Speaker 1: How many of the leadership challenges that you face are caused by communications problems? I'm Greg Schenkel, President of Unique Training and Development and Frontline Leadership Systems. And today's Leader Feeder, we go to the age-old challenge and problems for most leaders and most organizations. It's communication. The problem, of course, is that when we say it's a communication problem, it's easy just to brush it aside and say, well, there's not much you can do about that. But what are the things that you as a leader could do to become more effective in your communication with your team in order to not only prevent problems but solve them when they do come up? So, I've got three tips for you. Tip number one is to be clear about what you want, when you want it, and why it's important. If your team clearly understands your expectations, most of them are actually going to work to help you make those expectations come true. But many leaders don't explain what they want or how much of it they want or how urgent it is to get it or what the quality standard is or why it makes a difference to the end customer or another department upstream from yours. So, be sure to explain your expectations clearly and recognize that when someone isn't meeting your expectations, you should probably go back to making sure they clearly understand what those expectations are. All right. Tip number two, ask good questions. Asking good questions as a leader is so great because it allows you to gather information and not just yes or no closed-ended questions like, did you know that that was a problem? Because that only gets you a yes or no response. Great leaders ask nice open-ended questions. Hey, tell me what happened. Tell me what's going on. What caused that to happen? What seems to be the problem? And then you allow the person to contribute the ideas which, of course, makes the communication not just one-way but two-way flow. Third tip, pay attention and listen. Now, again, I always have this internal dialogue or not internal dialogue with my family and my wife says, you teach listening skills, don't you? And of course, that gets a big laugh. So, here's the reality is you've got to pay attention in order to listen. I keep reminding myself of that. It helps the home life go better. So, make sure that when your people need your attention that you're not distracted by something else that's going on, that you actually pay attention to them, that you fully listen. And if you really want bonus marks for your listening skills, repeat back what you heard so that they know that you heard them. By being an effective listener, it helps you become a more effective communicator. Plus, it allows your people to solve many of the problems on your own simply by you asking good questions and then listening effectively and repeating back what you heard them say. So, as you work on building your communication skills, it can help get rid of all those misunderstandings that can happen in your department. And when your department is running better, you might decide, hey, I got to work on some of my other leadership capabilities. And of course, you can do that by having us come in and work with your team either through our virtual training studio or by having us on-site to deliver workshops or maybe enrolling in one of our public workshops both live in person but also online virtually. And we have lots of resources for you on our website. No matter what, it starts with a conversation and of course, you can reach out to us at our website at uniquedevelopment.com and I look forward to working with you as you improve your leadership effectiveness.