Q. What about a middle ground?
Then you’ll find a person like Anne Mulcahy, who is the chairman of Xerox. She is not a dynamo as a presenter. When you put her behind a podium, she’s a white-knuckler and she reads and it’s uncomfortable. But you put her in a Q&A situation and she is so incredibly likeable and credible that you forgive her for her ums and ahs, and you forgive her for the fact that she doesn’t look polished, and you actually like that about her that she doesn’t appear slick.
I think leaders need to be two things when they communicate — credible and likeable. Think of it as a scale. If it’s all credibility, you may be the most boring college professor you’ve ever had. You’re not going to influence anybody. If you’re all likeability, you’re fluff. So what you need is straight up with a little bit of both. To me, that’s what [someone] like an Anne Mulcahy does. Anne is an example of a brilliant connecter in that you feel really connected to her. Steve Jobs is a brilliant convincer; he’s a good closer. And right in the middle is a person like Warren Buffett who is a brilliant conveyer because he knows how to tell stories. He can take this ultra-complicated stuff and turn it into a story that has repeatability. No one expects him to be Mr. Slick but he is who he is. To me, the lesson for all great leaders is find your brilliance, what it is about you — and your brilliance is what other people respond to positively — and build on that.
I think you have to be very aware of your blind spot, as well, because if you’re not, you’re going to have detractors, or worse, people won’t pay any attention to you.
Q. So you need to find people who are willing to give you that honest feedback to find your blind spot?
Not only give you that honest feedback, but find people who can discern what that is, who have a gift for knowing this is what’s holding you back and not just telling you ‘Well, you need to hold your hands this way.’
The old school of presentation skills, which was how do you inflect and how do you hold your hands, that’s old school, that’s not influence. What I do tell leaders is don’t inform, influence. Informing is just about giving people information. We don’t need to be handed information anymore. That’s what Google is for. We can find information, but what we need is for somebody to tell us what to make of it. That’s what makes your cover stories sing in that you’re getting insight from someone, so you’re giving me the color commentating, not just the play-by-play-boring information.
Q. How can you measure the effectiveness of your communications?
First, you have to decide how you want people to communicate in your organization. I don’t think that leaders do that. They don’t tell people, ‘Here’s how I want you to communicate with me.’ As a result, people are just throwing glue against a wall trying to figure out, ‘OK well, hmm, maybe I should do a really long presentation to him,’ or, ‘I didn’t try this.’
If leaders would, starting with their own executive team and then cascading down throughout the organization, say, ‘Here’s how I would like you to communicate with me,’ it would take the guess work out of it and would save us a lot of cover-your-butt situations that are going on all across organizations today. It would stop all of these cover-your butt e-mails that are gobbling up people’s time. It would stop these long voice mails. It would generate speed within organizations and would have people feeling better and more confident about themselves, if you will. First of all, just decide how do I want people to communicate with me.
Q. So a leader should be proactive?
I think we all need to tell people our ‘PMOC,’ our preferred method of communication. How do you want people to reach you and under what circumstances? I believe that CRMs (contact relationship management software) should include what I call PMOC. How does this person want to be reached?
I did an interview with a gal from the Wall Street Journal the other day, and what was happening, she’s writing a story about the end of patience. Some guy tried to reach her. He left her a voice message. She wasn’t there. He then tweeted her, he Facebooked her, he LinkedIn her and he e-mailed her all within the course of 20 minutes. He tried five communication methods, the end result was she was ticked off and is not going to get back in touch with this guy. He thought he was being efficient. What she experienced on the other end was an impatient person who she felt stalked her.
I think that there is a lot of ‘communa-stalking’ going on today, because we don’t know how are we really going to reach people. If the leader of an organization would decide, ‘Here is our plan; here is how we do this,’ you could stop a lot of hassles for a lot of people.
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