Leaders and Effective Communication

Good leaders  know that their communication skills  can make or break a team.  Simply put, the ability to clearly get the message across is the the lifeblood of an organization.  Why? Because strong communication skills create strong relationships and strong relationships are the key to success.  Poor skills create confusion and invite misinterpretation.   When the message isn’t clear, people tend to  fill in the blanks for themselves.  As their personal spin gets passed on, the message gets distorted and anyone who has played the children’s game “telephone line”  knows what I mean. In that game, a message is whispered to the first person in the line. The receiver is supposed to pass the message word for word.  The end goal is to have the last person repeat the same message as the first but that rarely happens. What really happens is that  the message moves down the line, words get dropped, meaning gets reinterpreted and the end result is a message that is nothing like the original.  An important part of any leader’s job is to make sure that the same message  gets relayed up and down the line.