“I don’t know if it’s possible, but I would like to be captivating.”
This came from Jeffrey who sounded like it would never happen. He was telling me his goals at the start of the presentation skills workshop for senior execs their CEO had arranged. Jeffery is in Finance and no one would have described him as captivating.
Alan, the senior exec over Engineering, said, “Me too.”
The rest of the group all nodded, they wanted that too.
They all did their “Before” videos. They came across as brilliant, smart, experienced. None of them was captivating.
They looked at me hopefully.
By the end of the training, they were each not only captivating, but irresistibly compelling, and even charismatic. They came across as true leaders.
I’m going to talk to you about one of the things they learned that contributed to their transformation…
I was watching the audience. When Arte walked on stage, they were looking at him with mild interest, light curiosity. It was his quarterly All-Hands presentation to 1500 in his division. Arte started:
“Good morning, I’m excited to be here, I hope you’re excited about being here also. Today I would like to talk to you a little bit about…”
By the time Arte got to that point, the audience had lost their spark, they were fading. He didn’t see it. By the time Arte got to the middle of his presentation, even to him something felt flat. He started to talk faster. He tried to inject enthusiasm, but it felt forced. He ended by telling a sea of polite but uninspired faces they had an exciting future ahead.
Arte knew something was wrong, but didn’t know what. He felt a powerful need to break free of something, but had no clue what was binding him and holding him back.
Bryony hung up from the virtual meeting with her boss with a heavy heart and a horrible feeling in the pit of her stomach. She had just gotten the news she dreaded.
Bryony was a Senior Manager who’d requested a promotion to Director. Her boss said, “Well, I can’t promise anything, but I’ll recommend you because you’re doing good work” and had unenthusiastically taken Bryony’s request to her boss. The answer was not only “Not now,” the top boss dismissed Bryony’s future possibilities as well.
Her boss thought she was being helpful when she said,” You don’t really have a chance of getting promoted because you don’t have leadership communication skills.”
Bryony had no idea what she was talking about. She asked what skills were they? The boss had trouble defining them, just that Bryony wasn’t coming across as “a real leader”.
Bryony sat for five minutes trying to figure it out, wondering if she needed to be bossier. It was not her style and if that’s what was required, it was hopeless. She also didn’t see how being bossy was a good thing.
A large corporation had acquired 8 successful companies through their Mergers and Acquisitions. They paid a lot for them. Each one of them had a CEO. Now the CEOs were Senior Vice Presidents, high up in the large company, but no longer the men in charge of everything and everyone.
The CEO had gone through our special virtual Leadership Coaching Program based on Mastering Virtual Presentations. When he saw each one of these 8 new SVPs speak to internal audiences, he cringed. They had good content, but lots of sharp edges and missing key skills in their delivery that would make them great. So, he signed them up for the program.
The 8 men showed up skeptical and arrogant, but willing to give me a chance to see if there was anything good in what I presented. They didn’t think so, but they weren’t rude about it. They were quite pleasant. But arrogant. Especially with each other. Each one tremendously competent. Each one exceptionally accomplished, and the proof was the organizations they had built from nothing and then sold for hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars.
Everything begins with awareness. When you are not fully aware of them, you lose sight of the person in front of you. An invisible wall forms, you unknowingly start talking at them, and your words can’t quite reach them. But when you become fully aware of them, truly present with them, the wall dissolves. You don’t have to try. Connection happens on its own. You start talking to them. Your communication flows naturally, it becomes effortless, and you reach them.
“Um’s” are what’s known as “filler words” during a presentation. They’re unnecessary and distracting. As in, “What we learned was important because … um …. what customers were saying was that … um… they wanted faster service.”
She turned to me and said, “Can you help him with the ‘um’s’?”
I told her yes, but not to worry about it right now. She trusted me and nodded.
I coached him on other things and within an hour they had disappeared.
Victoria’s fate for the next five years hung on what happened in the next 90 seconds.
Those 90 seconds would shape her future for the next five years, the future of her team, the future of the organization and very possibly the future of the industry.
Victoria wasn’t nervous. She was calmly enthusiastic. This is what mastery looks like.
Victoria’s coaching sessions had prepared her. Good coaching does that. It builds your confidence and makes you fearless. Real confidence is built on solid, consistent demonstrations of competence.
Being close to Silicon Valley, we have had many senior executives send engineers and other technical leaders from various disciplines, including finance, to us for coaching on their presentations to leadership. Their biggest complaint is also their top goal for the people they send. They phrase it like this: There’s too many details in their presentations.
What they mean is, too many unnecessary details. It drives executives crazy. And engineers are at a loss as to what to leave out.
There is a big disconnect between “engineering logic” and “executive logic”. I’ll explain what that is.
A team can be good when it has a star, or even two stars. But it’s nothing compared to a unified, seamless team when you are ALL amazing. This kind of team creates a juggernaut of exhilaration as it makes a common purpose real and broadly felt throughout the whole organization.
It’s a joy to be a star. It’s an even greater feeling of elation to be part of a dream team. You walk that much taller, hold your head up that much higher, knowing that to your left and to your right, your compadres are doing the same.
Dream teams are not the product of some mysterious luck or having a few stars. They’re shaped by practice. And they can happen fast.
Today is Administrative Professionals Day when we celebrate the unsung heroes of the corporate world. I’ve been working with them for decades and my admiration for them is boundless.
This article is about an extraordinary one, Debbie Gross, the author of The Office Rockstar Playbook: How I Leveled Up as an Executive Assistant and Helped My CEO Build a Multibillion-Dollar Company.
When you Google, “How to handle stage fright”, you’ll find many strange suggestions, some from very prestigious sources. I saw a video posted by a respected MBA program where the solution presented is finding a friendly face and only talking to them. Audiences hate that. Another impressive source posted a video demonstrating “Power Poses” where you have one hand on your hip and another on a chair. Looks ridiculous when you actually do it. Another respected source recommended drinking orange juice. Makes me wonder if he has investments in the orange juice industry.
No mention of a root cause.
I’ve been asked to coach the CEO of a major global corporation. Google his name and an abundance of videos pop up. I’m watching portions of many of them to assess where I can help him.
This is a man who has been given so much advice on “how you need to come across”, it overwhelmed and finally drowned his soul. Unfortunately, he listened to it. It led him into crafting this artificial persona. The persona he’s been told Wall Street and a faceless group of investors demands.
I’m seeing the superficial performance of a well-scripted theatrical role: “the successful CEO you should invest in.”
It all began when a re-organization thrust Olivia into a new department. She felt like a failure almost immediately.
The people on the new team were openly hostile, smug, superior, stubborn, cold, uninviting, and often mean.
Olivia very badly wanted to blame them.
But Olivia did something that most people don’t do when faced with a situation like this.
It was a virtual workshop on Causative Communication. On my screen were five beautiful faces. Each one of them representing a wonderful person in different countries across Europe.
Julien had just finished practicing presenting a proposal to sell the government of his country a new high-tech product. The others were watching.
Julien knew something was really different about the way he was communicating. He reached the end. Long pause and then he said, “That was Amazing! I never felt that before.”
4 heads nodded. They never had either.
Julien: “What was that?”
When Jeffrey started his coaching three months ago, he knew something was off in the way that he was presenting. He said to me, “If I could be 10% of what my boss is as a presenter, I would feel like I achieved a big goal.”
The problem Jeffrey was having was a “There’s so much to say about this” problem.
When you feel like there’s so much to say, it’s easy to fall into the trap of talking too much. The audience completely disengages.
In the last group I coached, there was a big discussion in the group about how they were holding themselves back. They were “toning themselves down”. They were intense people afraid of being “intense”. Having coached tens of thousands of individuals and executives, I have observed that many people hold themselves back, and as a result, many people live half a life, not being all they are capable of.
It takes work at the beginning to continue to use these skills after the Communication training when you’re living in a world that doesn’t have them. The payoff is an exhilarating life. It’s always amazing how others change when you do the training and speak to them as a causative communicator. You create transformation. The power truly is always in your hands.
Leonard was making the mistake of delivering a “stream of consciousness” type of presentation that followed his logic of “Let me start at the beginning and tell you everything”. This is a common approach for people below senior levels. It does not follow what I call “Executive Logic”.
What was missing from Leonard’s presentation was…
This week I have a lovely and talented co-author for my article. Evelyn transformed her life with one well-communicated sentence. She contacted me 7 years ago because she wanted to get promoted to VP and requested Executive Coaching to help her get there. I knew she was doing well since that time and was very pleasantly surprised to receive an email from her a couple weeks ago.
The Communication Formula puts the ability to create extraordinary outcomes under your control. It gives you a set of skills and a process to follow that allow you to do the “impossible.”
What Victor discovered is accessible to everyone. Even the most difficult situations can be completely transformed when you know how.
People get so wrapped up in looking good and trying to be impressive, in trying to overwhelm in an effort to be convincing, that they forget that what you’re REALLY doing is getting a message across that you want people to understand and even act on.
People come to me for coaching with goals that sound like, “I want to be impressive”. No one comes to me and says, “I want to be understood”. Yet, this second goal is the one which has true power.
Here’s a question from an “early in career” 22-year-old after working 6 months in a major corporation: “Don’t the senior executives know that when they’re making their speeches to us that they’re not actually saying anything?”
The answer is: They know something’s not right, but they don’t know how to fix it.
Javon was watching Anthony intently. He had just acknowledged him and was waiting in the pause. He was looking at Anthony’s reaction to the acknowledgment.
Slowly Anthony looked very satisfied, nodded his head, relaxed his shoulders, leaned back and smiled. Javon saw Anthony was ready to listen.
That had never happened before. Anthony was never ready to listen. Here’s what led up to it.
Farzad is the most listened-to person in the division. But it wasn’t always that way. His boss had contacted me saying, “Farzad is a great guy with tremendous substance, but his rambling presentations are driving everyone crazy. Especially my boss!”
Farzad was known as “The guy who talks the most and says the least.”
Farzad showed up for Coaching eager and interested in learning. He said, “I know I’m doing something wrong because everyone multi-tasks when I’m talking, but I have no idea what it is. If you can help me with that, I would love to have everyone listening to me.”
It was Valerie’s first Executive Coaching session of the new year and she was spiritless. She found out the CEO had decided to bypass her for the promotion from VP to Senior VP that she had been counting on. They wanted to bring in someone “fresh and with more experience” from the outside to be her new boss. Ugh!
Valerie got the bad news and then went out on the end of year holiday. It didn’t improve her mood.
“What’s going on?” I asked her.
“It’s hard. It’s hard to come back. It’s hard to look forward to this new year with any optimism. I feel like I’m not being valued. My enthusiasm for what I’m doing is completely drained.”
What was really drained was her ability to communicate effectively. If you look at the above definition of causative, it’s the ability to make what you want happen. And the ONLY way to do that is through the way you communicate.
The only way to persuade is to communicate persuasively. The only way to convince is to communicate convincingly. The only way to shape reality with others is through your communication.
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