Communicating with teams means ensuring that we build an excellent relationship with employees, colleagues, clients and suppliers. Leadership, for its part, inspires professionals, makes them collaborate, and keeps them motivated, engaged and productive.
Looking at organisations today, we can see that, besides meeting targets, managers are concerned with having high-performance teams. These teams should be made up of people who are highly motivated and inspired by the company’s brand, or rather, by the leader. Remember that every great battle was won by great leaders, people able to move multitudes who won others over through empathy.
When we look at some of the greatest communication icons in history, what do we find that they have in common? We see that their legacy was marked by the way they expressed their leadership and by their unique ability to communicate effectively. More than history, these leaders inspired, and continue to influence, multitudes through their motivational phrases, eloquent speeches, writings, parables and enchanting metaphors. The secret of these leaders lies, basically, in how they influenced multitudes through their interpersonal skills, much more than through their technical skills. These leaders turned ideals into goals and visions into concrete actions, and mobilised nations in support of their convictions.
We are talking about self-confident, self-motivated leaders with an excellent presence and body language, which, together with their effective communication, made them charismatic and surrounded by followers. A leader who uses communication in their leadership always conveys a message of security, of the organisation’s values and of motivation. Words make the employee an integral part of the company, and not just another person waiting for their salary at the end of the month.
To ensure this motivation and people’s commitment, it is necessary to understand the importance of communication in leadership, and for that we need to remember human capital management within an organisation, since companies are made of people, by people and for people. What, unfortunately, we have seen in some organisations is this inability to communicate efficiently. Managers who are more focused on technical skills and have no knowledge of human capital management. According to Peter Drucker, “Seventy per cent of all administrative problems result from ineffective communication”. Many of these problems are due to leaders whose communication is ineffective, since we know that, in the communication process, the result obtained is the sole responsibility of the person sending the message.
In practice, this means that, with a clear and assertive approach, the leader can truly add value to their team, provide growth and knowledge to their professionals and steer them towards achieving great results by combining the power of communication with good leadership.
A leader needs to use their communicative leadership to promote team engagement in achieving results, aligning individual skills with the organisation’s strategic objectives and establishing an open channel of communication between all hierarchical levels, because knowing how to lead is, above all, knowing how to communicate.
The great challenge is that, even with all these benefits, many managers still underestimate the need to continually develop and hone their leadership and communication skills. In doing so, they limit the capabilities and results of their teams. They delegate tasks and demand results wrongly, which leads to a great deal of upset, repeated work and serious professional demotivation in the team. Most of the time, management problems are the consequence of inefficient communication. Being in the midst of internal conflicts also means being prepared to resolve them. Transparent information makes each person aware of their role, aligns sales processes and presents the values, serving as devices to integrate the employee.
As leaders and managers we must make sure we leave a legacy, and that legacy must be positive, a mark wherever we go.
