Effective Leadership Communication: Top Skills and Strategies

Leadership communication is powerful. What a leader says can unite, inspire and clarify. Or, just the opposite — it can divide, anger, and confuse. We’ve all seen how a single email or tweet from a leader has an enormous ripple effect. And although most organizations recognize the link between great communication and great leaders, many leadership teams lack the skills and strategies required to reach the right people with the right message — and at the right time.

In this article, we’ll uncover what leadership communication is, why it matters, the relationship between leadership and communication, and the skills leaders can consistently employ to become more effective communicators.

What Is Leadership Communication?

Leadership communication describes the communication channels, actions, capabilties, and strategies that leaders use to relay critical information about their organizations — including updates on organizational change, company culture, their mission and core values, and high-level business objectives. 

Effective leadership communication is crafted with a strategic and proactive approach that helps leaders solve complex challenges, instill Deep Trust and High Expectations® cultures, understand diverse perspectives, and power business outcomes.

Why Is Communication Important in Leadership?

The proliferation of AI, shifting workforce demographics, and increasingly distributed teams are only a handful of today’s business realities that add complexity to your employees’ jobs. With these complexities come new obstacles for leaders trying to reach the overwhelmed and overloaded within their ranks. As leaders, how can we expect our employees to take action on — let alone understand — critical communications when they are already buried in the noise of their day-to-day work?

Reducing information overload at work is, in part, why leaders, employees, and managers all agree that good communication is critical to vibrant, high-performing cultures, according to research from our latest report on the people side of business. 95% of respondents — a greater percentage than any other factor — agreed that effective communication is an essential ingredient for building and sustaining productive workplace cultures.

Although we all may be aligned on the importance of communication, the research reveals a fascinating gap: leaders tend to overestimate the efficacy of their communications compared to the employees who are on the receiving end. Only two-thirds (67%) of small-business knowledge workers say that their company does a good job communicating. That percentage drops to 62% for large companies. In a related study, Harvard Business School professor John Kotter estimates that most leaders under-communicate their vision by a factor of ten. 

For future-forward organizations, these workplace transformations make it clear that the status-quo comms playbook — one filled with formalities and jargon, lacking context, and dependent on too many channels — will only widen the gap between employees and leadership. Today’s leaders need a new set of communication mindsets, skills, and strategies to connect their people with the business. 

Want to gain a better understanding of where your team needs support improving their communication skills? Our Human, Compelling, Visual Communications™ approach can help.

5 Critical Leadership Communication Skills and Mindsets

Although the communication blockers your organization experiences may be unique to you, we’ve noticed certain common attributes in our work developing more effective leaders that are critical to developing.

1. Empathy

Speak from the heart — people pay more attention when you connect your message to their thoughts, feelings, and purpose within the organization. Truly think about your people, what may be on their minds, and what they might be going through when you deliver communications to them. 

Empathic leadership is all about understanding the emotions and perspectives of the people who comprise your business. What is the current emotional climate of your organization? What is happening internally within the company and, more broadly, around the world? Be sensitive to this as you communicate with your team. Be prepared not just to speak but to be curious and to listen deeply to feedback, concerns, and questions from your team.

2. Authenticity

Be human. Communication is most effective when those on the receiving end “see” you — let your personality and values show up in your words. When you communicate with authenticity, you create deeper trust with your team.

Amplifying the right signals, in other words, requires leaders to understand what their people need as humans. That means creating communications that clarify, build connection, and lean into our innate tendencies to spot patterns and connect the dots. 

3. Storytelling

Crafting a story around your communications not only helps you connect with your audience at a human level, but it also presents information in a way that “sticks.” That’s because people remember stories 22 times better than facts alone. 

Much like your favorite books, shows, and movies, corporate storytelling is centered around your core message, features a cast of relatable “characters” (who reinforce the connection between your audience and your message), and offers a final resolution (or takeaway) to the principal message you relay.

4. Trustworthiness

Few aspects of leadership are as important to building trust with your people as knowing how to deliver the right communications, at the right time, through the right channels. 

As Kelly Frauenknecht, CHRO of Ensign-Bickford Industries, suggests in our latest report, leaders tend to underestimate how much effort it will take for their message to reach every branch of the organization, which can sow distrust over time. “You can only imagine how many layers information needs to transfer down through to reach a frontline worker — and it doesn’t always make it.” 

Trust-building communications can also only happen when your people feel respected, seen, and heard. Do your actions align with your words? Do your employees feel like communication is a two-way street? Has your message evolved over time in response to audience feedback?

5. Simplicity

Organizations can be dynamic, shifting, and complicated, but that doesn’t mean our communications have to be — especially when employees are already struggling to make sense of the information they receive on a daily basis. 

According to research, as many as 70% of global employees believe that job complexity has increased significantly in the years following the pandemic. The last thing they want to receive is a densely worded email that will take their focus away from the rest of their work.

A simple communications audit can signal if you need to take a simpler approach to your comms rollouts. Telltale signs of overengineered communication include:

1. Too much jargon and formal “corporate-speak.”
2. Too many communication channels, especially when used inconsistently.
3. A lack of context (i.e. no indication of how you arrived here or what comes next).
4. Overreliance on words alone. The ways that we receive and digest digital information — both in our personal and professional lives — has shifted considerably toward more visual mediums, such as social graphics and short-form video. Thinking through how you can translate your story into visuals is an vital skill for future-ready leaders.

7 Essential Leadership Communication Strategies

As you work to develop your leadership communication skills, keep these best practices in mind:

1. Begin with the End in Mind

For every message you deliver, no matter how big or small, it’s critical to first take the time to consider what you want your audience to know, feel, and do. This ensures leadership communication is meaningful, and impactful, and achieves your intended outcome. 

Segmenting your audience into distinct groups can help you tailor your message to better reach your people. For example, it may be helpful to segment based on hierarchy for internal communications and consider how your message will resonate differently with employees, managers, and other leaders. Remember to be clear, and give the appropriate context up front, to ensure your messaging lands.

2. Choose Your Words Wisely

Words can energize or polarize. Use words and messages that are universally understood and avoid slang or jargon. It’s especially important to be aware of differences in meaning if you’re speaking to a global audience and your message may be translated into other languages. 

Take the time to think about the variety of viewpoints and backgrounds of your individual team members and how your message will be received.

3. Know Your Audience

You already know your team. But do your communications reach them? Consider different mindsets and perceptions when developing your message, no matter how big or small. Use the “know, feel, do” approach by asking yourself the following questions: 

• What do I need my team to know? 
• How do I want them to feel about it? 
• What do I want them to do after I’ve communicated it to them?

4. Develop Your Plan

A strong leadership communication plan considers objectives, context, audience, timing, and channels. These help you craft the right message and — when executed well — ensure your communications are accepted, understood, and acted upon.

5. Be Available

Leadership is all about showing up and being present for your people, and the same goes for how you communicate — especially when leading through change. In the wake of major company communications, your strategy should give room for dialogue, including time for questions and follow-up sessions to debrief on anticipated bottlenecks, resourcing requirements, and action plans to move forward. 

Visibility is even more critical for displaced teams and remote workforces. Before you release communications, evaluate the channels and technologies that will best showcase your visibility as a leader — even without a physical presence.

1. Cut Through the Noise

As part of our 2024 workforce survey, which polled more than 1,200 knowledge workers, business leaders, people managers, and HR leaders, we sought to understand how leaders should respond to how employees prefer to receive organizational communications. 

Given how many frontline and knowledge workers report struggling with cognitive overload while on the job, we suspected that employees would feel they receive too many formal communications, especially through email. What the research revealed was more interesting; people generally fear they are missing what matters most because they can’t parse through the communication “clutter.”

Put simply, employees don’t want less communication — they want better communication. They need leaders to signal what is important to the business and their role within it. Our solution to a “noisy” work landscape is a communications philosophy that deepens human connection, galvanizes employee commitment, and creates strategic clarity. We call it Human, Compelling, Visual Communications™.

7. Encourage Feedback

Soliciting feedback from your audience ensures that your organization’s communication is not a one-way street. However, your feedback channels need to be intentionally designed before employees will engage with them in earnest. 

Regular surveys, onboarding and exit interviews, and consistent touchpoints with your management-level leaders will help you keep a pulse on the organization and fine-tune your communications approach. Additionally, encouraging a culture built on feedback can remove any stigmas around feedback, empower your employees to share their best ideas, and reinforce a regular feedback loop.

Last Thoughts

For leaders, communication isn’t part of the job — it is the job. By sharpening your personal communication skills and developing a greater communications strategy with your team, you’ll help your people navigate through the changes and demands of today’s fast-paced business environment. 

Learn how we approach communications that achieve business outcomes and put your people at the center of the conversation.