In turbulent times, the ability to communicate with power and purpose becomes a crucial leadership competency. Smart executives realize that leadership communication isn't a matter of "making nice," but a strategic necessity. Organized around an original model defining the important communication roles a leader must fill, The Leader as Communicator examines roles as diverse as trust-builder and critic, renewal champion and navigator, learning advocate and provocateur. The book presents case studies of organizations including Cadillac, Emerson, and Saturn, plus dozens of other examples. Packed with strategies and tactics showing how leaders can shape the communications climate of their organizations, the book culminates with assessment exercises that let readers measure their own communication skills. This insightful book demonstrates how to become a stronger, more confident leader--one who can use communication to build alignment, enthusiasm, and productivity.

Grounded in extensive research, this book offers practical guidelines to help professionals think, coach, converse, speak, write, meet, and negotiate strategically to deliver results. --

Ron Crossland, former Chairman of the Tom Peters Company, now Chairman of Bluepoint Leadership has revised has updated his business leadership classic for the quickly changing needs of today's business world.The leader speaks. Followers applaud on command. There is an illusion that communication took place, but it didn't. Unfortunately, this communication failure breeds additional communication static. Over time, leaders resort to commands rather than communication. This leads to breaking talent, not starting it. The Leader's Voice is the language of your associates and your constituents. They listen in facts, emotions, and symbols.By focusing on the principles of communication outlined in this book, leaders can overcome the obstacles that inhibit peak performance. Communication using the Leader's Voice will help individuals and organizations achieve their full potential.

It is hard to overstate the importance of the leader-member exchange relationship. Employees who share a high-quality relationship with their leader are more likely to earn a higher salary, climb the ranks more quickly, and report higher life satisfaction levels than their peers who have a less copasetic leader-member relationship. While Leader-Member Exchange Theory (LMX) research addresses the impact that the leader-member relationship has on the individual employee experience, much of this scholarship overlooks or obscures the vital role that communication plays in the development and maintenance of workgroup relationships. Much of extant literature also glosses over the role that communication plays in workgroup collaboration. Using a communicative lens, this text illustrates the complex theoretical underpinnings of LMX theory, such as the importance of social interaction and relationship building and maintenance necessary to achieve organizational goals. We explore how an employee’s relationship with their leader also shapes their peer relationships and their overall standing within their workgroup. Further, the text examines the potential dark side of LMX theory, such as the tendency towards demographic and trait and state similarity. Employing a communicative perspective emphasizes the extent of position and personal power both leaders and members have in engineering the quality of the relationship they desire. Integrating and applying once disparate lines of academic literature, this book offers employees, students, and teacher-scholars pragmatic yet research-based insights into developing and maintaining successful, healthy workplace relationships.

For more than three decades, award-winning leadership and communication expert David Grossman has helped scores of leaders become great leader communicators who drive impressive results for their organizations. Naturally, the global pandemic and mounting racial unrest of 2020 handed leaders one of their biggest challenges yet, with a level of social and economic tumult not seen in more than a century.Despite the upheaval, many leaders rose to the occasion, and often by drawing not just from experience and wise counsel, but from being human as they led - what Grossman calls Heart First leadership. In Heart First, Grossman explores the many aspects of being more authentic in leadership and how that can profoundly inspire a team and move them to achieve remarkable things, especially in times of change or crisis.Heart First also features interviews with CEOs and guest columns from senior leaders inside a variety of organizations, each of whom share extraordinarily candid insights and unique lessons learned from a year that changed everything.

Make every communication count—with a simple, four-step speaking model Whether it's among colleagues at lunch or an audience of a thousand, a leader's role is to move and inspire others. It's not only the big occasions that test a leader's mettle, but the little ones as well—in a casual conversation in the elevator, in phone calls, or one of many incidental, seemingly "insignificant" interactions in everyday work life. Written by one of the world's leading communications coaches, Speaking as a Leader shows you how to make the most of your daily communications, creating a presence on the job as a genuine and constant leader. In this eye-opening guide, aspiring (and established) leaders can enhance their reputations and influence by following a few simple steps. Speaking as a Leader: Shows how to structure your thoughts and message in any situation using a four-step model Offers tips on listening effectively, in three dimensions Details why you are the best visual and how to avoid "Death by PowerPoint" Offers guidance on taking the "numb" out of numbers Includes tips on moving from subject to message With Speaking as a Leader, you'll learn to tap into your innate leadership skills at every occasion—whether small or large—and earn the sort of respect that creates devoted friends and passionate supporters.

Leadership Communication articulates the important roles communication plays in helping to co-construct group, organizational, or community direction. Leadership Communication focuses on the communication skills necessary to help co-construct an effective direction in one's systems while playing the varied roles of doer, follower, guide, manager, and/or leader. Leadership Communication is organized around three major units: 1) the integrally linked role played by communication and direction-givers in constructing our past, current, and future experiences; 2) the communication skills required for different types of direction-givers, and 3) the nature of dramatic action, which represents human engagement in systems, that may manifest as ethical action and future experiences. This book has a number of unique features including: a coherent and unified set of frameworks with which to synthesize and employ a wide range of leadership research results and theory as well as other practical materials from contemporary leadership studies; a focus on explaining the common communicative elements and skills (e.g., soliciting and saving narratives for use as teaching tales, strategic stories, and memorable messages; framing and critical incidents; dialog, discussion, and debate) involved across seemingly quite different leadership contexts (e.g., working in groups, in small organizations, in large and complex organizations, in social movements, in communities, and in the broad cultural sweep of civic life); a discussion of the different processes for attaining a direction-giving role or position given the different needs faced by the system; an explanation of the art of following, doing, and guiding well: the "small leadership" so often overlooked or undervalued in leader-centric explanations for effective systems; an explanation of three different orientations for "communicating the vision": selling a vision; working with those who are seeking a vision; and acting with those for whom a vision is an evoked co-construction; and a discussion of how crisis (as a point of decision or of opportunity) can be useful as a source of the energy and rhetorical resources necessary for rare and difficult forms of dramatic action (leadership).