Great Speaking Coach

Business Storytelling-Taming the Rumor Mill

Grapevines and rumor mills may be old-economy methods of communication but they are still alive and well. Rumors are aided by Web 2.0 technology. In just a click anything can be broadcast far and wide.

How does a leader quell or dilute the impact of a rumor gone viral?

Tell a counter story. Craft a counter story that is one of these:

• A true story (vs the false rumor story)
• A humorous story (a humorous way to look at the content of the rumor)
• A positive story (find a positive or optimistic view point to the rumor)
• A rational story (show the rumor to be irrational in contrast)

You accomplish several key objectives with your counter story:

• Telegraph to the rumormongers that you're aware of the rumor
• Changing the subject is more effective than denying it
• Addressing the rumor head on is powerful compared to ignoring it
• You give people another definite, clear perspective

In the past you would convene people in person to quell the rumor with your counter story. Using Web 2.0 technology today lets you communicate quickly, widely and in the same way as the rumor was spread. Just using technology to quell the rumor is a strong statement that you're aware of what is going on and that the rumormongers can't get by under the radar any longer.

Add your thoughts about rumormongering and Web 2.0 through our comment link below.

Leadership vs. Management--Know the Difference

Leadership and management--are they the same things and should you use those words interchangeably? I don't think so!

Jeffrey Gitomer's recent ezine included an article by Brian Parsley that opened with two statements in a row that perpetuate this misconception. Parsley writes:

"...the real reason they quit is because of bad leadership.
You make the decision on how you choose to manage."

Leadership and management each can be great or poor. And one person can serve in both capacities. But they are not the same and it does you no favor to write about them as if they are synonymous.

Leadership encompasses the actions of creating the company environment, imagining the future and living the values. Leadership is about inspiration and being supportive. Outstanding business leaders encompass a diversity of personality styles yet have in common that they engage their staff in a way that makes sense for the individuals and leads to attainment of the corporate goals.

Management is about the day-to-day details of the efforts required to achieve the goals. Managers do pay attention to progress in small steps, allocate resources, and answer questions and provide services. Managers often review work and provide final approval. They should spend some of their time training their direct reports in new skills.

When you're both a leader and a manager, you must be clear about which of your behaviors are leadership behaviors and which are management behaviors.

What are your experiences with leaders and managers? Best, worst, other? Post your stories through the comment link.

Two Quick Tips to Create Your Audience Profile

Business speakers, ask yourself this question: what do you get by knowing the ages, genders, and education levels of your audience? Do these demographics improve your presentation skills? The answer: you get a lot of demographic information that rarely helps you customize a speech that is meaningful to that audience.

Presenters are also advised to know the characteristics of the type of people you’re speaking to. This is another way of saying “stereotype the audience.” Common stereotypes: CPAs only care about numbers and aren’t people persons. Technology workers are introverts who can only think in their jargon and love complicated slides. Women don’t like technology. Gen X and Gen Y want the information fast and high-tech. And on and on.

These myths force presenters to create presentations that bore or dispirit the audience. Unless your topic is truly and deeply important to an age group, a gender or a specific level of education, these demographics take away from what’s really important. (See Truths.)

Consider CPAs. Are they all introverts? Not at all—the partners of CPA firms have achieved their success because they are interested in

Speaker Success Strategies-When Is Quitting the Right Message?

Speakers who think about success--their sales, their careers, their awards--tend to be highly persistent and tenacious. They gravitate towards success mantras like "Winners Never Quit, and Quitters Never Win." And they bring this message to their audiences.

The New York Times Magazine of Dec. 16, 2007 reports that two psychologists have discovered that there are times when pursuing something extremely difficult in spite of obstacles and odds can be hazardous to your physical health. They found that when people are unwilling to disengage from trying to attain hard-to-reach goals, the levels of an inflammatory molecule increases. This molecule (C.R.P.) is linked to early aging, diabetes and heart disease, so it's nothing to shrug off.

CEOs and others in leadership and management often believe in exhorting their staffs: "work hard and then harder, beat back the competition, devote yourselves to the goal no matter what." When this message becomes a habit, and no thought is given to alternatives, other goals or taking a break, these speakers cross the line from meaningful persistence to creating dangerous health conditions.

In Why Quitting May Be Good for You it is reported that authors Miller and Wrosch found: "But all is not lost for go-getters. The psychologists also sorted both groups by their willingness to re-engage and set new goals after they gave up on something important. While they did not find a direct link between re-engagement and physical health, they did find that people who readily jumped back into life had a greater sense of purpose and mastery and were less likely to ruminate about the past. Setting these new goals appears to buffer the emotional consequences of failure, especially for those who have the hardest time admitting defeat."

When you're the success speaker, give your audience permission to disengage from the impossible goal and the re-engage with a new goal. This may seem like quitting, however when the new goal is attained, everyone will be a winner.

What are your experiences with pursuing a goal that couldn't be reached? Post your comments on our comment link.

YouTube Videos-Revealing You at Your Best or Worst?

Search YouTube for "CEO". You'll get a lot of CEOs being interviewed by various news personalities. These range from interesting if unpolished to embarrassing. You can give these CEOs some leeway though because the interviews are fairly spontaneous and unrehearsed.

CEOs speaking to invited audiences about their areas of expertise must be well prepared and polished and many YouTube videos show that they are not. I've seen some CEOs who are talking heads. They talk and talk and talk and don't give a thought to the interests of the audience. Others are self-centered. Three minutes of chit-chat about the new job, the new city, the family, while the audience is waiting for him to say something meaningful to them.

YouTube thrives because of twin desires: people like to watch others in embarrassing situations and people like to record those videos surreptitiously and share them. No CEO today can be sure he or she will not be the subject of a YouTube Video.

Since you can't avoid them, you must be ready for them. That means delivering sharp, video friendly presentations each and every time you are in front of an audience. Craft your content carefully, avoiding death by power point, and make sure you allot sufficient time to practice and rehearse. If you're recored "winging it" that video could come back to haunt you for years to come.

What makes you whip out the video cam and start shooting? Share your YouTube story with us by posting a comment on the link below.

Innovation vs. Creativity in Sales Presentations

"Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things." Thus says Michael E. Gerber, provider of business growth strategies through his E-Myth Revisited. McDonalds is a perfect example: it was creativity that helped Ray Kroc envision a new way of selling large numbers of hamburgers quickly. It was his innovative methods that made McDonalds the perfect business prototype.

Another definition of innovation from an organizational perspective is given by Luecke and Katz (Managing Creativity and Innovation. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press 2003), who wrote:

"Innovation . . . is generally understood as the introduction of a new thing or method . . . Innovation is the embodiment, combination, or synthesis of knowledge in original, relevant, valued new products, processes, or services. (p. 2)"

Your prospective client is counting on you to bring them innovations. They are excited and captured by new ways of doing business. That's what they will pay for.

How many times have you opened your presentations with a backward tale? You think to yourself "they need to know what we're all about." You say "they'll believe us more if we show them who else we've worked for." You are so sure that the size and geographic dispersion of your company is meaningful to everyone.

Start with a future story--one that helps them imagine their own business improved by or enhanced with your innovation. Since innovation is about doing new things, the story must describe the innovation in action and then the results.

How do you experience the difference between innovation and creativity? Post your thoughts on our comment link.

Need help with future stories and other business storytelling? Download our complimentary Great Speaker's Guide to Business Storytelling.

E-Myth Lessons for Executive and Sales Speakers

The E-Myth Revisited makes two key points that have applicability to you, the executive or sales speaker:

1. You must see your business or unit or division as a Franchise Prototype--that is, so well-thought out and implemented that anyone could take over and achieve your success.
2. You must manage by Delegation, not abdication.

Creating a Franchise Prototype and Delegating not abdicating means that you have clearly written operating manuals that lead to achieving your strategic objective.

In terms of presentations or the public persona of your business, this means that you have studied the best presentation skills practices and have modeled and demonstrated them yourself. You provide training for your employees so they do the same.

I don't mean that every speech or presentation is a clone of all others. I do mean that you elevate learning about speaking and using deliberate, clear principles rather than relying on a haphazard untutored approach to presentations.

Should you spend your limited time reading this book? I don't think so because

Storytelling: CEO Frank Donaghue--See it on YouTube

Frank Donaghue, the new CEO of Physicians for Human Rights, talks with warmth, passion and conviction about the future of the organization. Overall he demonstrates putting the audience first and speaking with passion from his inner knowledge.

Donaghue's key points are:

• there are human rights needs across the globe;
• the staff and volunteers are committed and he can't do the work without them
• human rights has a human face--it's not just a slogan or a special interest.

One of the most affecting story types is the future story. Through this type of narrative, the audience imagines a future that is better than the present and gets caught up in making that future a reality.

Midway through his speech, Donaghue tells a future story: a young mother in Macedonia gives birth and she names her son Victor because she knows he'll need to be victorious over the strife of their country. Listeners imagine themselves helping the 'Victors' of this world in the years to come.

Donaghue's style is quite natural. All we see is his face and shoulders yet he conveys emotion, commitment and inspiration with them. He is looking right at the viewer, he uses facial expressions to emphasize words, and he leans forward at a couple of moments when he wants to be sure you know he is talking to you.

Two improvements would make this presentation even more compelling.

1. Open with a story. Instead of an informal sounding, but clearly planned,  opening that "tells them what you're going to tell them," Donaghue could tell a story that conveys his values about human rights. He assumes that the audience is wondering what the connection is between relief work (his former role) and human rights work. Telling a story that shows the connection would be awe-inspiring.
2. He says he “hears the visions and insights of the people in the organization “ He could make the message about “your help” more dramatic with a collaboration story. Such a story demonstrates how collaboration generates huge results in ways that individuals working alone cannot.

Frank Donaghue allows his passion, personal commitment and values to come through. He touches on how the work of PHR brings new life and hope to their clientele. Let's applaud this CEO for a presentation that makes the audience glad they listened.

YouTube: Comcast CEO Brian Roberts Needs Help

Look at the YouTube video of Comcast CEO Brian Roberts introducing a new DOCSIS 3.0 Cable Modem delivering 160 MBPS using new "channel bonding" technology.  Roberts has a dazzling new product to introduce but his own presentation is so far from dazzling as to be, in a word, boring.

The first words out of his mouth are “What you’re about to see is…”  This is a case where a picture is worth thousands of words--show a large file being downloaded at a startling fast speed. Then he should go on to challenge the audience: "Think about the tremendous benefits you'd get from that kind of speed."

Roberts clasps and unclasps his hands in front of his chest over and over, which is very distracting. He holds his head and shoulders in a tight, awkward position. He does not demonstrate relaxation and confidence. How can the audience have confidence in what he is telling them about the new product when he looks so uncomfortable?

Roberts asks his helper to download ever larger files and shows on a screenshot how quickly the files load. Instead of doing this he should encourage the audience to create visions in their minds of how they will use this speed for themselves.

Faster speeds are fun but most users needs more justification for making the investment to get them. How will business grow, customers be served, problems solved, and critical needs met? Demonstrating how his new technology works in those ways would be a presentation equally dazzling to the technology itself.

Have a You Tube video you'd like me to critique? Send the link to me at susan@susantrivers.com and I'll add it to this blog.

If you have a video of a presentation that's not on YouTube, forward it to me and I'll do a complimentary, customized  critique of the first two minutes. Post your thoughts on what makes a great or grievous presentation on our comment link.

Communication Channels--Are You Keeping Them Open?

I've recently consulted with one member of a Board of Directors who is faced with a president demanding that she 'open lines of communication.' My client demonstrated through months worth of emails that there has been nearly daily communication from her to the president about various issues. Then she asked the question "what communication isn't taking place?"

The president is being disingenuous at best and aggressively controlling at worst. She wants to zip her directors into close-mouthed submission, allowing only communication outward and between them that she, the president, approves word for word.

There is tremendous cost to the organization when a president or manager says "lets communicate" when he or she really means "I'll tell you when and how you can communicate." Creativity is destroyed, innovation disappears and people leave the organization. The very things that the president desires to protect are damaged, sometimes beyond repair, by this stifling regime.

I always ask my clients this question first "what does the audience want to hear?" You must know this and write, phone, email or speak with the answer to that question in mind. There's a long history, going back to Napoleon Hill that says, in essence: "give people what they want and you'll get what you want too." Hill called this reciprocity The Golden Rule. What people want more than anything is