5 Powerful Ways to Be an Effective Communicator

Don't Just Repeat Your Words - Multiply them with Stories and Simplicity!
Ed Morgan

This article provided by the Engstrom Institute

In my early career, my job was to help GE senior executives give speeches, talk to employees, and talk to shareowners. The variety of techniques I worked with was substantial, from international teleconferences to private breakfasts.

But what made the most difference in the future careers of my clients (the fast track executives at GE) was clearly not the flawless execution of my projects. It was the personal qualities and learned communications disciplines that shone through or failed to materialize in their communications.

To put it another way—effective communication is not just about techniques, it's about the communicator. I've gone to school on those early years. I offer here a few principles whose seeds were planted in those years, but grew up to be my "main things" in my current role as a CEO of a growing ministry.

The truth in Kingdom work is that effective communicators get things done and become leaders. In the list of what turns good managers into leaders, communication skills like these five powerful principles are at the top of the list, along with vision and passion.

No. 1. Let 'em see your heart!

It's your ultimate weapon when things get really tough and the answer isn't apparent. Talk from your core belief about a situation. Let what you really believe about people and your ministry come out. Let them see your hopes and disappointments. This is counterintuitive—our natural instincts scream at us to take a step backward and become more formal in sticky situations.

But people respond to your leadership as people, not employees. It is especially important in a crisis to get real, not formal. It's the same principle as the rest of our walk of faith. What we want to be ours in a time of crisis, we have to practice all the time in routine circumstances.

Does talking from the heart always mean you get very passionate and over-the-top? Not at all. Passionate talk can be a contrived performance. Letting those you manage see your heart is totally different—it requires opening the door to how you process decisions. It's not a calculated response delivered with enthusiasm. It's real. It's you.

In our ministry, for example, a fledgling partnership to children in a new neighborhood looked like it might come apart in a welter of allegations of non-performance made by our staff, contrasted with assurances that results were just different from expectations from our new partners. Communications grew steadily more formal and formulaic. My first task: earn credibility by speaking my heart to both sides about why we did this deal in the first place, seeking to earn my way beneath the surface of the facts. It turned out I did have to make a personnel change there because my "heart talk" revealed no similar motivations on the part of one of our leaders and no interest in change on the part of that individual. A sincere "opening up" from me helped bring out the truth.

No. 2. Use the power of stories.

Be known as a creator of meaning—not an assembler of facts. Meaning is mostly transmitted in story. Recognize, as my friend and author Joe Wheeler likes to say, that facts are like Teflon to most hearers, but stories are like Velcro. They stick.

That means that a Power Point briefing should never be a recitation of facts. The facts should be woven into a story that means something important.

One of my most important jobs as a leader is to take facts and weave them together into a conclusion that takes us toward our mission. When I brief anyone—from board members to our newest associate—I am conscious of putting a narrative together about the situation before heading into the exhortation part.

A wonderful ministry partner and supporter taught me years ago that even financials (in fact, especially financials)—if they are well arranged—tell a story. It's our job as managers to know the numbers well enough and be so sharp with their implications that we can tell an accurate, compelling story using only a page (or screen) of figures.

I've worked for managers who thought business stories were like gossip around the water cooler, not part of the manager's daily arsenal. Don't be like them if you want to be an exceptional communicator.

No. 3. Be a simplifier.

All the good communicators are. If you find yourself giving a complex briefing, even if it's on a complex subject, maybe you weren't ready to give the briefing. All the best things in ministry are simple—like one-sentence mission statements. Give yourself and your ministry the gift of focus and watch how people appreciate it.

The "gift" of "making simple things complex" is one that has turned up in our organization over the years. I have always seen that the person practicing this "gift" sees the value of reversing that equation or else moves on.

To be sure, there are projects where precision and complexity are the keys to excellence. From the space shuttle to CMA's own annual conference, nothing approaches excellence or even approaches competence without the skill of simultaneous excellence on many fronts. But the art I'm speaking of is leadership, not project management. You manage projects with lists. You lead by finding simple, compelling stories on which to focus—and relentlessly looking for ways to communicate them even more powerfully and simply.

A few weeks ago I was handed a proposal in graphic form that had multiple elements, wheels within wheels (just like Ezekiel!) and lines going all over the page. When I commented on its complexity, its author challenged me saying, "You came from GE, a huge company with 400,000 employees, and you were close to some of the top people. Surely you've seen complexity like this?"

I was able to tell him the goals for the company in Jack Welch's early days were very simple and compelling. He'd say simply: we need to be number one or number two in market rank in every business we're in. Period. End of story. Getting there involved a lot of moves. But the goal was simple and Jack's constant repetition and actions in time galvanized the company.

No. 4. Add visual power to your words and ideas.

The best communicators remember that things reinforced through two "gates," the ear gate and the eye gate, are far more powerful. We all know that, but do we always consider it when the message just has to get through? Here are a couple of simple examples:

• Our ministry does a new iteration of a master plan every three years. Instead of pure text, one of the most popular pages is a "ministry flow chart" where we illustrate the steps people take in our ministry to go from poverty and despair and dependencies of many kinds to re-united, independent families. We put it on one page with shapes and arrows. The visual reinforces the word, multiplying the strength of the impression.
  
  
• Every year we do a New York-style gala with many top business people in attendance. It has grown substantially to over $1million in revenue and could fill a much bigger ballroom. But we continue to do it at the 37-table Rainbow Room on the 65th floor of 30 Rockefeller Center. Why? Because the visual magic of the view of New York City doubles and triples the effect of everything we say about the needs of the city. When people associate a powerful visual experience with your words and stories, you have truly communicated effectively.
  
  
• Our board and top supporters have heard several briefings from me about the changing sociology of the Bowery neighborhood in New York where we have our flagship operation. It's a complex piece of sociology called gentrification. I had already done what I believed was a good job of putting it in concise interesting briefings, but some people clearly needed visual reinforcement. The answer: do the next briefing on a mini-bus, Gray Line style, with a microphone and our good friends looking out the picture windows. The next board discussion, about our future in the neighborhood, was far more fruitful.
  
  
• Fundraising is sometimes exhilarating, but often it's just a test of simple persistence and endurance and then letting God give the increase. Beyond saying that daily, the question was how to create an atmosphere in our development area where the reminder is constant that we're proud of what we do. The answer: two walls, beautifully done, with enlarged photos and words about the results of what we do, headed by the phrase, "Finding the resources God has already set aside for this ministry." In addition, all of our employees are greeted each morning by Matthew 25:35, written in calligraphy on our two-story downstairs wall, "In as much as you have done it for the least of these, you've done it for me."

No. 5. Don't just repeat your words, multiply them.

Ask not how many times a day you can say the same thing—ask who else would benefit from this message and how you can get it to them? Are you the kind of communicator who mentally inventories every one of your publics when you work hard on a message to see if anyone else should get it?

Are you the kind of leader who has a little program running in the software of your mind when you are writing an e-mail—a program that asks, "Does everyone on this project feel they are totally clued in? Could anyone else in the organization benefit from knowing about this?" To have an organizational culture where everyone is on a level playing field in knowledge, you have to set the example. You have to spread information, especially leadership thoughts, far and wide in the organization.

One of the first clues I had that one of our young managers would become a star was the way he spread information around. He has trained himself to ask, "Does everyone feel totally in the loop on this project?" He considers the parties to a project to be like customers—always to be nurtured and kept in mind. It's simply another outgrowth of relational thinking, instead of factual thinking.

Those are the five powerful principles. In summary, it seems we've been talking about more than communications, doesn't it? We've been talking about godly leadership itself—the core of what Christian Management Association is pledged to nurture.

Come to think of it, Jesus spoke simply and from the heart, told stories and multiplied the effectiveness of his words, didn't he? And we want to be effective leaders, good managers, and sharpened tools in his hands.

Ed Morgan spent 20 years with GE in New York, Washington D.C., and Connecticut, and is currently President of The Bowery Mission and Kids With A Promise in New York City (www.bowery.org).