Authentic Communication Training » Communication Training Course

Leadership Communication: Speak with the power of a king

Howard Stableford — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:36:57 +0000

What if you had but one chance to speak and your life and the life of all those who were following you depended on it? How would you start? What could you possibly say?

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers….”

I was recently working with a group of senior executive leaders at one of the world’s largest and most successful high-tech companies and successfully used our M.A.G.I.C. communication formula to break down some long-standing barriers to effective communication in their organization.

As a part of my preparations I wanted to provide visual examples for Message, Authenticity, Gracing the stage, maintaining Interest and Commitment to practice.

In the process I found a single superb example of extraordinary leadership communication that demonstrates at the same time all five of the MAGIC principles dramatically and profoundly.

Before you take a look at the video here’s some background.

By the time King Henry Vth of England reached the fields of Agincourt in the year 1415, he was a leader without much of a following. He had promised his army quick wins on French soil and here they were six months later exhausted, hungry, most suffering from dysentery while the French army stood before them fresh, ready for battle and outnumbering Henry’s weakened soldiers by at least five to one.

Several times the French send a messenger offering Henry a peaceful but humiliating way out.

Each time Henry refused.

In Shakespeare’s version of events, on the night before the battle Henry dons a disguise and walks among his troops in the camp listening to their opinions of the King that promised much and had delivered little apart from the promise of death at the hands of French swordsmen the next day.

Henry, like many leaders, finds himself in an impossible situation. With little time left how can he change the hearts and minds of his men?

How can he rally and motivate them not just to fight but to fight believing they will win?

Shakespeare composes perhaps his most stirring speech for Henry and as I watched Kenneth Branagh’s version of the “St. Crispin’s Day” speech it occurred to me that this confluence of historical Henry Vth, playwright William Shakespeare and Branagh’s film version of the speech hit everything that our MAGIC communication model strives for.

Take a look at the movie clip and see if you can identify what Henry’s real message is; how he creates and resonates authenticity with his audience; how he uses the physical space as a persuasive tool; how he keeps his soldiers interested and how there is a commitment to practice?

Well, the actors certainly committed to practice since this complex scene is very long for a sequence that has so few shots in it.

In my next blog, I’ll tell you why I think this scene ticks all the boxes of the MAGIC communication model. And if you have ideas you’d like to share about why this is a near perfect persuasive speech, let me know.

How will you learn to be a great speaker?

Michael Gardner — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:28:40 +0000

You want to be a better communicator?

But how? Time is short. Money is tight. Job demands are increasing. And yet…

Increasing your communication and presentation skills is something you know you need to do, for yourself and for your career.

Take a look at this video, an Edutopia interview with James Paul Gee.

In a just a few minutes he shows how you can learn more from peers than experts and how new digital technologies promise to revolutionize how education happens. It’s pretty cool, if not radical thinking, and it’s made me think about education, teachers and the online video games my kids play in a whole new light.

By the way, we just started a new service offering online peer and expert video presentation coaching and training. If you’d like to give this a try for free, please let me know. (This is a limited offer.)

Young Start Ups: Communicate Your Mantra!

Howard Stableford — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:59:24 +0000

I recently returned from a wonderful trip to Russia where I was invited to teach a course on executive presence as well as presentation and communication techniques at the brand new Skolkovo Moscow School of Management.

The students are an extremely lively and, of course, incredibly bright collection of talent from around the world. Although most are Russian, citizens from Brazil, India, Finland, Australia, USA and Kazakhstan are also represented. They are not a shy bunch either.

A vision of Moscow

One exercise I introduced them to was how to develop and communicate a compelling vision for an organization. We discussed the differences between mission statements and vision statements and then I gave them free reign to invent their own company profiles and develop vision statements for them. Company products ranged from a pill that could make you instantly sober to a weapons factory designed as far as I could tell to eradicate all other weapons! (you had to be there I guess).

They did pretty well with the vision statements too, but it was at this point that Sergey Pavlovskiy from Russia, who is seriously into creating start up companies, suggested that mission and vision statements should be replaced with a “mantra.” He pointed to the book by Guy Kawasaki called The Art of the Start in which Kawasaki says “forget mission statements, they’re long, boring and irrelevant. No-one can even remember them much less implement them. Instead, take your meaning and make a mantra out of it.”

In fact, Kawasaki’s mantra idea is the vision statement. Vision statements should conjure up the values and philosophy of a company succinctly and memorably. They are not about how to achieve the bottom line but are externally focused and express why customers will want to work with your organization. Kawasaki uses these examples of good “Mantras”:

Authentic Athletic Performance – Nike

Fun Family Entertainment – Disney

Rewarding Everyday Moments – Starbucks

They are all great vision statements as well as Mantras. Each conjures up a clear image of the organization’s goals and aspirations. They are called vision statements for good reason - they paint powerful pictures in our minds.

So thanks Sergey for introducing me to Mr. Kawasaki. No pressure or anything but I think we should all watch out for a really powerful “vision/ mantra” statement coming out of a start up company in Russia soon!

Executive Presentation Training

Michael Gardner — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 23:16:08 +0000

Presentation training teaches you how to drill down and make what's important interesting

What can you learn about authentic communication from one simple question?

In my last post I talked about the difference between how participants at the Center for Creative Leadership come across during a TV interview when asked about personal questions versus business questions.

While the week-long program is not billed as a presentation training course, executives do go through a seven minute TV interview that most say seems to last much, much longer. There are a number of psychological reasons for this. When under stress the brain seems to shift into a higher gear. This is why traumatic events—not that being on TV is traumatic—that actually take but seconds (think auto accident), seem to play out in our memories in agonizing slow motion detail.

The questions our executives get asked have been carefully prepared and are based on interviews with their peers, direct reports and superiors. They are all about real-life business challenges and, while not always easy, they are completely familiar to the participant. They answer earnestly, objectively and even for those without presentation skills training, quite skillfully. And why shouldn’t they? Aren’t they, after all, one of the world’s top authorities on this particular topic?

But, and this is a big but. Too often their answers are overly technical or abstract or detailed in ways that aren’t meaningful to a wider audience. They lapse into what I would call execuspeak. And unless you are a reporter from the Wall Street Journal, an analyst or a direct report, the answers can be, well, boring.

In a world where “basic” cable includes 100 channels, where attention spans are measured in eight-second sound bites (the average length now of a TV news clip) our tolerance for anything not entertaining, meaningfully informative, immediately useful or easily digestible is very close to zero—unless, of course, you are on drugs.

Our executive may have answered the question spot on but because his or her responses lacked a few key vital elements it is doomed to be channel fodder, an easy victim to anything even minutely more interesting… and the airways are filled with minutely interesting programs.

So what are those vital career-saving elements? What will keep the viewer glued to you?

To find out let’s go back to the interview for a moment. At the very end we ask one question about a personal interest and almost without exception the executive lights up, either out of sheer relief or because they finally get to talk about something that’s fun and interesting and something they have a personal passion about. That’s not to say their work can’t have all those elements too. It’s just that they have a much harder time showing it. Sure, there are exceptions, but not as many as you might think. And you know who they are immediately.

As our executives talk about their fishing hobby, or new sports car or grandchild a funny thing happens. They talk to you like a person and not as if they were standing in front of their PowerPoint slides. They smile. Their natural humor bubbles up. They finally become human (in the best and most authentic possible way) and yes, interesting.

Being interesting is one of those vital elements. Unless you are a gifted actor it’s not something you can fake, which is why people who are genuinely interesting are often felt to be authentic presenters.

Now maybe you are thinking (and you wouldn’t be the first). “Well, I can’t honestly think of anything interesting about what I do.”

I understand. Some jobs are quite technical and just trying to explain what you do can be a challenge. You can’t imagine how anyone, short of the people you work with and for, would find what you do interesting, even if you could explain it. And that’s ok. Lot’s of people are in that boat.

But there are techniques for drilling down and making whatever you do (challenge me on this!) interesting and for making yourself, in the process, come across as authentic.

I’ve rambled on long enough in this post and will get to those techniques straight-away next time.

Until then may your light burn bright (at least brighter than whatever else is playing!)

Why Online Presentation Coaching Works

Howard Stableford — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:18:24 +0000

Practice makes presentations more palatable

The short answer is because today’s technology allows for easy and secure ways to get better at presentation speaking through communication training courses. Which can now be taken online.

But I prefer long answers so……

My favorite meal in all the world is Chicken Tikka Masala. Seriously.

When I travel abroad I test the local Indian restaurants looking for the perfect combinations of spices aromas and viscosity of sauce.

I once tried to make it myself from a cookbook. I found the mouthwatering recipe I was looking for, gathered the right ingredients and followed the instructions to the letter. After two full hours of preparation and creation, I presented it triumphantly to my family.

We ate out that night. It was so bad even the dog turned up it’s nose.

The lesson I learned was that the most important ingredient of all was missing. Practice! Oh, and a coach, or chef to give me pointers would have been nice too.

To be more precise, I needed practice, repetition and refinement of my culinary skills from family feedback. Great chefs are not born. They work very hard at it, they constantly practice and tweak their recipes until they work consistently every time.

The same is equally true for great speakers. The problem can be that as we prepare presentations we don’t have access to a “family” to provide truly helpful and objective presentation feedback.

Well, that used to be the case, but today websites like this one can help speakers all over the world prepare tasty, flavorful presentations by providing an online family to listen to and assess presentations in a totally safe and encouraging environment.

The way we coach clients online is to invite them into a secure online communication training conference room. The client sometimes records their performance and emails their PowerPoint slides beforehand but the whole thing can be totally live as long as they have a simple webcam pointing at them. We can even provide a camera.

We find it beneficial to have a small group of clients doing this at the same time because feedback from others in the same boat complements the pointers my colleague Michael Gardner and I might make.

The beauty of this simple recipe is that participants can be anywhere in the world and in any time zone. It’s also very economical to do. So if you have an important presentation coming up and would like to pass it by the ACT family, just belly up to the table and click here for more information.

While we’ve been doing this collectively for over 20 years in other venues our blog is quite new and so if you are one of the first 7 to respond we’ll give you an extraordinary discount in exchange for your feedback!

Meanwhile, although we know it is impossible to become truly skillful at anything just by reading a manual, I have just picked up this little book called “How to Play Golf”. This just might be the exception to the rule. It seems all you have to do is hit a small ball with a stick until it falls down a hole. Hmm. Now how difficult can that be? I’ll let you know.