If you are like most C-suite executives, you woke up this morning faced with a range of decisions, some that you will lead, others where you need to negotiate or influence others. Perhaps today is your quarterly board meeting, maybe you are addressing an industry conference, or possibly you are meeting one-on-one with one of your direct reports to review their year-to-date accomplishments. Regardless of the scenario, as you prepared to greet the day, it weighed on your heart and mind how you would approach these interactions, who you will communicate with, and what outcome you seek to achieve with those conversations.

C-suite executives spend countless hours communicating in order to influence, guide, and drive business impact. Leveraging communications to align vision, mission, and values to the enterprise strategy is a fundamental core competency that is developed, applied, and refined over one’s tenure in key leadership roles. While the mastery of leadership skills is more akin to a journey, we often take our ability to influence for granted, rushing forward with our innate confidence and self-assuredness.

With over 40 years of experience, we have provided communications skills capabilities to leaders and their enterprises across the globe. Regardless of one’s profession, everyone needs to be grounded in understanding what helps us accelerate our positive impact on those around us. In this blog, we desire to share a few things we’ve learned, or most importantly, what our clients have learned, to inspire you, inform you, and perhaps enhance your approach to influential communications.

Here’s a countdown of the key opportunities to enhance communications impact both inside and outside your C-suite teams.  

Opportunity #5 – Clear & Consistent Messaging

The Challenge: Messaging that lacks clarity and is delivered without consistency creates confusion and erodes trust.
When a leader’s words fail to align with their actions or when they change their stance frequently, a sense of unpredictability may be conveyed and may undermine the leader’s credibility.

Action: Reflect on your past communication to identify inconsistencies and the potential reasons behind them.
Pay attention to your nonverbal behaviors. Your connection with your audience will win or lose the room in the opening minutes of your interaction. You are a leader, and you are being observed. The listener is reading your visual clues even before you verbalize your message. Record yourself and watch it back to see how an audience could perceive you. We all now carry a video camera in our pockets; it is simple to look at what others are seeing. Additionally, develop a communication strategy. This strategy will serve as a roadmap for consistent and aligned messaging.

Decker Value: Our proven, high-impact methodology provides a roadmap to structure influential and impactful messages. The roadmap applies to ALL your communications – that one-on-one feedback session or leading your investors through another round of funding.

Dive into the other segments of this 5 part series on Accelerators for C-Suite Communication: Opportunity #4: Skipping Opportunities to Tell Stories | Opportunity #3: Loosen Up | Opportunity #2: Leverage Personal Content Creativity | Opportunity #1: Improve the Clarity of Your Message