Flexibility

The role of a leader has never been easy and it is more difficult now than ever before. Never ever has the workforce contained five, maybe six distinct generations, and the differences between those generations are significantly large. From the stiff upper lip, battle through anything often depicted by the oldest team members where not standing out was the order of the day to the rainbow snowflake woke and fragile youngest members who revel in and celebrate their difference.

Of course these descriptions are also vast overgeneralisations but the serious point is that leadership is all communication and the same communication style is not likely to be effective across such a broad spectrum. In fact, I can guarantee that it will be ineffective.

The macro classification of generations is not much help either as you are likely to encounter a myriad of preferences in the same generation. Successful communication relies on meeting the person you are communicating with where they are and adapting to their preferences.

So the prerequisite for a leader is the ability to be flexible; to calibrate their audience quickly and accurately and temper their style and delivery to be effective, or at the very least, inoffensive, and all the while being authentic.

This is no small feat.

Undoubtedly some will be more adept at this level of flexibility than others and I wonder how many executives have had any training or insight into the differing communication and learning styles that exist. I know that this was a big part of teacher training some years ago, for obvious reasons.

So the questions for this week are;

• On a scale of 0 to 10 how effective do you think your communication is?
• How effective do your team think it is?
• Generally, how many times do you have to repeat yourself to be understood?
• Remember ‘true communication is the response you get’. How often does the response you get match the response you had in mind?
• What have you studied about communication styles?

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