CHAPTERS SUMMARY OF LEADERSHIP AND COMMUNICATION

Chapter 1
LEADERSHIP AND COMMUNICATION

Leaders need to consider strategy in communication just as they do in other areas of their business. As traditionally defined in business, strategy consists of two pieces: (1) determining your goals and (2) developing a plan to achieve them. The same definition applies to communication strategy.

ESTABLISHING A CLEAR PURPOSE
Leaders recognize that communication has consequences; you need to be sure the results you produce are those you intend. To achieve your intended results, you first need to establish a clear purpose. The three general purposes:
- To inform—transferring facts, data, or information to someone.
- To persuade—convincing someone to do something.
- To instruct—instructing someone in process

Clarifying Your Purpose
Just as leaders need to determine a strategic vision or a clearly stated direction for their companies, you need to establish a clear purpose or direction for your communication.

Generating Ideas
Once you determine your specific purpose, and sometimes while you are determining it, you can begin to come up with the supporting words and ideas and explore your thoughts about the subject.
There are four ways useful in helping you to push your thinking:
1) Brainstorming
2) Idea Mapping
3) The Journalist’s Questions: Who? What? Why? When? Where? How?
4) The Decision Tree

DETERMINING YOUR COMMUNICATION STRATEGY
Once you have clarified your purpose, you are ready to engage in the tactical side of communication strategy. Effective communication—whether a simple e-mail or memo, a complex report, a meeting, or a presentation—requires going beyond clarity of purpose to the plan for accomplishing your purpose, the second essential step in any good strategy.

ANALYZING YOUR AUDIENCES
Analyzing an audience is fundamental to any communication strategy since the characteristics of audiences will determine your approach and shape your targeted messages.
Leaders need to communicate to audiences with a range of expertise from the layperson or non-expert to the technical or highly specialized individual/
In addition, when you seek a decision from your audience, you might want to consider their decision-making style to ensure that you use a communication approach that will be persuasive with them.
In ay situation, internal or external to your organization, knowing how your audiences make decisions will help you target your message.

ORGANIZING WRITTEN AND ORAL COMMUNICATION EFFECTIVELY
Once you have clarified your purpose, conducted your audience analysis, and created a strategy, you are ready to select the best structure for organizing your communication in your early thinking about how best to present your ideas to your audience.
You can pose the following questions to determine the best approach to organizing your communication:
- What is the most effective way to begin the document or presentation with this audience?
- How should I organize the content to ensure that the audience can follow the argument easily and understand the main ideas?
- What is the most effective way to conclude?

Selecting Organizational Devices
The following methods to organize individual sections and even the entire document or presentation:
1. Deduction
2. Induction
3. Chronological
4. Cause/Effect
5. Comparison/contrast
6. Problem/solution
7. Spatial

Using the Pyramid Principle
Using the Pyramid principle helps you structure a complete and logical argument. As you create the pyramid, you can easily see gaps in your evidence, establish the balance of your argument, and determine if each level logically supported the next.

Creating a Storyboard
Another technique for working out the structure of your communication is a storyboard. A storyboard is particularly useful if you are working in a team ti prepare a presentation. It allows everyone to see the logical flow and encourages you to think the individual slides you need to support each section.


Chapter 2
CREATING LEADERSHIP DOCUMENTS

SELECTING THE MOST EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION MEDIUM
As with any effective leadership communication, you need to clarify your purpose, analyze your audience, and develop a communication strategy before you put pen to paper or fingers to the keyboard to create a document.
If you have a complete freedom to select the medium and are not limited by the chain of communication or the practices in the organization, you should select the medium best suited for the context and your message.

CREATING INDIVIDUAL AND TEAM DOCUMENTS
Once you have developed your strategy and selected the most appropriate medium, you can then create and perfect your written communication.

Creating Individual Documents
Approaches to creating documents differ from person to person. Some people work best from an outline, while others feel more comfortable using the idea mapping or brainstorming techniques.
You should find the approach that work the best or you, but realize that you will be more productive if you follow some sort of step-by-step plan.

Creating Team Documents
Teams use one of two ways to divide the tasks: (1) one person on the team does all of the writing with the others providing the content to the scribe, (2) the team divides the writing among the team members according to the sections for which they have provided most of the moment.
The Single-Scribe Approach—ensures consistency in style and format.
The Multiple-Writer Approach—divides the writing among team members.

Controlling Versions
Version control is essential when creating the versions of your documents.

ORGANIZING THE CONTENT COHERENTLY
The initial stages of creating a document may be rather messy, particularly the idea generation stage. When you are generating ideas, you are engaged analytically, which means you are breaking things apart and probably even free-associating as one idea leads to another. Once you move into the stage of organizing them to present them to others. A business audience expects order and logic in a document; they expect it to make sense to them, to be coherent.


Organizing and Content
How organization depends on purpose, audience, and strategy, and explained some of the options for organizing your communication. You need to anticipate your audience’s response and stay focused on your purpose. You will want to select the organizing device that best matches your purpose and content, such as deductive, inductive, or chronological.

Opening with Power
In your opening, most of the time you should begin strongly by quickly stating your main message, but let your analysis of your audience guides you. You may want to begin indirectly for the following reasons:

- To establish the context for the communication if it is part of a chain communication.
- To include a more gentle opening with some appropriate pleasantries if your audience’s culture would expect it.
- To explain the reasoning or logic if you have complicated information to deliver.

Developing with Reason
You should aim for the same directness and brevity in the discussion or development section of your documents as you do in your introduction. Once you know you have the right topics and can develop each topic adequately, you should feel comfortable that your discussion section will appear reasonable to your audience.

Closing with Grace
Once you have taken your audience through your discussion, you should end as quickly and directly as you began. You should, however, provide a sense of polite, unrushed closure. Traditional academic writing requires closings that restate or summarize what has already been said. A letter, a memo, or e-mail is too short to require such repetition of ideas. A conclusion in a letter, memo, or e-mail should call for action, mention contact information or follow-up arrangements.
In a longer document, you may want to summarize your main points very briefly, and depending on the type of report, you may end with your conclusions or recommendations. However, it is usually more effective to have stated your conclusions or recommendations up front and end with next steps or implementation plans.

CONFORMING TO CONTENT AND FORMATTING EXPECTATIONS IN CORRESPONDENCE
You will determine the actual content of your letters, memos, and emails based on your purpose, strategy, and audience, but these types of business communications do carry with them some expectations of what you should include. In addition, you want to use a format that follows standard business writing conventions, which are designed to make your documents accessible as well as attractive.

INCLUDING EXPECTED CONTENT IN REPORTS
Business audiences also have expectations for longer documents and reports. The type of report, the company style, as well as the industry standards will often dictate content and organization. As a leader of organization, you may write reports that inform, instruct, or persuade. Often, you may team up with or supervise others in writing these reports. They may be long or short, informal or formal.