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Question of the Week: COMMUNICATION SHOULD BE A TOP PRIORITY FOR ALL LEADERS?


The Walking Leader (dot) com’s Weekly Leadership Poll Question for this week (09/29 – 10/05) is: COMMUNICATION SHOULD BE A TOP PRIORITY FOR ALL LEADERS? (click here to answer)

Communication is the only priority. When it comes to leaders becoming leaders, staying leaders, and making new leaders communication is king. By this I mean there is no other form that will convey the message and sustain the message greater than communication.

Communication in all its forms is what drives leadership.

Whether it be written or spoken, the message of the leader to her followers and the message of the followers to the leader must be clear, concise, well read, understood and can be acted upon with impunity then the conveyance of the message is success. Why with impunity?

Impunity is defined as the “exception from punishment or freedom from the injures consequences of inaction“. Thus when the message is clear, concise and understood, there should be no worries about what actions need to be taken, as there is no misunderstanding. Unfortunately, not all forms of communications are this way. Most messages are riddled with ambiguity and most of all uncertainty. It’s a miracle any work gets done at all.

So, as the leader must lead by example it falls upon the leader to deliver any message (in any format) in a manner that the message is understood and can be acted upon. It is when a leader fails to deliver that caliber of message that the followers cannot act on the message. When open ended questions are asked the answers will vary almost to the level of missing the point of the question altogether and that is when the ambiguity and the uncertainty creeps in.

It falls on the leaders, all leaders at all levels of the organization, to ensure that they work on improving their communication skills. Whether it is practicing your speeches, practicing and honing their writing skills, or creating better graphics they have the responsibility to ensure the message is understood.

Of course, there are applications and software packages that will change text or create better looking designs but where is the leader learning to improve? If the leader turns over those functions of communication to a software package and washes his hands of personally improving the content then how is that leader getting better? The leader is not getting better.

The leader got into a position of leadership begin by doing the dirty work and the leader must continue to do that to dirty work even if it means cracking open a thesaurus, every once in awhile. Therefore, the leader must do everything he or she can to improve themselves personally and professionally. If they have to give the speech how are they going to get better there are no applications for that? What there is, is standing up in front of a mirror and practicing and speech over and over again.

Because the message is so important, communication IS a Top Priority. As I mentioned, Communication is what put the leaders in that position they are now. Communicating is what will keep them there. Communicating is how they will make new future leaders. And again as always, that is nonnegotiable!

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David G. Guerra, MBA
email: [email protected]
twitter: @daveguerra
instagram: dave_guerra
facebook: thedavidguerra

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Question of the Week: What is the one thing you would like to change about Leadership?

East German Border Guards Riding By The Wall In Teltow, East Germany photo by David G. Guerra (circa 1987)This week’s walking leader weekly leadership poll question is ” what is the one thing you would like to change about leadership?”

That’s a loaded question and the answer is, as well. And what I mean by a loaded answer is that the answers will vary from the simple to the complicated. Because the question reaches deep inside an individual and every individual has been impacted by good leadership, mediocre leadership, and awesome leadership as well as bad management. Thus, most people’s answer will come from past experiences.

Using myself as an example, I can reach back far into my life, even my early childhood and can say that my grandfather impacted my fledgling concept of leadership. Then as I grew older my father to some extreme of well not so good management. Whom I kidding, he was a terrible manager. He is my father but he was not a leader. Of course, he did the best he could with what he had when it came to raising a family but for some strange reason, he could not help himself.

Obviously, there were other individuals, that impacted my sense of leadership. Them and what leadership meant to them or how they showed it started to chip away at the rawness of I understood leadership was and was not. All that took place while I was growing up. It was not until after I graduated high school that the reality of what leadership is, what it is not, and what makes bad managers started to influence me. I found out because I volunteered for it.

I joined the U.S. Army as an Infantryman. An Infantryman like my Grandfathers before me. The Army in its infinite wisdom and by luck I found myself in a place where PROFESSIONALISM was not just a word but it was a day-to-day expectation. It was the STANDARD.

PROFESSIONALISM was not a word on a poster on a wall in someone’s office. We lived and breathed PROFESSIONALISM 24-7-365-52. When I joined the military, we did not know then that we were in the ending days of the Cold War.

My first duty station was 110 miles behind the Iron Curtain. I was based in West Berlin. My barracks room was a couple hundred feet from East Germany in the Soviet Zone of Occupation. It was said that Soviet mortars were zeroed in on our barracks buildings. We were told that if war were actually to happen, we would be the first to go while we slept in our bunks. Not a pretty thought, but we lived with that concept every single day. We believed that because not a day went by that we didn’t see a Soviet tour car or Soviet Mi-8 Helicopter fly around. That was a lot for kid fresh out of high school, but what made all of that bearable were our leaders.

Oh yeah, there were few knuckleheads here and there, but for the most part we all knew that we were all we had should something go wrong. Being 110 miles behind enemy lines limits your options of relief or rescue. Thus, that is why I say I was lucky to be assigned to that unit, at that place and time, and it shaped me into the person I would become after I left Berlin.

The examples of leadership that I experience first-hand in West Berlin, were never ever to be duplicated again. The Officers and Non-Commissioned Officers as well as the Enlisted soldiers of the Berlin Brigade each brought their “A-game” every single day, come rain or shine. We had no choice not only was it a standard it was the standard our nation called on us to deliver because of where we were and because on a daily basis, we stood toe-to-toe with our adversaries. Because of where we were and our mission in Berlin centered on PROFESSIONALISM. That is because PROFESSIONALISM was the mission, it was the vision, it was where everything began and everything ended when it came to being assigned to the legendary divided city of West Berlin. If we failed being PROFESSIONAL then we would have failed in our mission. We did not fail.

Thus, I ask myself this week’s question; What is the one thing I would like to change about leadership?

The one thing is for leaders to remember and never forget that their actions will be emulated by those that follow them. What they do will mean so much more than what they say. For leaders to believe in themselves as PROFESSIONALS. For leaders to believe that those who follow them are as PROFESSIONAL as they are.

The moment a leader forgets to be PROFESSIONAL is the moment that leader should be stripped of the title of Leader and that is Non-negotiable!
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David G. Guerra, MBA
email: [email protected]
twitter: @daveguerra
instagram: dave_guerra
facebook: thedavidguerra

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September 2019: Embracing Change by David Guerra

September 2019

When we hear a word September immediately comes to mind trees losing their leaves, cool crisp mornings, football, and pumpkin spice lattes? Seriously, what we’re really doing is thinking about change. Change in the sense that everything around this is changing and so are we. However, we don’t think about ourselves as changing, only the environment changes.

As the song goes, ” seasons change” so must we. But we’re constantly evolving. We as human beings as individuals are constantly in a state of dynamic change. Believe it or not it is called getting older. That’s the dynamic part. As we age, we start to see ourselves in a whole different light. We see ourselves as that kid that was raking the leaves on the front yard and then jumping into the pile. Now we have to rake those leaves, but the last thing we want to do is jump into the pile. Hell, we might break a hip or something.

There’s the change. We get older we got wiser (well I hope we got wiser). Soon those cold Chris mornings will turn into blustery icy days. And sound winter will arrive. Winter comes to signify the end of the year. Winter is the last season and the cycle of plants trees, and just about everything else. Of course, all of that waits until spring when it gets born again. And change comes again.

But it comes to change, as individuals we tend to fight it. When it comes to change, as leaders we are taught and teach others to embrace it. Talk about the duality of man. We fight it and we embrace it and then we fight it again only to embrace it yet again.

And so, we struggled again, much like those gridiron warriors and two every Sunday afternoon. Battling back and forth across 100 yards of artificial turf but at the end of the day there is a winner. However, in our case we hope and pray it is the leader that comes out winning and not the individual. The leader has to win, in the sense that she knows that change while fleeting will come again. The leader must know that this week’s battle is one but we must prepare for the next battle next week or tomorrow morning or later this afternoon or three weeks now but you get my drift.

Enjoy December, after enjoying November, of course after enjoying October, but all that is moot as we still have to get through September. So, my friends I say enjoy the change in the season, enjoyed a change in weather, but most of all, enjoy September. It is only 30 days but these 30 days we’ll set the pace and the standard for the remaining months of this calendar year. These 30 days also said the standard by which the remaining days of this year will play out and eventually take this into the depths winter.

Embrace the change that is coming. Appreciate the change as it signifies time’s humility. Humility in that no matter what he can go fast in tank slowdown it goes at the pace that it has to go whether we like it or not. Time is humble and all I can do is keep us humble. And because time’s humility is not perfect it does grant us the perfect opportunity to live through the change that is coming.

Leaders, this one is for you: lead by example by embracing change and encouraging others to do so as well.

You have your mission

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David G. Guerra, MBA
email: [email protected]
twitter: @daveguerra
instagram: dave_guerra
facebook: thedavidguerra