Great leaders – including great school leaders – use a secret weapon that many of their counterparts in similar positions ignore or don't know about. It's called straight talk … plain English … shirtsleeve communication.

It's a simple, but amazingly powerful, tool that gives successful leaders an edge and allows them to win the war of words every time. And words are what much of leadership is all about.

Some people think that leaders should use technical terms, flowery speech, fancy language, or ethereal oratory in order to sound like a leader. Actually, the exact opposite is true. The only thing that leaders really need to do is to be clear. That requires no-nonsense, no frills straight talk – and not much else.

Leadership is communication. It's what leaders do for a living. While the average person may speak or write up to 18, 000 words each day, that's just a warm-up for most leaders. Principals and superintendents know this better than anybody.

When leaders, in any field, fail to communicate fully, accurately, and understandably – misinformation, misinterpretation, misunderstandings, and mixed messages run rampant. The result is costly confusion. That's not leadership; it's chaos (better known as anti-leadership).

That's why successful managers, supervisors, and administrators, in both the public and private sectors, latch on to straight talk to get the right message across to the right people at the right time, every time.

Unfortunately, many school officials seem unaware of the superior firepower of plain speech or are afraid to use it, because it might make them sound ‘unprofessional.’ Educators are infamous for sending out messages that miss the point.

This is alarming in an enterprise designed to help people understand unfamiliar subjects. But it happens every day. It could be happening in your school as you read this. Are you sure it isn't?