One critical and challenging part of leadership is managing communication with your team.
The higher levels of leadership you go, the more bad news you receive.
Why?
The leader of every department or company is tasked with solving the biggest constraint of the department or organization.
What’s better?
Leadership is an ongoing process of solving the biggest, messiest problems.
With this responsibility, the hard truth is that you often encounter unpleasant news.
The best part?
The bigger the responsibility, the more frequent and heavy the news you receive.
So my message and lesson today are this:
When bad news that will affect your team and clients hits your door.
You must provide proper visibility so the concern is transparent.
Your people deserve this.
At the same time, you must ensure your communication is steady and not frantic. It should include a few proposed solutions along with a solution-oriented feedback request to build trust.
This way, you show light (as there’s always light) and collaboration (to increase the probability of identifying the best solution) despite the darkness.
This is very hard and both an art and a science of leadership.
Just remember: Good leadership requires strong communication management.
