A recent Washington Post headline read “Federal leadership on the decline, report says” which was referring to the newly issued report by the Office of Personnel Management for the year 2012.
Based on a 100 point scale, the overall leadership score for federal government agencies fell 3.82% (2.1 points) from 2011 to 52.8 points. Max Stier, President and Chief Executive of the Partnership for Public Service stated “it is definitely significant and consequential”.
I would heartily concur with Mr. Stier, as this report provides further confirmation of the growing global leadership crisis and the shortage of qualified leaders in our government, business and civic arenas. 52.8 out of a 100 is a failing grade score by any measure.
The report also cited that federal employees “feel less empowered to do their jobs and are less satisfied with the way senior leaders are handling their agencies”.
Additionally, “Given the current environment, sustained attention to improving leadership is not a luxury, but a necessity.”
The House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul stated that his panel “has routinely found that Department of Homeland Security mismanagement and a lack of real leadership has bred dissatisfaction throughout the ranks…”
The Office of Personnel Management report also stated that “The decrease in satisfaction with senior leaders is especially worrisome.” One of the specific issues that the report cited was that “Part of the problem is that leadership doesn’t communicate with staff well enough”.
Effective communication is not only a critical leadership issue, it is an essential attribute of an authentic leader. In the words of Gilbert Amelio, President and CEO of the National Semiconductor Corporation, “Developing excellent communication skills is absolutely essential to effective leadership. The leader must be able to share knowledge and ideas to transmit a sense of urgency and enthusiasm to others. If a leader can’t get a message across clearly and motivate others to act on it… Then having a message doesn’t even matter.”
When you consider the results of a recent Salary.com survey report, there are a lot of messages that apparently don’t matter to the American workforce at large. According to a Salary.com report, 84% of all American workers are either dissatisfied or unhappy with their jobs. Concurrently, 86% of American workers are not fully engaged in their work assignments.
On “National Boss Day” in 2012 it was reported on Yahoo! News that “Two-thirds of American’s are unhappy with their jobs to the point that they would rather have a ‘new boss’ than a pay raise.”
Good communication is a basic concept and a clear necessity for building mutually beneficial working relationships in business and government. This requires nothing less than a basic comprehension that every human being is unique and that they have genuine “value”. Effective communication and meaningful business relationships are built on the foundational building block of mutual “respect”.
People can only take appropriate actions if they are first appropriately informed about both the current situation and the work that needs to be accomplished. Regardless of how brilliant the ideas and plans of leaders may be, if they can not be effectively communicated, little progress will ever be made to achieve or implement them.
George Bernard Shaw once observed that “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” Amidst the hustle and bustle of daily work routines, the fatal mistake is that all too many supervisors, managers and executive leaders assume that their people know what they know and consequently “understand” what is at stake as well as the work to be done.
One of the primary reasons that leadership is in decline is the failure to comprehend that communication is the language of leadership.
Copyright © 2013 Developing Forward | Thomas H. Swank, CBC | All Rights Reserved.
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