Original post: Sally Williamson & Associates is the proud recipient of Top Leadership Development Training/Coaching Provider 2020
How Compelling Communication Creates Leadership Impact
Leaders are often recognized for their expertise. But expertise creates value only when other people can understand it, believe in it and act on it.
That is the role of compelling communication.
Compelling communicators do more than deliver accurate information. They organize ideas around what matters to the audience, communicate with credible presence and adjust their approach to the situation.
For an emerging leader, that may mean contributing an idea with enough clarity and confidence to be recognized. For a people manager, it may involve setting expectations or giving feedback. For a senior executive, it may mean creating alignment around a strategy when the path ahead is still evolving.
The communication situation changes as a career progresses. The need for clarity, credibility and influence only becomes greater.
In this interview, Sally Williamson shares why she founded SW&A, what organizations expect from leaders and how communication coaching helps professionals move from knowing their subject to creating impact with listeners.
A leader or a manager may be highly qualified and skilled in his chosen field, but his abilities become irrelevant without competent communication skills. At Sally Williamson & Associates (SW&A), Sally Williamson and her team help rising leaders at all levels strengthen communication influence and impact across their organization through communication training and coaching . The company undertakes training programs and executive presence coaching, to teach the fundamentals and finer nuances of effective communication, and create better leaders.
In an interview with CIO Application, Sally Williamson, President and founder of SW&A shares her insights on effective communication, and how their communication training and coaching can improve communication strategies. As a leading resource for improving the impact of spoken communications, Williamson has been communication training and coaching leaders for more than thirty years. Her team specializes in executive coaching and developing custom programs for groups across company verticals. By working with professionals to better understand their listener’s expectations, SW&A can coach  a communicator to influence people with a compelling storyline and personal style that drives engagement.
What spurred the conception of SW&A?
I founded SW&A when I realized the gap between training and coaching in the marketplace. We are one of the few firms in the training industry that combines both concepts to not only introduce skills but to help a person adapt skills to their communication situations. Communication is a durable skill that all organizations look for, and it is an essential skill of leadership.
In the early stages of a person’s career, if someone can express their ideas with confidence, they move up the career ladder quickly. For mid-level managers, clarity of communication is essential to manage people and processes. And for senior leaders, the expectations of communication increase significantly as employees and customers expect a compelling leader who can build trust, understanding and conviction behind ideas.
What are some of the recent trends that you have witnessed in the leadership development space?
The trend we see is urgency. Companies need leaders ready to lead, and new managers ready to manage right now. The skills haven’t changed; it’s the timing that has intensified in terms of having someone ready to step into a role. And, it’s why we have two delivery models: executive coaching and group workshops. Through workshops, we teach the foundational skills for future leaders and through coaching, we strengthen consistency and impact for someone who is already leading.
Tell us more about the services you offer and how do you deliver the same?
We deliver our services through group workshops, and one-on-one coaching programs.
When you work on communication skills, it comes down to content development, what someone plans to say, and personal delivery skills, how someone comes across when they say it.
We teach foundational skills for creating content and building personal confidence, and then we support that foundation with a number of situational tools to help someone apply the fundamentals in many different ways.
What sets us apart in the marketplace is a deep bench of expertise. Our coaches share the intent of communication rather than just the techniques. And that means that we bring knowledge from our research and our insights on what it takes to drive impact with listeners. While we often focus on communication in a classroom format, no one on our team started their career as an instructor. Instead, we were in roles that required clarity and influence and we have leveraged that experience into our coaching relationships.
Historically, our workshops run one-two days, and our coaching engagements are tailored to the needs of the coachee. In 2020, many of our programs shifted to a virtual format, and we now have the capability to deliver all of our services as a series of sessions with small group breakouts and coaching circles.
How do you measure the outcomes of your programs?
We start with the rating of the workshop by participants. We capture a self-assessment of skills at the start of the program and the completion of the program. We also have an online practice tool that allows us to track frequency of practice and the tools being leveraged by an individual. In our custom programs, we provide managers with tools for ongoing coaching and support. And if we’ve worked with a group on messaging as well as personal delivery, we can also design a customer survey to measure effectiveness of content and style.
Could you narrate an instance that highlights the benefits brought to one of your clients, through your coaching program?
One of our clients was a specialized group of technologists. They were the most senior technical team within the organization and a quiet resource to a top leader. With an abrupt shift in leadership, the senior sponsor was gone and the group had no visibility and no executive support. The technical leader feared that her team would be dissolved.
She sought help to build the storyline that elevated their role and their results within the organization. She knew they had to resell their value to the leadership team and build greater awareness across the organization. We worked with the team to build a story that highlighted their expertise and raised awareness of their impact. We built a strategy with their communications team to raise their visibility among colleagues and we helped each technologist gain confidence in sharing that story in multiple settings.
Within about six months, the group had established visibility within the company and had begun to establish value with the leadership team. Within a year, the group had doubled in size and was managing three times the amount of work for the full leadership team.
What is SW&A’s future roadmap and how do you stay ahead of the competition?
We always align ourselves with our client’s priorities and pain points. We learn a lot through relationships and discussions about expectations. One client may lead us to their priorities, and over a period of time, we begin to see a trend developing across a number of clients.
We’re able to share commonalities and bring conversations together as we position our response to a trend.
A great example was the pandemic. No one really understood the nuances of virtual communication and the balance of similarities and differences. We quickly pulled our learnings together and created a Virtual Communicator course to help our clients navigate the new normal.
Compelling Communication: What Is Compelling Communication?
Compelling communication creates understanding and movement.
It helps listeners recognize the central idea, see why it matters and understand what should happen next. The message may inform, persuade, reassure or challenge, but it is always shaped around an intended audience response.
Compelling does not mean dramatic. A leader does not need to become an entertainer or adopt a style that feels unnatural.
The strongest communication is often straightforward. It brings the right ideas together, removes unnecessary complexity and communicates them with enough confidence and connection to hold the audience’s attention.
Compelling Communication: Why Communication Skills Matter at Every Leadership Level
Communication expectations grow as careers progress.
Early in a career, professionals are often evaluated on the quality of their individual work. As they gain responsibility, success increasingly depends on their ability to explain ideas, influence colleagues and create results through other people.
Emerging Leaders: Build Visibility and Credibility
Emerging leaders need to translate their work into contributions others can recognize.
It is not enough to have a strong idea after the meeting. They must learn how to enter the conversation, organize the point and connect it to the group’s objective. Clear communication allows others to understand not only what they know, but also how they think.
People Managers: Create Clarity and Accountability
People managers communicate expectations, priorities, feedback and decisions. This is compelling communication.
Their teams rely on them to connect organizational direction to daily work. When that communication is vague or inconsistent, employees spend more time interpreting expectations and less time acting on them.
Managers create greater impact when they can be direct WITH compelling communication without becoming dismissive and empathetic without losing accountability.
Senior Executives: Build Confidence in the Direction
Senior executives communicate across audiences with different priorities.
Employees want to understand what a strategy means for their work. Board members may focus on risk and performance. Customers want to know how the organization will continue creating value.
Executive communication must remain consistent while adapting the level of context, evidence and emphasis for each audience.
Compelling Communication: The SW&A Approach: Content, Style and Situation
SW&A develops compelling communicators through three connected dimensions: Content, Style and Situation.
Content: Organize the Message
Content is what the leader plans to say.
Strong content identifies the central idea, organizes supporting points and connects information to an outcome. It helps leaders reduce unnecessary detail without oversimplifying the issue.
A clear storyline gives the audience a path through the communicator’s thinking.
Style: Shape How Listeners Experience You
Style is how the leader comes across while communicating.
Voice, expression, pace, posture and audience connection influence whether someone appears confident, credible and invested. These choices affect how willing listeners are to engage with the message.
The goal is not to create a manufactured persona. It is to help leaders make intentional choices that strengthen how their ideas are received.
Situation: Adapt the Skills to the Moment
Situation determines how the communicator applies Content and Style.
A board update, employee town hall, difficult feedback conversation and customer meeting require different choices. The audience, business context, format and desired response shape what the leader should emphasize and how the conversation should be managed.
Compelling communication becomes more effective when leaders understand the fundamentals well enough to adapt them.
Compelling Communication: Executive Coaching vs. Leadership Communication Training
SW&A uses both coaching and training because they support different development needs.
Leadership communication training introduces shared concepts and gives groups an opportunity to practice foundational skills. It is useful when an organization wants to build greater consistency across a leadership population.
Executive communication coaching applies those skills to an individual leader’s role, audiences and business priorities. A coach may help an executive prepare for a strategic announcement, improve audience connection or strengthen communication across recurring leadership situations.
Organizations may use either approach independently or combine them within a tailored development initiative.
Compelling Communication: How to Measure Communication Development
Communication programs should be connected to more than participant satisfaction.
Development can be evaluated through:
- Participant self-assessment
- Coach or facilitator observations
- Manager feedback
- Audience feedback
- Application to real business situations
- Consistency of message delivery
- Increased confidence and participation
- Greater clarity around decisions and next steps
- Changes in how listeners respond
The most useful measurement depends on the purpose of the engagement.
If a program focuses on executive presence, feedback should examine how the leader is experienced. If it focuses on storyline development, measurement should consider whether audiences understand and remember the central message.
Compelling Communication: A Communication Coaching Example
The original interview describes an engagement with a senior technical team that had lost visibility after a leadership change.
The challenge was not a lack of expertise. The team needed to communicate its value to a new group of leaders who did not have the same history or understanding of its work.
SW&A helped the team develop a storyline that clarified its contribution and coached team members to communicate that message across multiple settings.
The example illustrates a common compelling communication gap: people closest to the work understand its value, but decision-makers may not see that value until someone communicates it in language connected to organizational priorities.
Compelling Communication: How Communication Expectations Continue to Evolve
Formats, technology and workplace expectations will continue to change as will compelling communication.
Leaders now communicate across in-person, virtual and hybrid environments. They must explain increasingly complex topics, including organizational transformation, data, technology and AI, to audiences with different levels of knowledge.
The fundamentals remain consistent. Leaders need focused content, credible presence and an approach suited to the situation.
The compelling communication challenge is applying those fundamentals with enough flexibility to remain relevant as the audience and environment change.
We’re also underway with our fourth book on career disruption. The trends that we see are more frequent shifts in careers and roles. So, whether you create your own disruption or are impacted by a company’s disruption, we believe professional development and skills of influence are ingredients that people need to take ownership for themselves. The book sets up the research to validate the trend and provides our insight and coaching on how to reset your personal brand and your professional career.