Have you ever had a conversation with someone who you felt was talking over your head? Maybe on purpose? It’s not effective communication at all. The Colonel said, “You may think I’m smart, and maybe I am. But all of my smarts and all my degrees don’t amount to anything if I can’t communicate in a manner that inspires and empowers others to act on what I’ve said.”
Throughout my childhood, my father hammered into me the importance of being well-spoken and having a broad vocabulary. During my grade school years, Dad gave me weekly assignments to look up words in the dictionary and then write out the definitions. This was a dual task intended to both increase my vocabulary and improve my handwriting. In junior high, the weekly assignments grew, with the added goal of using the thesaurus to research and provide a minimum of five similar words that could be substituted without changing the overall meaning of a sentence. While I didn’t appreciate it much as a kid, as an adult, I am grateful for that forced expansion of my vocabulary.
Unfortunately, while I am proud of my advanced vocabulary, I am often chastised for “talking over peoples’ heads.” The interesting part of this critique (which I didn’t realize until I became a speaker) is that it doesn’t matter if you have an advanced vocabulary if you cannot successfully communicate your meaning. I have struggled against those who have advised me to “water down” my vocabulary to be more effective. I still struggle with it, even though I know they’re right. As one who aspires to be a master communicator, it does my audience no benefit if they lose my message because they don’t understand every tenth word I say. Furthermore, it doesn’t make me look smarter; it makes me come off as inauthentic.
As leaders, it’s our responsibility to express ourselves in such a manner that our message is easy to understand and causes the listener to internalize or act upon that message. You can’t inspire or empower someone with a message that goes over their head or that they don’t understand enough to act upon. It is our obligation to make sure we communicate our meaning successfully so that we empower others to take action. Fancy words are only fancy if they can be fully grasped and used to inspire others to share your vision.
Read Lauren’s Whitepaper on The Nine Essentials of Significant Leadership.
