You have just been promoted within your organization to lead a diverse group. This is an opportunity for you to have significant impact proving yourself as an effective leader. Communicating your vision effectively early on with your team will increase your ability to lead and influence the organization to success.
Your vision explains what you believe the future will look and feel like for your team. It is also a dream of what the organization would and could be for you and those around you.
Here are a few tips that will ignite and establish your leadership with positive influence in the organization as an effective communicator and leader.
Develop transformational leadership skills[1]. What is a transformational leader? It is someone who cares about their followers by showing compassion, empathy, having high standards, and helping others achieve long term goals. Do you treat others with respect, trust, and motivate them to accomplish more than believe they can accomplish? You can develop and employ transformational leadership[2] in your leadership approach by:
- Modeling the vision – frequently communicate your vision, lead with excellence in all interactions, holding high moral standards and accountability, daily demonstrating the appropriate behavior.
- Committing to the vision – equip followers with the skills and tools necessary to achieve your vision, inspire your followers to become influencers of achieving and transcending the vision to others.
- Fostering creativity and innovation – continually challenge existing processes and results to achieve greater accomplishments, create a culture where risk taking will occur.
- Helping followers achieve personal success/self-actualization – become sensitive to the needs and desires of your followers for their personal success, explain how their personal success aligns with your vision.
Inspire and communicate a shared vision. Creating a vision for everyone to understand and believe in is paramount to your leadership success. A key role as a leader is to encourage and inspire a shared [3]vision for all people in the organization.
You must be able to address questions such as, what are you trying to accomplish? How are you going to achieve the desired results? What do you expect of everyone when they agree to the vision and the journey before them?
As the leader of your organization, you must have effective communication skills[4] in both verbal and non-verbal methods.. When possible engage in face-to-face communication, this is the most effective. because it demonstrates your authenticity and makes the interaction a personal and memorable experience for all parties.
To ignite a shared vision, start imagining what the future would look like in face-to-face communications, building a common goal and purpose. Engage others for their input and work to transcend their emotions and thoughts to what the future would look and feel like with their contributions and commitment to success.
To sum up, your number one priority as a newly promoted leader is to communicate a vision that all followers will join in and commit to seeing the vision become reality. Early buy-in from those who adopt the vision will help drive the message with you to the organization, resulting in alignment with the vision. Your success is a result of your commitment to the vision and the followers you serve, inspiring change for the good and future of your followers. Remember, you are not changing an organization, but changing people’s lives for their benefit through effective transformational communication.
If you would like to discuss and build upon this concept, I welcome your insights and innovative thoughts. Please contact me at pscheuer66@gmail.com.
[1] (Northouse, 2013)
[2] (Kouzes & Posner, 2012)
[3] (Jensen, Salomonsen, & Moynihan, 2019)
[4] (Kouzes & Posner, 2012)
References
Jensen, U. T., Salomonsen, H. H., & Moynihan, D. P. (2019). Communicating the Vision: How Face-to-Face Dialogue Facilitates Transformational Leadership. Public Administration Review, 78(3), 350-361.
Johnson, C. E., & Hackman, M. Z. (2018). Leadership A Communication Perspective Seventh Edition. Long Grove: Waveland Press.
Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2012). The Leadership Challenge. San Francisco: The Leadership Challenge A Wiley Brand.
Men, L. R. (2014). Strategic Internal Communication: Transformational Leadership, Communication Channels, and Employee Satisfaction. Management Communication Quarterly, 28(2), 264-284.
Northouse, P. G. (2013). Leadership Theory and Practice 6th Edition. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
