Are You Sending the Right Messages?

As a leader in a complex organization, you are a source of knowledge, direction, and motivation for others. You want to foster high performance and enthusiasm. Keeping top talent engaged and productive takes time and attention. 

Sometimes in a crunch you are amazed at how well people perform, and at other times breakdowns occur and you wonder if you are having an impact at all. 

If this is the case for you, your organization, or your clients, how do you make sure you are nurturing the kind of organization you want to have? Many companies use surveys and metrics to measure performance, which can provide useful feedback, though often generalized or too long after the fact. 

When you assess your own leadership influence, how can you tell if you are sending the right messages, in real time, so that you can adjust with agility? How can the way you communicate reinforce healthy interdependence rather than passivity or resistance?

Here are some places to look. 

Content and Context
Let’s say you are calling a meeting, maybe a conference call. You craft the agenda, being careful with the wording and ensuring that sufficient information is provided. It’s important to meet sooner rather than later, and there are ten people involved, so you send an invitation to the participants with the agenda and attachments. 

Meeting time comes, seven people show up, three have read the material, and you receive two "can't make it" emails and an autoresponder that the other person is out of the office. The others are trying to open the attachments and find your email. There’s some confusion as to who was supposed to be on the call. There will be more tradeoffs in the decision than you would have hoped for, due to missing people and a ticking clock. 

What happened? Even though you got the content out there, apparently it didn't get the attention you wanted. It’s not just that everyone is busy, although that’s true. If this has happened more than once, it’s clear that it’s not about what you are communicating, but about how. 

It’s time to step onto your personal observation deck and consider the context. If you accept the premise that “the meaning of your communication is the response you get or the effect it has,” then you know it’s time for learning.

Conscious Competence
It’s helpful to have a framework that accounts for all the aspects of successful influence to achieve results while building relationships. 
Using SYNTAX (see the “swirl” model), you can step through five aspects that will give you specific clues.

Being awake and on your observation deck in itself gives you many additional choices. Besides thinking through the content, you can step into the shoes of each team member and think about what’s in it for them. You can take an overview of the whole situation to see how best to make it flow, with everyone included that needs to be included.

With that assessment, you can address much more than the INFORM task, which is all you were thinking about when you wrote the agenda. Often we get deep into the matter at hand and can overlook the other dimensions of influence.

Rather than being a side trip, stepping through PLAN, LINK, BALANCE, and LEARN, in addition to INFORM, saves a lot of time and hassle. Conscious competence is an investment that pays off big time. 

 

It’s All About the Request
The swirls, or arms, of SYNTAX all connect through the center, BALANCE. Balance is about making requests and agreements that move the action forward and build trust and cooperation. 

When you step up and make a clear request, you are not just putting information out there. You are taking action, which engenders action. 

When you convey a specific time frame with your request, you make the action a lot more likely to happen. 

We often think we are making requests when we are just sending out information. Being consciously competent at making requests means you are putting your intentions into action and inviting others to respond. Crafting a good request is just one of the SYNTAX skills that gets you real-time results while modeling effective behavior.   

Common Sense
This seems like common sense. What’s missing in many leadership moments is that we overlook key factors that determine the response we will get or the effect we will have. 

As we grow our skills and influence, we develop our capacity for both focus and flexibility, which are characteristics of outstanding leaders. Balancing these means sending the right messages more of the time. 

 

We have inherited some common sense that should be re-examined in the world we inhabit today. For instance, many people have a knee-jerk reaction that negotiation means opposition, or that your influence comes from the position you hold, or that it’s up to the listener to figure out what you are asking for, i.e. they have to "sink or swim." 

These reactions send messages that you may not consciously want to send. They are often outside of your awareness or intention, and still they come across to the other person.

Modeling is the Most Powerful Form of Influence
Who you are and what you do has more influence than what you say. Are you willing to be authentic and take responsibility for the impact of your actions? If so, that is likely to show up in the people around you as well. For instance, if you were the one who was late for the last meeting you called, others’ expectations may shift accordingly. 

So, Are You Sending the Right Messages?
The only feedback you really have is the results you are getting. As you succeed and see the people around you contributing with enthusiasm or at least good cheer, apparently you are sending the right messages. 

 

You can observe how all aspects of SYNTAX are present in that outcome. This strengthens conscious competence for the other times.

When, as will happen, you encounter obvious or hidden roadblocks, engage your curiosity. Get on the observation deck and LEARN by trying out new choices. Take the context into account and build multiple dimensions of influence. You will be enhancing the conscious competence of those around you as you do so yourself.  SYNTAX is a roadmap that makes this process tangible. 
 
The ideal goal of of SYNTAX is for every workplace - or community - to be a place where people are fully able to contribute their talents. As you embody the messages you send to create the outcomes you want, you are creating that kind of community. Bless you.