Speak Better Now, Avoid the Post-Promotion Reckoning Later (1,451)
LEADERS ACROSS ALL INDUSTRIES today are under massive pressure to speak better – a development spurred by the post-pandemic rise of a new boundaryless system of hybrid work that crosses continents, time zones and cultures.
But many new leaders – and even established ones – are finding out the hard way they are underequipped to deal with these new communication expectations.
RUDE AWAKENING
They may have been promoted, initially, to a leadership role based on their technical achievements.
Once they begin their new duties, however, they learn they lack the broader ability to leverage their words and voices to be:
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Boundary Breakers: Creating impact that is felt not just across countries, but continents, oceans and cultures as well
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Level Linkers: Crossing hierarchies to connect with everyone from employees to higher-ups
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Stage & Screen Stars: Excelling either in person or away from a camera
HURTING THE ORGANIZATION
Leaders who fall short as communicators can inflict significant damage on an organization, hurting everything from employee morale to product quality to the user experience to the bottom line.
Organizations have long sent promising leadership candidates for public speaking training to build confidence and help them hone their skills for handling higher speaking challenges.
But a major flaw has opened in conventional speaker training.
SPEAKER OVER-EMPHASIZED
It increasingly tends to emphasize the speaker or the content. What it should be doing more of is prioritizing what matters most in speaking – the audience; and what the audience needs to hear and experience to grow.
This misguided focus stems from the evolution of communication technology over the eons.
The Ancient Greeks gave the world the art of speaking well, known as rhetoric. Their system prioritized applying logic to build the audience relationship and pave the way for informing, persuading and motivating listeners.
From Ancient Greece to the late 19th century, rhetoric played an essential role in Western education in training orators as well as statesmen, lawyers and poets.
AUDIENCE DISPLACED
However, the rise of the great communication innovations – the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the television, and the internet – helped push the principles of rhetoric into the background.
As the public acquired greater ability to communicate from farther and farther afield, the original classic ideal of building a more personal speaker-audience relationship to inform, persuade and motivate audiences disappeared from the mainstream.
Today, a smartphone-wielding population accustomed to getting the content they want when they want it, and to creating voluminous amounts of content daily, tends to see public speaking as being more about the speaker or the content, rather than the audience.
MISGUIDED TRAINING
Public speaking clubs, courses and books often tend to follow this misguided view.
They neglect the most basic laws of public speaking – that a speaker is only a speaker if they have an audience willing to listen to them, and that if you fail to put the audience first, you are courting miscommunication or even disaster.
The very best business speakers – too, too few – get it. They know that the audience is everything in speaking and you ignore it at your peril.
But many leaders – especially new ones who have grown up with social media – discover the hard way they are woefully underprepared for the big-time speaking challenges of leadership …
… when they try to have a meaningful conversation with a “difficult” employee;
… when they attempt to talk up a product at a conference;
… when they endeavor to translate technical language into plain English for non-expert stakeholders;
… when they lead a team training session on increasing productivity;
… when they give a media interview; or
… when they try to get buy-in for a controversial policy change.
TROUBLESHOOTING A TALK
They fail to grasp that when any communication attempt falls flat, the first thing to check is the health of their relationship with the audience. Chances are, they didn’t do their due diligence first, ascertaining what information the audience needed to hear and receive to achieve the desired outcomes.
If you are a leader at any level, you can overcome your struggle to confidently create an impact in a fast-changing global marketplace by embracing these 7 audience-first principles for connecting with your crowd, as described in my book, “How to Become a Super Speaker: The 7 Principles for Speaking with Confidence and Connecting with Audiences”:
7 PRINCIPLES FOR CONNECTING WITH AUDIENCES
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Prioritizing Delivery: Arousing the audience’s curiosity by speaking emotionally about what you see as the solution to their problem.
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Putting on a Show: Speaking as a performer every time you take the stage, wherever or whatever it may be, and putting on an emotional show for an audience that expects one (and every one does; it’s just the way we’re wired)
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Displaying Personality: Allowing what defines you personally, including your quirks, to mesmerize an audience that loves the revelation of human traits on stage (and all do; see point #2)
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Feeling the Fear But Continuing to Practice: Turning your speaking anxiety into an ally that will boost your energy and brainpower to help you be your best on stage.
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Giving the Audience a Reason to Care about the Talk: Including relevant contextual information to answer the question that is top of mind for every audience: “Why am I supposed to care about this information?”
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Revealing What’s Inside You: Allowing the crowd to catch you revealing emotions that are too strong to hold back, spurring them to bond with you and paving the way for them to follow your call to action.
- Keeping Things Easy to Follow: Providing signposts that keep the audience aware of where it is in a talk at any moment, since they generally can’t immediately replay any missed information, unlike consumers of films, books and music.
APPLICATION IN PRACTICE
To apply these principles in practice, first identify your core speaking struggle. Let’s pick “communicating across boundaries with diverse groups of stakeholders.”
Then identify your specific issues. They could include: “communicating with groups with differing interests”; “explaining technical matters to a wide universe of non-experts”; “communicating with non-native English speakers”; and “showing how technology solves a problem”.
Next, look back at your list of the 7 principles.
Note that principles #1-3 are more audience-focused. Principles #5-7 are more content-focused. Principle #4 is both audience-focused and content-focused.
MATCH PRINCIPLES TO PROBLEM
Pick the principle or principles that are relevant to your problem.
With the challenge of “communicating across boundaries with diverse groups of stakeholders,” you will find that principles #5 (Give audience a reason to care) and #7 (Make things easy to follow) are a fit.
Now apply the principles to your issue to get remedies.
Regarding #5, “Giving the audience a reason to care”: Double down on putting yourself in audience’s shoes
Tailor your words to each person’s personality, goals, roles, responsibilities
E.g. a rational person may be swayed more easily by logic than emotion
UNLOCK CORE STRUGGLES
You can use these principles to help you unlock the solution to your core speaking struggles.
Regarding #7, Make things easy to follow: Explain technical concepts for non-experts in terms of results rather than process. Reinforce intent with body language.
CASE STUDY: NINA
I used this system to help my client Nina learn to explain technical ideas to non-experts.
She was a new leader with a technical background. Her problem was a lack of empathy for some of her less tech savvy stakeholders. Her issues led to miscommunication. A big part of what we did was helping her appreciate others’ limits, strengths.
I developed a self-checklist that she could use to explain tech to non-experts. I also taught her to listen to her feelings to gauge the success of her explanations. As a result, she became a more effective instructor, eliminated most communication problems
IN-HOUSE TALENT DEVELOPMENT
Adopting the 7 principles as a system for preparing leadership candidates for their future roles gives organizations a way to develop leaders from within, producing a time and cost savings in recruiting, training and onboarding leadership candidates.
As a leader or potential leader, you can avoid the post-promotion reckoning, and meet your organization’s needs by remembering these three simple basics of effective professional and leadership communication: authenticity matters, interaction is currency, and listening is the most powerful speaking skill.
And once you’ve identified your shortcomings and what you must change, there is but one way to fix your issues and that is to work your improvement plan – and to do it assiduously.
COMPLIMENTARY SPEAKING COURSE
You can learn how to implement the 7 principles by going to michaelbarris.com/mini-course and subscribing to a free public speaking series based on my bestselling book, “How to Become a Super Speaker: The 7 Principles for Speaking with Confidence and Connecting with Audiences.”
You will receive each chapter of the book with an accompanying instructional video. You will also get tips, strategies and take-action assignments to guide you toward becoming an empowered speaker and a creator of impactful talks and presentations that get the speaking results you desire.
MICHAEL BARRIS
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Michael Barris is the consummate evangelist for speaking better now to avoid the post-promotion reckoning later.
He is a transformational public speaking coach and speaker who has a background as a former adjunct professor of public speaking and expository writing at Rutgers University.
He also is the author of "How to Become a Super Speaker: The 7 Principles for Speaking with Confidence and Connecting with Audiences."
A longtime journalist, he worked for Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, producing articles on many of the world’s biggest financial and business news stories.
In total, he has produced over 3, 500 print articles over his journalism career, including more than 300 for the Wall Street Journal, and countless more published online.
Learn more about Michael and his work at michaelbarris.com
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