Communicate As A Leader

Your subordinates must know the difference between offers, invitations, requests, and commands.

In What You Want and When You Don’t I wrote about why it is so hard to ask for what we want from our families, our romantic partners, our investors, and from our superiors. However, Leaders have a special obligation to communicate their wantings well, because any utterance can take on the meaning of a command — even if it was just a casual thinking-out-loud kind of speculation.

I discovered this when my research group expanded from four doctoral students to 12, and I found that my students were spending additional energy trying to figure out what it was I wanted. Sometimes:

• When I thought I was suggesting, they thought I was commanding.
• When I thought I was prioritizing, they thought I was brainstorming.
• When I thought I was asking, they thought I was accusing.

Finally, one of my mentors asked me, “Tom, how do your subordinates know the difference between your invitations, your requests, and your commands?”

I had no idea.