Whether it’s in politics or the office, communicating with clarity and directness is a fundamental leadership quality that guides an organization through the best and worst of times. There’s simply no room for an effective leader to speak vaguely about important topics. If an issue or process matters to you and your business, spell it out clearly and repeatedly instead of vaguely hoping that others will come to the correct conclusion.
One of the most important duties of a leader is the ability to look at complex data and break it down into clear, specific and actionable components to help steer the company vision and drive revenue. But that same attention to clarity should be placed in areas that go beyond strategy and profits.
No matter the topic, remaining unequivocally clear as possible can be the difference between connecting with your organization to help them continue doing great things or confusing a capable group of people that simply need direction.
4 crucial areas a leader MUST communicate clearly about:
1. Honesty and ethics – Discrimination and dishonesty should have no place in your organization. Period. And when something suspect does occur, you must quickly and directly deal with it without tiptoeing around the heart of the issue. The worst way to guide the ethics of your organization is to avoid uncomfortable conversations and to side-step the facts. If you say that you have no tolerance for a certain behavior, be prepared to call out that behavior with specificity and deal with it with equal force each time it happens. Your job is to steer the ship. Delivering inconsistent consequences and confusing (or vacuous) messaging from the C-level will do nothing but take you off course.
2. How to treat customers and colleagues – The way that your organization treats its people (internally and externally) starts with you. Your actions greatly influence the way your entire organization acts and responds to one another, but so do your words. Your company values exist for a reason – to act as guardrails and guidelines for what is expected and how to behave – and you, as a leader, are there to clarify and communicate out what constitutes living those values.
3. Accountability for goals and business objectives – There can be a fine line between communicating company vision and micro-managing. One of the most challenging parts of being a leader is setting clear expectations without boxing in your employees. This is where clarity comes in. When you excel at providing clear communication, your team is then free to do what they do best – understanding what is expected of them and, at times, what is simply unacceptable.
4. Saving and spending money – The saying “Put your money where your mouth is.” means quite a bit when it comes to providing financial clarity for your business. It’s less about obsessing over every line item in your financials and more about empowering your team to make the best spending (and saving) decisions with the information they need.
The difference between clarity and transparency
“Effective leaders don’t have to be passionate. They don’t have to be charming. They don’t have to be brilliant… What they must be is clear,” said Marcus Buckingham in his book The One Thing You Need to Know:…About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success.
As leaders we like to talk about how important transparency is – but, in reality, complete, 100% full transparency is not always attainable as sharing raw data “opens the door to selective interpretation“. This is where clarity comes in. Instead of handing out just the facts and numbers, clarity gives your organization full “access to understanding the facts.”
If you expect a certain behavior, clarity in communicating and consistency in communicating out is key. The better your team understands the facts and (exactly and directly) where you stand on issues, the better your organization will run and the happier your employees will be in the long term.
As a leader, you simply don’t have the choice to NOT communicate. Choosing not to communicate is, in fact, communicating – but communicating all of the wrong things. Be responsive, be consistent and – above all – be CLEAR. Your associates and community will thank you, clearly.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.