(Editor’s Note: What follows is an excerpt from “The Emergent Leader: A Guide to Brand Building, Leadership, and Self-Mastery,” a book by Don Gregori)
Great communicators are more influential, more persuasive, more inspiring, and rise to power faster than those who have poor communication skills. By consciously curating the message and employing storytelling throughout our engagement with stakeholders, our ideas are more likely to stick and spread. Before we speak, we need to prepare. The shorter the speech, the longer the preparation. The more knowledgeable we are of our audience, the more effective the speech. There’s a reason audiences never get to see a twelve-hour film filled with raw footage, scene takes, miscues, and unedited audio. From an audience perspective, such a movie isn’t very compelling. It lacks purpose and clarity, without which we lose the point of the story.
Crafting a compelling story is commendable, yet we also have to ensure that it is consumed as we intended. In what format, through which medium, and with what frequency do we want our message to be heard? In the field of marketing, the most impactful advertisement of all time is Apple’s “1984” commercial. To launch their new Macintosh computer, Apple chose to create a commercial based on George Orwell’s novel 1984. They hired director Ridley Scott, who had previously made the films Alien and Blade Runner, to create their video. They chose to air their sixty-second commercial only once — and both Apple and the Super Bowl would never be the same. The right message at the right time in the right space can be the difference between success and failure.
Our message, in a presentation or a pitch, has the potential to be interrupted, ignored, or trumped by competing interests. We need to determine how we can avoid those obstacles or work through them. I once designed a software application that was used by thousands of employees daily. It was a homegrown solution built to address the changing needs of a newly virtual and centralized workforce. It took the crucial elements of an archaic system and introduced new features that made it more intuitive and flexible. At the same time, the company was looking to consolidate the vast number of systems in use by employees down to as few as possible. Literally hundreds of applications were to be shrunk down to a couple dozen, and the mandate was to buy and configure rather than build and customize. But the highest levels of the organization could not understand the usage, the impact, or the user satisfaction of the application I’d designed. As a result, I was asked to meet with the C-Suite and the heads of divisions to discuss how this custom software application fit into the long-term picture.
I knew that if they had all of the pertinent high-level facts, they would support the application moving forward. I had to provide them that information first, ensure that they reviewed it, and keep the conversation from drifting onto a number of tangents. For the hour-long meeting they scheduled, I decided to create a five-minute video that I would play at the start of the meeting. I did not pre-send it, as I knew certain executives would not watch it prior to our meeting. The video covered statistics on adoption, usage, time savings, tasks completed, and internal customer quotes. It gave visuals of the application in action, and it focused on tasks that could not be done in the prior systems and which were not addressed in the off-the-shelf software under consideration. Lastly, it laid out plans for how to integrate with our future systems.
When the video ended, the CEO made the first comment: “I get it. Don’t screw it up.” The application was saved and supported through the upcoming consolidation. No system or process should be utilized or adhered to forever, and we should not attach parental feelings to our creations. At some point, the needs of the business will change, and our products and tools may need to evolve or simply be abandoned. We don’t fight to save something because it’s our creation or was born from our idea; we fight when it makes sense for the business outcome. The next twenty minutes were spent fielding questions about how my team had accomplished some of the tasks and could solve other related problems in the future. Everyone got back forty minutes of their day — which, if you added up the salaries in that room, was a significant reallocation of dollars. It was an easy win, but only because I was able to control the message for the target audience. That meant I first needed to know my audience. I also had to frame the conversation, leaving no ambiguity as to why the people were gathered together. This let everyone know what was in scope and focused attention on what needed to be addressed. It also allowed for self-governance: when the group knew the objective and not just the agenda of the meeting, participants helped rein in anyone trying to take the conversation off course.
We should practice word economy, both spoken and written. A fifteen-minute video would not have worked as my pitch to the executives. There’s a good reason writers and filmmakers need editors. Editing is even more important in business communications, because participants have competing interests and time is money. Unless we’re conducting training, the aim is to tease, not to teach. We should strive to provide the highest-yield content in the most effective way possible. A high school English teacher once taught me to put a point value on words when writing: one point for each word that carries meaning and is substantive to the story, zero points for filler language and extraneous words. The goal is to maximize the point value of our story and yield the highest point-to-word correlation.
Another strategy for efficient communication is to build proposals with options before asking for feedback. We shouldn’t start with a brainstorming session — they’re hard to time-box and even harder to keep collaborators focused on. Instead, we start with a statement and a pitch. We give our audience something to respond to. Think of taking a team of twenty employees to lunch and asking each of them where they want to go. We’d get a dozen different suggestions, a handful of undecided votes, more questions than we started with, and an argument over someone not getting their way. In all likelihood, we wouldn’t eat lunch together that day. The alternative is to propose three options and take it to a vote. That way, we spend our time arguing on the issues that actually matter.
Most importantly, we can only be effective if we understand the situation, the people’s perspectives, and the public perception — all of which can only be learned through observation. My pitch to the executive board would have been a complete failure without the right building blocks. I needed to understand their interests, their misperceptions, their expectations, and their objectives before I could craft a persuasive argument. To be an effective communicator, we need a passion for learning, a penchant for research, and a skill for observing. If we don’t listen to what people are saying — and what they are purposefully not saying — we can never give them what they want.
Take Away: The message we craft will take on a life of its own. Nurture it before releasing it into the wild.
Take Action: The next time you need to present or seek support from a group, spend extra time identifying who your audience is and listing their interests, their biases, and how each unique group benefits from your ideal outcome. Write your argument from their point of view, and pre-plan what objections or interruptions may arise and how you’ll address them.
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The Emergent Leader: A Guide to Brand Building, Leadership, and Self-Mastery by Don Gregori is available now in print, ebook, and audiobook — on Audible, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and wherever books are sold. Wherever the day-to-day pulls between architecture, operations, and the C-suite, the book offers 61 short, direct chapters on brand, resilience, innovation, efficiency, and self-mastery — built for practitioners, not theorists. Learn more at emergentleader.co.