Effective communication
I came across a post at the Practice of Leadership blog that I found interesting. The title of the post is "Leaders connect with the people" and it is basically about communication and getting your message communicated effectively.
"Getting the message across is one of the most challenging leadership tasks. People are powerfully engaged when they emotionally connect with the leader's message. Meaningful conversation, shared experiences and teaching are the foundation of emotional connections with others. Weak communication results in emotional detachment and people disengage from the leader's vision and goals. Effective leaders spend time with their people in conversation and in shared experiences, using their experience to teach and mentor others." to read more ....
The point the I would like to make is our job becomes much more difficult when we do not communicate effectively. This past week I found myself is a situation where I had multiple technical and non-technical issues to deal with. One issue was non-technical and non-work related, however it heightened my stress level, and when combined with the usual stresses of work, this made my normal communication difficult.
After dealing with a difficult work related incident, I realized that I was in that emotional warning zone and forced myself to take a step back, stop talking and start breathing. I really believe that there is more to communication than just verbal communication and this was confirmed when later in the week at my staff meeting I said something like "I know I was a little worked up yesterday", and someone replied sarcastically "A little". That's when I knew that my stress level and emotion from the day before had spilled over and probably influenced my team.
I know that situations like this occur every day, however, as a manager I believe that we need to be able to handle the daily stress without loosing your cool, and we need to set an example and always be consistent when communicating to team members, to peers or to management.
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