Welcome back to the Look and Sound of Leadership, an ongoing series of executive

coaching tips designed to help you be perceived in the workplace the way you

want to be perceived. I'm

Tom Henschel, your executive coach, and today we're talking about communicating

with clarity. Joel is Chief of staff at a major metropolitan hospital. His feedback report

revealed that while people were very fond of him, they couldn't always

follow what he was talking about. I'd experienced this myself.

I'd often have to ask if he had changed topics. It's not that Joel wasn't smart, quite the

contrary. Joel was brilliant. I just couldn't always follow his train of thought, and it seemed others were having the same problem.

So he and I discussed a tool I call frameworks.

Frameworks are sign posts you drop into place for your

listeners to tell them where you're headed. I gave him an example I knew he'd

understand. We had discovered that we both enjoy a podcast called Radio

Lab, and I told him they use frameworks all the time. Radio Lab delights in telling stories about the world around us in a style that plays with sound the way painters play with color.

They know that when they make a leap in their stories, which they do all the time, they have to tell us

listeners where they're going if we're going to have any chance of following along.

And of course part of the fun of each podcast is exactly that, following along with hosts Jadaboomrod and Robert

Krollwich on a journey that's full of fun twists and turns.

Joel thought he knew exactly what I meant.

I think I heard a great one this weekend, he said.

At the very beginning of this one section, a guy's voice comes on and very slowly asks this big important question.

And then Jad cuts in and says something like,

...