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Leadership Communication

December 3, 2013

“We’ve got the weather,” the man said. And for years, my wife and I have wondered what he meant.

We had been walking in Dublin, Ireland and paused to photograph the huge wooden doors of an aging church building, when an elderly man on the sidewalk greeted us with those few words.

Did he mean the weather was bad because it was raining? Or, as we think more likely, was he saying the weather was good because it was a mild day with a gentle breeze and only a light rain?

My wife and I still recall that day in Dublin, that brief encounter, whenever we hear people make statements that could be interpreted in exactly opposite ways.

Speakers often say one thing and mean another, sometimes intentionally, sometimes innocently. Listeners often misinterpret what was stated because they had something different on their minds or expected something different to be said.

All of this and more adds to the difficulty of communicating effectively, whether between two people or within a team or organization.

Leadership communication attempts to minimize these misunderstandings; and an effective tactic for doing so is to have listeners restate what they believe they heard the leader say.

Communicating messages clearly and repetitiously is a leadership essential; but so is providing opportunities for others to repeat those messages. This leads not only to more precise communication, but also to more pervasive and powerful messages.

Remarkable Student-Athletes

May 8, 2015

Every spring I have the privilege and pleasure of participating in several league or local school events that acknowledge and reward the careers of student-athletes who distinguished themselves as multiple-sport participants with very high academic grade point averages. One of those events this year was the 2015 Senior Athlete Recognition Ceremony of the Capital Area Activities Conference. It was remarkable in several ways.

It was my fourth time in attendance at the event, which started when the league was smaller and simply called the Capital Area Conference. I was the speaker at one of its first recognition ceremonies. In later years I attended as our first son, and then our second, were among the evening’s honorees. But I found the 2015 CAAC event remarkable in two other and more important ways.

First, as the Master of Ceremonies Tim Staudt read off the intended college majors of the 200 honorees (10 per school), I noticed that not one of the students had declared the intention of being an English major, which was my college major and to which I credit much of the pleasure I’ve enjoyed as a human being and the success I’ve experienced as an administrator of school sports. I’m hoping some of these 200 of the CAAC’s best and brightest – a truly impressive group – will decide or even just stumble into an English major – a place to learn how to think and to communicate.

The second remarkable feature of this remarkable group of 200 was that the number of boys almost equaled the number of girls. This almost never happens, and that has always concerned me – that boys settle for athletic achievement alone while girls strive to achieve in athletics, academics, activities and much more of what a comprehensive education has to offer.

It is extremely important to the future of our society that we demand much more of boys than we are getting. If we expect them to be productive in life and to be good citizens, husbands and fathers, boys need to learn in high school that “settling” is not sufficient and that a life which revolves around sports alone is a life that will be disappointing.