Briefly describe and explain why being an effective communicator is a MUST in your role as a leader. Be sure to fully cite all sources in these description

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How to Improve Leaders' Communication Skills

Are poor communications skills holding you back? Experts share their advice.

By Dori Meinert February 26, 2019

s a leader, you might be an expert in your field. Maybe you have a degree or two. You might even have many innovative ideas that could help solidify your company’s future.

But if you can’t convey those ideas in a meaningful way to your employees and clients, your influence will be limited.

“The ability to communicate with clarity and purpose is the key to personal and professional success,” says G. Riley Mills, co-founder of Pinnacle Performance Co. in Chicago and author of The Bullseye Principle (https://amzn.to/2XipLP3) (Wiley, 2018).

Effective leaders must be able to inspire, motivate and persuade those around them to achieve organizational goals. However, leaders often fail to devote as much time to developing their communication skills as they do to honing other business skills, experts say.

Communication failures can be costly for organizations, causing wasted time and effort, low morale, reduced productivity, and a loss of trust and credibility, according to Dean Brenner, president of The Latimer Group in Wallingford, Conn., which provides executive coaching.

Here’s some advice from communication experts:

Know your audience. One of the most common communication mistakes that leaders make is failing to tailor their message to fit their specific audience, says Chris Westfall, a communication coach and author of Leadership Language (https://amzn.to/2EypsbD) (Wiley, 2018).

To be effective, leaders must make a connection with their audience, whether it’s employees or clients.

“The strongest message always starts with what your listener is thinking. You have to understand the challenges and concerns of your team,” Westfall says.

“You need to start by connecting to where your team is if you want to create real influence,” he says. “Browbeating doesn’t capture the hearts and minds of employees.”

Whether speaking to a group or an individual, leaders can help make a connection by using “you” rather than “I.” For example, say, “Have you ever noticed … ” instead of “This is the way I see it.”

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“Ultimately, the best leader serves the needs of the team, just as the team serves the leader,” he says.

Mills coaches leaders to ask team members and clients, “What do you need? How can I help?”

Create meaning. Twenty years ago, the smartest person in the room at work was the one who had gathered more and better information than anyone else.

“Today, the smartest person in the room … is the one who can simplify all the things that are going on and create a path through the complexity and toward a simpler solution,” Brenner says.

Many leaders spend a significant amount of time creating slides containing all kinds of data but don’t put those numbers in context. They need to explain what the numbers mean for each specific group that they address.

“The real mistake is to assume that everybody cares about the nitty-gritty of the data as much as you do,” Brenner says. “What you have to realize is everybody’s listening to what you’re saying and thinking in their heads about how they can apply it to what they’re doing.”

Effective leaders find a way to make their message relevant to what their employees are working on, he adds.

Become a better listener. A huge barrier to good communication is poor listening skills.

But learning to be a better listener can be challenging in a world filled with electronic distractions. And listening skills usually aren’t recognized or rewarded within organizations, Brenner says.

“We tend to promote people because they’re decisive and do things proactively,” he says.

When coaching executives to improve their listening skills, Brenner advises them to:

Respect the situation by choosing to ignore the distractions. Retain the information by engaging in a conversation or taking notes. Review what they’ve heard. If a colleague is in the meeting, compare what was heard. “We all listen through different filters,” he says.

Too often, people listen just enough to confirm what they already know or to defend their own position. Instead, they should be listening to discover what they haven’t heard before. Is there an opposing viewpoint that might be beneficial?

“Discovery is the listening that leads to innovation,” Westfall says. “Effective leaders know they have to gather information before they can make an informed decision.”

Prepare properly. When leaders at large companies are scheduled to give a presentation, their first step is often to search for an existing slide deck on the topic, Mills says.

“They think they’re saving time, but I would argue they’re adding time,” he says. “Think about what you want to say first. Who is your audience? What do they care about?”

Mills encourages leaders to focus on their objective as they craft their talk. Choose a strong, one- word verb to guide you. Do you want to excite audience members? Challenge them? Reassure them? “Most leaders go into it to inform, and there’s no emotional connection,” he says.

Practice makes perfect, but few executives perform trial runs, according to Darlene Price, an executive coach and author of Well Said! (https://amzn.to/2ThGhiZ)(Amacom, 2012). In fact, her surveys show that fewer than 5 percent of 5,000 business leaders who have attended her workshops said at the outset that they practice their presentations aloud or conduct a dress rehearsal.

“Most of the time, leaders deliver a rehearsal to their audience, and that’s just a huge mistake because they’re not putting their best foot forward,” says Price, noting that many mistakenly believe they’re already good at public speaking.

Mills, a former actor, says he hears many CEOs say, “I’ll just wing it. I don’t like to be tied down.” But their message can get lost if they ramble or misspeak.

He coaches executives to prepare by using the three phases that actors use:

The read-through, which is often stilted and awkward because they’re not yet familiar with the content. The stumble-through, when they add physical movement as they learn their lines. The dress rehearsal, when they wear the clothes that they’ll present in; use the slides, projector and microphones; and get comfortable in the setting.

Price reminds business leaders that 93 percent of communication’s impact comes from nonverbal cues, including body language and tone of voice. Without a rehearsal, leaders may unintentionally send mixed messages. They may be concentrating to remember their talking points, but their audience might see their furrowed brow or clenched hands and worry that the company’s situation is far worse than it is, she says.

When leaders strengthen their communication skills, they boost their “executive presence,” Price adds.

“A leader’s No. 1 job is to inspire,” she says. “That’s really why leaders need to work on communication skills—so they can inspire and motivate, and ultimately lead people in the desired direction.”

Dori Meinert is senior writer/editor for HR Magazine.

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The Leadership Quarterly 20 (2009) 814–827

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

The Leadership Quarterly

j ourna l homepage: www.e lsev ie r.com/ locate / l eaqua

Do you feel what I feel? Mood contagion and leadership outcomes

Stefanie K. Johnson⁎ University of Colorado Denver, School of Business, PO Box 173364, Campus Box 165, Denver, CO 80217-3364, 303-556-5894, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o

⁎ Tel.: +1 970 491 2793. E-mail address: [email protected].

1048-9843/$ – see front matter © 2009 Elsevier Inc. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2009.06.012

a b s t r a c t

Keywords:

This research examines the role ofmood andmood contagion in a leadership situation. In phase 1 of the study participants received a positive or negative mood induction and completed a leadership speech describing how to complete a hiring task. In phase 2, participants watched one of the speeches from phase 1, completed ratings, and performed the hiring task. Followers in the positive mood condition had higher levels of positive mood and lower levels of negative mood, rated their leaders asmore charismatic, and performed better than followers in the negativemood condition. Followers' mood mediated the relationship between leader mood and follower outcomes. In the third phase of the study, participants read transcripts of the speeches fromphase 2 but experienced no change in mood or performance, suggesting the previous effects found in phase 2 were due to mood contagion rather than the content of the speeches.

© 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Mood contagion Charismatic leadership Positive and negative mood

Affect has been theoretically linked to charismatic leadership since Weber (1920) referred to the emotion, passion, and devotion that ensue from charismatic authority. Furthermore, affect remains central to modern theories of charismatic and transformational leadership (e.g., Bass, 1985; Bass & Avolio, 1995; Conger & Kanungo, 1994; Gardner & Avolio, 1998; House, 1977; Shamir, House, & Arthur, 1993). Leaders' affect not only influences leadership perceptions (Gaddis, Connelly, & Mumford, 2004; Lewis, 2000; Newcombe & Ashkanasy, 2002) and follower performance (George, 1995; George & Bettenhausen, 1990), but can also influence followers' affect through emotional/mood contagion (Bono & Ilies, 2006; Cherulnik, Donley, Wiewel, & Miller, 2001; Johnson, 2008; Lewis, 2000; Sy, Côté, & Saavedra, 2005). This study builds closely from past research on leadership, mood, and mood contagion (Bono & Ilies, 2006; Sy et al., 2005; Towler, 2003) by examining the effects of both leader positive and negative mood on followers' mood, perceptions of charismatic leadership, and performance in a controlled laboratory experiment (Fig. 1).

1. Charismatic leadership

Charismatic leadership theory, based on the conceptions of Weber (1920), House (1977), Burns (1978), and Bass (1985), explains the unique connection between leaders and followers that results in outstanding follower performance. Bass and Avolio (1994) distinguished among three facets of charismatic leadership. Attributed charisma reflects the personal power and confidence associated with charismatic leadership. Idealized influence involves leader behaviors related to serving as a role model for followers by stressing values and beliefs, moral behavior, and a strong sense of the collective mission. Inspiration motivation refers to leader behaviors aimed at adding meaning to followers' work, typically resulting in an increase in follower enthusiasm. Through these attributes and behaviors, charismatic leaders make each follower feel special, give each follower needed support, and engage each follower in a personal relationship (Fuller, Patterson, Hester, & Stringer, 1996; Kets de Vries, 1988) encouraging followers to exhibit greater effort, satisfaction, and commitment (DeGroot & Kiker, 2000), and take on greater responsibility (Bass

All rights reserved.

Fig. 1. Proposed model of the relationships between leader mood, follower mood, follower ratings of charismatic leadership, and follower performance.

815S.K. Johnson / The Leadership Quarterly 20 (2009) 814–827

& Avolio, 1994). Changes in followers' attitudes and behavior result in improved performance (DeGroot & Kiker, 2000; Lowe, Kroeck, & Sivasubramaniam, 1996).

2. Affect and leadership

The current research examines the relationship between leader mood, follower mood, and charismatic leadership. Mood is a subjective feeling that is relatively low in intensity, diffuse, and not directed toward a specific object (Lazarus, 1991). Based on the Circumplex Model of affect (Larsen & Diener, 1992), mood differs on two affective dimensions: valence and arousal (Russell, 1980). The first dimension, valence, ranges from negative to positive and the second dimension, arousal, ranges from deactivated to activated, resulting in four quadrants of moods or emotions: negative deactivated (e.g., bored), positive deactivated (e.g., calm), negative activated (e.g., distressed), and positive activated (e.g., elated). The distinction between high and low arousal of positive and negative mood is particularly relevant to mood contagion because contagion is more likely to occur with high arousal moods thanwith low arousal moods (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson,1994). This study focused on two quadrants of the circumplex: positive activated and negative activated.

Moreover, both experienced and expressed mood are examined in the current study. Specifically, leader mood will be induced and it is expected that the expression of that mood will influence follower experienced mood. Drawing from Gross, John, and Richards' (2000) process model of emotion experience and expression, it is expected that individuals' moods are affected by environmental situations which give rise to expressed mood. Therefore, the induction of leader positive and negative moods should give rise to the expression of those moods.

2.1. Affective Events Theory

The theory that has most strongly focused on the role of affect at work is Affective Events Theory (AET, Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996). AET suggests that positive and negative workplace situations serve as affective events, giving rise to changes in employees' affect, attitudes, and behaviors. AET is implicated in leadership research in at least two important respects. First, leaders have the ability to reduce the impact of negative affective events on follower reactions (Pescosolido, 2002) and performance (Pirola-Merlo, Hartel, Mann, & Hirst, 2002). Second, leaders' behavior, including their expressed moods, can serve as affect events for their followers (Dasborough, 2006; Johnson, 2008). Moreover, leaders may intentionally manipulate their expressed moods and emotions in order to elicit desired responses in their followers (Ashkanasy & Tse, 2000; Mio, Riggio, Levin, & Reese, 2005). In the subsequent section, I will provide greater detail as to how and why leaders' expressed mood is expected to impact followers' attitudes, performance, and mood.

3. Hypothesis development

3.1. Follower ratings of charismatic leadership

It is expected that leaders who express more positive mood will be perceived by their followers as more charismatic than leaders who express more negative mood. Generally, people who express positive moods are more likeable and perceived more positively than persons in less positive or more negative moods (Cialdini, 1984). While this is true for all individuals, leaders' moods are likely to have a disproportionate impact on others' perceptions because of leaders' salience as organizational members (Connelly, Gaddis & Helton-Fauth, 2002). Indeed, leaders expressing a positive mood are perceived positively (Ashkanasy & Tse, 2000; Dasborough & Ashkanasy, 2002) whereas leaders expressing a negative mood are perceived negatively (Gaddis et al., 2004; Lewis, 2000; Newcombe & Ashkanasy, 2002).

Further, Bono and Ilies (2006) note that the outcomes associatedwith facilitating positivemood in followers are quite similar to the outcomes associated with charismatic leadership. They suggest that the contagion of positive affect may be one of the

816 S.K. Johnson / The Leadership Quarterly 20 (2009) 814–827

psychological processes linking charismatic leadership to follower outcomes. Further, they note that research on personality points to the fact that the charismatic personality (e.g., extraverted, expressive, high in positive affectivity) is also likely to facilitate positive affect in followers (Bono & Ilies, 2006). Finally, in terms of charismatic leadership, the expression of positive mood is a behavioral indicator for charismatic leadership (Bass, 1985). As such, it is expected that leaders who express more positive mood and less negative mood will be perceived as more charismatic.

Hypothesis 1. Leaders expressing a positive mood will be attributed greater levels of charismatic leadership from followers than leaders expressing a negative mood.

3.2. Follower performance

Leader mood has also been shown to impact follower performance (Gaddis et al., 2004; George, 1995; George & Bettenhausen, 1990), although the mechanisms behind this relationship are largely unexplored. One possibility is that leaders who express positive moods are more well-liked (Cialdini, 1984), and their followers are willing to exert extra effort for them. Followers who dislike their leaders can derail them by refusing to comply with their wishes (Ashford, 1989) and performing poorly (Bass, 1990). Another possible explanation is that followers interpret leader positive mood as optimism about their performance, increasing followers' self-efficacy (Shea & Howell, 1999; Towler & Dipboye, 2001) and performance (Eden, 2003). Conversely, leader negative mood may lead followers to believe that the leader is pessimistic about their future performance, leading to a decrease in self- efficacy and performance. Therefore, the leader positive and negativemoods are expected to impact follower performance (Gaddis et al., 2004).

Hypothesis 2. Leaders expressing a positivemoodwill elicit better performance from followers than leaders expressing a negative mood.

3.3. Follower mood

Finally, leaders' moods can impact followers' moods through mood contagion. Mood contagion is the automatic and unconscious transfer of mood between individuals (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1992) which is thought to occur as a result of individuals' tendency to mimic others' nonverbal behavior, cueing the target to experience the mood that he or she is mimicking (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). Just exhibiting a particular facial expression can elicit the corresponding mood or emotion in the individual (Adelmann & Zajonc, 1989). There are reasons to believe that mood contagion is particularly relevant in leadership contexts. In general, high status individuals are more likely to successfully influence others' moods than are low status individuals (Anderson, Keltner, & John, 2003). Moreover, leaders are highly salient groupmembers (Connelly et al., 2002) and should therefore have a greater impact on followers' moods than non-leaders (Fredrickson, 2003). Indeed, recent work has demonstrated mood contagion in leadership contexts (Bono & Ilies, 2006; Cherulnik et al., 2001; Johnson, 2008; Lewis, 2000; Sy et al., 2005).

Hypothesis 3a. Leaders expressing a positive mood will elicit more positive mood from followers than leaders expressing a negative mood.

Hypothesis 3b. Leaders expressing a negative mood will elicit more negative mood from followers than leaders expressing a positive mood.

3.4. Follower ratings of charismatic leadership

The role of mood contagion in a leadership situation is particularly important given the potential effects of followers' moods on their attitudes and performance. The theory of mood congruent learning suggests that people are likely to learn information that is of the same affective tone as their current affective state (Bower, Gilligan, & Montiero, 1981) and the theory of state dependent learning suggests that people exhibit better recall of information that is learned and retrieved in the same affective state (Bower, Montiero, & Gilligan, 1978). If followers are in a positive mood, then they should learn and remember more positive information about their leader than if they are in a negative mood. In addition, the affect-as-information principle suggests that individuals use their mood at the time they make a judgment as an indicator of their feelings toward a given stimulus (Schwarz, 1990). Moreover, as followers' moods are affected by their leaders, followers should attribute their moods to their leaders, causing them to believe that leaders who induce a positive mood are more charismatic than leaders who induce negative moods (Johnson, 2008).

Hypothesis 4a. Followers' positive mood will be positively associated with ratings of charismatic leadership.

Hypothesis 4b. Followers' negative mood will be negatively associated with ratings of charismatic leadership.

3.5. Follower performance

Recent research also has demonstrated the potential for mood to impact performance in leaderless (Jordan, Lawrence, & Troth, 2006) and lead (Sy et al., 2005) groups, as a result of the impact of mood on group process and coordination. The findings from

817S.K. Johnson / The Leadership Quarterly 20 (2009) 814–827

group research can be extended to individual-level performance, as well, through the impact of mood on individuals' cognition, motivation, and behavior. The cognitive explanation for the mood–performance relationship suggests that positive moods lead to better decision-making (Isen, Means, Patrick, & Nowicki, 1982) because positive moods cause individuals to rely on useful heuristics (Sinclair & Mark, 1992) and promote simplification of complex tasks (Isen et al., 1982).

The motivational explanation for the mood–performance relationship suggests that mood impacts individuals' arousal, increasing the initial effort that they put into a task and their persistence on that task (George & Brief, 1996). That is, the energy associated with positive mood can lead individuals to exert greater effort. Positive mood also results in an increase in individuals' expectancy motivation (Erez & Isen, 2002) and self-set goals (Ilies & Judge, 2005), possibly because people in a positive mood experience increases in: perceived control over future outcomes (Alloy & Abramson, 1979), self-serving bias (Fiske & Taylor, 1991), and probability estimates of positive future events (Bower & Cohen,1982). For these reasons, mood has also been shown to impact self-efficacy (Baron, 1990) which positively impacts performance (Eden, 2003).

The behavioral explanation for the mood–performance relationship is based on the idea that positive moods cause individuals to be more cooperative (Gouaux, 1971; Griffitt, 1970) and helpful (Isen & Levin, 1972), making themmore willing to work hard for their leader. The mood maintenance hypothesis suggests that persons in a good mood are likely to help others in order to prolong their good mood (Isen, Shalker, Clark, & Karp, 1978). Conversely, individuals in a negative mood may help others to alleviate their negative mood. Positive moods lead to increases in organizational citizenship behavior (OCB, George, 1991; Lee & Allen, 2002) and negative mood leads to decreases in OCB (Johnson, 2008). In the current study, the participants' performance task consists of ranking resumes based on a set of criteria and writing a letter to recruit the top candidate. This task is expected to tap all three processes by which affect impacts performance. The behavioral and motivation processes may encourage participants to spend more effort completing the tasks. Increased cognitive processing should help participants rank order the resumes according to the criteria. Therefore, the following hypotheses were formed.

Hypothesis 5a. Follower positive mood will be positively associated with performance.

Hypothesis 5b. Follower negative mood will be negatively associated with performance.

The main contribution of the current study is the integration of previous research and theory to examine how the relationship between leader mood, follower mood, follower ratings of charismatic leadership, and follower performance function together. It is suggested that the relationship between leader mood and follower ratings of charismatic leadership is partially mediated by follower positive and negative moods, as suggested by charismatic leadership theory. Only a partial mediation is expected because other factors are also likely to mediate the relationship between leader mood and follower ratings of charismatic leadership. For example, followers' implicit theories of charismatic leadership should also explainwhy leaders' mood impacts followers' ratings of charismatic leadership.

It shouldbenoted thatother researchhas demonstrated that leader charisma influences follower affect (Dasborough, 2006;McColl- Kennedy&Anderson, 2002), just as follower affect impacts followers' perceptions of charismatic leadership. Bothprocesses are likely to be true. More charismatic leaders (who likely exhibit high levels of positive affect) will likely have followers who experience greater levels of positive affect and followerswhoperceive themtobemore charismatic (Fig.1). It is expected,however, that followers' affective reactions to their leaders' charismatic/positively emotive behavior precedes the cognitive reaction of followers' perceptions of charismatic leadership. Indeed, there is evidence that affect precedes cognition in the evaluation of stimuli (Zajonc, 1980).

Hypothesis 6a. Follower positive mood will partially mediate the relationship between leader mood and follower ratings of charismatic leadership.

Hypothesis 6b. Follower negative mood will partially mediate the relationship between leader mood and follower ratings of charismatic leadership.

Similarly, in line with previous research (McColl-Kennedy & Anderson, 2002) followers' moods are expected to partially mediate the relationship between leader mood and follower performance. There are competing theories as to why leader mood should impact follower performance, including increases in followers' affection for the leader or increases in follower self-efficacy. Therefore, only a partial mediation is expected of follower positive and negative moods on the relationship between leader mood and follower performance.

Hypothesis 7a. Follower positive mood will mediate the relationship between leader mood and follower performance.

Hypothesis 7b. Follower negative mood will mediate the relationship between leader mood and follower performance.

4. The current research

The current study examined the impact of mood and mood contagion in a leadership context. In the first phase of the study, participants' moods were manipulated and they completed a leadership speech. Although previous research has generally used actors to manipulate leader mood (e.g., Gadd

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