The Communication Secret Of The Successful Servant Leader
Before you serve your team, you need to understand what they’re trying to say
Tamara thought she was doing a good job as a servant leader. Her team generally liked her, and performance was pretty good across the board. There was only one problem: Joe.
Don’t get me wrong, they got on well, or at least so it seemed. It’s just that he couldn’t deliver good quality work, and she couldn’t understand why.
They tried to talk it through on several occasions. The conversation was often brief and she could never draw more than heartfelt apologies from Joe.
Tamara was unable to get to the root of the issue, and Joe’s work wasn’t getting better. That upset her quite a bit.
What was she doing wrong?
Looking at the story just now, it’s easy to conclude that Joe might be choosing passive-aggression to express unhappiness about the work assigned. He probably likes the working environment and Tamara’s leadership style, but he’s unhappy about his own tasks. However, he chooses to avoid direct confrontation on the topic for fear of appearing “negative”, or selfish, and bring down the team.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happens in the end: the team is worse off due to his subpar performance, and Tamara has a difficult nut to crack.
Now, it’s easy to put the blame on Joe for displaying this behavior, which could be branded as naïve or even immature. Regardless, it’s Tamara who’s actually at fault here for being unable to see the actual issue, in spite of her frequent talks with the guy.
There is more than just words and speech in the world of communication
Communicating without words
Babies learn to communicate with their parents long before they learn how to speak. Dogs can signal to their owner that it’s walkies time or that they’re distressed by the thunderstorm we faintly hear in the distance.
These are simple examples of non-verbal communication, and it’s easy to dismiss them as unrelated to the world of business. However, psychological studies carried out since the 1960s have shown that non-verbal cues play an important role in building up an accurate understanding of what people are saying.
Non-verbal cues include body posture / language, the tone of somebody’s voice and their facial expression.
The extent of their importance is up to debate, with extreme proponents suggesting that they contribute to more than 90% of a message and others giving it much lower relevance. That’s less crucial to us than the fact that these clues are there, and they cannot be ignored in the context of servant leadership.
You cannot ignore non-verbal cues when talking to your team
The interesting thing about this non-verbal portion of communication is that it’s often more direct than the verbal part itself. In other words, it’s more difficult to bend them to mask our feelings.
This has two key implications for the servant leader:
- They need to be able to read their team’s cues
- They need to learn to control and shape their own non-verbal language to better communicate with the team
Easy right? Well, not so fast.
The language of non-verbal communication
Non-verbal communication, like its words-based counterpart, has its own language and its own rules. Unfortunately, unlike verbal communication, these rules are less codified and therefore harder to learn. They’re also more personal and culture-dependent.
What does it mean in practice? It means you need to understand your team members’ social and cultural context in order to be able to read them correctly. Or in other words, you need to understand where they’re coming from and what they’re about.
This is not something you can do in five minutes, even if you have a very similar background. It’s a process which takes time and continuous observation of non-verbal cues during daily (work) life.
Learning the language of non-verbal communication takes time and observation
The other side of the coin is, of course, your own communication style. Once you learned the non-verbal language of the team member you’re trying to serve, you can use the same language when it’s you doing the talk. In fact, copying somebody’s positive body language is a surefire way to build trust, as it will make them more at ease with you and, by extension, open up more.
The content of non-verbal communication
Another difference between verbal and non-verbal communication is about the aspects they express. Whereas verbal communication is very effective as a way to transfer data and knowledge, non-verbal communication is all about the emotions and intentions of both the “sender” and the “receiver”.
These are just as important as the message itself. After all, us humans are emotional beings and our feelings and intentions play a big role on our state of mind, in turn affecting long-term performance and efficiency.
Emotions and intentions are just as important as the message being delivered
In Joe’s case from earlier, it’s easy to see how this plays out. Joe doesn’t refuse to do the job, but he does it poorly. His main intention is to preserve the good relationship with Tamara, so he carries out the task anyway in spite of his dislike of the work.
Tamara, on her part, fails to read Joe’s displeasure, which could be due to either him concealing his own emotions, or her misreading the non-verbal cues present.
Effective non-verbal communication
So, what can we do to ensure we utilize non-verbal cues effectively when serving our team?
First of all, we need to learn the non-verbal language of each team member. This used to be easier when we were all sitting in the same office as we could simply observe people’s behavior during meetings and watercooler interactions.
In this age of remote work and Slack messaging, it’s becoming a bit more challenging, but not impossible. The non-verbal cues can now be observed during video calls and, to a lesser extent, through emojis and stickers used in chats.
Socialization is another good source of observable behavior, and again its viability depends on the nature of the team (local vs. remote), and the ability to get together outside work.
The second step to achieve effective non-verbal communication is awareness, both of our own and the other person’s emotions and intentions. Some non-verbal cues, such as facial expressions, are more controllable than other, more visceral ones. Breathing patterns, for example, often reflect somebody’s mood and mental state, and therefore are more tricky to control.
Some non-verbal cues are easier to control consciously
When communicating, we should at least be able to “modulate” the more conscious ones to ensure we elicit the desired response in our audience. And it doesn’t end there.
We also need to analyze this response against our expectation. When there’s a mismatch, we need to investigate more and understand whether our approach needs tuning, or whether there’s an issue at the receiving end that we need to look into further.
To sum up, there’s more to communication than just the message delivered through words and speech. The way we speak, our posture and facial expressions can make this message stronger or weaker, as they convey the real emotions and intentions behind it.
Not only that, they also elicit an emotional response that can give us useful insights on the effectiveness of our communication approach.
Moreover, this emotional response will vary from person to person, implying that the same delivery style isn’t going to work with everyone the same way. That’s because the language of non-verbal communication is highly personal and affected by a number of disparate factors such as culture and life experience, and people will use their own language to interpret our message.
The interpretation of non-verbal cues varies from person to person
When trying to serve a team, we should strive to understand each individual to the best of our abilities, and use a communication style which is compatible with them, rather than the other way around.
That’s perhaps the greatest secret of an effective servant leader: communicating in the language of our audience is the only way to ensure they’ll trust us and therefore allow us to serve them better.
