Three common leadership Mistakes

Here are the three common leadership mistakes that I see leaders make with messaging.  Understanding each of these mistakes will help you in correcting them and demonstrating you as the leader you are.

Mistake #1: Not having a clear elevator pitch

An elevator pitch is the core message of your business. It’s something you share with employees and with potential customers.

Yes, business is full of pivots and adjustments, yet that’s not an excuse for not having a clear elevator pitch. Every adjustment to the product, to the target market, to the problem you solve, you should adjust the elevator pitch.

Mistake #2: Not buying into your message

If you don’t believe in what you are saying, then no one will. If you say that your product will disrupt the banking industry and you don’t demonstrate certainty, then it will show, and all the facts and evidence you provide will be a waste of time. When you communicate you transfer your emotion to the people around you. That’s why a nervous speaker makes others nervous, and an uncertain speaker makes others uncertain.

For great employees to join your team, for customers to abandon the products they are currently using, they need to feel a sense of certainty.

If you have not bought into your message yet, then you don’t have the certainty yet, and you can’t transfer that which you don’t have.

Mistake #3: Not synchronizing the team message

In his book Behind the Cloud, Marc Benioff the CEO of Salesforce.com wrote” “Make every employee a key player on the marketing team, and ensure everyone is on message.” Benioff explains that as the company grew, he had an elevator pitch crafted and distributed to employees. Then employees were trained on delivering the elevator pitch with conviction.

If you want to spread your message as a leader, then you need to enroll others to do the same. As a leader, it’s your job to train your team, your department, and the whole company to communicate the same message all the time.

I find when working with growing teams, that the core messaging starts to erode over time. Different people and different teams will start communicating and explaining what they do differently. One time I asked five different people at a growing startup what they do and I got five completely different answers. The job of the leader is to synchronize the messaging so that the whole company is on the same page and communicates with the same voice.