Being able to communicate well has become so critical to leadership and your career that there’s an entire new work designation for it: “influencer.”
You may not be involved in the social media world, but wherever you operate in your company, navigating tough discussions, presenting insights clearly and just generally getting your voice heard are key to doing well both personally and for your organization.
Chief Executive Group’s Women Leaders Connect community will hold an online discussion, Mastering Influence: Confident Communication in High-Stakes Moments on September 9 (join us!) to help you improve these skills. Melody Wilding, a top executive coach whose clients have included leaders at Google, Netflix, IBM, JPMorgan and more, will help lead the discussion. We spoke with her ahead of the event to get a taste of her insights.
We all know communication skills are important—but just how important is being good at communicating today?
It’s everything. The higher you rise, the more important it becomes. Your technical skills become less important and your influence and persuasion skills are really your job. Your job is all about communicating with other people, bringing people together, getting buy-in for your ideas. Smoothing things over between different stakeholders, dealing with unhappy clients or getting them to buy with you again.
That’s one reason being a good communicator is important. The second reason I would say is, as AI grows, communication is becoming more and more commoditized. Being able to read the political dynamics, understand the question behind the question, for example—those are things that AI cannot do.
So your communication skills are your point of difference.
Yes. Having that level of savvy, acumen, situational awareness is really going to give you a differentiator.
Authority is obviously critical to leadership. But can authority be built? Talk about how communication skills can help you there.
I’ll use authority and power interchangeably here. There are different types of power. One we traditionally think of is positional power—your place in the hierarchy, your job title. And that is, of course, harder to change. But there are other types of power. There’s resource power, there’s power that’s based on your personality, your level of charisma, your level of warmth and ability to connect with others. There’s expert power, which is how much do you know about your field or your area and how valuable does that make you. And so those other types of power are levers you can pull. And again, communication is so important for each of those because that’s what it’s based on.
You can’t be perceived as having higher expert power if you don’t know how to communicate the value you bring to the table and the knowledge you do have in your field. You can’t rely on resource power if you don’t know how to build relationships with people and make sure you have those connections to ask for favors or whatever it may be when you need it.
And so it’s really at the core of everything in shaping people’s perception of you. And then, of course, as you increase those aspects of power, usually that leads to more positional power down the road and you’re granted that actual authority.
So let’s get into some of the specific ways you can hone your communications skills. You’ve talked about the importance of clarity, for example.
Yes, clarity is crucial because everyone’s inundated with information. You’re typically communicating with people who are very busy, who need to know what you’re trying to get from them or tell them within seconds or they’re going to tune you out.
So much of clarity comes down to good structure. Many of us narrate our thought process. We lead up to our conclusion in terms of, here are the options I explored. Here are the people I talked to, here’s the background about this situation and here’s my recommendation. We need to flip that and lead with the recommendation, then offer that we have additional details we can give if necessary.
We want to get our bottom line up front so the decision-maker knows, where are you taking me? And why is this a good use of my time? That’s always the question running through their head. So practice flipping that—and that’s easier to do in your written communication, in emails or presentations, first—where you can consciously assess yourself, do I need to flip this to lead with what I’m trying to say?
Other tips for structuring our communications?
When we’re able to be concise and structured in the way we present an idea, it suggests we have mastery over it. Because you need to understand complexity to make something simple and elegant. One of my favorite tools for this is the rule of threes, which is to break things down into buckets or pillars or just three steps, whatever it is.
So you may be presenting to a committee, for example, and you would say, there are three main things I want to cover today: timeline, resources and the customer’s response. Immediately it shows, oh, you have a plan, right? You know where you’re going and we know where we’re going. We’re not left doubting, does this person have a point? Where are they trying to take me? Because people’s minds will fill in the gap. So that structure is really key.
Some female leaders have talked about how challenging it can be for women to project authority, that it can be a bit of a mine field.
With women in particular, there’s this fine line we have to walk between competence and warmth where we don’t want to over index on warmth because then we’re seen as a pushover or that we’re, you know, more admin, but we don’t want to be seen as too competent because then we come off as cold, rigid, everything else.
So we have to straddle this very tough line of being collaborative and inviting people into the process while also having a point of view ourselves. A mistake I see a lot of women make is they over index on consensus seeking, or well, what does everybody else think, without ever saying what their own point of view is, what their suggestion is, what their recommendation is.
It’s fine to say, well, what does everybody think? But give a starting point for people because the executives around you, they’ve hired you for a reason. And they don’t want to do a lot of the mental heavy lifting. So if you can save them cognitive energy by saying, I’ve whittled it down to two options, I would suggest A, but I’m open to other ideas, there may be factors I’m missing here. That’s a good example of balancing competence and warmth.
How about showing emotion? This can be complicated for all leaders but there are special challenges for women there too, right?
Yes, yes. A lot of men express frustration or anger either by exploding or totally withdrawing. A lot of women express frustration through tears. And while we don’t want to be crying constantly in the workplace—then we have a bigger issue going on—there may be heated conversations, or you get some critical feedback out of the blue, whatever it is that can make you start tearing up. How you respond to that will then dictate how other people respond to that.
You’ve said, you teach people how to treat you.
Yes. Most women will say, my gosh, I’m so sorry. Like, ugh, I didn’t want to react this way. And we get very shameful about the response. And then the other person responds with, yeah, that is weird.
You’re branding it as showing weakness. Whereas if you categorize what’s happening as this is a sign of my commitment, dedication, loyalty, how hard we worked, our level of investment. If you don’t put a negative label on it, the other person is less likely to. So if you say, yeah, you can see I’m having a reaction to this because we’ve put six months of work into this, and my concern is that all of that is going to be thrown out the window. So I want to make sure we have a plan for moving ahead here.
Owning it is also honest—and that can build trust.
Yeah, exactly. So responding to your emotional responses in a grounded way is important. That’s the warmth-competence, balance, right? If you are so buttoned up, people don’t trust you because they think you’re hiding something. You’re not relatable or as approachable. And so yes, you need to be able to appropriately express your feelings and your reactions. It’s being able to say, yeah, I am concerned about this—and it’s also saying, I believe that we can move forward from this.
It’s totally fine to express that emotion or say, I’m actually really surprised by that feedback because we hadn’t heard it before. So let me try to dig deeper. Tell me where this is coming from. I find it helps to put a label on the emotion for you and for them, instead of trying to hide that you’re having any sort of reaction whatsoever. Label the emotion with a statement like, I’m surprised to hear that, and then something that’s forward looking or solution-focused.
That’s the best way to approach any difficult conversation, isn’t it?
Yes, let’s put a plan together for how we deal with that. Put both of you on the same side of the table instead of against each other. That can sound like, you know, we both care about doing what’s best for the client here, or simply asking, would you agree? We want to find the best way to work with each other as possible. Make it less combative.
