From the course: Communicating Internally during Times of Uncertainty

Communicate with mindful transparency

From the course: Communicating Internally during Times of Uncertainty

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Communicate with mindful transparency

- In times of uncertainty, it's really important to remember that you as a leader are also facing very difficult feelings and stressors as you navigate through the situation. This is important because you have to have self-awareness about how you're feeling and process those feelings so that those anxieties don't come out as you're communicating with your employees. I call this the difference between mindful transparency and radical transparency. Radical transparency is the act of sharing all information including your own assumptions, feelings, and anxieties. This can happen when you haven't taken the time to process your own feelings and therefore you communicate them without knowing it. Or you use the communication as a platform to process your own feelings. While processing your own feelings and stressors, it's very important to being a self-aware communicator and leader, it is not appropriate to do that at the expense of others' feelings and experiences. You need to do that separate from your communication so that you can become aware and enter the communication with a heighten sense of self-awareness but also the ability to put those feelings aside and communicate with empathy for what others are feeling in the moment. Now mindful transparency is the form of communication you should strive for. Mindful transparency is the act of communicating very openly but doing so while taking your audience's feelings and perceptions into consideration. This means that you've taken the time to think about how your messages will land with the audience because you understand how they might be feeling or thinking before you've spoken to them. Your employees need the facts but they also need to feel like you can relate to them. So make the communication about them. Share the information, let them know you can relate, and also think about inspiring them by painting a picture of the future where you have navigated through the situation and come out on the other end. Remember, you have a responsibility as a leader to take your own assumptions and anxieties out when communicating with them. That level of transparency does not serve your employees nor does it serve your goals. Lastly, remember, this does not give you license to selectively leave things out that might make you or the company look less than ideal. Mindful transparency is about communicating even those things while taking out your own personal narrative and instead inserting empathy for how your audience might be feeling and what they need to hear to manage their uncertainty and navigate out of the situation.

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