How Leaders Speak

Essential Rules for Engaging and Inspiring Others

Jim Gray

• Publisher: Dundurn Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781554887019
• eBook ISBN: 9781770705692
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Senior executives, professionals, politicians, entrepreneurs, and educators are increasingly being evaluated by how well they speak - how credibly, how naturally, and how enthusiastically. They're being judged on their presentation skills. In today's communication-saturated age, the ability to address others effectively has become the essential mark of a leader.

How Leaders Speak covers the seven keys to speaking like a leader: preparation, certainty, passion, engagement, and commitment. It's a personal handbook for planning and conveying presentations that will engage and inspire others, from overcoming nervousness to handling difficult questions from listeners.

How Leaders Speak: Getting Ready to Present:

• Know Your Audience
• Find and Create 'The Nugget' (something your audience doesn't know)
• Make a Video Rehearsing your Presentation
• Be Prepared for Anything
• Don't Rely on PowerPoint (have a print out as well )
• Test your Technology
• Have a Checklist of Materials Before You Leave the Office
• Pre-Presentation Jitters are a Good Thing!
• Know Your Environment Beforehand (schedule a run through the day before)
• Eat and Drink Lightly Just Before Your Presentation

How Leaders Speak: During Your Speech

• Have Water Handy
• Keep Language Short and Simple
• Have Your Speech Printed at the Top of Your Page To Keep Eye Contact Connected
• Most Nervousness Doesn't Show
• Draw in Your Audience Via Names and Anecdotal Info
• Ask Questions to Involve Your Audience (and to Relieve Pressure)
• Speak with Passion!

The First Key — Preparation

How’s this for a high-pressure scenario?

Your CEO steps into your office and gives you some big news. She’s chosen you to deliver a keynote presentation at a major conference, “Industry 2020,” in two months in Las Vegas. Basically, the deal is this: she wants you to share the company’s vision with more than five hundred senior and mid-level executives from throughout North America, with the goal of generating excitement about your organization’s planned initiatives and, ideally, renewed respect for your solid but staid outfit.

YOUR BIG SPEAKING OPPORTUNITY

Congratulations. You’ve just been given an opportunity to speak like a leader to leaders.

You’re pleased and excited, right?

Perhaps your overriding emotion is fear. You know for a fact that the CEO, let’s call her Peggy, should be the natural choice to give this presentation.

But Peggy has made the decision to sit this one out. She’s received extensive media coverage recently, and feels that a cult of personality has been starting to develop around her.

To her credit, she wants to put more of the focus back on the company and its strong senior management team. And you, my friend, are a member in good standing of that team.

You suspect, though, that one of your colleagues, your chief rival and longtime nemesis, the widely reviled Tim, would be a better choice to deliver the presentation. He knows a lot more about the company vision. The sycophantic Tim is also tighter with the CEO, but Tim will be in Europe for some strategic planning meetings during “Industry 2020” and those meetings can’t be rescheduled.

So while Tim is slogging away in overcast Berlin, you’ll be basking in the spotlight in sunny Vegas.

Who says good things don’t happen to good people?

It is what it is

Now, a cynic might say that you’re the third choice to give the big presentation at “Industry 2020,” and the cynic might be right.

But it should make absolutely no difference.

Whether you were choice number one or twenty-one, you’ve been handed the ball. Now you have to run with it.

Put any negative self-talk out of your head and tell yourself here and now that you’re going to take this project on, and complete it superbly.

Not to overwhelm you, but following your thirty-minute presentation you’ll be asked to take questions from the audience. Relax — it’s all good.

If you’re not pleased and excited, you should be. You get to serve the informational needs of a prestigious audience, while enhancing your company and personal profile. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Few learned skills carry with them the potential to speed you up the corporate, educational, and political food chains faster than the ability to speak effectively to others.

Barack Obama, the forty-fourth president of the United States, is the most dramatic modern example of the career-building power of speech. Just think about it: Obama was an Illinois State senator, little known nationally, when he rocked the 2004 Democratic National Convention with his passionate keynote. Four years and four months later, he was elected president.

Chances are you aren’t planning on running for the leadership of the Free World, but you can employ the simple but powerful speaking techniques that Mr.

Obama uses to compel his audiences.

We’re going to assume that you’ve enthusiastically accepted the invitation from your CEO to present at “Industry 2020,” and thanked her for the opportunity.

Good move. Now, let’s get to work.

Thinking about the challenge

How do you even begin to get your head around such an assignment? By embracing the first and most important key to speaking like a leader: preparation.

I’ve been a presentation skills coach for a long time, and it became apparent to me early on that accomplished communicators have three qualities in common.

First, they consider the chance to address others freely in a public forum to be an occasion to be respected, and never taken lightly.

Second, they understand that a presentation needs to be more than a compilation of facts, figures, and opinion but rather a story, the most powerful and sublime form of communication.

Finally, they’re rigorous and disciplined in their preparation.

Skilled presenters spend a great deal of time thinking about who their listeners are, what those listeners know, and what they need to know in order to respond positively to the message being delivered.

They know a presentation shouldn’t be about them. It should be about the people who show up to hear them.

Traumatic listener experiences

The need to consider the audience would undoubtedly come as a surprise to many of the speakers I covered as a young business reporter, back in the day. I heard a lot of bad speeches — mumbled, disorganized, meandering, interminable, and ultimately incomprehensible discourses that sorely tested the patience of the inconceivably polite people in attendance.

More often than not, the speakers knew little or nothing about the background or mindset of those in their audiences, and didn’t really seem to care. They’d mispronounce the names of the executives hosting the event at which they were appearing, propagate a dated or ignorant view of the issues affecting the sponsoring organization, and talk incessantly and reverentially about themselves.

It wasn’t pretty.

These speakers weren’t just rude, they were confusing. As a journalist, it was my responsibility to make sense of the just-completed assault on rationality. Because the presenters weren’t always available for interviews following their remarks and because I had to produce a story, regardless of whether a speech warranted coverage or not (it often didn’t), I was left to grapple with a perplexing question: what was their point?

Out of this early career tribulation came the determination to devote my professional existence to coaching good-hearted men and women in the preparation and delivery of presentations with clarity.

Clarity comes about only as a result of understanding — understanding your audience, its issues, its attitudes, and its motivations. Without knowing all of this, you simply won’t be successful. You can’t be successful.

Audiences can tell, astonishingly quickly, whether speakers have taken the time to learn anything about them or not.

When speakers have done their due diligence, listeners can be remarkably supportive and forgiving. When they haven’t, well, onlookers can become downright hostile, in a silent, seething way that can take on a near-malevolent force of its own.

But you’ll never experience such antipathy, because you’re all about the preparation.

Or soon will be.

GETTING STARTED

You can begin preparing for your big presentation by thinking about others. How can your remarks at “Industry 2020” best serve the informational needs of your listeners, while achieving the goal set down by your CEO?

Schedule an in-depth meeting with your boss and ensure that you share absolute agreement about the objective of the speech, an understanding of what success looks like, and her buy-in on the investment of time and resources it will take for you to adequately research, write, and rehearse the presentation.

You can’t slack off on any of this stuff. Do that, and you’re guaranteed to come up short in Las Vegas.

Schedule weekly meetings with your CEO to review your progress and to solicit her input. For this project, your personal motto should become, “There’s no I in team.”

Regular consultation will eliminate (or at least dramatically reduce) the chances of any frantic, late changes resulting from your boss not having seen the content, while providing you with the ongoing benefit of her insights and advice.

Comprehensive preparation includes several essential components, including learning as much as possible about those to whom you’ll be speaking.

You need to know about your audience

For whatever reason, presenters at every level often fail to embrace this responsibility with the diligence and care it so obviously requires. It’s as if they believe they’ll somehow learn too much about their listeners, and the knowledge will serve to spoil the spontaneity of their presentation.

But that’s just crazy. You simply can’t know too much about your audience.

Put in a call to the conference organizers and learn about the delegates who’ll be attending “Industry 2020.” What organizations do they represent? What are their expectations of the conference, and from your presentation?

Ask for a delegate list, and for permission to contact a handful of respected attendees. You’ll want them to answer your questions candidly.

Ask:

“What are the biggest challenges facing our sector?”

“What keeps you up at night?”

Don’t be reluctant to go deeper when you sense there’s more to learn. You can always ask, “Can you tell me more?”

Your aim should be to acquire enough quality information to understand the attitude of your audience at “Industry 2020.” It’s invaluable intelligence to keep in mind as you build a presentation that tells your story while exceeding the expectations of your listeners.

Think about life from their perspective. These days, the people who run businesses are quicker than ever to dismiss or ignore information that doesn’t relate to their organization’s most pressing needs, whether short or long-term.

Business leaders are more focused than ever. They have to be. They want insights and ideally some answers, yet very few speakers provide them. So be a speaker with the insights.

Be a speaker wit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• The First Key — Preparation
• The Second Key — Certainty
• The Third Key — Passion
• The Fourth Key — Engagement
• The Fifth Key — Commitment
• Final Words
• About the Author
• Index