Are You Being Understood?

Are you being understood?  Consider for a moment, when you speak are others hearing you but not listening to you?   When you give directions, are they clear and actionable or do they need to be interpreted by those responsible for carrying them out?  Do you make unfair assumptions when communicating or do you identify all the necessary information and articulate it?

Communication holds power to either be a great catalyst or destroyer of an organization. While I would not consider myself an expert communicator, I do find a large part of my job responsibility as a leader is to communicate effectively.  While this is not an exhaustive list, I thought I would give you a few things to consider when you are needing to communicate, but you desire to be understood as well.

• Understand your audience before you communicate
• Your Non Verbal cues speak louder than your Verbal cues
• Are you relating the information you are communicating to your listener effectively?
• If you were given one sentence to communicate your message, what would it be?
• Individual emotions from the giver or receiver have the ability to translate your message before they are ever internalized. (are you being sensitive?)
• Effective communication is more about clarity of speech than flowery speech.

Hopefully these few thoughts will help guide you as a leader the next time you need to communicate to an individual or even an entire organization.  It is unfair to hold others responsible for something you have not clearly communicated.  So speak to be understood.