Leadership Communication Skills — The Art of the Possible

By: Pete Machalek Tagged With: , , , ,

I wrote a post last week about the difference between criticism and leadership communication, suggesting that criticism is all about describing a negative situation, and that leadership uses a negative situation as a “not-so-happy beginning” to start a story that you can lead with.

Communication Skills and Leadership

Leadership communication skills are cultivated when we start to speak to the interests of our audience.

So, from one perspective, a leadership story has a lot in common with criticism.

From another, they are miles apart.

When we criticize (or complain or whine, etc.), we’re doing it for us. The target of the criticism might be the weather or the president or the political party on the other side of the fence from you or the political system or the people over there or whatever. But the audience of the criticism, the person it’s for, is ourselves. It’s satisfying to hear our own opinion out loud. In some way it separates us from the thing we’re criticizing, and emotionally can even put us above it. Maybe we imagine some kind of moral superiority by voicing the criticism.

When we create and give voice to leadership stories, on the other hand, we’re going way beyond that.

Maybe we’re starting from a similar place we’re in when we criticize. We’re spotting a problem in the world and giving voice to it. At that moment, we’re doing it for ourselves.

Then if we proceed to develop it into a leadership story, we’re thinking about who the problem we’re describing actually hurts. At this point, we’re starting to do it for them as well.

Finally, we need to start thinking about how to craft the story to ensure that it resonates for specific audiences, the people we want to take specific actions in order for the story to be realized. When we do this, we’re doing it for these audiences.

So criticism is really just for us, while leadership communication is for us, the community we want to help, and the people we want to inspire.

This is valuable to understand for a few reasons:

First, we often communicate publicly when really the only relevant audience is ourselves. Distinguishing when we’re  complaining just to hear ourselves complain can safeguard other people’s feelings and our own reputation all at the same time. In this age of social media where we all have powerful megaphones, we need to bear in mind who is on the receiving end of our diatribes, and we need to ask ourselves, what do we want out of this? Do we just want to get it out of our system? Do we want people to chime in so we create a community of people feeling bad about something? Or do we want people to do something about it?

If the answer to that last question is yes, then that leads us to the second reason this understanding is valuable.

We all know that not everybody cares about the same things. If you want people to do something about something that you care about, you’re going to have to craft your leadership stories so that they speak to what your audience cares about. The story that you come up with that motivates you into action may not be the one that motivates your target audience.

You have the potential to be employing leadership communication skills and creating leadership stories all the time. Every message that you put out to the world should be put out there with your specific audience firmly in mind, so that you can speak to what they care about, inspire the actions that need to happen, and create the result that you’re after.
What do you think of this? Do you ever complain? Can you feel the difference between how you’re being when you complain and when you lead? What does it take to shift you from one to the other?
12 interesting opinions, add yours

SAGEPRESENCE HELP DESK – Talking Skills for Conversation

By: Dean Hyers Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Everyone faces “make-or-break moments” in their career, and in their lives. SagePresence formed to help you master the role required to get past them.

SagePresence Help Desk troubleshoots your Talking Skills for ConversationTHIS POST’S HELP DESK TOPIC:
“What make-or-break moments do you face in REGULAR CONVERSATION? How can we help you develop your professional talking skills?”

The SagePresence Help Desk wants to answer to your specific challenges as you present yourself with professionalism in your daily communication. (Post a comment for a talking skills solution!) 

The SagePresence Help Desk is a one-touch solution for communication questions. You tell us what you’re dealing with and we’ll bring you answers you can use to achieve winning presence under pressure.

We started SagePresence after working in the film business, then stumbling into the spy business, teaching acting to undercover agents in a federal spy school.

Movie stars, agents, and business professionals all face Make-or-Break Moments, so we applied our training to coach $2 billion in winning competitive sales presentations.

We want to respond to your Make-Or-Break Moment questions? What do you face, and what’s in your way? Let us help. The Sage is IN!

11 interesting opinions, add yours

Leadership Communication Skills: Leading Vs. Criticizing

By: Pete Machalek Tagged With: , , , , ,

We are living in the age of punditry and criticism.

Criticizing is not leading

Criticizing is not leading.

Everywhere we turn, we’re exposed to an opinion that attacks, criticizes, and deconstructs. Our leaders don’t know what they’re doing, our system is corrupt, our institutions are broken, our laws are unfair — The targets of derision are all around us.

I don’t see this as a completely bad thing. I think it’s good that people are thinking about what’s going on. They’re processing it, and they’re coming up with an opinion about it based on their values and priorities. It’s good that they’re engaged and intelligent enough to formulate their thoughts.

But I do think what people are doing when they’re criticizing is incomplete. All they’re doing is describing a problematic situation. It’s almost indistinguishable from whining and complaining. I say “almost,” because I do think it’s more intellectual and reasoned than the typical emotional and knee-jerk qualities of whining and complaining. But the net result of criticizing, whining and complaining is all the same: It puts us as an audience into a negative place, and it leaves us there.

(And by the way, conscious or otherwise, I believe this is part of the intent of criticism. We’re in a bad place when we criticize, and we want others to join us in that bad place. So the payoff is in finding agreement, others of like mind, and in a sense, creating a community of negativity. Because misery loves company, right?)

I say criticism is incomplete because of the experience it creates for audiences. When we are exposed to criticism, it either resonates for us because we’re already in that bad place, or it takes us to that bad place. Then it just leaves us there.

Although sometimes we can experience a kind of communal enjoyment out of sharing a bad place with people, I think most of us don’t want to be stuck in that bad place. We want a way out of the bad place. We want a way forward. We want motion, we want progress, we want a feeling of improvement.

So it’s fine to criticize, in that it identifies a negative situation that others can emotionally resonate with. But it’s incomplete, in that it leaves people there.

So what happens if we don’t stop there? What if we proceed from the bad situation and talk about what needs to happen? What if we talk about what we want people to do? What if we talk about what we will do? And what if we then describe the better situation that will come about as a product of our actions?

All of a sudden it stops being just criticism, and it becomes something else. It becomes a leadership message.

This is the crucial difference between critics and leaders. Critics leave us in the Negative Now, while leaders only see the Negative Now as the beginning of something. Great stories start out in a negative place, so leaders actually appreciate problematic situations that we can agree on, because it gives them a place to lead us forward from.

We all can be leaders, just like we all can be critics. There’s no doubt that it’s harder to be a leader than it is to be a critic. It takes more work to envision a better future situation and to come up with ideas about what needs to happen, and who needs to do what, to lead us into that situation.

But the payoff is much greater as well. Rather than getting ourselves and our audiences stuck in a Negative Now, we’re moving people forward. We’re catalyzing something. We’re making a difference that we want to experience. We’re focused on where we’re going and on what we need to do to get there. And the Negative Now just becomes an increasingly meaningless background buzz that fades into history.

What do you think of this? What keeps people from stepping up from being critics to becoming leaders? What have you seen in others, and what have you experienced in yourself? What do you criticize that you could lead from? Share your thoughts below!

29 interesting opinions, add yours

SAGEPRESENCE HELP DESK – Making a Presentation

By: Dean Hyers Tagged With: , , , , ,

Everyone faces “make-or-break moments” in their career, and in their lives. SagePresence formed to help you master the role required to get past them.

SagePresence Help Desk is like a Bat Phone for Presenters

The SagePresence Help Desk wants to answer to your specific presentation challenges. (Pose a comment to ask for help on making a presentation, and you'll get a higher-altitude answer than a subterranean bat cave could offer!)

The SagePresence Help Desk is “Your Bat Phone” for presentation questions. You tell us what you’re dealing with and we’ll bring you answers you can use to achieve winning presence under pressure.

We started SagePresence after working in the film business, then stumbling into the spy business, teaching acting to undercover agents in a federal spy school.

Movie stars, agents, and business professionals all face Make-or-Break Moments, so we applied our training to coach $2 billion in winning competitive sales presentations.

We want to respond to your Make-Or-Break Moment questions? What do you face, and what’s in your way? Let us help. The Sage is IN!

THIS POST’S HELP DESK TOPIC:
“What questions do you have about making a presentation to a roomful of people?”

14 interesting opinions, add yours

Finding a Job vs. Creating a Career: You Can Have It All

By: Pete Machalek Tagged With: , , ,
Finding Position

The process of looking for a fit can be a massively dispiriting one.

When I got out of film school in the early nineties, I wasn’t ambitious enough to move out to Hollywood, and I wasn’t confident enough of my skills to start my own production company. So I started looking in the want ads in the paper, hoping to land on something I was the perfect fit for.

Unfortunately, nothing there had my name on it. The best I could do was find positions which, if I crossed my eyes and imagined real hard, I could picture myself maybe being able to to fit into. But nothing felt spot on, so the process was a consistently depressing one that convinced me I didn’t really fit anywhere and made me want to stop looking.

So for several years, that’s exactly what I did — I stopped looking for the perfect job. Instead, I just did jobs I could do, and on the side I worked on film and video projects that really captivated me.

When Dean Hyers invited me to create an acting workshop with Dean, I jumped on it. I could sense it was heading down the right path. And the farther we went down that path, the righter it felt.

I realize now that  it felt so right for exactly two reasons:

  1. I was really enjoying what I was doing in the moment. I was working with actors, I was being creative, I was being collaborative.
  2. I was making a difference for people I cared about. We were helping actors develop their craft and move closer to professional goals. This gave me an experience of doing something meaningful.

As the workshop progressed and proved to a be a resource first for covert trainees, then for business professionals and ultimately for teams looking to build business, I experienced a greater and greater sense of doing something meaningful.

I tell this story because I think there are a lot of people out there who are like I was when I was just coming out of school: Hoping to find their place in the world, trying to find their meaning.

But in my experience, it doesn’t work that way. I didn’t find my place or discover my meaning, I made my place, and I dictated the meaning.

Which, of course, is wonderfully freeing. We don’t need to hope that there is a place for us in the world. We can make a place for ourselves. We can design it.

There are a ton of resources out there to help people figure out who they are and what personality type they are and what their preferences are and what they like to do and what needs to be in place in their lives for them to feel whole and complete and productive and satisfied.

Many of these resources are very, very good and helpful.

Sometimes, though, the multiplicity of resources can be dizzying and can leave people with more questions than answers.

And sometimes they can accidentally leave people with the idea that their place in the world isn’t up to them, it’s up to the world. That’s a horribly disempowering idea.

When I work with people to help them figure out their future, I keep it simple, and focus them on two questions:

  1. If you could dictate how you fill your waking hours, what would you be doing?
  2. If you could help anyone, who would it be?

I do this because I want my clients to look at their lives like a story that they’re writing. If you think about any good Hollywood story, there are two things that need to happen for us to enjoy it:

  1. In the middle of that movie, the hero is doing stuff that we’re engrossed in.
  2. When the story is done, we recognize the difference that that action has made for someone other than the hero. And in that moment, we recognize the meaning of the story.

The same is true for us to enjoy our own lives. When it comes down to it, we all want two things at any point in our lives: We want to enjoy what we’re doing, and we want what we’re doing to have a greater meaning by impacting something or someone outside of ourselves that we care about.

It’s so easy to get frozen in place with questions about who we are or what we should be doing or what we’re qualified for or will we make enough money doing it. Those are all reasonable questions, but they can get in the way of what’s really crucial to us: How we want to be filling our waking hours, and how we want to be making a difference to the world around us.

I want to invite you to look at your life and your job and your career right now and ask yourself if those two things are in place for you. If not, why not? Maybe you’ve never been clear on what you wanted to do, or who you wanted to help. Or maybe you never realized that you can help others by doing what you want to do. It’s just a question of figuring out the story that you want to create.

Go ahead. Have it all. And if you need help getting there, let us know.

What do you think of this? Share your thoughts below!

18 interesting opinions, add yours
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