Today’s Rick Spence article in the National Post is all about communication and messaging. Whether you are a team lead or CEO, there are some important bits in it. He spends a lot of time heaping praise on Obama and his leadership skills (like all media these days), but those parts are not what I draw your attention to.

*As I wrote last March, business owners have to “make growth a team effort. If you gain the trust and support of your employees, you have a better chance of coming through the storm with a stronger, more focused business.”

That is not hard to do if you have a plan and a clear message to communicate. In fact, it is probably easier now than it will be any time again in the next few years.

Let people understand where your company stands during this downturn. What are its strengths? What are its biggest challenges? What objectives does the business need to reach?

Then explain to your employees how you expect to meet those objectives, and what role everyone will play as you move forward. Make your objectives ambitious, but attainable. Everyone must feel like a winner as they work together for success.*

Be honest. Talk to the people you lead about what the team is doing well and what challenges we think might be coming.

Your employees probably want to accomplish amazing things, too. But it’s not enough to give people new objectives: You have to give them licence to think for themselves, permission to run with new ideas and the freedom to fail, without recrimination, if things don’t work out.

Leadership is all about trust and scale. Michael Lopp has a great post on the role of management today as well. Trust and scaling play a prominent role in it.

One more quote.

*Many business leaders don’t articulate a clear message often enough: They make the point once or twice, then move on, thinking their job is done.

Yet advertising experts agree it takes multiple exposures to the same message before your target audience absorbs what you’re trying to say. And when you’re trying to change the culture, the messages need to be even more frequent, and expressed in creative new ways.*

Strategy is a long-term item. It is not jumping from shiny object to shiny object. Find the strategy and hammer it home. A well defined strategy should be almost mantra-like for those tasked with implementation.