Q. Are there ways to know when you’re losing your audience?
There are external signs. You know when you’ve lost people because they’re on their BlackBerry and they’re looking under the table. But there’s no accurate predictor of that because some people are just cold when they put their arms in front of them. What I have found is that some leaders lack self-awareness. They get so caught up in their own moment of ‘I’ve got to deliver all of this information right now’ and ‘Oh, my gosh, I have to get all of these facts out’ that they’re unaware of the impact that they’re having on other people. They actually get lost in how long they’ve talked and how they’ve missed everything that is important to this audience.
I see this a lot in emerging leaders who will go into the executive team not realizing that the executive team values brevity and they value the bottom line. They think they have to lay out all of these justifications and build to the big finish. But that is not what the executive team wants. The executive team wants insight. They want a color commentator, not a play-by-play announcer who is going to go along and tell you in a linear fashion — ‘And then this and then this and then this.’ No one has taught them to turn the tables opposit
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— give me the results, the outcome first that matters most to me, then you can back up and I’ll ask you the questions.
Q. What other signs are there to indicate that someone is a weak communicator?
You’ll be able to see that people are deep in thought. Today, people are pretty rude. People will not just start talking to others during a meeting, they actually just walk out. They’ll excuse themselves to take a cell phone call. They’ll start communicating with their fingers, meaning they’re texting, and they just blank out on you. People are falling prey to distractions and impatience, and I believe that what is happening today is that our impatience is showing. We expect instant gratification. We want people to get to the point and get to it now.
Q. What can executives do to address their communication weaknesses?
Learn to frontload a message. The first thing you have to do is figure out what does this audience want and value. If you have a mixed audience, that’s more difficult, but there will be something that all of these people have in common. Is it the bottom line that they care about? Is it the impact on people? Generally speaking, people value what they’re rewarded for or they value not falling prey to what they’re afraid of. If they’re afraid that sales are going to collapse, address that upfront and get to it quickly because people will not wait to hear you out, they will cut you off.
Q. How does this relate to your three-step method of connecting, conveying and convincing?
It is a series of events. I don’t believe that influence is just a thunderbolt event. If it had been, we’d have the Olympics in Chicago because we rode in on a wave and brought the big guns. No, it’s in incremental steps. You connect with people by tapping into what they want in value, meaning you have to engage them, which means they have to get past trust issues.
You have to be able to discern what is real and why they might turn you down. You really have to do your homework on them and find out why they might just say, ‘No matter what you try to influence me to do, I’m not interested.’
In the Olympics case, I think we knew that there was distrust of the U.S. and there were money issues. By not addressing that and thinking we could just come in on the white carpet and get the Olympics, well, that wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t going to work because they had to connect first, meaning stay in their moment. What’s their moment? (The Olympics) needed money, and they like to be treated very well on the Olympic Committee. We played the short game. To influence people, you have to play the long game because that’s where we are.