Grade your performance
When you’re speaking to a larger group of employees about a big development, make sure you clearly ask for questions to be raised.
“You say, ‘There must be questions out there that you have,” Gonsiorowski says. “What are they?’ It’s how you can respond to those questions and how forthright and honest you come across. And oh by the way, this doesn’t start from that moment. You would hope that you have a leadership quotient already in place with your team so that they know that you are an honest leader and they know that you have a history of treating people fairly in their business dealings.”
No matter what kind of leader you are, you need to focus on being authentic when your people are looking to you for leadership.
“By authentic, they literally project their personality and their abilities as best as they can,” Gonsiorowski says. “I would like to think that a good leader treats the furthest subordinate in an organization the same way they would treat their boss. If you do that and if people recognize that’s how you behave in the normal course of your business, it gives you a great storehouse of credibility when you’re up there dealing with uncertainty and saying, ‘Look, I just don’t know what the answer to your question is. But the decisions I make, I will tell you and I’ll share it with you as I can. We’re going to be as fair and honest about whatever the situation is as we can possibly be.’”
Know your audience before you speak and think about whom you’re speaking to.
“I would always counsel someone to be in touch with the audience and recognize the range of people within the audience,” Gonsiorowski says. “Great communication always starts with better listening skills before great speaking skills.”
When you’re done speaking, get some instant feedback as to how people closest to you think you did.
“I go to the senior people who are in the meeting and say, ‘How do you think that went?’&#x
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1D; Gonsiorowski says. “You do a debrief. ‘Was it clear? Did we get our message across? Do you think people got what we were trying to say? Could we have done this better? Next time we do this, how can we improve on the content?’ It’s an iterative process. I think good managers just do that as a matter of course.”