Over-communicate your message

When working with leaders around communication, I often use the phrase:

“When you have communicated your message so much that you are bored to death doing so… you are probably about halfway there”

This is a repetition of a theme (hey, in well over 1,500 daily posts, that happens!), and yes, “repetition, repetition, repetition” and was prompted by a discussion around the ” Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive ” by Patrick Lencioni, which are (as per the graphic above) :

1. Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team
2. Create Organisational Clarity
3. Over-Communicate Organisational Clarity
4. Reinforce Organisational Clarity though Human Systems

Now, clearly, the third point is the one relevant to Over-Communication, so yes, the first point today is to always over-communicate your message. However, for “bonus points”, let me highlight where most organisations fall short on actually creating organisational clarity, and that is on their Purpose and Values.

In fact, a great sign that they do NOT have real clarity and focus on their Purposes and Values is often when they DO have their Values posted up on a wall, or perhaps on a big mural behind their reception, or behind the CEOs chair (have seen all of these).

When an organisation really commits to gaining clarity on their Purpose and Values, and once the over-communication phase has taken place, they become deeply embedded, nobody needs a reminder on the wall, they all know the values and what they mean in how they interact with each other and with clients, as well as every decision they make.

In fact, if you read anything by Patrick Lencioni around this topic, he will echo my thoughts that the first two (and most key) areas for any organisation to get total clarity on are, yes, your Purpose and Values. Once you have done that, then you must over-communicate that.

Supporting leaders and their organisations around this are key to my life’s work. For more on my thoughts, these two articles are some of those selected to be in the footer of my website, listed under “Core Insights”:

• Leading from Purpose – a new model for leadership in business
• Cascading Leadership – a contextual model for the fourth of Lencioni’s four obsessions, ie how to reinforce messages throughout an organisation and beyond (and not “top-down”)
• Oh, and one more: Are you ready for Open Leadership? as, back to Lencioni, his first and key “obsession” is building and maintaning a cohesive leadership team, and that starts with a leader and style of leadership that supports that. I call the leadeship style for the 21st century #OpenLeadership, with the four attributes of such leaders being: Brave, Hungry, Open and Humble.

In closing, I have made every single one of these points before. You see what I’m doing here? 😉