Communicate with Mastery

Speak With Conviction and Write for Impact

JD Schramm, Kara Levy

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119550167
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

Develop your leadership communication

Communicating with Mastery provides readers with a rich treasure trove of frameworks and tools for leadership communication as developed and taught over the past decade at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Designed for the business leader on the go, it provides you quick access to helpful approaches to vexing communication problems leaders face today in speaking and writing to various audiences.

Projects often fail not because of the vision, but in the articulation of that vision. With the help of this book, you'll learn how to ensure you get the results you desire as a leader and communicator including:

• Speak with conviction and write with impact
• Tailor your communication to any goal, setting, or audience
• Scale your leadership through effective coaching

Every time you write or speak, you need to make your words count. And this book shows you how.

Part 1
Speaking with Conviction and Writing for Impact

1
Adopting a Communication Mindset

Consider your communication mindset as a platform—every time you deliver a message, whether it's verbal or non-verbal, written or spoken, you'll stand on your communication mindset as the basis for all you do. Your communication mindset will ask you to think strategically, analytically, and empathetically about your audience and what matters to them. It will ask you to clarify the work that your communication is meant to do. And it will invite you to make choices about the words, channels, visuals, and multimedia assets that will comprise your message. It is not only a starting place, but the foundation for all effective communication. So let's dive in.

Know Your AIM

Nearly every class, workshop, or seminar I've led in the past decade at Stanford and beyond has begun with one simple yet elegant framework (Figure 1.1). So, of course, my first book should also begin in the same fashion. It's not just at the heart of all I teach and coach around communication, but I believe it's at the heart of all great leadership communication.

Figure 1.1 AIM triangle

Source: L. Russell and M. Munter, Guide to Presentations

While I wish I had developed it, there's nothing that I've seen or created on my own that's a better place for a leader to start. Lynn Russell (then at Columbia Business School) and Mary Munter (then at Dartmouth's Tuck School) co-created this model and included it in their book Guide to Presentations. But I believe it applies equally well to written and interpersonal communication as well as presentations. I've deployed this on ten-foot-high slides behind me at the Qualtrics Summit and sketched it on the back of a napkin at Starbucks while coaching an entrepreneur on her startup. It really does offer a beginning for most of the important communication that we engage in.

Order is important here … crucial, in fact. We must begin first in the shoes (or seats) of our audience. Once we know who we are addressing, we have to clarify our intent; what do we want them to do, think, or feel as a result of this communication? Only by clarifying Audience and Intent can we move on to Message. Inboxes around the planet are chock full of emails the recipient does not need to see, because too many people “blast out a message” rather than slowing down to tailor the communication to the right audience for the right reason (e.g., Intent).

Let's explore each of these elements in order. Let's begin with Audience.

Audience: The Starting Point for All Communication

I challenge leaders to devise as many methods of audience analysis as possible. “How can you get to know your readers before they open the email or pick up the pitch book? How can you learn about an audience before you are in front of them?” Typically, the responses I get fall into three broad categories: online research, personal contacts, and “creative espionage.”

LinkedIn and Google searches top the online examples; finding information about individuals, groups, or firms with whom you plan to communicate has never been easier. It's relatively simple to find company bio pages, recent conference presentations, or public blog sites. Those who dig a little deeper may find their way to Glassdoor to research a firm or leader; this site often offers more subjective information, as its entries are largely provided by former employees—many of whom may have a bit of an ax to grind. Go deeper still, and you may find yourself amid 10-K reports on publicly traded firms, briefs on non-profits, and other forms of disclosure information that's public but not as quickly surfaced. In my reputation management class, we discuss the fact that almost everything online is permanent; once posted, even if taken down, it can still often be discovered.

Leveraging personal contacts makes up the second, often deeper, round of analysis. Can I find somebody in the audience to serve as a “mini focus group” for my message? Can I test out a few phrases or stories with a sample audience before I use them on my actual audience? Further, if I can find somebody who has recently spoken to this group who's willing to share that experience, all the better. The true gold is finding somebody who failed with this group and can share why. They might be able to tell you, “We were pitching a software solution, but they've shifted all their funding to cloud-based startups.” Or: “I focused my recommendations on global expansion right when the firm announced layoffs and cost-cutting measures.” While LinkedIn provides a great resource in and of itself, it can also yield valuable ideas about who you might contact for a one-on-one conversation. When I'm searching for a personal contact, I look both at who is currently at the firm, and who has recently left the firm or group. Recent employees may be able to be much more candid than current ones.

On that note, here's a tip about your “gatekeeper” when you first approach a new organization: mine your conversation with that person effectively. If someone at the firm is arranging your visit, pepper that person with questions at both a macro and micro level. Everything from “What has marked the success of recent speakers?” to “Do the men in your office wear jackets and ties to work?” is fair game. If you've been invited to submit a column or blog for a publication, likewise, ask them to share two or three examples of successful recent submissions.

Over the years I've enjoyed the strategies my MBA students have provided in the realm of “creative espionage.” They have found social media posts on Instagram and Snapchat that mention the firm or individual. Some have gone so far as to apply for a job at a firm they wish to solicit for business to see how the firm represents itself to prospective employees. I've known people who've posed as secret shoppers and attended information sessions or participated in online webinars to better understand a firm and its offerings. One student (jokingly, I think!) shared the strategy of figuring out the “watering hole” for a team of interest to him and hanging out there to see what casual conversation he could overhear.

I often share the story of my colleague Ray McNulty, president of the National Dropout Prevention Network, who was invited to deliver a workshop on a Saturday morning for a group of public school teachers. This “mandatory in-service” was far from popular with the faculty who were required to attend. He arrived early and the host had not yet shown up to open the door. He listened intently as the teachers began to assemble, grousing about the need to come listen to this “expert” on a Saturday morning. They were a bit sheepish when they realized who he was when the person with the key arrived and welcomed him.

Let me be clear: I don't endorse duplicitous or deceptive measures for audience research; but I do appreciate the lengths that some leaders will go to better understand their audience before they try to write or speak to them. If only more leaders went to this effort.

It's also crucial to emphasize that any time we communicate with others, there is both a primary and secondary audience. Our primary audience is on the “to” line of the email or seated in front of us when we speak. These audience members are the primary reason for the communication to occur. Anybody with whom they choose to share the message would then be a secondary audience. Table 1.1 shows typical primary and secondary audiences with whom a leader may communicate.

Table 1.1 Primary and Secondary Audiences

Primary Audience Members	Secondary Audience Members
Regional directors	The field managers they supervise
Junior partners at a VC firm	Senior partners who will decide to invest
A journalist	All of those who read her column
Advisors to a senior leader	The senior leader
Sales team members	Customers who will ultimately buy

Thus far our discussion of audience members has been around intentional primary audiences: individuals or groups of people whom we've designated to receive our communication. Yet we cannot end this section without a discussion of unintended secondary audiences. An email we intend “for your eyes only” is forwarded to a wider group. A person who was listed as BCC mistakenly hits “reply all” and comes “out of hiding.” A disgruntled employee or customer secretly films an interaction with you and posts it on YouTube for the world to see. The classic example I provide is Mitt Romney's 2012 election bid, when he thought he was having a private conversation with a limited group of high-net-worth donors. But unbeknownst to Romney, a bartender with an iPhone propped against a water pitcher recorded and then broadcast the entire chat widely, arming the Obama campaign with controversial sound bites for the remaining six weeks of the campaign. As a leader, you need not cower from such communication possibilities, but should simply commit to owning your communication so that if an unintended audience hears or reads it, your words still do the work you intend them to do.

Audience-centric communication provides the foundation for everything else in this book. It's not simply the first part of the AIM model, it's the place all leaders must begin their work to inform, influence, or inspire others. Occasionally a student will ask me for a letter of recommendation without telling me the name of the recipient. I say I'm willing to write the letter, but that it's going to be much stronger and more effective if I can tailor it to the organization and role to which the student is applying. Without a clear audience in mind, how can a leader provide an impactful message?

Intent: Your Reason for Communication

Now we move to Intent, the second part of the Munter/Russell model. Certainly there are numerous ways to describe the goal, objective, or outcome of a communication. I like their choice of “Intent” not simply because of the great...