As any veteran executive will be happy to tell you, communicating with one’s staff is an activity that is fraught with peril. If you fail to make your instructions clear, productivity will suffer. If you take the wrong tone, you can unintentionally alienate your best employees.
And if you miss state of facts, mangle a quote or mispronounce a word and don’t immediately correct your gaffe, you run the risk of permanently damaging your staff’s faith in your abilities as a leader and intelligence as a human being. But for those you could use a few pointers in the art of the corporate communication, this Inc. piece provides a list of 10 things executives should avoid when talking to their team.
The list begins with an excellent lesson that more modern CEOs should be aware of: using threatening language or a domineering tone will eventually eradicate all traces of their loyalty to you. While some schools of thought hold that using fear as a motivator is a good way to optimize performance, that kind of leadership style ultimately breeds disengagement and dissent. Along similar lines, it’s important to never patronize your staff.
Disappointment is an unfortunate inevitability of being a manager, but reacting to that disappointment with petulance is an unmistakable sign of a weak leader.
Read the full article here: http://www.inc.com/steve-cody/10-dumb-messages-smart-leaders-should-never-send.html
