Communicate Credibly to Grow Your Company and Save Money in the Process

April 28, 2005 -- Chances are you probably can’t gauge how much money and lost revenue poor communication has cost your company over the past year. But it’s likely more than you can afford. Keeping up an adequate level of credible communication on an ongoing basis is one of the cornerstones for avoiding “strategic gridlock” – the persistent organizational problems that pile up and grind progress to a halt. And when you avoid strategic gridlock, you also avoid losing money to those challenges that seem to never go away.

Author and business performance expert Pamela S. Harper advises, “To accelerate progress toward a company’s key objectives, leaders must do more than transmit information. They must communicate credibly.”

In her book, Preventing Strategic Gridlock®: Leading Over, Under, & Around Organizational Jams to Achieve High Performance Results (Cameo Publications, $19.95, ISBN 0-9715739-4-8), Harper shows business leaders how to avoid the hidden roadblocks that could lead to strategic gridlock, resulting in poor communication. As Harper explains, business leaders can prevent strategic gridlock when they fully consider all six of the guidelines and principles of organizational reality, which are represented by the acronym U.N.L.O.C.K.® That is, business leaders need to Understand the full challenge, Negotiate buy-in of key stakeholders, Locate cultural advancers and blockers, Organize relevant goals, priorities, and action plans, Communicate credibly, and Keep adjusting.

One very important step of this process is communicating credibly. Realize that there’s a big difference between transmitting information and communicating credibly. To communicate credibly and grow your company, you need to meet the needs of employees, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. One of those needs is consistency. Do you “walk the talk”? To be considered credible, people must perceive that a policy is consistent with what really happens on a daily basis. You have to target your message to your audience. Also, studies show that people need multiple exposures to messages in order to digest them.

When you communicate credibly to your employees, customers, suppliers, and everyone else, people will be more comfortable providing you with the feedback you need to grow your company. Credible communication also saves money that could have been lost due to misunderstandings and a lack of trust.

Pamela S. Harper helps business leaders transform their strategies into high performance results by identifying seven roadblocks that stall success and the keys to unlock them. Founder and President of Business Advancement, Inc., Pam bases her in-depth knowledge of the impact of organizational issues on her twenty years of internal and external consulting to leaders of entrepreneurial, middle market, and Fortune 500 companies.

For more information or a review copy of Preventing Strategic Gridlock®: Leading Over, Under & Around Organizational Jams to Achieve High Performance Results, please call 866-372-2636 or send an email to e-mail protected from spam bots.