In the 2019 Open Championship, American golfer Kyle Stanley was widely criticized for not yelling “Fore!” after hitting an errant drive that struck a spectator. Actually, he hit two such balls—and two such spectators—according to his golfing partner, Scottish golfer Robert MacIntyre. The first, on the fourteenth hole, bounced off the leg of a marshal. The second, on the seventeenth hole, hit the mother of MacIntyre’s caddie. Thankfully, neither one was injured.
Stanley’s mishaps didn’t go over well with MacIntyre, who shared what happened next with national Scottish newspaper The Scotsman. “Aye, there were harsh words. It wasn’t too pleasant. But you’ve got to tell him it’s not right.” The problem wasn’t that Stanley’s drives were off—that happens in golf, as anyone who has ever attempted the game knows all too well. It was that Stanley never shouted the traditional warning. MacIntyre reiterated, “Shout fore. That ball is going straight into the crowd. You know from the word go it’s going into the crowd. Just shout.”1
In his defense, Stanley stated that everyone else was yelling the word, so he didn’t feel he needed to shout it as well. That wasn’t enough to appease his critics in the golfing world, though, because golf etiquette puts the onus on the golfer: “If a player plays a ball in a direction where there is a danger of hitting someone, he should immediately shout a warning. The traditional word of warning in such situations is ‘fore.’”2
The origin of the term has been lost to history, but there are two primary theories.3 One is that it is a military term; when a row of soldiers was about to fire, they would shout “Beware before!” to make sure the row in front of them knew to keep their heads ducked. That was eventually shortened to “before” or simply “fore.” The second theory, less violent and more plausible, is that the term comes from forecaddies, people who are sometimes stationed down the course to keep an eye on where the ball lands. “Fore!” would have been a logical term for a golfer to yell upon teeing off, mostly as a heads-up to the forecaddie that a ball was on its way—not to save lives but to save golf balls.
If you’re on a golf course and you hear a desperate shout of “fore,” you don’t stop to think. You protect your head and then try to spot the incoming missile before it strikes. It’s hard to imagine a more potent, concise, and urgent term in the context of sports. One four-letter word can cause people to dive for cover; usually, those people then yell other four-letter words from the shelter of their golf carts.
As a leader, most of your communication will be longer—and hopefully less desperate—than screaming “fore.” But that doesn’t mean your communications are any less urgent or any less important.
No offense to Stanley, but in leadership, you can’t stand silently by, relying on others to shout your message, and trusting that people will figure out what’s coming their way. You have to communicate. You have to make your voice heard and keep your message clear.
Communication is an essential part of leadership. It’s how you take something that is in your heart, mind, or imagination, and get into someone else’s heart, mind, or imagination. Successful communication might be the most challenging leadership task you’ll face—and also one of the most important. Your effectiveness as a leader is in the degree to which you mobilize your team, which means you have to get really good at communicating to others what is important to you.
We could compare the elements of communication to the process of mailing a gift to someone: you start with the gift in your possession; then you put it in a box and ship it; and finally, your recipient receives, opens, and uses it (or returns it and buys what they really want). This process of sending something from one person to another is analogous to communication, although in the latter case, the “item” being transferred is invisible, and the exchange often takes place instantaneously.
If we break it down, this communication process involves six components: a sender, a recipient, a message, a code, a channel, and a response. Each component is crucial, and, much like the classic children’s game of “telephone,” each can become dysfunctional or distort the message along the way. Compound that by the multiple people talking and responding and talking again in a leadership context, and you begin to see how important it is for leaders to understand and master each component of the communication process.
1. The Sender: It Starts with You
In team contexts, the communication sender is often you as the leader: you decide to share something you believe could benefit the recipient(s). Your message might convey instructions, values, vision, correction, affirmation, or any number of other things. Maybe it’s a memo to the staff about punctuality, for example, or an announcement to the public about an exciting new product or service that is in development, or a conversation with a specific person about an area of work performance that needs improvement.
The message starts with you, which means you are responsible for communicating it. You own it, you understand it, and you want to share it. If your communication fails to elicit the desired response, don’t be too quick to lay the blame on your recipients. First consider how well you did your part as the sender.
When it comes to communication, leaders tend to focus mostly on their message because they assume the message is all that matters. But the message always comes from a person—you. And you can’t separate yourself from your message. In other words, what you communicate will be colored by your worldview, experiences, prejudices, insecurities, goals, and personality. That’s inevitable, but inevitability is not an excuse—t’s just a reminder to be wise and humble when you communicate. Before you speak, check your motivations, check your attitude, check your facial expressions, and make sure you know what you want to say. Be careful and intentional about what comes out of your mouth or onto your screen.
2. The Recipients: It’s All about Them
The recipient of your message might be an individual, a team, an entire organization, customers, church members, volunteers, or any number of others. Regardless, the point of communication is not to launch a message into an unsuspecting universe and hope someone listens. It is to reach a specific audience (whether that’s one person or a thousand people) with a specific message. If the audience doesn’t get the message, communication failed. Period. That means that reaching the intended recipients is the strategic focus of all communication. In that sense, what you say needs to be more about your recipients than it is about you.
The principle that communication is about the hearers has at least four practical implications. First, don’t get offended if your message is not well received. For example, if the only people who read your memo about punctuality are the ones who already arrive at work on time, or if your new product announcement is met with yawns instead of cheers, or if the individual you were trying to motivate toward improvement can’t seem to understand what the problem is, don’t get upset. Take a moment to think about why the reception of your message was less than ideal. If what you say doesn’t meet a felt need, or if people don’t see the point or understand the relevance of your message, getting mad at them won’t help. You might feel sad or frustrated or disappointed, but keep your focus on the people receiving the message, not your feelings. Do your best to improve your messaging, while also remembering that your audience has free will—they determine their own response, and you can’t totally control that. Your role as the communication sender is simply to do the best you can to reach your recipients with your message.
Second, tweak your communication based on feedback from your hearers. Don’t just repeat the same thing louder—ind a better way to say it. That means paying attention to the cues you get from the other party. Whether that party is a person sitting across your desk, a group of people on the receiving end of your email blast, or a roomful of conference attendees, there will usually be some feedback that can help you evaluate and improve your messaging. Maybe it’s an email reply, maybe it’s the body language of an audience, maybe it’s the facial expression of a person you’re talking to—these things and many more can give you clues about how well you are getting your message across. Your goal is to communicate, not just to impress, wax eloquent, or vent; so listen to the feedback or read their cues and adjust your communication accordingly.
Third, pay attention to how well they are paying attention to you. If your recipients aren’t listening, you might as well be addressing an empty room. This is where reading people and reading rooms comes into play. If your hearers are worried, or on their phones, or rushing out the door, or upset with you, or just really tired, don’t be in a hurry to get your point across. Good communicators don’t jump into the heart of their message until their audience is engaged. That might mean taking a break, telling a joke, asking a question, explaining the problem, changing up your delivery, or simply tabling a discussion until a better time.
And finally, know your audience. The better you understand your audience, the better you’ll know how to speak to them. What are they worried about? What do they care about? What do they want to accomplish? What approach or presentation or wording or illustration will help them the most? Leadership is about serving people, and communication is an important tool you can use to better serve your team.
3. The Message: What You Want to Say
“First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak,” taught the ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus.4 In other words, think before you speak, as your parents tried to tell you when you were growing up. You know the essence of what you want to say, but the hard work is what comes next, and it needs to happen before you call a staff meeting or fire off a group text message. Identify exactly what you feel, believe, and want. You need to offer more than a vague idea if you want to reach people’s minds and hearts. Work through your thoughts on your own first. Sort out the pros and cons, the risks and advantages. Break your message down into distinct parts and ensure each one makes sense. There is a place for processing ideas out loud and off the top of your head, but if you’re planning to do that, give people fair warning that you’re processing, not proclaiming, and don’t frame mental or emotional musings as decisions or facts.
4. The Code: Language Matters
How does your message cross from your mind to the mind of the recipient? It must be encoded in written or spoken words, body language, pictures, charts, tables, mottoes, lists, or anything else that expresses your message. In the shipping analogy, the message is the gift, and the code is the box that carries it to the recipient. Messages don’t telepathically appear in someone else’s brain: they must be translated into a shared code that conveys your meaning.
That’s all language is, actually: a communication code. We laugh when we see people who speak different languages trying to communicate by talking more loudly or slowly, as if the problem were somehow with the other person’s hearing. But the problem isn’t lack of hearing; it’s lack of a shared code, the language used to transmit a message. Similar problems can occur when leaders fail to communicate in terms their recipients can fully understand, even when they do in fact share the same language. This might happen for any number of reasons: your email was rushed and too confusing; you showed up to a meeting stressed and came across too aggressive; your graphs were too complicated; or you simply didn’t have the words to explain what you meant when you answered a question. All of them are code fails.
Your job isn’t done just because you spoke your mind in whatever form suited you in the moment. You have to make sure your message was properly deciphered on arrival. That’s on you as the sender more than the recipient, and it comes back to knowing your audience well.
How can you do that? One way is to speak in the same language as the hearer. I don’t mean a literal language like English or Spanish or Chinese, of course (that’s a given), but a metaphorical language, the “code” I mentioned above. In other words, use words, illustrations, logic, and humor that will be understood by your hearers.
Second, communicate empathetically. That is, put yourself in the recipients’ shoes for a minute. Do your best to understand how they will interpret what you are saying on both an informational and emotional level. That’s not easy, which is precisely why communication is a skill—you have to learn how to say things in a way that people will understand. For example, before sending an important email, reread the entire thing, thinking about what the recipients will read and feel, and making sure you are communicating both the information and the emotion you intend.
Finally, make sure your verbal and nonverbal communication are aligned. In other words, consider how your body language, tone, and approach will be received and whether they support or contradict your words. Do you sound like you’re joking when you’re actually serious? Do you look angry but you’re just deep in thought? Do you seem disinterested when you’re really processing ideas? You may need to remind your face to reflect your thoughts and your words.
5. The Channel: Reaching Crowds, Not Crickets
If, for the sake of nostalgia, you’ve ever logged in to an old social media account (such as your MySpace account from 2008) and posted something, and then received absolutely no response because your friends abandoned that channel years ago, you know what an ineffective communication channel is. It is any channel your target audience isn’t using. You can send out eloquent messages all you want, but if no one is tuned in to that channel, you’re not communicating.
As a leader, utilize the means of communication best suited to reach your target audience, whether that is a person, your team, or the public at large. Before you default to the channel you are most comfortable with or have traditionally used, identify the channel your audience is listening to most and the one that will best communicate your message. You might use email, texts, social media posts, sticky notes, to-o lists, hallway meetings, weekly staff meetings, one-n-ne conversations, video conferences, project management software, or any other of the myriad of communication options that exist or will exist in the future. The point is, find what works.
Communication is never easy or perfect, so you’ll continually be looking for ways to send out your message more effectively. It helps to diversify across multiple channels, because different audiences tend to gravitate toward different platforms or strategies. As a leader, you will likely have to choose a master communication strategy for work purposes, such as getting everybody onboard with a particular app or software; but that doesn’t eliminate the need for being smart about messaging across other channels as well.
6. The Response: Communicate for Change
In his book Communicating for a Change, communicator and pastor Andy Stanley recommends “refusing to stand up and speak until you know the answer to two questions: What is the one thing I want my audience to know? What do I want them to do about it?”5 Your goal in communication is generally to both convey information and to persuade, because you are a leader and you want to take people in a certain direction. You aren’t just transmitting data randomly; you’re using it to make a point. You’re motivating and guiding people toward a goal. So most communication is intended to produce some sort of response. You need to know what response you are looking for before you communicate in order to measure the success of the messaging.
The response of the recipient indicates the effectiveness of the communication. Even if the response is not what you were hoping for, it at least tells you the extent to which your message was received. Are your recipients confused or informed? Excited or scared? Encouraged or frustrated?
People make decisions based on their understanding, which consists primarily of their mental and emotional perception of what is true. If you can help them understand your message, they will likely respond in the way you hoped they would. If you can’t, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle, trying to override their logical and emotional barriers. Understanding is key, and it’s worth taking the time to help people grasp what you are saying and why it is important and true.
Based on the response, you can decide how to continue. Assuming the message was received and internalized, you can expect it to be acted upon. If you can tell the message wasn’t received the right way, or wasn’t received at all, don’t repeat it ad nauseum. Go back to the steps above. Make sure you and the recipient are on the same page, and that it’s the right page. Think through your message again and make it even clearer. Evaluate the way you are communicating (the code) and the channel through which you are sending the message.
You might need to do additional homework, ask more questions, reach out to some influencers, or simply wait for a better time. But whatever you do, don’t just settle for watching golf balls fly toward crowds, hoping someone else speaks up. Your team and your objectives are too important to leave communication to chance.