Underestimating Your People Skills

Untrained leaders are likely to be very comfortable in one style of communication. This is true of everyone in general. You may micromanage, undermanage, or you may be autocratic. You default to one style, and that works for a while, in particular in small companies and during the launch of a new company. But as time goes by, leaders wonder why people leave, or don’t do what they ask them to.

Essentially: Why aren’t people like me?

This is when the self-fulfilling prophecies happen. An entrepreneur starts thinking, “I’m the only one who can do everything around here” and “I might as well do it myself”. The reason this type of thinking begins comes down to bad communication style. Leaders should understand that the responsibility of great communication rests on them. It’s critical to understand who you’re dealing with and be able to flex your leadership style appropriately. Most leaders fail to figure this out until they realize “you’re the problem, dummy”. That’s an absolute critical realization.

Leaders know how to build companies, but there’s a lag time between the vision these leaders have and how to get everyone on the team to understand it. The journey of communication skills rests on the leader. You must understand who you have around you: you must understand the team. Without this, we hire people based on resume and experience. Then, in 60 to 90 days we think “this person sucks”. But we’re disguising winners as losers (a nod to Ken Blanchard) because we don’t know how to properly communicate.

Leaders say, “It’s just the way I am”! But that equals a very low emotional intelligence and a lack of self-awareness. Then, we get those “losers” working for us. They have no direct or proper communication so we think they suck. The problem is the leader can’t communicate effectively with the new hire. So they quit, or leader fires them out of frustration. It is my strong belief that 99 percent of us are in the commodity business. There’s a competitor that makes/sells something as good as what we have. Therefore, our strongest asset is how we communicate things to our people and our clients. It’s essential. Tools like DISC and Emotional Intelligence assessments are the building blocks to greater communication skills.