Instill Confidence, Avoid Catastrophe

What You Feel: you are making progress but there are so many risks to the business and you struggle with how this comes through in your communication

Perspective: As the leader, you set the tone.  Every minute you are being watched by customers, prospects, employees, investors, advisors, and the community at large. You have to keep the organization moving forward confidently as if it is not “if” but “when” you succeed. To do this, when you communicate, do a couple of key things:

• Instill confidence. Despite the challenges of your organization, always communicate with confidence. Confidence does not mean that you are not candid, that you don’t outline challenges or create unrealistic expectations.  Confidence is about how you deliver the message.

• Never talk catastrophe. There will be times you feel that you are on the brink of failure, at your wit’s end, too burned out to go at it the next day or have no money.  There will be times when you hit “the last straw”  with a vendor, employee, investor or customer.  Marathoners talk about “hitting the wall”  at mile 20.  Entrepreneurs hit the wall at mile 1,2,3,4,5,6,7…

  Despite this, your communication can never include words like disaster, catastrophe, quit, falling apart and the other similar words that run through your mind.  Whatever you do, and as hard as it is, eliminate these words from your public vocabulary, and share them only with your bottle of bourbon and hope that the bottle doesn’t talk.

• Avoid Cockiness.  It is essential that you are confident about your business. That being said, when that confidence shifts to cockiness, you run a great risk.  There are times people do business with you because of your business value.  There are other times they do business with you because they like you.  When you demonstrate cockiness, you make customers and employees think to themselves, “do I want to do work with them?”

There are many communication styles.  However, if you fail to instill confidence, or shake the will of your people with talk of catastrophe, or demonstrate a cockiness that makes them want to get away, you will leave a lasting negative impact that does not go away the day after.