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Powerbrokers as Presenters

by Dianna Booher

While position has its privileges, it also has its pitfalls. In the critical area of communication, few managers have the luxury of honest and consistent feedback. In fact, the higher you go in the organization, the more difficult it is for you to get an accurate assessment of your communication style.

If you’re the boss, people will naturally pay more attention to your preferences, respond more quickly to your requests, and give heartier approval to your ideas. Don’t assume this means your communication is clearer, your ideas have more merit, or your customers and colleagues embrace your actions with more enthusiasm.
 
Those in less powerful positions want to win your goodwill, so you have to interpret their words and behavior accordingly. Honest feedback flows or dribbles according to your own and others’ awareness of position and power. The higher the flow has to go, the harder it is.

With that in mind, many failed executives and managers recognize that their organizations first hired them for their technical skills—and dismissed them for their lack of people skills. Perhaps their résumés promised proficiency in finance, business management, or sales and marketing. But as they won promotions, they needed broader core skills—the ability to interact with and influence more and different groups of people inside and outside the organization.
 
Communication is the basic business act. Successful people continue to focus on mastering these core skills both personally and throughout their organizations. Communication is not a to-do list item; it’s an outcome produced by these core skills: speaking, listening, writing, leading a meeting, and resolving conflict. And there is a reason speaking tops my list…excuse me for paraphrasing a cliché, but you are what you write and say. Your reputation with customers or colleagues often rests on a single interaction.
 
Effective speaking is no longer a “plus” in the business world—it is now expected. And the higher one goes in an organization, the more crucial this skill becomes. Today, public speaking is the norm for successful executives.
 
Some tips for powerful presenting:

Determine Your Point for Each Platform

You do have one, right? And a purpose? In any communication—whether a speech, email, report, meeting, cafeteria poster, or trade show hospitality suite—identify your purpose. Is it to inform, persuade, inspire, coach, commend, warn, entertain, introduce, overcome objections, respond to concerns, or answer questions?

Once you’ve determined your real purpose, you can shape your one-sentence message as a road map.

Give Meaning to the Facts

Even if a fact happens to be correct, it doesn’t always double as a reason. For example, a salesperson may tell me that I can buy a caseload of off-brand PDAs for a special price of $99 each to give to key clients as an appreciation gift at the end of the year. The salesperson may interpret that fact as a reason to make the purchase: a low price, a nice gift for clients.

I may interpret that same fact as a reason not to make the purchase. No matter the special price, giving an off-brand to key clients may not create a good impression but instead may make my company look cheap.

Facts are just facts, until you interpret them as reasons “for” or “against” something.

Make Your Facts Tell a Story

To be useful, facts need to serve some sort of strategy. The only thing worse than filling up your speeches, slides, emails, or reports with fact after fact…is not shaping them to tell your story. What story do your facts tell? What trail do the facts leave?

Tell how your division exploded with the introduction of the new widget, and your headcount climbed from three to sixty-eight engineers in the first two years you were in business. Then tell how you grew lax in your quality control.

Tell about your rejection rates. Show how the customer satisfaction numbers plummeted. Show how orders started dropping off as fast as they were logged onto the computer. Then circle back to the layoff of fifty-eight engineers three years later. Then out of the ashes came…Well, you get the picture. Drama. Dialogue. Climax. Denouement.

Translate Concepts Like “Vision,” “Strategy,” and “Initiatives” into Specifics

If you’re writing or speaking to an audience of more than one and using these vague terms, people are going to have different tasks in mind for their next week’s to-do list. In Asian corporations, vision often refers to plans to be executed twenty to fifty years into the future, while vision in American companies may refer to next quarter.
 
It’s not just the lower-ranking employees you address who’ll want more specifics. Political candidates receive as much criticism for vagueness on implementing their campaign promises as they do for their positions on controversial issues. People demand the particulars.

Truth that Tells, Truth that Sells

When presenting an agenda, giving a speech, or trying to illustrate a point, actual experiences can be as effective as cold facts.

Captain Charlie Plumb, a jet fighter pilot who was shot down, captured after parachuting into enemy hands, and held as a prisoner of war for nearly six years during the Vietnam War, tells a fascinating story. Several years after he was released from the POW camp, Charlie accidentally ran into the man who had packed his parachute!

His story makes the point that none of us ever knows the impact we are having on the lives of others. And the point is so powerful that audiences remember it for years—even recapping it to their friends on the Internet and calling him years later to tell their own tales.

Drive your point home with a well-chosen story. On the other hand, never use a $100 story in a three-minute time slot to make a nickel point. Make sure the point deserves a story.

Consider carefully as you develop your message—not only the power you hold as a corporate leader, but the potential your presentations have to make or break you and your company. If your goal is retention and impact, create, shape, and deliver accordingly—with the finishing touches that pack a wallop.

Dianna Booher is the founder and CEO of Booher Consultants, a leading communication training firm. Her clients include IBM, Lyondell Chemical, PepsiCo, Frito-Lay, Lockheed Martin, JP Morgan Chase, and NASA. She’s the author of more than forty books, including her latest, The Voice of Authority: 10 Communication Strategies Every Leader Needs to Know. She is an award-winning international speaker and member of the CPAE Speakers Hall of Fame. Successful Meetings magazine named her to its list of “21 Top Speakers for the 21st Century.” Booher Consultants is based in Dallas/Ft. Worth, Texas. Find out more at www.booher.com.