Chapter 4: Creating Written Leadership Communication

This chapter you will learn that the leader must be able to share knowledge and ideas to transmit a sense of urgency to others. Professional written communication falls into one of two broad types: correspondence (text message, e-mails, blog posts, memos, and letters) and reports (including proposals, progress reviews, performance reports, and research documentation).

This chapter focuses on helping you create written leadership communication that accomplishes your communication purpose by selecting the most effective communication medium, creating individual and team written communication, organizing the content coherently, conforming to content and formatting expectations in correspondence, including expected content in reports, and formatting written communication effectively.

Interacting with social network is important for us to consider carefully how we want to approach social media and how we wish to present ourselves in these very public. Some of the best strategic practices for using forms of social media: blogs and microblogs.

Organizing the content coherently, A professional audience expects order and logic in a document; they expect it to make sense to them, to be coherent.  To “cohere” means to hold together, which is what we want our communication to do. For social media, our posts, comments, tweets, and the like should “cohere” as well – to a central theme or idea.

Conforming to content and formatting expectations in correspondence, we will determine the actual content of our letters, memos, e-mails, and text messages based on our purpose, strategy, and audience but these types carry some expectations.

Including expected content in reports, Professional audiences also have expectations for longer documents and reports. The reports may be long or short, formal or informal.

Formatting written communication effectively, Formatting is important in creating a professional appearance for all of our written communication. The frequent use of headings and lists to break up the text, separate main ideas, and avoid long blocks of text will make our documents more inviting the audiences.