Communication, Leadership, and Relationship

For the first time in a university setting, I have moved outside of first-year composition and into Business Communications. I am teaching a course as an adjunct at the University of Oklahoma called "Strategic Communication for Business Professionals." The material is incredibly fun for me to prepare and to teach because the class is an amalgam of my academic background in Rhetoric and Composition and the last decade of my professional experience as a leader and supervisor.

One really nice thing about the design of this class (the basic structure of which was provided by the department) is that our semester started with lessons on interpersonal communication, emotional intelligence, ethics, and credibility. For me, the fact that the course recognizes that communication starts long before communicative acts actually occur is a great strength of our course. Communication does not happen independent of credibility and relationship, and so strengthening these is a vital precursor to effective communication. 

Last week, the topic of our class was credibility. We discussed individual and organizational credibility, why it's important, and how to establish it. We interviewed a professional from a high credibility organization and discussed case studies of organizations that had harmed their credibility. 

As part of this process, we had a short set of group discussions and debrief where students shared examples of the best leader they had ever had as well as the worst. None of the answers were surprising. The best leaders cared about those they led, led by example, and mentored followers. The worst leaders were rude, hyper-critical, or micromanaging. Again, not earth-shattering stuff to anyone who's ever worked anywhere, but what I was able to point out to my students after hearing their stories was that all of the their examples were relational. Not one of their examples involved competency. 

Certainly, competency is important too but, for one thing, it is less common for someone with no technical know-how to get promoted than it is for someone with sufficient job knowledge but little emotional intelligence. Also, problems we have had with bosses that caused us emotional discomfort or harm are far more memorable. This conversation provided a salient example to my students of why credibility and emotional intelligence are key foundations for communication. 

In my previous assignment at my regular nine-to-five, I was working to develop the informal leadership capacity of our trainers and senior members. This had, in my opinion, been neglected in the past and I did not feel that we had given our informal leaders the skills that we could have. As I spoke to them, I began trying to build a mantra out of the teaching that, "it doesn't matter how right you are, if you aren't also effective." The ideas was that if you seek to influence others, you have to be attuned to what they are willing to be influenced by. You won't win them over by being right if they think your only interest is in being right. They must believe that you care about them. I've since added to this mantra (though I no longer have this particular group to repeat it to):

It doesn't matter how right you are if you are not also effective. And you cannot be effective without influence. And you cannot have influence without relationship.

Of course, this is too long to be a mantra, so probably my original should stand, and this should become a follow-up explanation, but I think the causal chain is important. Communication isn't just a matter of getting the facts right and building an unassailable logical connection between facts and your claims. If an audience doesn't accept you as credible, you will not communicate as effectively as you might have. And if your relationship with your audience is poor, you will have no credibility. If you want to influence others more effectively, you will need to invest in your relationships with them.

This is why relationship-building must be an integral part of any communication strategy. And the more difficult the conversations will be, the more this is true. In any organization, a good communicator should begin building sincere and positive relationships immediately, long before the communicative moment. Your effectiveness as a communicator will be directly correlated to the quality of your relationships.