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The Leader's Voice: How Your Communication Can Inspire Action and Get Results!
In this provocative and instructive book, The Leader’s How your communication can inspire action and get results!, business executives and others can acquire the much-needed skills effective leaders use to manage change in turbulent times. "To say language is everything to a leader is no understatement. It’s a fact," says Tom Peters, America’s Number One business guru. Clarke and Crossland, executives at tompeterscompany, show how others can use leadership principles to discover the power in their voice. The authors define the core principles of effective leadership communication. In a volatile business climate like today's, the ability to communicate authentically and powerfully is the crucial leadership competence. Unfortunately, the complexity of the current workplace has muted the voices of many leaders. Ever wonder how John F. Kennedy, Margaret Thatcher and Martin Luther King, Jr. commanded through communication? Read this book and apply the principles. You’ll discover the power in your voice! The Leader's Voice is backed up by twenty years of communication research. Reviewing over 1,100 examples of leadership communication, and studying the inferences of modern neurological science has led the authors to a simple, stimulating leadership communication model. Leaders, at their best, communicate simultaneously on three Factual, Emotional and Symbolic (FES). Clarke and Crossland demonstrate how FES can be used in public presentations, one-on-one meetings and even via email to enhance a leader’s effectiveness and ability to move his or her constituency to greater conviction, consciousness and competence.
- GenresLeadership
160 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2002
41 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 6, 2024
Dated and, although a short read at 160 pages, bloated with irrelevant quips and anecdotes. Not sure why this is still material selected by my college instructor as required reading…
October 24, 2009
An OK read. I finished it a month or so ago, and don't really remember much from it (this says something). I do remember it inspired some introspection, particularly in the first chapters. However, by the end, it felt as though they were bending reality to fit their model, rather than the other way around.
Meh... (shrugging)
Meh... (shrugging)
July 3, 2010
I happened to sit next to management guru Tom Peters at a conference a few years back, and I was struck by his intensity offstage as well as during his performance. (The guy knows a thing or two about effective communication.) So when Boyd Clarke and Ron Crossland (then CEO and Vice Chair of Peters’ company) came out with a book on leadership communication, I expected it to be pretty good…and it was. “The Leader’s Voice” was reprinted in 2008, and when I picked it up the new version I was reminded its important core teachings.
Most important is the authors’ holistic treatment of the subject matter, giving equal weight to the three channels through which effective leaders communicate: Facts, Emotions and Symbols. (Ask yourself how often you – or your CEO – simply ignore one or more of these channels. And then what happens? Listeners fill-in-the-blanks for themselves. Your audience supplies its own facts – by way of assumptions and objections. Your audience supplies its own emotional content – including fear of change, skepticism, worry about your initiative’s impact on them. Your audience supplies its own symbolic interpretations – such as how they feel about your brand. In short, you lose control of your communication. And sometimes that can be a major problem.“
While every human being communicates (to varying degrees) in these three channels, most people have an over-reliance on just one mode. (It’s the MBA religiously devoted to the facts of business, for example, or the creative vice president speaking with pure emotion.) Unfortunately, there’s a price to be paid for neglecting the communications channels that others favor. In fact, what often happens in leadership communication is what the authors call “The Four Fatal Assumptions.” Leaders speak and then assume that their constituents:
• Understand
• Agree
• Care
• Act Accordingly
But this “The Silver Bullet” theory of communication was debunked almost a century ago, so we all know that effectively communicating an idea is a little more complicated than simply exposing an audience to it. Yet in the whirl of fast-moving events and corporate crises, what we know is often not reflected in what we do.That’s where “The Leader’s Voice” makes its contribution. It’s a practical and accessible guidebook providing just enough truly useful information to quickly improve the communications efficacy of leaders who heed its advice. There’s always room on our shelves for another book like that…
Most important is the authors’ holistic treatment of the subject matter, giving equal weight to the three channels through which effective leaders communicate: Facts, Emotions and Symbols. (Ask yourself how often you – or your CEO – simply ignore one or more of these channels. And then what happens? Listeners fill-in-the-blanks for themselves. Your audience supplies its own facts – by way of assumptions and objections. Your audience supplies its own emotional content – including fear of change, skepticism, worry about your initiative’s impact on them. Your audience supplies its own symbolic interpretations – such as how they feel about your brand. In short, you lose control of your communication. And sometimes that can be a major problem.“
While every human being communicates (to varying degrees) in these three channels, most people have an over-reliance on just one mode. (It’s the MBA religiously devoted to the facts of business, for example, or the creative vice president speaking with pure emotion.) Unfortunately, there’s a price to be paid for neglecting the communications channels that others favor. In fact, what often happens in leadership communication is what the authors call “The Four Fatal Assumptions.” Leaders speak and then assume that their constituents:
• Understand
• Agree
• Care
• Act Accordingly
But this “The Silver Bullet” theory of communication was debunked almost a century ago, so we all know that effectively communicating an idea is a little more complicated than simply exposing an audience to it. Yet in the whirl of fast-moving events and corporate crises, what we know is often not reflected in what we do.That’s where “The Leader’s Voice” makes its contribution. It’s a practical and accessible guidebook providing just enough truly useful information to quickly improve the communications efficacy of leaders who heed its advice. There’s always room on our shelves for another book like that…
November 13, 2008
Seemed to lose the plot with too many ideas unrelated to the topic they were putting forward.
November 19, 2008
This a a great book about inspiring action to lead by example. There are multiple diagrams that are interesting to consider.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews