We are All Broadcasters of Information During This Time

On today’s episode, our host Brian Crooke talks to Gina London about the importance of communication during these difficult times and about the impact of a consistent and positive leadership communication structure. 

Gina’s lifelong passion for storytelling led her to a career in journalism. She’s a former correspondent and anchor for CNN and has travelled the world working with organisations and people highlighting issues and campaigns. She was a strategist for the first immunisation awareness campaign in Cambodia and worked with the first women running for parliament in Iraq. She now works with corporate and emerging leaders on storytelling; on the delivery and the construction of purposeful communication.

Video interaction versus in-person communication

Gina talks about how important it is to be mindful of the way you communicate during video interactions. Simplifying your backdrop during calls is one aspect anyone can improve. For example, there are services like Zoom that offer people the chance to use a green screen as their background. Lighting is another essential aspect people should take into consideration. It’s hard to communicate consistently over a video call, but it gets even more confusing when you can’t see the other person’s face. The fatigue rate of video communication is something that was being discussed even before COVID, but now more than ever, people are feeling the effects.

It is twice as tiring to try to pay attention, lock somebody and listen to them on video than it would be to have a conversation in a boardroom or across a desk. That is why engaging with your audience during a video call is crucial. Looking directly at the camera while talking as opposed to looking down at the corner of the screen, will give the other person the impression that you are addressing them. That will send a message that you care for that person particularly and that your audience is the most important thing. Keeping people’s attention, especially now when the fatigue rate is so high, can be a challenging task. 

Dispelling the myth of the authentic leader

When people talk about wanting to be an authentic leader, they generally refer to authenticity as a means to make excuses for themselves. It’s an excuse for leaders to avoid developing themselves around leadership communications or executive presence. “Someone can go - Well, that’s not me! - and that’s limiting behaviour.” Communication and continuous development is a massive part of leadership. Gina believes purposely demonstrating your company’s values is not inauthentic, that’s deliberate communication, and there’s a difference. 

As a leader, bringing your frustrations into a call with a customer or your team is not an option. That is because people deserve the energy and the positive emotion, and it’s not about being fake, it’s about demonstrating purposeful value. 

How do we preserve the good aspects of remote work?

“We’ve never had a personal life and a professional life, we’ve always just had a life. [...] some really good things are coming out about this interaction, this humbling of us.” 

How do we maintain some of that as we get back into our offices? Keeping those five o’clock sharing meetings with your team could be something beneficial in the long run. Gina suggests coming together with your team and brainstorming ideas of what they would like to keep and how. “Maybe you don’t always have adult beverages brought into the office at five o’clock. But there’s got to be some way when you start getting real with each other, that you keep that realness going because that does ultimately make more cohesive teams. It makes a more articulate culture, you can look at that culture and understand it. And that’s going then to impact the bottom line for shareholders and for customers, and it’s a great thing.”

Over-communicating leads to exhaustion; how do we avoid that? 

Leaders need to communicate with their teams, but it’s also essential for them to be judicious. It’s not always about over-communicating, it’s about wisely talking, not just telling people what you think they want to hear, but guiding them. Preparation before meetings is essential in Gina’s opinion: “prepare so that you can contribute, not just be reactive”. Purposeful communicators prepare, listen, they try to anticipate the questions, the concerns, the hopes, dreams and fears of that audience. And they try to come up with positive solutions for those.

People seem to send and receive between 35 to 45% more emails during this time. Even before COVID and remote working, the approach to emails was to read subject lines and triage as you go. So people are sending more emails and receiving fewer responses which is a result of an inefficient email structure. If you’re going to be over-communicating, try to make your ask in an email at the very top. If there’s more information, then put it below, that’s part of becoming strategic. Lead with a headline, if you have time, give more details, if you don’t, leave it out.

The situation we are living in has its benefits, and one of them is getting businesses to accelerate their leap into the virtual space. Gina is happy to announce that she is getting ready to launch a brand new online learning platform called The Language of Leadership. Her platform combines daily micro-videos with an online exercise so that people can individually skill themselves incrementally and become comfortable and confident communicators. This six-month program approaches a different topic each month. “We kick off with executive presence; we move into motivating and inspiring teams. We also focus on presentations in person and virtual storytelling, your social media curation. And finally, then we wrap up with the importance of business writing.”

You can watch the full video of our conversation with Gina through this link.

Go to www.ginalondon.com for more information or reach out to Gina on LinkedIn.