Q. Once you’ve connected, now what?
You have engagement. You have their interest. They are saying, ‘OK, tell me more.’ This is permission-based communication. Now we go on to conveying. Oftentimes, people lose when they’re conveying because they convey too much information. Today, people are buried under an avalanche of information. The last thing we need is more info. Do you need people to send you more lengthy e-mails? Do you need more things coming in to you? Absolutely not. To me, the winner is the person who can communicate something that is very big and funnel it down into an understandable bite. What you’re going for is clarity not confusion.
Once you have connected and they’re listening, and then you convey and they understand you, now you can move into convincing them to take a specific action.
But that’s where many people still go wrong. You have to have a specific goal either for them to do something or believe something. Without that, you’re just being general, you’re letting them off the hook. That’s not true influence.
Q. So what should executives do to create that call to action?
One of the most effective ones that I see in the workplace is peer power, which means transferring ownership of the idea from you to someone else.
Let’s say you’re not the most influential leader in the room with this particular group, so what do you do? You find someone else who is influential in that group. You go to them before this big meeting and you say, ‘I’d like to run this idea past you. What do you think?’
I learned this technique from a woman who was a senior vice president. She was the only woman on the executive team and knew that she needed a peer. So she would go and talk to another senior vice president before the meeting and would say, ‘What do you think of this idea?’
What happened is the other person could clarify the idea and make it better so she could find the weak spots. Then that person became her champion, so in the meeting, when she was presenting this, she had somebody who had her back. The key is to pick an influential person in that group.
Q. Does the way we communicate really make that big of a difference?
It makes a difference that you communicate authentically. Let’s look at two people. Let’s look at Steve Jobs and Bill
Gates. Now whom would you say is the better communicator of the two, who is more influential?
Steve Jobs has more of the rock star status as a presenter onstage. I would argue that Bill Gates is every bit as influential as he is, but Bill is who he is. He is authentic. What he realizes is that it’s a long game and convincing people isn’t a thunderbolt event.
I think that as long as people feel you are who you say you are they will give you slack for not being slick. I think the difference is being smooth versus being slick. Nobody likes Mr. Slick because you don’t trust that person. You know it’s a put on, and when they walk away from you, you both feel you need a shower because something in your gut said what just happened here that wasn’t real.
Steve Jobs becomes more of his good self when he is onstage. When he is onstage, suddenly he becomes the person I think he wishes he were in person, because he becomes patient. He uses what I call the power pause. When he is onstage, he will let it breath. He’ll say something important, and he’ll let it breath, and he’ll let it sink in. That’s part of his brilliance as a presenter — he actually has patience on stage where he does not necessarily in real life.