Transformational Leadership And Employee Communication

Transformational leadership is all about steering the organization through change and that business outcomes are achieved because of the commitment and engagement of employees. One of the essential skills required to achieve this is to communicate change to their teams, however frequently they are not equipped with the appropriate tools to help them focus on the key message and to ensure that their team members are all facing in the one direction towards the new organizational vision. What is needed is structure and process and team briefing which is a formal communication cascading process via management is a tool that perfectly fits the bill.

It has three levels of cascading messages:1. At the first level the Company President will brief his direct reports about the key issues for that week that he wants communicated to all employees.
2. This information is then distributed to all the executive team members who then are required to communicate those topics to their teams together with what they consider the top 5 issues for their division and then the top 5 topics for their respective team.
3.

It is only the last section of a team brief that changes as this is directly related to how the corporate and divisional issues for the week relate to specific team issues. This section of the team briefing will always change depending on what the team is working on. Team briefing always works because it is very easy.

It ensures that each manager and leader in the organization understands what the top 5 issues are for the corporation, and their division. Most importantly they then have to think about what is important for their team and how it relates back to the top issues. So by using team briefing you are changing behaviour and creating a simple way for face to face communication to occur for all leaders and their teams.

The best aspect of team briefing is that you can decide if it will be weekly, fortnightly or monthly and the dates can be set a year in advance. This ensures that all leaders and managers in your organization will know when team briefings are due and will prepare for them in advance. Team dynamics is all about focussing employees in the same direction and team briefing provides the perfect tool to ensure that everyone understands the vision of the organization. Most importantly is provides a simple mechanism so that leaders and managers take the lead in ensuring that this happens. So these are the keys to making Team Briefings work. 1. Team briefing must be an easy to understand process.
2. Transformational leadership is all about changing leaders behaviour – this process needs to be owned and driven by the CEO to ensure that everyone understands the importance of it.
3.

In the first and second section of team briefing the topics must be easy for managers and leaders to communicate and understand.
4. Ensuring that there is a feedback loop is essential to ensure that managers and leaders are comfortable in conducting team briefings with the knowledge that if there is a question that they can't answer they can quickly find that answer and let team members know.
5.

It should only take . 15 minutes for a team briefing – this also ensures that managers and leaders feel comfortable that the process wont take up too much time. Team briefing serves as a great tool for focussing leaders and managers on issues to communicate face to face with their teams. As with all organizations though there will be some issues that only the CEO or Company President should deliver and these are generally the big issues of the day, mergers and acquisitions, staff retrenchments, closure of plants or offices and the reason is that employees and all leaders and managers want to hear it from the person making those big decisions. However for the operational and day to day issues team dynamics demonstrate over and over that employees want to hear about what is happening from their direct manager or leader.
To learn more about transformational leadership and team dynamics visit www.transformational-leadership.com

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