Lean Communication for Leaders Part 5: Brevity and Clarity

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Brevity and clarity are important for leadership communication, except for some caveats which I cover in this podcast.

Brevity

I will keep this section brief. The need for brevity applies equally to leaders as it does to followers. At any level, it’s good practice not to take any more of your listeners’ time than you need to get your message across, and besides being concise can make you sound more confident and sure of your message, which is important for any leader.

There is one area, though, in which you can and should violate the principle of brevity, and that is repetition. It may seem wasteful to repeat a message that has already been heard; repetition is rework, which implies that the product was not made right the first time.

If you’re asking for a decision or specific action, repetition is wasteful. But leadership communication is more general, such as communicating a vision or setting guidelines that people can follow over time, and that can’t realistically be done in just one shot.

For example, let’s assume you announce a new strategy that you want the whole company to follow. Some people in your audience may enthusiastically commit to it right then and there and will resolve to change how they work. But in real life, not everybody hears it; not everybody understands it; not everybody takes you seriously; not everybody buys into it; not everybody will remember it when they leave. So, if you said it and it did not have its full effect, what you said only once is waste unless you repeat it as often as it takes.

Repetition ensures the message gets through. Any parent knows that saying something once is almost never effective. Value doesn’t happen just because it’s uttered; it has to be heard, understood, agreed and remembered.

Repetition makes sure people take you seriously. I worked for many years with a large company whose leadership was fond of latching on wholeheartedly to the next big idea; they would announce it, incentivize for it, measure progress, and make it the most important thing in everyone’s attention. Everyone soon learned that most times they could smile and agree—and then just go back to what they were doing, because they knew they could ride it out until the next big “flavor of the month” idea came out.

Repetition can serve as a quality check. The higher you rise in an organization, the more layers your message may get filtered through. When you make enough copies of copies, the message can quickly degrade, like a game of telephone. But if you keep repeating the same thing over and over, that’s less likely to happen.

How much is enough—or too much? There are different viewpoints on that. Jack Welch says that a leader has to be relentless and boring. If you think you’ve said it enough times, you probably haven’t. Conventional wisdom says it takes at least seven exposures to an advertising message before in sinks in, but that may just be a message told by the advertising industry to sell more ad time. One formal study done showed that persuasion increased up to three repetitions, and then began to decrease at five or more repetitions.[1]

Add variety to your repetition. Don’t be afraid of repeating yourself, but be smart about it. Repeat the same message but vary the way you say it, or substitute different stories and examples; use different channels—that will help keep it fresh for you and for your followers.

Clarity

You may not always have to be brief, but you always have to be clear. For leadership communication, clarity is at least as important as adding value. That’s because as a leader, you create value through others, so your most important task is to give them the direction and motivation to act towards a common and worthwhile goal. You don’t have all the answers, but by being clear about the big things such as vision, values, priorities and goals, you can enable, empower and encourage others to find the answers.

As Jeffrey Pfeffer says, “A leader’s job is to reduce uncertainty, not create it.”[2] Uncertainty is wasteful. Only about one-half of workers say they know what’s expected of them at work. Imagine how much waste there is when someone does not know where to apply themselves half the time.

Uncertainty saps effort. As James Clear says, “Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity.” His assertion is backed up by studies in such diverse areas such as medical decisions, investments and buying choices which show that too much choice leads to less action.

Besides reducing waste and increasing effort, clarity can also expose disagreement with your message. This may sound wasteful, but it affords an opportunity to openly discuss differences and resolve them before they get out of hand. But that means that you have to pay close attention to LC Key #6: Candor and Directness.

Candor

Candor is fairly straightforward. In your own communication, you should strive to be as candid and transparent as possible, with one exception. If the situation is especially challenging, you should give your followers the respect of knowing they can handle the truth. But you are perfectly justified in hiding your own fears or lack of confidence. When things were looking bleak for Britain after the fall of France in June 1940, Churchill stiffened the British spine with his famous “we shall fight on the beaches” speech. What people then didn’t realize is that right after he finished the speech, he growled: “We shall hit them on the heads with broken bottles, because that’s bloody well all we’ve got.”

Candor works both ways; if you can dish it out, you have to be able to take it as well. That means you have to make it safe for others to speak up, even when it’s bad news. Fierce Inc. surveyed 1,400 executives and employees and found that while 99% said they valued honesty and openness, 70% did not believe their own organization lived up to that ideal. When people are afraid to speak their minds, problems get hidden, learning is suppressed, poor performance goes unchallenged, and mistrust breeds—all potential sources of waste.

Directness

Lean communication is biased toward directness, because direct speech is clear speech. Stating a point directly, in as few words as possible, is both efficient and clear, so it definitely reduces waste in communication. In general terms, you want to be as direct as possible.

But when speaking to individual subordinates, there are two good reasons for dialing back direct speech.  First, don’t forget that that’s a human being you’re talking to, and human beings are prey to those pesky things called feelings, especially when their personal status is challenged. If they refuse to listen to your message because they feel slighted, or worse, determine to do the opposite, whatever you’ve gained in efficiency, you’ve more than thrown away in terms of effectiveness.

That’s why I hate the phrase “brutal honesty”, which some leaders seem to brag about as a badge of toughness. When giving feedback, of course you have to be clear. But there’s a huge difference between clarity and brutal honesty. Clarity is about identifying and effectively communicating the gap between actual and desired performance. Brutality is about being savage, cruel, or inhuman, according to my dictionary. Is this what you want to be when giving feedback to others?

Second, as a coach you often get better results from followers when they come up with their own ideas and plans for improvement. So, rather than directly telling them what to do, you indirectly guide them to the right conclusions by asking questions.

In the final podcast of this series, we will examine the importance of dialogue in leadership communication.

[1] Cited in Robert H. Gass and John S. Seiter, Persuasion, Social Influence and Compliance Gaining, p. 200.

[2] Jeffrey Pfeffer, What Were They Thinking? p. 104.