Enhanced Importance of Communication – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post 1165

Enhanced Importance of Communication – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post 1165

Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post 1165 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma    Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to pharmaveterans2017@gmail.com  for publishing your contributions here.

Credit: Moose Photos

Preamble

This post is based on an INSEAD article by Andy J. Yap. Link at the end.

The Power of Impactful Communication: How Leaders Can Speak to Both Head and Heart

In moments when organizations are pressed from all sides, market disruption, workforce changes, remote work, shifting expectations, communication becomes not just a tool, but the lifeline of leadership. Leaders who can mobilize others, inspire belief, and align emotions with purpose are far more effective than those who rely solely on strategy and metrics.

INSEAD’s Andy J. Yap argues that for leaders, communication is the bridge between influence and impact. If you lead others, you must communicate, otherwise, your vision, values, and strategy remain inert. But impactful communication isn’t just about what you say, it is about how you listen, adapt, and embody what you claim to stand for.

Here are the core insights from Yap’s piece, what makes communication truly impactful and how leaders can put it into practice.

Listening First: Understanding Before Speaking

One of the foundational points is that impactful communication begins with listening. Before deciding what to say or how to say it, great leaders observe, listen, and understand their audience’s context, culture, needs, resistance, and fears.

“Reading the room” isn’t mere cliché; it means noticing what is unsaid, what people seem hesitant about, what questions or worries lie beneath the surface.

This is especially critical in diverse workplaces, where different backgrounds, norms, or languages can create misunderstandings.

In Practice – Hold listening sessions before major changes or announcements. Ask open-ended questions: What are your concerns? What's working? What's broken? Use tools like surveys, pulse checks, or small-group discussions to capture different voices. Pay attention to nonverbal cues, tone, body language, engagement.

Authenticity: Aligning Words, Actions, and Values

Yap emphasizes authenticity, not simply “being yourself,” but ensuring your verbal communication reflects your values and your actual behavior. Leaders build long-term trust when people observe consistency between what they say, what they do, and what they value.

It’s not only about avoiding hypocrisy. It’s about letting people see that what the leader promises, and the leader practices, are aligned, even in difficult situations.

In Practice – Before public messages or announcements, test whether the language matches existing behavior. If you say, “we value transparency,” but decisions are still opaque, that disconnect undermines credibility.

In challenging situations, bad news, mistakes, failures, leaders who acknowledge errors or show vulnerability often build more trust than those who try to obscure or spin.

Encourage feedback, including honest criticism. Having someone you trust (as Yap calls a “nasty friend”) to give you unvarnished feedback helps you stay on track.

Emotion and Meaning: Engaging the Heart, Not Just the Mind

Data, logic, metrics; they’re essential. But people don’t rally around spreadsheets. They rally around stories, shared identity, purpose, meaning. Effective leaders communicate in ways that appeal both to the head (reason) and heart (emotion).

Yap notes that when messages invoke emotion and meaning—why the work matters, how it ties to values or identity—it tends to mobilize people much more deeply.

In Practice – Use storytelling: share stories of people affected by your work (customers, employees, communities). Connect to larger purpose: instead of just “what we need to deliver,” also communicate why it matters. Use metaphors or analogies that people can relate to. People remember emotional images more than cold statistics.

Managing Stress, Pressure, and Impostor Syndrome

Even seasoned leaders feel stress, anticipatory anxiety, or impostor syndrome—especially when speaking publicly, making large-scale changes, or stepping into unfamiliar territory. Yap asserts that high stress is common, but how leaders manage their internal state significantly affects their communication.

Techniques such as reframing the situation mentally, taking deep breaths, pausing before responding, or rehearsing important messages help reduce tension and deliver more confidently.

In Practice – Before big presentations or difficult conversations, run through what you truly want people to hear. Rehearse both content and emotional tone. Introduce “micro-pause” rituals: pause, breathe, compose before responding under pressure. Acknowledge vulnerability publicly (where appropriate). Saying, “I feel a little uncertainty but here’s what I believe is best…” can humanize and strengthen connection.

Feedback, Practice, and Continuous Improvement

Even the best communicators are learners. Communication is a skill, one that improves with feedback, reflection, and iteration.

Yap suggests finding people who will give honest feedback (“nasty friends”) and creating safe spaces for practice. Communication missteps are inevitable. What matters is how leaders learn from them.

In Practice – Record or observe your speeches, key meetings, or pitches. Review what went well and what didn’t. Ask for direct feedback: “What part was unclear? What didn’t land?” Partner with a communication coach or peer group to sharpen skills. Try new formats (video, writing, storytelling) to stretch comfort zones.

“Soft Skills” Are Your Sharpest Edge

Though often dismissed as secondary, communication “soft skills” are arguably among the sharpest tools a leader has. The ability to empathize, to frame messages in ways that move, to maintain trust under pressure—these are not fluffy niceties; these are levers of real organizational power.

Strong communication often makes the difference between a strategy that remains on paper and one that people believe in, own, and act upon.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

In an age of fractured attention, competing narratives, hybrid workplaces, and hyper-visibility (social media, remote communication), communication is often the differentiator between organizations that endure and those that underperform. Teams may be globally dispersed, but emotions, values, trust still travel in stories and words, not just charts and KPIs.

The pandemic showed us how leaders who communicated clearly, compassionately, and purposefully held organizations together in crisis. Those who did not, saw disengagement, misunderstandings, and trust erosion.

Sum Up

Impactful communication is not optional for leaders, it is central to influence, alignment, and performance. Listening, aligning speech with values, engaging hearts, managing personal stress, and embracing feedback make the difference between messaging that echoes and messaging that moves people.

As Yap underscores, soft skills are not soft. They are as sharp (or sharper) than strategy. For leaders who choose to hone their communication, the payoff is profound: trust, loyalty, alignment, and ultimately, results.

If you lead, you must communicate. And if you communicate well, you lead better.

A Word about Pakistan

Communication is national weakness in Pakistan. A fact, which is reaffirmed every day on TV and social media. Of course, the corporate world cannot be an exception. Our senior most managers do not know how to articulate their messages. And with time, rather than improving, things have been deteriorating. This does not reduce the importance of communication, however. There is a great need to work on this most important area of work and management.

Concluded.

Disclaimers: Pictures in these blogs are taken from free resources at Pexels, Pixabay, Unsplash, and Google. Credit is given where available. If a copyright claim is lodged, we shall remove the picture with appropriate regrets.

For most blogs, I research from several sources which are open to public. Their links are mentioned under references. There is no intent to infringe upon anyone’s copyrights. If, any claim is lodged, it will be acknowledged and duly recognized immediately.

Reference: 

https://knowledge.insead.edu/leadership-organisations/impactful-communication-leaders