Six years ago, I was working in a large business facing a major outsourcing of 400 employees, needing strong and effective two-way employee/leader dialogue. I surveyed the leaders and 97% of them said they were “good or excellent” communicators. An amazing and confident result. But I also surveyed their teams. The result was a sea of red and amber scores, showing that employees saw leaders infrequently. When they did hear from leaders it was less than satisfactory.

Time for a reality check.

This honest feedback to the leaders about their poor perception, turned out to be a real gift. A tipping point. It enabled me to work with the leadership team on improving their communication capability and their personal brand. The outcome was better stakeholder engagement and better leadership.

Often I hear Comms colleagues say “but it’s our job to make leaders look good”. I kind of agree. But it’s typically our leaders that are performing as the face of the business, not the Comms team.

To help improve a leader’s personal brand, I believe our role is to help leaders inform and engage effectively, so that stakeholders support the business strategy.

We need to help leaders improve their will and skill as communicators.

I believe effective leader communication has three key parts:

Confidence (their will to engage, consistently)
Capability (their skill of using insights to create connection with an audience)
Content (their knowledge and story).

Each leader has individual strengths when it comes to engaging stakeholders. But to improve any performance we need honest feedback on how leaders are perceived. Leaders need to “mind the gap” between how they think they are perceived and how their audience perceives them (their brand). Comms Teams can play a critical role in providing this feedback and supporting leaders to uplift communication capability.

Too often I see confident leaders address stakeholders or hold a difficult conversation without preparation. Leaders are often experts in their field or have worked in their sector for decades. So why would they be anything other than confident? In this sense confidence alone can be a curse. For me good delivery by a leader is a blend of confidence, capability and content.

I am calling on leaders to seek honest feedback on their communication capability. The honest feedback from their audience is a gift to help them be better leaders. This in turn will bring higher levels of stakeholder engagement and a better employee experience as well as better engagement with corporate decisions.

My view is that improving communication capability is the most effective way to make our leaders look better, because they are better.

As a leader are you using the right insight and audience feedback to help you? And as a Communicator are you providing feedback and support to help your leaders actually get better, not just look better?

A reality check for leaders