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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.

Innovation Obstacles

April 12, 2013

It doesn’t take long to compile a dozen or more examples of products or businesses that have disappeared, or nearly so, because the world changed while the product or business did not.

Think eight-track tapes and players.  Consider what digital photography has done, from the Eastman Kodak Company to out-of-business local studios.  What the Internet has done to travel agents.  See what’s happened and still happening to print newspapers across the country, to magazines, and to both local and large chain bookstores.

It is not at all rare that businesses fail to reinvent themselves.  For many reasons, including admirable passion for what they are doing, business leaders often miss the trends or ignore the signs that suggest the need to change their products or their entire business model.

As Geoff Colvin wrote in FORTUNE magazine Feb. 25, 2013, “Business model innovation is a competency that doesn’t exist in most companies.”  He continued:  “The largest obstacles will be weak imaginations, threatened interests, and culture.”

I suspect that those are also the three major obstacles we must overcome as we think about the future of interscholastic athletics.

  • Does school-based sports, with a 100-year-old history, have a 50 or even 15 year future in schools and society?

  • If so, should the business model change?  And if so, how?

I suspect that some of what we think is change may be no better than rotating bald tires on our car; when what we really need is new tires, or no tires at all.