Sometimes things just go wrong, and when they do, I operate from a belief that there’s always a way to win. I’m going to share a worst-case scenario of my own and what I did about it. Then I want to hear from you. What went wrong for you that leaves you wondering, “If that ever happens again, what are my options? What’s a better way to bounce back?”
Let’s see if we can find a new “what to do if.”
SagePresence Help Desk offers solutions to your worst-case challenges!
The premise I operate from was forged in my personal relationships, when I noticed what makes certain essential people stand out in my life. My “inner circle” relationships tie in some way to a crisis we faced together, or a crisis between us that taught us something important.
Few if any of my critical relationships hinge on how smooth and effortless they are. The higher status of a relationship comes from the tests it has been put to, and what I learned about myself, and about them, under the pressure of crisis.
Why not recognize that any crisis you face as a leader, in customer service, or as a presenter, can also be the very test that makes you special and important to your audience? This belief has led me to find opportunity in the worst-case, and approach greatness not by how perfectly I do something, but in how successfully I maneuver the mishaps I create and discover.
The Wrong Presentation
One of the worst things to ever happen to me as a speaker was to discover on stage that I had completely misunderstood the assignment, and prepared the wrong presentation for my audience. I was well into it, committed, rehearsed, and with a PowerPoint that locked me in.
What was wrong about it was everything. The information on our company calendar called for an interactive speech and workshop for presenting skills, but the audience turned out to be an audience of phone-support people who never present. They thought they were getting a seminar about how to communicate over the phone (which wasn’t my specialty).
The first indication was the funny looks, and then when I asked for audience examples of where they present, someone said, “None of us ever present,” which I found to be a pretty good clue that some wires had gotten crossed.
What I did about it was simple enough. I connected the dots between what I was prepared to talk about and the audience, like two different worlds comparing notes about how they accomplish similar tasks.
At that point in my career, I wasn’t going to discover an impromptu phone-support presentation waiting in my subconscious. Instead, I acknowledged the “apparent misfit” between public speaking and phone support and built to a leap of faith statement that we would learn from each other how they were similar, as though this had been the plan from the start.
To buy myself some time, I took a few moments to explore what the differences are. (Phone is one-on-0ne. You can’t see the audience. It’s a conversation. You don’t have a set time. Etc.)
Then I asked them, “What is similar about presenting to a group and the customer service phone calls you make?” I wanted to see if they could help me connect the dots between their situation and my content. To my surprise, they talked about “stage fright.” They needed confidence, connection, chemistry, well-structured messages, positive energy, dynamism, and the ability to follow a plan even when they get a surprise from their caller – their audience.
Suddenly, the leap of faith I had to make didn’t seem so vast. Right now, I was in their situation. I expected one thing from my audience, but I got a surprise, and had to make it work with what I had available. So I took a breath and jumped.
“Folks, what if I told you that you could be better at facing your clients if you stepped out of your domain of phone support and took the stage as public speakers? Because I believe that my realm of presenting will give you some new techniques for making connections, and rolling with the punches, as more powerful communicators. Are you game?”
They were. And suddenly my presentation fit, as long as I connected the dots at each and every main point to their world. We moved through my material as an analogy to what they did. I even discovered that some of their work is done from scripts, which were sometimes read verbatim, sometimes as talking points, and other times merely a starting point for improvisation – just like speaking.
I enjoyed a special “bonding in empathy” moment, when someone asked for an example of going off script and improvising, and as my example I admitted to the audience what had just happened to me in having prepared for the wrong subject.
At that point, I became living proof of what I was describing. It was a terrifying discovery in front of 150 people as a paid speaker, but in the end I won their hearts and increased my importance to them. I got high marks and was asked back for more presentations and training in the months to follow.
Help Desk Topic – What’s Your Worst-Case Story or Challenge?
What happened to you that you weren’t sure how to respond to? Are there situations out there that come up when you speak, present, or communicate in the workplace that you have a hard time figuring out how to face with winning energy, or stories where you turned the difficult situation around?
The Sage is In!
The Future of Business
Back in the early 90s, I read an article predicting that the future of business was to follow the Hollywood model. Being a film guy, a was attracted by the headline, so I excitedly read the article.
It was an interesting piece that described the Hollywood business model as this:
The future of business is more, faster change. The best way to survive and thrive in all that change is to flex with the flux.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this article, not only because in the intervening years I’ve become an independent professional, but because I’ve been seeing more and more evidence that the article was truly prophetic. More people are going independent, and those that aren’t are changing jobs more frequently, often having different responsibilities from position to position.
This trend is not solely because of the economy going sour, although I’m sure that this is an important reason.
More people are tasting independence and loving it. Pop culture has taken to celebrating entrepreneurs and entrepreneurialism. More and more tools are available for individuals to help them promote independent ventures. Business franchises modeled specifically for individuals operating out of their homes are sprouting up all over the place.
It’s an exciting time.
And for many of us, it’s a scary time too. The world is changing faster every day. Technology is moving faster than anyone can keep up with. And the business world is moving right along with it.
Fast Company magazine recently featured an article about “Generation Flux,” covering a gaggle of professionals who all share the trait of reinventing themselves serially over the course of their careers, sometimes for seemingly whimsical reasons, but ultimately because they are responding to the changes they perceive going on around them in the business world. Sometimes they are starting their own businesses, sometimes they are going into existing companies. Many of them say that they don’t have much of a plan. But by one measurement or another, they are all successful.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” — Charles Darwin
The article ultimately made a Darwinian point: The best way — maybe the only way — for us to not only survive, but thrive, is to change with the times.
This doesn’t mean we have to constantly change everything about ourselves to keep our heads above water. We don’t have to become anything we’re not. We don’t need to throw any of our skills away. We don’t need to constantly get training to learn new jobs that are obsolete by the time our training is complete.
What it does mean is that we need to be flexible in how we think, and let that flexible thinking inform what we do. We need to define ourselves not by what we do on a day-by-day basis, but by the change we make in the world, and whom we make it for.
Focusing on what we *do* is often bound by the specific circumstances of the moment, and therefore will change a lot. Focusing on the change we’re committed to creating connects us to bigger picture movements, and will allow us to follow consistent values inside of us while the specific nature of what we’re doing flexes with the flux surrounding us.
For many years, Deluxe Corporation could operate just fine thinking of itself as a company that prints checks. But as technology has made the use of checks plummet, it has needed to change course. And the only way for it to successfully do that was to stop thinking of itself in terms of what it did, and to start thinking of itself as to who it helped, and what change it wanted to create for those people it helped. The company is on better footing now, focusing on helping small business have what they need to run smoothly.
One of the seemingly simplest applications we do here at SagePresence is help people design their elevator pitch — a simple, concise way to communicate who and what they’re about.
It’s an incredibly powerful tool. Most of our clients want one because they want to have something both compelling and informative to say when people ask them what they do. Beyond that, the elevator pitches that we design for our clients help them tell people who they’re looking to help, and how they help them, so that the people they talk to are inspired to think about who they can connect them to.
So an elevator pitch is a vital networking tool.
But even more important than that, an elevator pitch is a simple and compelling message for us to hear. So that, every time we tell it, we remind ourselves what we’re about, why we’re here, what we’re looking to accomplish. In this way, an elevator pitch can also be a mission statement.
For instance, my elevator pitch for SagePresence coaching is this:
Business professionals come to me when they’re stuck in their career and they don’t know how to move forward. I help them get clear on what they want, and give them the tools and the skills they need to go for that goal. When I’m done, they’re thrilled to be moving with velocity toward the goals they know they want to achieve.
I love to see this and hear this because it resonates with who I know myself to be. I’m all about self-determination. I’m here to help people be who they are and make the difference that they’re here to make, regardless of the economy, or their background, or who they’re worried they are, or what other people have been telling them. People are happiest when they doing what they say they’re here for.
So I want to give everyone reading this an opportunity to do this for themselves, maybe for the first time. And at the same time, I want to hear it from you. What are you about? Why are you here? What are you looking to accomplish?
Give us your elevator pitch. Tell us four things:
Let us hear it, and let us know how it resonates for you to put it into language like this.
And for anyone out there who reads one of these elevator pitches and knows someone in the target market who is suffering from the problem that a poster describes, follow your instincts and make an introduction!