Most leaders have fantastic ideas about how their companies may become more successful, but they are reluctant to share these ideas for fear.
What methods do you use to communicate your ideas securely? In this essay, we’ll talk about how to do just that. Some of the best leaders learn their communication skills as politicians early on. It helps win elections, and can later help guide corporations.
You’re the leader.
You’re a leader in an organization. You have some suggestions that you’d want to have taken into consideration. For example:
- Contribution to the overall strategy.
- How you might improve that technique in terms of implementation efficiency.
- Why customers, clients, and other stakeholders have shown interest in learning how to satisfy their demands better.
- The best ways to improve staff engagement and morale.
- The best practices for improving change management in a manner that results in more coherence and less resistance.
You, on the other hand, tend to hold back. Why? Most of the time, for very excellent reasons!
Others have attempted to provide alternative viewpoints to top officials. They were shut down, ignored, marginalized, or subjected to even harsher treatment. Alternatively, you’ve almost certainly heard tales of similar incidents. Keeping your head down and staying out of danger feels like a safer option.
But what is the price of doing so? It hurts your morale and involvement and the efficiency with which your business operates.
Even if the expression “speaking truth to power” is popular these days, it implies that you are actively confronting something despite opposition. This is about something much more straightforward. What steps can you take to reduce that resistance?
The fundamentals of dynamic steering are critical in this situation. Whatever you undertake, begin on a tiny scale. Do an experiment that is “fail-safe” and see how it goes.
So the worst that can plausibly happen is a social embarrassment rather than anything more serious. If everything goes smoothly, keep going on the same path. If things don’t go as planned, make a change.
Here are some suggestions for “managing up” in an efficient manner.
1. Leaders explicitly ask.
Engage in a dialogue with the senior leader, in which you make statements such as, I have some ideas that I’d want to share with you in the hopes that you would consider incorporating them into our work.
What’s the most efficient means of getting things to you? In meetings, for example? Privately? You’re requesting permission and inquiring about the most effective method of obtaining it.
When you make your initial attempt, keep in mind to remind your senior leader, “You offered me to share some of my thoughts with you in private the other day, and I accepted. Is this a good moment to do this?”
2. Take a different viewpoint.
To illustrate the point let’s start with a factual anecdote.
An executive coaching client had specific ideas to share with a leader two levels above them. Still, they were afraid of retaliation, ramifications, and other negative consequences, as is familiar with such situations. You can assign the following task:
- Take some time to reflect on what is essential to that leader.
- Therefore, what are the pressures in that position?
- What do they consider to be significant?
- Take it into consideration.
- Consider the leader’s point of view, and see if you can present your thoughts in a manner that the leader would be interested in hearing them.
One customer sent the following email: “I believe I have figured out what is most important to you right now [and then said it explicitly]. I’m seeing things that I believe you can do to get there even more quickly. Please let me know if you would be interested in hearing them.” An unexpected knock on my client’s home door may follow five minutes later. It was the top executive who made the announcement. “Do you have a few minutes to spare? I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts.”
The Leader Tolerance Window is a period within which one can tolerate anything.
Regardless of what you do, be sure that you never convey your opinions during a moment when both you and the senior leaders have passed through their Windows of Tolerance. Instead of being reactive, make sure that you and your partner are in a responsive state of mind and heart, e.g., open, interested, calm instead of angry, agitated, upset.
Experts have worked with hundreds of leaders and stand by this advice. Leaders know how to manage their time. And the time of those under their responsibility.
