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All organizations operate with a finite amount of resources (material, financial, informational, and human) which, in turn, creates challenges to prepare employees for future leadership roles. Leaders must be effective communicators, regardless of their hierarchy of authority within the complexity of organizational structure. The authors of this study conducted secondary research via library databases, popular press books, government sources, and periodicals found online with Google Scholar, to determine if any best practices exist for leaders who are also effective communicators. We found that when a leader has developed reasoning and emotional intelligence as a skillset, employees are encouraged to work harder for that leader: employees are more willing to share responsibility for goal achievement, irrespective of the management tier. In this study, we identified four best practices any manager can implement to become a leader as an effective communicator.
Keywords: communication, leadership, emotional intelligence, managerial, style, benchmark, best practices
LEADERSHIP AND COMMUNICATION
Leadership and management are often used interchangeable. Organizations will normally give top managers titles where there is complex organizational structure, or accountability to the public, such as: Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Information Officer, Vice President of Marketing, and many more. These titles are loaded with meaning. Top level managers are considered the organization's leadership. Nevertheless, does a top manager title automatically make a top manager a leader? The answer is "That depends." Of course, a top manager title is not a guarantee of an effective leader; moreover, an immoral manager might have extraordinary influence over subordinates reporting to him or her within the organizational hierarchy. Who can forget Bemie Madoff? A pied piper with bad ideas can lead the entire organization astray. This phenomenon is established in the leadership literature. One book in particular, "Management Mistakes and Successes" has detailed the consequences of management decisions on the respective organizations of the decision makers (Hartley, 1994).
A leader is someone with a responsibility to influence one or more followers by directing goal achievement, and managers can use interpersonal communication as a scientific management approach to increase employees' personal productivity (Bell, 2011; Bell & Martin, 2012; Sethuraman & Suresh, 2014). Managerial communication is perception and expectation of the recipient, which makes demands on both parties. Information can become...