3 Leadership Tips to Communicate During VUCA Times

    

Whether you are a brand-new leader, an emerging leader, a mid-career leader, or a leader looking to leadership-tips-2.jpgretire within the next 10 years, you are facing the same challenges; it is a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous business world out there and your people are looking to you for answers and guidance.

“Leadership” means many things to many people and if you Google it you see 795,000,000 hits in 1.25 seconds.  To help me as both a trainer of leadership and the leader of my company, I have a very simple definition that “Leadership is equal to the execution of your business strategy.”  Great leaders understand it’s all about developing the right business strategy, creating alignment within your organization to execute, providing objectives and goals for achievement, coaching to success, empowering, and creating a culture of accountability.

In the Business Leadership development learning journeys I lead I often ask participants to share some of the most critical challenges they are seeing in this VUCA world when it comes to leadership.  Last week I had a significant number of participants asking about communication skills.  At the highest level, communication skills are the language of leadership; it’s how you connect the strategy to the alignment to the ability to get things done through other people.

Based on research from the academic world, the consulting world, and my own experiences working with leaders for more than 25 years, I’ve put together an up-to-the-minute list of 3 leadership tips to help you to better communicate in these VUCA times.

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Keep the communication simple

Thanks to the growth of communication technologies, systems, tools, and platforms communicating has never been as easy…or hard.  We live in the Twitter age of 140 characters and I for one love it.  @jack have given is the tools we need to craft simple, meaningful messages that get right to the point.  There is no need for long drawn out speeches, emails, or custom videos.  Great leaders of today can figure out ways of cutting through the VUCA world clutter by keeping it simple and to the point.

Think about ways of communicating strategy in a tweet:

  • “All, remember, our strategy is Product Leadership. Keep pumping out great products!”

Or how about reinforcing objectives:

  • “Our new product called WOW is at 68% of goal; let’s create more market awareness”

Repeat it often using different modalities

The second tip is to repeat your messages often and use different modalities as obviously just tweeting short messages is not going to be very effective.  People will remember your leadership message if it’s engaging and if it comes in different forms. So try different techniques and think outside of the box.  You have access to video on your smartphones and on your computer systems, you can broadcast using web conferencing and you can even create a podcast of you want; the choices are limitless; all you must do is make it happen.

Suggestion: Build a leadership communications SMART Plan.  Take the time to create themes and list out all the things you want to say, when you are going to say them, and how you are going to say them.

Make it a conversation

Talking at people in a VUCA world won’t work.  You need to make sure it’s a conversation and that your people can, and do engage with you. It doesn’t matter if you have a team of 1 or a team of 65,000, you must take the extra time and effort to find ways of providing a two-way street where your people can ask you questions and more importantly provide you with the ideas and insights to change volatility into vision, uncertainty in and understanding, complexity into clarity, and ambiguity into alignment.

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Robert Brodo

About The Author

Robert Brodo is co-founder of Advantexe. He has more than 20 years of training and business simulation experience.