Effective communication is fundamental to effective leadership. It’s also one of the main challenges for leaders at all levels and all ages.

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One of the first non-fiction, non-textbooks that I bought from the Co-Op Bookshop in semester one, year one of university was People Skills, by Robert Bolton.

I was seventeen and bought it because I wanted to feel more confident in how I was dealing with other people. One of the parts that stuck with me was about how interpersonal communication works, or doesn’t. The key message from this was that I’m responsible for ensuring my messages got through – it’s not the responsibility of the audience to hear and act on whatever I’m communicating.

The book was a great teacher then and I still refer to it from time to time when a return to fundamentals is required. Handily, the communications insights from People Skills were very useful a couple of years later when starting work in a marketing and advertising agency. The managing director, Andy Edwards, had told me my job as a baby Account Coordinator was to be a sponge, to soak up everything I could learn. He sat me down one day and said our task in communication was about getting people to do something they aren’t necessarily planning to do. And to get the behaviour we’re seeking we need to first understand them, and then influence how they think and feel.

The Five Rs of Effective Communication

Andy said effective communication boiled down to Five Rs:

Relevance, and: getting the Right Message, to the Right Person, at the Right Time, in the Right Way.

It didn’t matter if the people we were talking with were our clients, our suppliers, bosses or subordinates, each other, the company oztag team, your family, or putting together strategy and creative concepts for our clients’ target markets. The Five Rs applied all the time:

1. Relevance: ensure the message is something that matters to the person
2. Right Message: ensure the message is efficient, and something they want to hear
3. Right Person: ensure they’re the right person to hear the message
4. Right Time: ensure they receive the message when most receptive and able to act
5. Right Way: ensure that they’ll hear the message because it’s in the right format or medium, from someone they’ll respect, and the signal will cut through the noise of competing messages and ideas

A few things to note here:

• All of these are considered from the listener/receiver’s perspective,
• I’m using the word ensure, because effective communication is planned communication,
• Empathy is the key requirement, because
• It’s about ethos, logos and pathos, and
• People have the option, not a requirement, to hear and act on your messages (unless you’re in the military, and that still requires effective communication).

Leadership is influence – nothing more, nothing less.

John C. Maxwell

And how do you influence? Through effective communication. If we were to be even more reductive, there are plenty of examples in history where leadership is only about influence, using simple but effective communication that make it easy for the audience to comply. Here are some examples:

• Free!
• Act now.
• If you don’t know, vote noe.
• Think different.
• Loose lips sink ships.

Yes, there are plenty of other more powerful examples that have been used to tap into latent fears and give implicit permission to behave in ways that are destructive or immoral.

And they all use the Five Rs.

Raising the stakes

Successfully implementing a strategy turns on effective communication. The more responsibility you get, and the more you want to achieve or are asking of others, the more it matters to communicate effectively.

Effective communication is hard because everyone in the audience has different perspectives and a bunch of other things on their minds competing for attention. Because of this, and because I don’t feel I’m naturally good at it, planning and working to communicate well is probably the thing on which I spend the most time. I still get it wrong, even after thirty years practicing the Five Rs, but maybe I’m getting better.

As ELO₂ Consortium Director I’m working with around fifty individual people in the consortium. Externally, directly and indirectly, there are hundreds more with advisors and government and other stakeholders. We share purpose in the delivery of a lunar rover design from the consortium that can perform a defined mission and be a viable candidate for selection by the Australian Space Agency to undertake that mission. But each person also has a choice in how they engage, preferences in how they like to interact with others, diverse backgrounds, different interests and constraints, and their own desires and definitions for success.

So while we share relevance of a motivating purpose, the messages and how and when and who delivers them are subtly different for each person. They’re received differently, processed differently, understood and felt differently, and then people respond and react differently. So it matters that we understand who we’re speaking with and how they might receive and feel hearing the messages. And the job is to ensure each person hears what they need to hear the way they need to hear it so they understand the importance of the part they play, and that they perform it well.

Context matters, too. While the job is still leadership – helping people progress and perform despite uncertainty – the shared purpose in each context and role you hold changes the way communication happens and needs to be framed. For example:

• Advisors – like coaches and mentors, the role is often as a guest offering perspectives (all care and little responsibility)
• Boards – as directors, the role has statutory responsibilities and messages and processes are both formal and informal (all care and all responsibility)
• Superiors – effectively communicating up is about managing up, and there is a power imbalance that may not provide permission for some conversations
• Subordinates and partners – ensuring intent, direction, scope, support available and expected outcomes are clear

And there are many others…

Seven simple steps to effective communication

Seven things you can do to communicate effectively, no matter what they context or audience:

1. Practice the Five Rs. Relevant message, right message, right person, right time, right way.
2. Put your audience at the centre. It’s not about you. It’s about your audience, what they want, think and feel, and how you can help them find a better path. (Let’s assume you’re offering a better path).
3. Know your audience. Do the research, understand motivations, problems, pain points, what they care about and what their lives are like. Understand what they’re looking for.
4. Keep it simple, stupid. A simple main message, easy to remember, with a simple call to action. Make sure it’s relevant, and make it easy for people to understand how your message can help get them what they want.
5. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. Literally four times. Research has shown that messages start to sink in when they’ve been presented around four times, depending on the medium. In a written or verbal delivery, say the main message at the top, repeat it in the middle, repeat it again at the end.
6. Ethos, logos, pathos. Adopt and rhetoric techniques of ancient Greek orators to connect with people. Have the right person provide the message as an established authority, connecting with the audience’s logic by being consistent with their worldview, and understand feelings and thinking patters to influence via emotion.
7. Call to action. Make the expectations and next steps clear. Close with this.

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And here’s the call to action.

Reach out to me if you’d like to chat about strategy, leadership, innovation and how to communicate more effectively.