Communicate
One of the first things you have to do in order to be a more effective leader is know how to communicate with people, but no matter how you choose to communicate, you have to do it with enthusiasm.
“The leader has to communicate it with a certain level of personal passion,” he says.
The best way for people to see your passion is to actually get out of your office.
“You have to get out there and have some personal contact with the people you’re leading,” Nelson says. “They have to know you and get a feel for what kind of leader you are and whether, in fact, your passion is real because sometimes passion doesn’t come across electronically.”
When you’re out among your people, you absolutely have to be listening to them, and not in a covert type of way but instead in real conversations.
“A leader who is going to lead through influence is going to have to have great listening skills,” he says. “They have to be willing to listen rather than always going out to your people with an attitude that, ‘I need to tell them what to do.’ Sometimes you have to go out to your people and listen and hear their questions.”
For example, the national CEO of Deloitte recently came to the Dallas office and sat with 300 staff members in a room and took their questions and answered them. A lot of people were concerned with the economy and its effect on the firm, and those concerns came out in their questions, and he was able to better understand them.
“There was a lot of understanding that comes through just the process of hearing their questions,” Nelson says.
But sometimes as we listen, we tend to tune out the parts we don’t want to hear or interpret things how we want them to sound.
“There’s no question that we all probably possess our own opinions and thoughts on things, but a good leader is going to be intellectually curious, and they’re going to be curious enough that they actually really value and kind of hunger and thirst to really know what other people think about things,” Nelson says.
The other benefit to getting to know your people is you’ll know what they expect.
“You have to think about the many ways in which you can deliver your message,” he says. “Clearly, it’s still fundamental and critically important that the message be clear, that it is presented in an articulated fashion, and that it actually rings with practicality and logic to its audience, to the people that you’re communicating to.”
For instance, Deloitte’s people are highly educated and intelligent people, so he knows that factors into how he communicates with them.
“Communicating with this kind of work force is one where you have to be very logical and clear because they will quickly see through a veiled attempt at intellectualism,” he says.
Lastly, communication is completely reliant on your personal integrity.
“Communication always has to involve credibility at the source, so the integrity of the communicator is critical and important,” he says.
If you can have integrity, then your people will be more likely to listen to what you have to say.
“Integrity is more than just honesty,” Nelson says. “In some respects, honesty is just table stakes. We’re all expected to be honest to be in business, but real integrity, I believe, is when you always do the right thing.”
