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Effective Leaders Communicate both Priorities and Deadlines

Effective leaders understand that good communication also involves the ability to give clear direction and productive feedback.

Here is another of my leadership communication skills tips to help you communicate your message more effectively:

Communicate both priorities and deadlines. Sure you can walk up to an employee and ask for a list of tasks to be done. But without context, the employee might not do the tasks in the order you expected or might not complete them in the timeframe you wanted. Effective leaders communicate priorities and/or help employees prioritize.

Effective leaders also are not afraid to ask, “When can you get this done?” Whenever possible, it is a good idea to create deadlines together. An employee might have several other projects going at the same time, and while you might not want to compromise time, you don’t want to sacrifice quality.

ACTION During the next few weeks pay attention to how often you communicate priorities and deadlines. 1. Are you communicating priorities and helping the employee prioritize? 2. Are you giving them the deadline and/or creating the deadlines together? These two questions will help you become more aware of your need to improve on these two areas.

I will be sharing more areas that can help leaders communicate their messages more effectively.

So be sure to check back.In the meantime, if you have any successes or questions about leadership communication Let me know and I will share them with my readers. E-mail Patrick

Comments

Anonymous said…
Thanks for this interesting post. Knowing how difficult excellent communication is to achieve, I am looking forward to your next several posts to achieve some clarity.

With respect to prioritizing, I see a key component to be making sure that our employees feel safe in asking (professionally of course) for some help with competing priorities. It isn't unusual to have a leader or manager assign more than one "hot" task to the same employee!
Thu May 21, 01:07:00 PM 2009
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