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When we think of leadership communication most organizations focus on information tools. These include intranet sites, staff magazines, CEO blog, Town Hall meetings and so on. Whilst all these employee communication methods are to be applauded, they inform employees about what is going on. To truly engage employees in the process of change, for instance, a merger or acquisition, a re-organization, financial results or corporate social responsibility, leadership communication methods need to be designed to actively engage employees.

Transformational leadership is about engaging employees in changing behaviours to support the new business objectives. However whilst information is important, as part of leadership communication it only serves to provide information on what is changing and when, it is not an engagement tool.

These following 5 tips illustrate how you can ensure leadership communication will achieve desired business outcomes.

1. Step one is reviewing all the current tools and methods you use to communicate with employees. You need to scrutinize the content of that communication and determine whether it is one way information or whether some could be adapted as an engagement tool.

2. The second tip is important because your ultimate aim as a leader has to be to create the “Aha Moment” for employees. The “Aha Moment” is based on information that challenges the employee’s belief about an aspect of the business. The information that suddenly helps employees say, “Now it makes sense”, “Now I understand”, “Now I can do something about it”. Once you know what the “Aha Moment” is this will form your key message and the basis of your design of your employee communication strategy.

3. This third tip explains the best type of research to find out what the “Aha Moment” is, and the best type for this purpose is focus group research. Focus group research allows you to ask employees about your business and their thoughts on competitors, to identify the largest gap between what customers think and what staff think customers think, and to identify what would create a paradigm shift in employee’s thinking. It also helps you identify how you will measure the impact of your leadership communication strategies in the change in employees thinking and to determine how significant it is to achieving the business objectives.

The use of focus groups is useful as they allow issues to be discussed further and often they reveal issues or ideas which you would not have considered prior to the group session. I recommend that focus groups are generally held for one and a half hours duration and in groups with no more than 8 – 10 participants. The role of the facilitator is to lead the discussion but leave the actual dialogue to the participants, and then to steer them back to the main issue if employees have gone off on a tangent or to ensure that all the topics that you need to cover within the allocated timeframe are covered. The benefits of a well facilitated focus group are that they will identify the key messages for your leadership communication strategies as they relate to a particular business issue.

4. In this fourth step you gather the information sourced from the focus group feedback. The key data you are looking for is what the opinions are of employees about a particular topic or issue that directly relates to the business issue at hand. Then if it is based on false information or assumptions you find the factual data to refute this and then present it in such a way that employees are engaged and understand the basis for change.

5. Step five is all about taking the information you have gathered from the focus groups sessions and with that identify a business goal that you feel confident that your leadership strategies will impact. Use of that research data forms an essental part of your leadership communication strategy that can be measured by business achievements.

When you have gathered all the outcomes of the focus groups you will then be in a position to identify the key messages and data to bring about change in your organizaiton. Transformational leadership is about understanding what is of concern to your employees and what they need to know to support your business objectives. Development of an employee engagement strategy that focuses on “Aha!” moments and information is the essence of transformational leadership.

For more information make sure you obtain our excellent free report on how to design transformational leadership communication strategies.

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