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Tips to Improve Your Public Speaking

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  1. Realise your purpose in speaking – it is not about you – what do you want people to know, think and feel as a result of listening to you? Unless you are clear on this before you start to think about your presentation you will struggle to rise above the mediocre. Spend time on working this stuff out. Talk about it.
  2. If you are not passionate about – don’t talk about it. People recognise if you lack passion or authenticity. This is not about tub-thumping – it is about belief.
  3. It is not about ‘performance’ – it is about connection. Remember you want them to connect with you – not your powerpoint slides.
  4. Slow down. Use pauses. “I have a dream’ — pause, pause, pause — ‘that one day’ — pause, pause, pause — ‘this nation will rise up….” You don’t have to be Martin Luther King to let pauses improve your connection with the audience.
  5. Make eye contact.
  6. SMILE!
  7. Move towards the audience – get out from behind the podium or desk.
  8. Vary your tone, pace and pitch.
  9. Practice – as much as you can whenever you can.
  10. Repeat your key messages – most people will struggle to remember more than 2 key messages.  If you have more than 2 messages to get across then re-think your communications plan.
  11. Remember: ‘It is not about you’.

Communicating well, whether it is with a colleague or an audience of hundreds, is essential to management and leadership success.

When did you last take some time to improve your communication skills? For most people a small investment on some communication basics makes a big difference.

And if you read these tips and were thinking ‘I know all this’ just remember, it is not what you know – it is what you do! Communication is one area where the ‘Knowing/Doing’ gap can be dangerously wide.

“People will forget what you said,

people will forget what you did,

but people will never forget how you made them feel”

Maya Angelou

Leaders-Teachers Do Not ‘Transform’ or ‘Motivate’ People!

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Instead leaders-mentors-teachers:

  1. Provide a context which is marked by;
  2. Access to a luxuriant portfolio of meaningful opportunities (projects) which;
  3. Allow people to fully (and safely, mostly – caveat: “they” don’t engage unless they’re “mad about something”) express their innate curiosity and;
  4. Engage in a vigorous discovery voyage (alone and in small teams, assisted by an extensive self-constructed network) by which those people;
  5. Go to create places they (and their mentors-leaders-teachers)had never dreamed existed – and then the leaders-mentors-teachers;
  6. Applaud like hell, stage “photo ops” and ring the church bells a 100 times to commemorate the bravery of their ‘followers’ explorations!

This according to Tom Peters.

Wow!

Just imagine if your leadership were able to provide this kind of context for people to do great work in.

What might it mean for the impact of your team?

What opportunities do you have to DELEGATE!

Who is ‘mad enough’ about the opportunity to really engage?

How can you support them on their journey to create something new?

How well do you celebrate success – and heroic failure?

Searching for Answers…

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One of the great things that a blog can do tell you exactly what people typed in their search engine to get to your site.

Yesterday two of the search items that led people to me were:

  • Can Managers Be Effective Leaders?

and

  • Are Leaders Always Managers?

In short I believe that the answers are Yes and No respectively. Let me say more:

Can Managers Be Effective Leaders?

Managers exist to ensure that ‘leadership’ happens. Managers are paid to make ‘the rubber hit the road’. Got a new strategic plan? It is worth nothing unless you have managers who implement it. Developed a new set of values? Again worthless without managers who can bring them to life in work. Been building a balanced scorecard or working on Lean systems? Pointless, unless you have managers that can and will implement change. Without management leadership is nothing.

The lack of management capacity to engage with and implement the products of leadership is in my experience frightening – certainly here in the UK. Sometimes the problem is lack of time. Managers are too busy keeping the current show on the road to really thing about the production of a new one dreamed up by the ‘leadership’. Sometimes it is lack of skill and will.

Are Leaders Always Managers?

I meet many leaders who fail to really engage with the problems of implementation and management. The strategies, plans, visions and values are published and the expectation is that things will happen. Accountabilities are not clear, progress is not monitored and support is not provided. At least not in the quantities or with the rigour needed to make leadership work. Leaders often fail to engage managers in the leadership process – leaving them detached and struggling to take ownership of the process.

In my experience the best results occur when good managers are trained to engage in the leadership process. If this is well planned then they own the leadership process and leadership is not invested a single charismatic leader. It is distributed throughout the management team.

As for the best leaders,
the people do not notice their existence.
The next best,
the people honour and praise.
The next, the people fear;
and the next, the people hate…
When the best leader’s work is done,
the people say, “We did it ourselves!”
To lead the people, walk behind them.
Lao Tzu

Communication: Companies need less . . . not more!

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This is the title of a great post on the Slow Leadership blog. Dave Woods says:

‘I work with a large variety of CEOs, senior managers and key employees. If I ask about the needs and issues within the company, I almost always get the same response: “We need more communication.”

My reaction to that is that it is simply, WRONG!

Companies don’t need more communication. They need more clarity.

  • Clarity of the vision of the company.
  • Clarity of where the company is going (long term and short term).
  • Clarity of HOW the company will get there.
  • Clarity of individual roles and how those roles create value toward the vision.
  • Clarity of how roles must intertwine in order to achieve extraordinary results.
  • Clarity of how the company will hold itself and each individual accountable.’

Dave then goes on to argue that if you look at a great sports team they actually need very little communication from the coach. They know all the plays and they know what they have to do. In short they have clarity. Dave argues that it is not communication that we should be increasing – but clarity.

Amen to that!

However clarity only comes with communication that is frequent, 2 way and relevant to both player and coach; employee and manager. Surely there can be no clarity without communication?

When you watch a great team play what you are seeing is the result of dozens of hours of communication, practice, feedback, delegation and coaching. Typically tens of hours of this ‘management’ go into every hour of play.

Life in most businesses is not like that. There is no practice ground. It is always ‘game time’. And most managers find it incredibly difficult to pull players out of the game to them at all whether to clarify, give feedback, coach or delegate. It is all they can do to keep playing the game – never mind improve.

So I disagree with Dave – and agree with his clients. Most organisations do need more communication. But it has to be effective. It has to focus on performance and improvement. It has to be constructive. It has to keep both vision and values in the front of people minds. And it has to be frequent.

Sounds just like a recipe for 121s to me!

You Are a Superstar: 90% of Managers Are In the Top 10%

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This from the ‘business pundit‘ blog recently:

″A new study shows that 90% of managers think they are in the top 10% at their workplace.

Believe you’re among the top performers in your office? You’re not alone.

According to a new survey, an impossible 90 percent of managers think they’re among the top 10 percent of performers at their workplace.

The number is highest among executives, 97 percent of whom consider themselves shining stars, according to a recent survey in BusinessWeek magazine.”

Read More

The sad truth is just how easy it is for most people to get into the top 10% of managers in just about any organisation.

By consistently doing some management basics such as:

  • communicating well (that’s listening as well as telling),
  • providing feedback,
  • coaching every team member – every week,
  • running effective (as opposed to frequent) meetings
  • delegating, and
  • keeping mission, vision and values in the front of every team members thoughts…

the vast majority of managers can massively improve their effectiveness and really stand out as high performers.

It is not about charisma, vision or flair.  It not about MBAs, strategy, long hours and inspiration.

It is about consistently doing the basics well.