The importance of communication is not lost on most people and most entrepreneurs. What is required is the deepening of an understanding that communication is not something that just happens. You cannot speak and take for granted that what you've spoken has been interpreted and understood with the same meaning as you intended.

A dimension of communication that I always bring to the attention of leaders and entrepreneurs is leadership communication. It is important to understand that showing up every day in your business, picking up where you left off the previous day, looking at what needs to be done today and communicating that, is not the same as fulfilling your primary leadership communication tasks.

The first C stands for clarity, the second C stands for commitment and the last C is completion. Why is the triple-C principle important from a communication point of view? Because to tackle this and do it properly and thoroughly, requires time. It is a huge effort. It doesn't just happen.  

It does not require a substantial budget. What it requires is an understanding and an appreciation and a commitment to not miss that critical step of engaging with your target audience. 

You should start to think about approaching your communication proactively as opposed to reactively, so that it becomes an intentional, deliberately managed effort.

It must be clear in terms of your service offering or your product and how you want to make the world better, how you want to enhance and improve people's lives. Get clear on what the world looks like now without your offering, your service, your product, and then get clear on what the future looks like with you offering, your product, your service in it.

I define a leader as someone to whom other people look for guidance, someone who wields influence through their subject matter expertise and to whom people listen. If you are able to guide people and help them, that makes you a leader in your own right. 

Leaders should not approach communication as a one-way action where they basically just give instructions. Instead, they should create an opportunity for the kind of engagement that provides context for better understanding and that enhances that foundation of trust and warmth.

I believe that leadership, at its core, is really about the heart. The moment that you are placed in a position where you potentially can influence someone else, then you need to recognise that just being one human soul touching another human soul is really, fundamentally, first and foremost.

A story well told has the power to stay with you, to challenge you to think, to unlearn your deep-seated beliefs. It can challenge you to open up the very core of yourself to what the moral of the story imparts, so that you can start to open yourself up to relearning. That is what I always emphasize for leaders in using storytelling as a powerful technique.