The Need for Strategic Communication Skills

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<The Need for Strategic Communication Skills>

The value of strategic communication has garnered traction over the years. It is attracting more and more attention in society and corporations. Many organisations have grown to understand the vital importance of strategic communication for the survival and success of organizations. Yet, communication professionals and communication departments around the world continue to struggle with a rather low status in organizations. 

Need for strategic communication

Well-designed communication programs are essential for sharing a company’s strategic plan and providing other important organizational information that informs employees of the organization’s goals and objectives, business priorities, products and services.

Explaining the strategic focus of the business and how it creates value for the customer and stakeholders through effective strategic communication helps employees understand how their work directly contributes to the success of the organization. This is because strategic communication ties the organization’s objectives to its core values and mission. This sustains the momentum of productivity in the workplace. It also increases employees’ personal drive and pride.

For a strategic communications program to be effective, senior leaders in an organisation must understand and embrace the importance of communication strategy, rationale and core messages.  Along with the CEO, senior leadership can be important storytellers for communicating the message with authenticity, purpose and consistency. Therefore, it is of paramount importance that senior leaders continue to upgrade their strategic communication skills in the workplace.

Why upgrading strategic communication skills are important

There are a few reasons why it’s important for senior leaders to continuously upgrade their communication skills. Here are three reasons why.

• Vital Communication Tips
• Understanding how leadership styles affect communication
• Learn The Necessary Techniques Required

Vital Communication Tips

Leadership communication is a complex process which starts from developing a strategy on how to communicate, writing precisely and then speaking effectively to control difficult situations. Therefore, leaders need to constantly learn and upgrade their communication skills to keep abreast of the best communication tips which they can utilise in their own workplaces.

Leaders are often great speakers in the workplaces, however, being great speaker does not entail that they are great communicators. There is a big difference between the two, a great speaker, while eloquent in speech lacks knowledge and gets confused while interacting with others, whereas great communicators speak in confidence and never get confused because of the knowledge they possess. Thus, by attending lessons on how to communicate better strategically, leaders learn vital tips such as how to connect to passions and ambitions while communicating their ideas with others, and ways to develop the unique quality of listening peacefully to what others are speaking.

Through effective communication, leaders can engage employees in a conversation that generates support for the organizational strategy, motivates useful behaviours and, through empowerment, allows the employee to participate in creating the desired change and thereby increasing organizational value. 

Understanding how leadership styles affect communication

Different leadership styles also influence communication process. As such, leaders need to constantly understand how their leadership styles may influence the communication process. Examples of these types of leadership include goal-oriented leadership style, where leaders have to communicate the vision and goals to his team to motivate them to achieve them with efficiency. Action based leadership style is where leaders give emphasis to three main duties; the assignment given, the team working on that assignment and individual issues of the team members and should try to meet the deadlines by focusing on each one at different times.

Therefore, through learning and understanding how various leaderships styles would influence the strategic communication techniques used and the effects that it would bring, leaders can learn to communicate better and bring out the best in their colleagues.

Learn the Necessary Techniques Required

Communication is often a very complex task, while communicating in a group, although all good leaders try to keep in mind the listener’s point of view, it is still difficult to make everyone understand what exactly a leader wants to deliver. As such, choosing the right tools and techniques to communicate with their colleagues or disseminate certain information is extremely important for leaders.

The problem in communication arises from the disturbances or barriers in the transmission, either by the leader or by the receiver. This is because the wrong choice of techniques and tools can act as a barrier and reduce the level of exact understanding of the communication done. Examples could include the use of signals, postures and gestures which do not support the words used during communication. To get rid of these barriers, leaders will need to learn and attain mastery in the core skills required in strategic communication.

Interested to find out more? Do check out our online training course on strategic communication management for business leaders, to learn the required skills to be a better and more efficient leader in the workplace!

<Blog – 5 reasons why corporate communication is important>

Strategic Communication Management ‘The Business Leader’ is a 1-day online training course. Designed for communication professionals who currently occupy, or want to occupy senior leadership roles within organisations, and those who want to gain a better understanding of business strategy. The Business Leader course builds on senior communication knowledge and skills, providing additional development for change management, negotiation and influencing skills, advanced strategy planning, budgeting and financial management and coaching skills.

<Strategic Communication Management – The Business Leader 10 Jul 2020 Online>