The Number One Skill Leaders Need In A Crisis

There are several skills that leaders possess that are helpful in a crisis. Skills such as:

• The ability to get people to stretch and accomplish a difficult challenge.
• Using a strategic perspective and the ability to take the long view.
• Mentally focus on what’s happening outside of your organization, rather than focusing internally.
• Influencing a majority of people to make a significant change.
• Delivering significant and important results when needed.

But the skill that has the most immediate impact, and helps or hurts a leader the most in a crisis, is the ability to communicate powerfully and prolifically. Over the last few weeks of experiencing the coronavirus, we have seen a variety of excellent and terrible examples.

Rather than rehash the news, we looked at data from 97,822 leaders and ratings from their direct reports to understand the impact of poor and excellent communications. In the graph below, we show the effectiveness of leaders communicating powerfully on the horizontal axis. On the vertical axis, we measured the percentile ranking on the level of confidence that direct reports had that their goals would be achieved. It’s evident from the data that leaders who were more skilled at communicating had direct reports who were much more confident that the organization’s goals would be accomplished.

Keeping others Informed versus Communicating Powerfully

The first step in improving communication is keeping others well informed. Often leaders get negative feedback from their direct reports about not being informed of changes, new directions, or decisions that impact them. The impact of keeping others informed has been measured in companies going through a merger. When a merger is announced, leaders are forbidden to share confidential information with their employees. This stern warning from the lawyers causes many managers to stop almost all communications with their teams. In spite of the warnings, other managers continued to meet with their teams often and talk with team members about their concerns. Even though many of the team members’ questions could not be answered, they continued to communicate. Managers who met regularly and communicated were substantially more successful after the merger, while managers who quit communicating had higher turnover and more integration problems post-merger. Everyone wants to be well informed and is frustrated when they are surprised by changes.

Many managers set a goal to keep direct reports and their managers well informed. Doing this is a beginning step of becoming a powerful communicator. The table below illustrates some of the differences between a leader who is an informer and one that is a powerful communicator.

Becoming a Powerful Communicator

To discover what leaders did to move from being an informer to a powerful communicator, we analyzed data from 97,700 leaders. Looking at the data, we discovered that there were five enabling skills that facilitated leaders in communicating powerfully. In our research, we found that if leaders were just above average on their performance on these five skills, their ability to communicate powerfully would be rated at the 82^nd percentile. The implication of this research is that leaders need to have a reasonable level of skill in all five areas.

1. Inspires and Motivates Others. For most people, this feels like a big challenge, but our research revealed a few simple techniques that can help every leader to be more inspiring. Making an emotional connection can make communications more inspiring while being distant and elusive is uninspiring. Leaders can make an emotional connection by including others in the conversation, thanking people for their contributions, or even remembering the names of employees. Using stories to illustrate important points also makes communications more memorable and a higher impact. Inserting passion, excitement, and fun into what is said always helps.
2. Strategic Perspective. One thing that can make communications more impactful is to link the issue being discussed back to the strategy and vision of the organization. Linking a problem back to the strategy illustrates why an issue is important. This is easy to do, but too often, leaders assume that others automatically see the linkage.
3. Focus on Priorities. Often people in organizations complain that every issue brought up is the number one priority. It’s called the color of the day because these priorities change so regularly. By linking the issue to a priority, a leader is communicating the importance of that issue. When leaders do this, it increases the probability of implementation substantially.
4. Address the Individual. Too frequently, communications are focused on broad organizational issues that no one feels a personal responsibility to change. By breaking issues down into specific actions that individuals need to take makes every communication more actionable.
5. Building Trust. This skill has a dramatic effect on communications. If trust alone is a fatal flaw (rated at the 10^thpercentile or lower), then a leader’s ability to communicate powerfully drops to the 11^th percentile. Imagine a leader giving an inspiring speech where they say all the right things in an inspiring way, but you distrust this leader. Everything is neutralized because of the lack of trust. With high levels of trust, even mediocre communications are accepted and utilized.

When we looked at data from over 3,000 leaders who were working to make improvements, we discovered that communicating powerfully was the one competency that showed the largest level of improvement. Every person can do something to improve in this area, and even a little progress will have a significant impact.