Sunday, January 25, 2009

What Did You Say?

An old joke has two guys sitting in a bar. One guy says, "my wife says I don't listen to her....at least I think that's what she said".

When you think about business meetings, substitute either gender and that joke is not far from the truth.

How many of us really listen in business meetings? How many of us are just waiting to talk?

We sit in meetings listening to someone drone on about a point we don't think is relevant and we know as soon as they shut up we will jump in with an absolutely brilliant point.

Sounds arrogant, but if we plumb the depths of our 'impatient listener' souls, we've all probably done that - more times than we'd care to admit.

So how do you become a better listener? By doing the Bill Clinton head-bob while other people talk, biting your lip and saying "I feel your pain". Nah. A good way to start becoming a better listener is to try the following exercise the next time you're listening to someone talk in a meeting:

  • Look at the speaker - not eye to eye - eye to face is fine. Just direct your eye focus toward them to the exclusion of everyone else in the room. If they are down at the end of a long table turn your torso toward them as well.
  • Be physically quiet while the other person speaks. This puts the spotlight on them, where it belongs and makes them the star. A subtle nod once in a while is OK - just make sure that any head movement is subtle and sparse.
  • If you're going to respond, wait till you think they are finished and then wait an extra beat to make sure they are really finished. Then talk. This is tough, especially when others in the meeting respond so quickly it makes it seem like the start of the Kentucky Derby...and they're off!
  • Build your response off of something they just said as in, "we reacted the same way as you did to the numbers, with disbelief, but we went back and took another look and here's what we found". This gives the other person tangible evidence that you just listened to them. It can be referred to as 'playing back' or 'reflecting back' what you heard. Whatever you call it - do it. It helps. A lot.

I realize these four tactics are not always doable in a world where the competition for airtime in a meeting is fierce. Think about it though. How many meetings have you been in where the smartest comment was made by someone who waited patiently, then made a 'spot-on' observation that wove all the threads of the meeting together? Often people remember those people and their comments more than the folks who practically leapt out of their seats competing to see how much air they could each suck out of the room.

The key is patience. It is a skill that needs to be strengthened through practice. Here's a simple hokey exercise you can do at home. It will eventually pay off with your clients and your colleagues - I promise. Here it is:

When you go home after a long day, plop down on the couch after dinner with your spouse, partner, family member or close friend and listen to them vent about their horrendous day. Then, see how long you can hold out without...

  • interrupting
  • judging
  • problem solving

To do the exercise justice, try holding out for ten minutes without doing any of the three things above. If the other person runs out of gas in their story, you are only allowed to say "so, what happened then?" - and then resume listening. Then you must recap what you learned to the other person and have them informally grade your comprehension.

It sounds easy, but it isn't. Just ask my wife how well I do at it. She'll probably tell you I'm still learning. When I offer this challenge to most men, they laugh. They know they will go home that night and never hold out for anything close to ten minutes. If you do this exercise it can help you discipline your ear to be patient - and it certainly won't hurt your relationship either.

Bottom Line

The best leaders listen well - the best salespeople listen well - and the best partners listen well. Be one of them. It doesn't take miracles. Just practice.

The Global Coach

Monday, January 19, 2009

Pitching Yourself

If you enter the words (job interviews) in Amazon you get 30,570 results starting with Winning Job Interviews and Acing the Interview. I don't intend to compete with all that information and the thousands of other sources on the subject. You can surf as well as I can.

I will offer a few practical tips here to help you prepare for the onslaught of job interviews you will face between now and your next role. These tips are based solely on my common sense, my 28 years of experience in the business world and my observations as a communication coach to more than 1500 people. For this blog, I will assume that you are looking for a more senior role, but the tips can be useful for any level job.

Preparation

  • Read Peter Drucker's article "Managing Oneself" - it will help you focus on your strengths and avoid wasting time on converting weaknesses. You can get it as an electronic download at hbsp.com.

  • Grab a pad and sit down at the kitchen table. Write a line down the middle. On the left, list your strengths. On the right, list a corresponding real-life example of that strength in action. Keep pushing yourself until you have twenty. Then pare it down to the Top Ten that are relevant to your current job search.

  • Practice relating your examples (out loud to a mirror or tape recorder) until you can say them in your sleep. Don't worry, the act of rehearsal makes you sound unrehearsed and you don't need to memorize word for word. You're learning to tell your story.

  • Repeat the process for your weaknesses. On the left, list the weakness. On the right, how you overcame or managed the weakness. Start with five and pare it down to three or less. Then practice as above.

  • Review your resume. Is it a recitation of function or value? Review it and change it until the person reading it can determine the value you added to each organization and each job.

  • Review the job you are pursuing. Is it a turnaround situation? Is is a build-it-from-scratch situation? Is it a strong-getting-stronger situation? Make sure you match your interview prep to the reality of the business and the company.

  • Do due diligence. Write down the name of everyone you know who ever worked with or for the company you are interviewing with. Call them and interview them about the company. What's the culture? Who succeeds there, and why? Who fails there, and why?

  • Review your wardrobe. Make sure the suit you pick out is one you not only look great in, but you feel great in. Make sure it fits you comfortably. Make sure it fits in with their culture. For women, make sure it frames your face with the right accessories. For men, make sure the tie is tied all the way to the top. For either gender, carry a small cosmetic mirror with you. You can't always hit the restroom before your interview. You always want the advantage of a last minute face check.

  • Get into the interviewer head. Many interviewers play the interview straight up. Some play games. With the games-players, don't play. Unless they make you a Michael Corleone offer, why would you want to work with them anyway? There are enough jerks in the world and life's too short to spend 12 hours a day with one more. In any case, I think that most interviewers have four common sense questions they want answered: a) Do I like you? b) Will you fit in with our team? c) What do you bring that the other candidates don't? 4) Will you make our business better?

Body Language


  • Think tall (whether you are or not) and look them in the eye while shaking hands firmly. Visualize yourself entering the room confidently, as if you were already colleagues. Also, remember to heed the words of a legendary salesman, "people hear what they see". If you look like you belong where you are, maybe they'll ask you to stay.

  • To quote our mothers, Sit Up Straight! They were right. After watching 1500 people on videotape pitching clients and colleagues, I assure you it makes a big difference.

  • Keep a level head - leaning your head to either side is a weak deferential gesture - avoid it. It can make you look uncertain, questioning, or equivocal.

  • Be physically quiet while listening. An occasional nod is OK. Keep eye contact (not always eye to eye - more eye to face). If you're physically quiet, it puts the spotlight on the person speaking and you come off as a much more attentive listener. When they sound like they are finished, pause for a second to make sure they've really finished. Then build a response off something they just said. Be a great listener.

  • Gesture with purpose. Your purpose is to project strength and self-management. If you gesture without purpose, you can appear nervous, jittery or out of control. Tie your gestures to words. Keep them subtle. If they are too big they may seem out of place. Interviews should be conversations, not presentations. You don't need big gestures to make an impact.

  • Avoid nervous tics. If you clasp your hands together you may start 'washing' them if you get nervous or get a tough question. You could also shift around in your seat, play with your tie, hair, wedding ring or other jewelry. You want to look comfortable and composed.

  • Practice, practice, practice. If I'm prepping an executive for a media interview. my goal is to make the practice interview harder than the real one. Similar to mock trial for a law student or a hitter swinging a weighted bat in the on-deck circle in baseball. Pick someone you know who can play a tough S.O.B. interviewer and practice with them.

Vocal Presence


  • Speak slowly. The actor Michael Caine is my godfather of slow speaking. He maintains that powerful people speak slowly because they assume that everyone wants to hear what they have to say, whereas subservient people speak quickly because they think no one wants to hear what they have to say. Slow down - where's the fire?

  • Emphasize key words. There is usually a key word or two in each sentence that you want to hit a bit harder than the others. If you do, it gives you vocal variety. That's what people like to listen to. We hate monotone, but monotone is a by-product of 'monoenergy'. Apply more energy to specific words and it helps the interviewer listen to you.

  • Inject a little passion. The one constant in the business world is passion. Every good leader has it and most good leaders look for it. Speak with your head, heart and gut and sound like a person who loves what they do for a living -whether you have a job or not. It goes back to that cliche in sales - "If you don't sound like you care, why should they?"

There are 10,000 other tips you can get from other sources. Consider this a down payment. Remember, Barack Obama has just endured a year-long string of job interviews. He aced some, screwed up a few and was average in some others.

In the end though, he got the job. You will too!

As I always say,

"If you believe it, you will be it.

If you don't, you won't."

Remember, the first interview you have to ace is the one you have with yourself.

The Global Coach



Friday, January 16, 2009

Unleashing the Real You

Speaking in a business context is commonly called presentation. Whether it’s picking up a telephone, facing off with a client, giving a recruiting talk, appearing on a panel at a conference, reporting to a management committee, updating a board of directors or leading a Town Hall meeting as the chairman of your company – presentation says a lot about us. It tells people whether we have confidence in ourselves, credibility in our profession, command of our subject, conviction in our point of view, and comfort in our own skin.

When it comes to this learned skill, we are all in the same overcrowded boat. It doesn’t matter what position you have or how much money you have or what corporate title you have. As speakers and communicators, we are all subject to the same influences. We all have some of the same strengths, weaknesses and anxieties. This blog is about how we can play to our strengths, minimize our weaknesses and manage our anxieties.

It's also about the choices we make as speakers in the business world – starting with the biggest choice of all. Which character are we going to play when speaking to employees, colleagues, clients and total strangers? Our authentic selves – the person people close to us know, love and respect. Or, will we play a ‘presentation’ version of ourselves, which gets watered-down and over-managed to the point that we are unrecognizable.

We have all seen ourselves or our colleagues in a business speaking situation – wrapped in an invisible presentation straitjacket with our head down in notes or slides. Our real personality gets subsumed by an overarching desire to ‘get it right’ and our authentic self starts to disappear. It’s almost as if we said to ourselves before the talk - “at worst, I’ll be boring, but at least I won’t make a mistake and look or sound foolish in front of my peers”. That fear of failure is what keeps us from showing our authentic selves when speaking. That fear of looking foolish keeps us from succeeding as speakers.

Being an effective speaker involves taking risks. That’s the big problem. If you’re high up in an organization, you want to minimize risks in speaking situations for fear of hurting the brand by saying something incorrect, untoward or just plain stupid. Let’s face it – in a world with a billion self-appointed paparazzi with cell-phone cameras, being careful with your words isn’t such a bad idea. Go ask Howard Dean, or Don Imus, or George Allen, or John Kerry or Prince Harry if they’d like to take back a few words if they could. Say the wrong thing and your words fly around the internet, completely out of context, defining your character for billions of people who have never met you - a tremendously inhibiting factor for speakers, even in the corporate world.

If you’re just starting out in an organization or working your way up, this fear of failure exists too, in a slightly different way. You may want to appear ‘professional’ to your bosses and your clients. We all want to look, act, walk and talk like ‘professionals’. Sometimes in our zeal to do so though, we can overdo it and suppress our personality and natural way of communicating. We can come across as dull, uninteresting and ineffectual, when we are anything but that in real life. As a result, we fail to make an impact in business settings because of our fears – of making a mistake – of looking foolish – or of not looking ‘professional’.

Succumbing to those fears is what makes our true authentic selves disappear. As a result, we don’t connect with our clients or our audiences the way we want to or the way we should.

So what can you do to overcome this obstacle and stop 'presenting' and start 'talking'. Let's take a practical business situation as an example of what you can do:

Let's say you're a CEO (or any senior leader) talking to your employees in a Town Hall setting. You walk up to the podium prepared to wade through a 22-slide, 45-minute brain dump on the 2nd quarter followed by, "any questions", followed by a planted question from the CFO, a canned answer from you, and a stampede to the cocktail party or the car. Ten minutes into your 'book report' the audience would like to shoot themselves and you'd probably like to join them.
Here's an alternative:

You walk in the hall. You shake hands with some people you don't know in the first row and thank them for coming (you had pre-placed your direct reports in the back row as observers). As you walk by the lectern, where everyone expects you to stay out of habit or speaker anxiety, you drop off your notes, then you keep walking to the center of the hall, directly in front of the first row. You plant your feet about hip width apart (very important to keep you from wandering) and you give a 3-5 minute leadership message including an icebreaker (if appropriate), some context, a bit of framing, a theme for the talk and your intent for the day as in, "I'd like you all to walk out of here today with..." I call this part - THE HOOK. After you've hooked them, you walk back to the lectern to do your heavy lifting with the slide show.

Instead of reading the slides though, you simply look at some 'alive' faces in the audience (one at a time), frame the main message on each slide, and talk to them about what it means. If the theme is market share, think about taking a step to the side of the podium (with your back-up clip mike already attached) and say "let me tell what I mean by taking market share in this environment". That signals to your audience that it's story time and you rebreak the invisible 4th wall that usually exists between you and the audience. The very same wall you shattered during your leadership message at the outset. It's keep you and your audience connected. Remember, the only medium in the room that matters is your connectivity with your audience. The slides aren't the star - you are! They didn't hire a PowerPoint Pusher, they hired a leader.

Then, when you finally get to the last slide, go back to your leader spot dead center in front of the first row, set your feet again (very important) and give a 3-5 minute leadership wrapup. I call it THE HAMMER. You need to hit the theme again with a sledgehammer and place in their minds the critical ideas you want them thinking about and talking about afterward.

Then, instead of the 'plant' question from Vinny the COO or Mary the CFO, you open your arms with a simple welcoming double open-hand gesture and say "what questions do you have for me"? If you get silence, you whip out a 'prime the pump' question (from the mental inventory you prepared before the talk) and say something like, "what do you think our biggest opportunity is right now?" Like all great leaders, you want to end up your talk by focusing on the future, not the past (all great leaders deal in optimism). That may, or may not, trigger a 20-minute back and forth with your audience. If it does, people will leave the hall feeling they saw the 'real' you. Not the artificial, disconnected, 'slide reader' version of you who showed up last quarter and bored the heck out of everybody.

Best advice - for the rest of your career as a leader, STOP PRESENTING and START TALKING. Occasionally, divorce yourself from the podium. It's a prop, not a crutch. And once, just to feel what it's like to walk the wire with no net, leave the slides on your desk and walk into the room with nothing - and just talk. You may end up liking that style so much that Vinny or Mary will get the duller-than-dishwater slide show delegated to them - where it belongs.

Now, this doesn't just happen. If you try this, you will be breaking 'speaker scar tissue' that has been there for years. It takes planning, preparation and practice. Invest that time once though, and then go succeed in the execution, and every talk after that gets easier as you go along because you now have a process to repeat.

QUICK TIPS
  • Every talk has one theme - find it before you begin to write
  • Nail the HOOK and HAMMER and the rest will be easy
  • Practice out loud - for your spouse, a friend or the family dog
  • Practice to a mirror - so you can see what they see, or don't see
  • Practice in the hall - so you can make it your 'home court'
  • Enjoy yourself when you talk - as your 'real' self - they will too!


The Global Coach