With so much at stake these days, strong communication skills are critical for any CEO. If you don’t connect with people by giving them what they want and value, they may not listen. When they don’t listen, you can’t get your points across clearly and won’t move them to action.
This is why communication failure often turns out to be the root cause of many organizational problems. But good communication habits can resolve those issues, says Connie Dieken, whose book, “Talk Less, Say More,” takes her years of experience as a television talk show host and news anchor and boils down the solution to a three-C methodology.
“It’s a sequence of habits,” says Dieken, founder and president of onPoint Communication, where today she works with executives from such companies as Apple, McDonald’s and Moen on mastering communication skills. “If you will do it in this order — connect, convey, convince — you’ll be more influential in the 21st century.”
Smart Business sat down with Dieken to learn the secret of building those better habits and turning any CEO or leader into a great communicator.
Q. How important is it for executives to be effective communicators?
It is critical. As a communicator you need to know two things — what’s your brilliance and what’s your blind spot. Because we learn to communicate within the confines of our home, we generally are not getting any formal training. So you get into the workplace, and you repeat what you’re rewarded for, and on your way up the ladder, you’re often rewarded for just getting results, driving results, making things happen, and you don’t realize that there are a lot of dead bodies along the way.
Brilliance is something that leaders are totally unaware of; they have no idea why people respond to them positively or what specifically they’re doing that inspires people and brings them under their tent.
Q. So how can someone learn to identify his or her brilliance and blind spots?
You need somebody external to identify it, because you’re too close to it. You’ve lived with it all your life. You need somebody to help you identify and build on that strength.
On the other hand, there are your blind spots. I was working with a fellow who was president of his division, a brilliant man, but he was driving his executive team crazy because he was a wrangler. He would accidentally highjack all of the meetings. He would go in and present an idea and others wouldn’t necessarily buy in to it so he would just circle the wagons, try to say it another way, repeat himself and hold them all hostage in there. They finally said, ‘We have to get him some help. He has no idea what he is doing to others around him, and that is turning us all off.’
I worked with him on how to frontload a message, meaning to put the most important things to that audience first — what did they want and what do they value? Give that to them first and then save all of these other ramblings for back-pocket questions.
His thought was, ‘If I give you everything that I have and lay out this huge, long argument, I will persuade you.’ But what he persuaded people to do was tune out to the point that they said, ‘Gee, I don’t know if we need to get rid of this guy.’ He needed someone to not just identify the problem but help him with a solution.
There are two things that need to be done in that situation: Frontload your message and stay in their moment. Put the most important part of the message and relative part to that audience first. No. 2, what does this audience want and need right now?