All That Great Education, Oh Well ...

I recently sat with a very well-educated executive to help him prepare for an important presentation. It was our first time working together, and I began by saying, “Charlie (not his real name), we are about to go against everything you learned in school, from Kindergarten all the way through your MBA program!” This kind of statement, and I make it often, tends to cause consternation at first but eventually brings relief. Charlie was no different. Smart and motivated, he caught on pretty quickly and off we went.

After that meeting, I came across an interview with Guy Kawasaki, the former chief evangelist of Apple and co-founder of Alltop.com. Guy Kawasaki is one of the great thinkers and communicators to come out of Silicon Valley; he’s a widely respected author and speaker. Here’s an excerpt from a Q&A with him in The New York Times on March 21, 2010:

Q: What should business schools teach more of, or less of?

A: They should teach students how to communicate in five-sentence emails and with 10-slide PowerPoint presentations. If they just taught every student that, American business would be much better off

Q: Why?

A: No one wants to read “War and Peace” emails. Who has the time? Ditto 60 PowerPoint slides for a one-hour meeting. What you learn in school is the opposite of what happens in the real world. In school, you’re always worried about minimums. You have to reach 20 pages or have to have so many slides. Then you get out in the real world and think, “I have to have a minimum of 20 pages and 50 slides.”

I’m with Guy all the way. What works for learning may not work for persuading or informing or motivating in the workplace. But school can be a tough habit to kick!

Me Too!

I sometimes marvel at the extraordinary docility with which Americans submit to speeches.

- Adlai E. Stevenson

SmartMouth Note: Me too, Adlai, I marvel at the very same thing. Perhaps if there were a little more civil unrest, we'd be more entertained, better informed, inspired, and even highly motivated! Alas, we Americans are amazingly passive and polite audience members. Hmmmm, interesting food for thought.

The Golden Rule: Do Unto Others

This may sound harsh, but you’re not that special that when you get up to speak everyone is captivated the entire time, has the patience to sit through your lengthy deck of slides, and will be perfectly content to allow you to run over your allotted time. You know how hard it is to be 100% attentive, and you know you don’t like it when other speakers kill you with more slides than you could possibly remember and talk for longer than scheduled. It’s quite likely that you are more often the audience than you are the speaker, and so consider yourself an expert on what audiences like and don’t like.

The single best guideline for any speaker to use in preparing for a talk is The Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Plan and choreograph your presentations accordingly …

If you don’t like or can’t pay attention to a screen with dense text slides in a darkened room for a prolonged period of time, then don’t do it to your audience;

If you can’t sit through a 50-minute talk that isn’t broken up with visuals or video or interaction, then your audience can’t either;

If you get lost during talks when speakers ramble and provide no guidance as to where they are going or what their point is, then your audience will be lost without your guidance;

If you like stories and anecdotes, then your audience will like them too;

If you like someone who is brief and succinct, then your audience will like that too; and

If you like speakers who stay more connected with their audience than with the lectern or screen, then your audience will appreciate that as well.

Your preferences are your own best litmus test for what your audience might like, so remember that!

It’s All the Rage

Leadership development programs are all the rage these days. Helping people and organizations grow into what they need to be is happening through seminars, training programs, executive coaching, executive education, you name it. All good.

But if I may, I’d like to offer up one shortcut for “leaders” to think about … stay out of the weeds! Leaders shape and then maintain their leadership positions largely through communications. Yes, they review plans and budgets, set strategy and make decisions, but really it’s how they interact with their various constituencies – both internal and external, and up and down the ladder – that defines and predicts their success. The weeds are the detail, the information, and frankly that’s usually someone else’s responsibility. The leader is responsible for context, direction, the bigger picture, which is communicated through messages, not information.

It’s actually imperative for a leader to be able to identify and deliver messages … statements that convey value, benefit, or significance. Of course, there are occasions and audiences that require the communication of more in-depth information, but an effective leader should always be able to wrap that info inside the packaging of a darn good message.

Think about it … communicating a whole lot of detailed information can be done by anyone. Wrapping that information in a package that conveys something meaningful can and should be done by the leader.