Communicate effectively
Nearly every leader will tell you that you have to communicate and listen to be a successful leader, and Clark agrees, but he also says it’s more than that.
“Those are great characteristics of leading through change, but I just go a little bit further in describing that,” he says. “What really works is face to face — looking each other in the eye and talking. That’s what makes a difference. If you can do that rather than make a phone call, do that. Talk face to face. If you can, make a phone call rather than e-mail. Use the e-mails as a last resort for communicating. At that point, it gets personal and it gets real, and have an adult conversation about what it is we want to accomplish. When you do that in a room full of people, that’s when you really engage a team of people and get power in the team.”
When you’re communicating, you need to be transparent and use the correct language.
“People should expect and people deserve just candid communication,” Clark says. “The example that I often use is often people will say, ‘We need you to do this,’ but I think what’s more candid and hits it home right is to say, ‘We expect you to do this.’ That’s clear, and that’s the type of transparent communication I think this requires for a leader to develop a team so that team can lead an organization through change.”
The other key to communication is recognizing the difference between information and data.
“It’s the leader’s privilege to be able to take a lot of data and create an information story from it so you can communicate that in a transparent way to make a team more effective,” he says.
One of the biggest mistakes he says he’s made in the past is just throwing a lot of data out there and assuming that people will just put it together the same way that he did.
“Boy, is that a huge mistake,” Clark says. “So you learn from it. People put data together the way they do it for themselves, and everybody does it differently. I think the leader’s privilege is to take that data and create an information story that leads the team in a certain direction.”
You’re not looking for people to interpret it the same way that you did but rather for them to understand your point of view.
“You have to put it together in a way that you can communicate, ‘Here’s the data that I’ve used to come to this conclusion — what do you all think?’” he says. “More often than not, the team that we have is incredibly bright people that are a lot brighter than me, and that’s one of the things that you have to do is set up teams that are better than you, and they’ll come back and say, ‘What about this, or what about that, and here’s what’s really going on.’ That provides the rich discussion that makes the team effective.”
But as the saying goes, communication is a two-way street, so when you’re talking to people, it’s also important that you listen extremely well.
“It’s really hard to be a listener,” Clark says. “I always think I’ve done a good job of listening in a meeting if I’m absolutely whipped afterward and haven’t said much. The act of active listening should be tiring. You should put a lot of energy into not saying anything and listening. The trick is to not be judgmental. The trick is simply to listen and listen and ask clarifying questions and keep listening, and then respond after you’ve had some time to think. If you’re always listening to someone and you’re trying to formulate a response, I don’t think it’s going to be as good a communication effort as it could be.”
Most of Clark’s career he’s been a relationship manager trying to understand clients’ needs, and a lot of his take on listening was learned from those experiences.
“Every time I thought I had something to sell them, and if I was listening to them, all I could think about was what I could sell them; I never sold them anything,” he says. “But when I would kind of just go there with an open mind and a sense of really trying to understand their needs, then over a period of time, as I listened to them and understood their needs, I could solve their problems for them, and I was selling all sorts of stuff. You’ve got to be in a mindset where you’re just really conscious of the other person’s needs and listening strongly.”
If you’re not actively listening to both customers and employees, you’re not going to get very far.
“You will only go far with that if you provide value to the team, and the only way you’re going to provide value to the team is if you really understand what their needs are,” Clark says. “So if you’re talking to someone and trying to engage them and trying to help lead the team through change, it’s all around listening to what’s important to them and then responding to that, and then making sure that as you respond to that, you do it in a way that’s clear.”
You may think you have to have an elaborate communication process set up, but it’s really much simpler than that.
“We try to make this stuff a bit complicated at times, but you just have to ask somebody, ‘What’s important to you?’” he says.
For example, nearly every company has employee reviews, but for it to be most effective, you should ask how that employee prefers to receive that review.
“Some people like to get that in a meeting, some people like to get that in a piece of paper that they can read and think about, some people like to get that over a lunch,” he says. “Everybody has a different way in which they like to talk about issues that are of a real importance to them, so you’re never going to know what that is unless you just ask them, ‘What’s important to you, and how would you like to receive important information?’
“You just have to keep asking questions, so you really understand the individual, and then that’s how the team comes together. If everybody does that and everybody has real clear accountability as a team member to do that, then the communication around the team is just exponentially powerful.”