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Hosted by veteran communications strategist and leadership trainer J.Marie, Your Friend in Leadership is an inspiring and approachable podcast created to empower today’s public leaders. Each episode delivers strategic insights, transformative ideas, and actionable communication tools to help you better connect with your communities and move your mission forward. With deep appreciation for the important work of public leaders and the knowledge that leadership and communication are skills that can be built and improved, this podcast is your guide to confident and effective leadership every step of the way.
(Music)
J. Marie
Greetings, friends. I am delighted that you are here spending a little time with me, thinking together about communications and leadership. So for today's episode, I want to dive into just the basics of organizational communication. We've talked a little bit about some personal communication skills, and I'll definitely keep talking about personal communication skills. But I want to pause and focus today on organizational communication skills because they're not quite the same thing.
Most folks who find themselves in leadership positions possess some pretty strong communication skills. That's often a pretty tight correlation. Might have your own form of charisma, your own way of motivating and supporting and inspiring people to come together and work towards a shared vision and a shared set of values. Having those personal communication skills is not the same as learning how to systematize those communication skills, how to scale up communications from the person-to-person or leader-to-team level, to the point of actually communicating on behalf of an entire organization. So I want to talk about that today and we're going to break it down into just four basic parts, your audience, your message, the tools you use to share that message, and the logistics, the scheduling of the work, the project management of it, so to speak.
We start with the audience because quite frankly, that's where you need to start. You have to know something about the people that you're going to communicate with in order for you to frame your communications, your topic, your content in a way that matters to them. I think sometimes that essential foundation of communications often gets lost in the excitement of the message. Before you delve into identifying and clarifying your message and all of that fun, talking points development, all of that, you need to start with an understanding of who is it that you're talking to, what matters to them, how do they prefer to receive information from you, what do they already know about this thing you want to talk about, and what do they not yet know? So start by identifying your audiences and answering a few questions in your mind about the person or people that you are seeking to communicate with. I actually tend to start, I will often work with teams to brainstorm a list of who are our audiences for this information. And then underneath each audience, I'll jot a couple bullet points of what do we know about these folks? Are they particularly busy? What are they most interested in related to what we're talking about? So if I'm using, for example, communicating on behalf of public schools, we might brainstorm some of our audiences. And by the way, remember your internal audiences, because those folks in fact should be the people you communicate with first. In a school district, for example, audiences might involve teachers, non-teaching support staff, front-line staff,
J. Marie
parents, community members, taxpayers, retirees in the community, people who might be open to volunteering in schools, faith communities. You might have subsets of communities like you might have a north end community that has a slightly different culture from your south end community. You might have downtown versus rural. You might have various communities of different ethnic backgrounds who will have different priorities and values. So you form a big old list of who are all of our different audiences that we're seeking to reach, what do we know about those audiences, how do they prefer to be communicated with? Because parents might prefer to get phone messages for some kinds of material and emails for other.
In your internal audiences, there might be a culture around email, or it might be that there are people who are overwhelmed with email, and so please, for the love of all that's good and holy in the world, don't send me one more email. Save that for the stand-up staff meeting on Fridays. So you have to know your audience well enough to be able to make those kinds of decisions. So you start with audience. Who are you communicating to? That then gets you around to then you can think about your message. And when you're thinking about, "What is it that I want to communicate to somebody?" Remember that your audience is busy. And when you are the one sending out information, you're the one who has the motivation about it, not necessarily your audience. You know, when a person decides that they have a real passion for animal husbandry and horses and whatnot, then they are going out seeking information about that. And when that's happening, they got all the time in the world to really dig deep on it. But when you are the person with a passion around a particular topic, or you want the tax-paying public to understand about a measure you're putting on the ballot, then you're the one with the motivation. So you need to simplify your message because people who are reading your message are busy. They didn't go asking for it. You're pushing it out to them. So it behooves you to think about if someone is only going to remember three things, like maybe it's a really complicated thing I want to talk about, you know, we're redistricting these particular non-profit, these particular organizations, or whatever the case may be. It might be very complicated. But you need to think about if someone only walks away with three ideas after they read my article or my newsletter, or see my piece on social media, what are those three ideas? And then if you're really smart, you're going to figure out if they only walk away with one idea, what do I want them to know?
Get really clear on that in your own mind before you go writing or developing or filming the message that you want to send. So start with your audience, figure out what you want to tell them, simplify that message, prioritize your message to the top three or even one ideas that you want them to know, and then think about what's the best tool to get this idea across. And we're going to, in the next episode, we're going to dig into communication tools much more deeply. But be intentional about which tool will get to the audience member you want in the way that you want to get to them. And then once you have those three things, your audience, your message and the tools, then you can step back and actually schedule it.
And experienced communication professionals will tell you that you generally need a lot more time for your message delivery than you think you do. Because depending on the tool that you're using, if you're thinking about printing something, you need time to not only write the content, but identify the appropriate visuals that will help convey the ideas. Get all of that laid out thoughtfully and in a way that is eye catching and easy to digest. And then you need time to actually produce it, either run it through to be printed or to be mocked up and designed for social media distribution or recorded, edited and distributed. So you need more time to get from your intention to communicate to the actual vehicle that will share your message than you probably realize. And so oftentimes when I'm developing a schedule for communications, I start with the deadline, OK, we want the person to receive this information on such and such date. Or we want to do this staff meeting presentation on such and such date. Well, that means we need to have the material completed a week before so that we can prep the speakers. Or in the case of a print material, we might need to have that material off to the printer six weeks or eight weeks before delivery date or sometimes. And then you have to back up from there the actual time to do the writing and the layout. So sometimes you need as much as three months to put together the material in order to achieve that final deadline of sending the material out on the date that you want to send it out. But start with your audience, identify and clarify your message, figure out the tools that will get you there and then you can back your schedule up and identify who's doing what by when. And that is the heart of kind of organizational communications.
J. Marie
And I'll leave you with one last tidbit, and that is it comes from Pat Jackson, who's kind of the grandfather of school related communications. And he laid out that not only when you are seeking to communicate as an organization, we tend to think about the messages that we're wanting to share. And Pat used to challenge us as leaders and as communicators to figure out not just what message do we want to tell people, but what behavior are we hoping to drive?
J. Marie
How do we want someone to behave differently as a result? What's the action that we want to have as a result of us taking the time to communicate with them? Do we just want them to be better informed voters? Do we want them to show up at a school event to support kids? Do we want them to do something? Do we have a call to action? So give that some thought when you're putting together your messaging as well. What's the, as one of my bosses used to say, what's the so what of this? What am I actually hoping to be different as a result of communicating this way? So friends, chew on that. I hope it helps you in your line of work. I hope it helps you feel more effective and connected to the communities that you work with and for. Thank you for spending your time together with me here today on this topic. Know that who you are and what you do matters. I care about you. Take good care of yourself. Be well, friends.