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. As leaders, I think it's natural that we want to impress

our listeners. We want our messages to be

taken seriously. We want to sound expert. Unfortunately, the impulse to impress often creates behaviors that result in the opposite of the look and sound of leadership.

What follows are five short behavioral tips to help you communicate with clarity. Pay particular attention to these tips if

you have an advanced degree, if you add value through technical knowledge, if you're

highly data-driven, if you're highly artistic or

intuitive, or if you've achieved success by being a subject matter expert.

I'm going to guess that that list applies to a great many of you, but it's not intended to just be a catch-all sort of list.

Rather, those are the types of people I coach who most often need the kind of help described in the following five tips.

Ready? Here we go. Number one, get to the end of your sentences briskly without digressions.

Listen to this.

Interrupting yourself with parenthetical phrases and digressions, a style that can be followed fairly

easily on the written page because the punctuation helps us see the subordinate clauses, but when spoken aloud

and heard in real time without any chance to stop or go back, is usually a strain on our

ears.

Were you able to follow that? If so, I attribute it to two things. First, I wrote

it so I was really prepared to say it to you. Second, I trained intensely for years and years as a classical actor, and I learned how to deliver

sentences that were written hundreds of years ago structured just like that.

But many people who aren't as adept at handling complex structure... like that Thus their digression sound like ramblings.

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