Veronica Allardice, a founding director of the Theatre of Leadership, takes a look at why performance skills can help leaders become more expressive and provide the inspirational communication needed to engage, persuade and inspire commitment on the business stage.

Every day decisions that determine an organisation’s future direction, its priorities and performance ride on the oral communication skills of its leaders. Research shows that our voices and our expressive ability have immense power to influence the outcome of any interaction. Put bluntly, in an increasingly competitive and media driven world, the economic success of a company depends on the leader’s ability to effectively use his or her communication skills.

Some in senior roles use their voice 90% of the time to conduct business. Yet many continue to either undervalue their communication skills or are satisfied to leave their potential under developed. HR management can and should play an important role in positioning these skills as a priority for leaders at all levels.

What worries leaders most on the business stage

Over years of working with people from many fields on three continents we have asked leaders to identify their biggest communication challenges and concerns. Their responses frequently include how to be calm under pressure; how to convey both warmth and authority; how to appear credible and genuine; how to be clear, compelling and articulate; and how to be more inspirational. These are their top concerns.

The leaders expressing these concerns are in very senior roles proving that good leadership communication does not get any easier for people as they progress in their careers. It appears that senior leaders still struggle to overcome seemingly basic leadership communication challenges.

Only the persuaders survive

In business, control and command paradigms for leading no longer work. Professor Jay Conger points out that managers and leaders need “the ability to persuade and convince rather than command and direct.” In the past, a leader’s responsibility as a communicator rested more or less on providing good information and clear direction. People more readily accepted direction. Leaders got away with using tools of persuasion that went little beyond plain facts, graphs and pie charts.

Today, more and more leaders work in cross-functional, cross generational teams where they have little or no formal authority. Their ability to connect, engage and persuade is challenged daily. Even where leaders do enjoy formal status they find themselves working with people who are more media-savvy than ever before. People want to receive and absorb information from a credible, confident and authentic source in the form of powerful interesting experiences that leave a positive emotional resonance. Leaders can only inspire performance not command it.

More than presentation skills

Often we either take oral communication skills for granted or assume that a couple of days spent learning presentation techniques, negotiation skills or media training and the like will give us what we need to succeed. Leadership communication goes way beyond what is traditionally taught as presentation skills.

Some of the most crucial leadership tasks include engaging the hearts and minds of multiple audiences; inspiring people to give their best; persuading and influencing key stakeholders and clients; nurturing important relationships; facilitating dialogue and the exchange of ideas; and, most importantly, crafting messages bring vision to life, make priorities clear and direct people’s focus and energy through challenging times. It is impossible to do these things without sophisticated communication skills and many leaders fall short.

The voice is underestimated in everyday business

Business professionals rely heavily on the voice but most know little about how it works and how to use it optimally. Insufficient attention is given to developing the vocal techniques and performance skills to ensure we engage and inspire confidence in others. In most businesses, the door is closed on reaping the considerable benefits to be gained from an effective voice use and a more inspirational communication style.

Leadership is a performing art

Crucial for the performer on the business stage is to grasp the reality that every workplace is a stage and that work itself is theatre. The leader is always in the spotlight of attention and can benefit greatly from an understanding of, and ability to use, appropriate performance skills to demonstrate authenticity and ensure that nothing gets in the way of honouring his or her intention.

Great leaders and great performers engage the emotions. Leadership is, as Kousez and Posner describe, ‘an encounter’. It goes beyond the rational. It involves being in relationship with others. It requires passion and passion is important. As the poet Czeslaw Milosz reminds us, “the passionless cannot change history.”

For leaders this is a call to action. To rely predominately on the written word and bland, featureless oral communication is a disappointing choice for a leader to make. Our advice to leaders is to become a performing artist.

Leaders can learn to use their voice and speech with the discipline, precision and passion of a skilful performing artist. As a former White House speechwriter said: “Ronald Reagan’s delivery could lift a bad speech by the scruff of the neck, shake it and make it sing.” This is one of a leader’s most important tasks; perhaps the most important one. As Gilbert Amelio says: “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.”

The voice used well is a transformational tool

In the alchemy of leadership, a leader’s voice is an essential ingredient. Its quality, vibrancy and expressive ability can bring words and images to life in a way that transcends the literal meaning of words. The voice can animate words to stir emotions, release fresh insight and inspire confident action. The voice can help sustain a sense of possibility in others and transform lives, communities and organisations.

Any neglected, voice without tone, colour, variety, energy and melody risks being dull, unappealing and open to misinterpretation. Such a voice would struggle to inspire achievement, face-down critics or win the confidence of an array of wary investors, constituents, clients or stakeholders.

A new frontier for leadership communication

Today the world wants character, interest, substance and style from leaders. There is an urgent need for a more confident, dynamic, interesting and inspirational brand of leader for a global world where it is essential to be distinctive, credible and genuinely engaging to win on-going attention and respect.

It is time to get the balance right between the necessary intellectual frameworks for understanding leadership and what we call the ‘felt experience’ of leading. Aspects of performance training can help leaders to explore what it feels like to be fully and powerfully present in the moment; to learn how to be relaxed, open and fully attuned to the situation at hand; to open up the full range of the leader’s vocal instrument; to use the body, silence, time, space, words, melody and rhetoric to hold people’s attention; to compel, inspire and engage others and give people a hint of a higher order of understanding, knowing and feeling through the power of a leader’s imaginative and interpretative skills. These are just some of the communication challenges for leaders.

Practical learning experiences can be designed to unleash the talent of our leaders to communicate more purposefully and powerfully. In business, a great voice is a powerful tool and HR management can lead the way by putting the voice, verbal expression and performance skills centre stage in every leader’s development.

Veronica Allardice is a founding director of the Theatre of Leadershiptm and holds a B.Ed in English & Drama Education; an Advanced Diploma in Voice Studies; a Licentiate in Speech & Drama (AMEB), a Master's degree in Business Management and Public Policy. Veronica graduated with Distinction in Voice Studies from the esteemed Central School of Speech & Drama, London, the UK’s centre of excellence in theatre and voice training. She works in Australia, Asia and the UK with private and public sector clients. The Theatre of Leadership™ uniquely combines cutting–edge leadership practices with voice training and performance techniques to enable you to expand your personal authenticity and develop the professional skills to communicate, lead, and influence in today’s constantly challenging business world.

Winning ‘Em Over: A New Model for Management in the Age of Persuasion: Jay A. Conger, Simon & Schuster, 1998.

The Leadership Challenge: How to get extraordinary things done in organisations: James M Kouzes & Barry Z Posner: Jossey-Bass, 1995


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