Leadership in Action: Seeing Your Way: Why Leaders Must Communicate Their Visions

OPPOSING FORCES

In your efforts to communicate a vision, you may encounter resistance from your audience. Such circumstances increase the difficulty of your task, but there are positive ways to work through them.

One of the most important things any communicator ever learns is to design a message for the intended audience. It's natural to wish that your audience would be supportive, but if it is not, there's no point in pretending that it is. You must prepare your message for the audience you have. When listeners are resistant, it is often because there is a competing priority. Consider the following example:

In response to a written survey a college's faculty members overwhelmingly said that they would be willing to give up their reserved parking ...