Being a leader means you are an expert in what you do or have a unique skill set. Therefore, you have unique innovative ideas that can help improve your company’s bottom line. However, your influence is somewhat limited if you can’t effectively communicate with the clients or employees.

According to G. Riley Mills — author of The Bullseye Principle and co-founder of Pinnacle Performance CO. — being able to communicate with purpose and clarity is the key to professional and personal success. Therefore, improving the efficiency and morale of your team starts with harnessing your leadership communication skills.

Today, we take a comprehensive look at four ways to improve your leadership communication skills:

Create Dialog and Develop Emotional Intelligence

It is vital that you don’t speak to someone, but rather speak with someone. You need to focus on creating a dialog rather than a monologue. Every communication needs to be an information exchange rather than an order. Ensure you ask for your audience’s viewpoints to help you make more informed decisions.

When you have emotional intelligence, you can empathize with people and consider their thoughts. It is a skill that will shape your dialogue with employees and clients accordingly. Increasing your emotional awareness also lets you better control different situations.

Enhance Non-verbal Communication

Most leaders forget one vital communication aspect — body language. It is something that matters more than you think, especially when it starts contradicting your verbal message. It can be somewhat confusing when you say nod your head while saying ‘No’.

A conflicting message will get you negative feedback because the audience thinks you are lying to them. It is something that will quickly lower trust and lead to miscommunication. Therefore, you need to ensure your body language transmits the right emotions when communicating with your team or clients. Work on your body movement, tone, facial expression, posture, and speed of your voice.

Summarize Your Message and Obtain Feedback

Did you know that there are three message versions in every communication? The message you intend to send, the actual message passed in words, and the interpreted message by the receiver. Therefore, keeping everything short will help limit deviations in your communication.

Obtaining feedback, therefore, becomes crucial because it highlights what stuck with your audience. You can quickly make any clarifications and answer arising questions or concerns. Doing this is an excellent way of ensuring everyone is on the same page, thus enhancing efficiency. It would also help to ask what part of the message was challenging to understand, thus allowing you to make clarifications in your next communication.

Use Written Form to Enhance Clarity

Apart from working on your verbal communication, it will also help to enhance your written communication. Ensure you use clear and precise sentences with a viable call to action. It is a crucial part of communication, especially in presentation documents — including PowerPoint.

It will also help if you work on your email communication as well. Start by numbering items when you have a single email with multiple questions, topics, or actions. Every email communication needs to be positive, thus motivating the readers to go through the entire message. It is counterproductive to have your audience only read a portion of your email.

It Takes Time

Improving your leadership communication skills will take a bit of time to master. You will need to put in some work and exercise patience until you find the winning formula. Luckily, Dustin & Amy Delay is here to help you harness your communication skills. Ensure you apply for mentorship today to start working on your communication skills and ultimately lead your organization in the desired direction.