clear and solid, and what they say promotes those values. Their teams admire them and follow their lead. Likewise, if you want your company to reach new benchmarks of achievement, you must master the art of clear communication. So, how do you do it?

First, you must realize and accept that clear communication is always a two-way process. It’s not enough to speak clearly; you have to make sure you’re being heard and understood. To facilitate this, use the following two-way communication primer:

Prepare how you’ll communicate
• Clarify the goal of the communication.
• Plan carefully before sending it or meeting in person.
• Anticipate the receiver’s viewpoint and feelings.

Deliver the message
• Express your meaning with conviction.
• Relate the message to your larger goals.
• Identify the action to be taken.
• Confirm the other person understands.

Receive the message
• Keep an open mind.
• Identify key points in the message.
• Value constructive feedback and use it to grow.
• Confirm your understanding.

Evaluate the effectiveness of the communication afterwards

Take corrective action as necessary

Primers, of course, aren’t enough. You must go deeper and determine why internal communications are poor or ineffective, considering any potential barriers. Once the barriers have been identified, you’ll see where to improve. Additionally, you’ll inevitably realize the stakes are high when it comes to communicating — if you fail to do this properly, you can poison the atmosphere between you and a colleague, as well as your company’s morale. So the next time you’re drafting a letter, e-mail or policy statement, before you send it, stop and consider these common barriers to clear communication:

2. How to Conduct Audience Analysis?

Know the definition of audience analysis: determining the important characteristics of an audience in order to chose the best style, format and information/arguments when writing or speaking. Understanding the identity, personality and characteristics brought to a situation by the specific type of audience.

Know the purpose of audience analysis: Having knowledge of a specific audience allows the writer or speaker to understand the social situation in which he or she writes. It allows the writer to come up with a strategy to adapt arguments to best suit an audience. Conducting audience analysis informs a speaker or writer about the people he or she is talking to. This is important because based on what is found out in the audience analysis a writer/speaker can adjust his work to relate to an audience in the best way possible. It allows a writer/speaker to be able to succeed in their goal of writing or speaking whatever that may be. If a speaker/writer wants to persuade, inform, motivate, excite, scare, warn or cheer up an audience, then analyzing those people to which he/she is talking can allow them to pick the best words, stories, tone, style and delivery to use when writing or talking to that specific group of people.

3. Why leader needs to develop a strategic leadership communication plan?

Concise communication is essential for the success of any organization and is especially important to develop effective strategic leadership. The focus of strategic leadership is to build and maintain a sustainable competitive advantage for the organization, according to Ralph Stacy, author of “learning as an Activity of Interdependent People”. Concise communication is significant in developing effective strategic leadership, as it is typically the responsibility of leaders to translate the desires of those at the upper echelons of the organization to those at the bottom. The strategic planning process is a common method used to develop and maintain a sustainable competitive advantage for an organization. In the strategic planning process, organizational leaders develop a mission statement for the organization, explaining its reason for existence. Managers and leaders must then develop strategies to meet this purpose. The development of effective strategic leadership is vital to the success of the strategic planning process, and concise communication is an essential element of this development.