JACK MALCOLM

Month: September 2012

  • Leadership IS Communication IS Leadership

    It doesn’t work this way anymore

    When a CEO complains that he wants his life back after a disastrous oil spill, is that a leadership problem or a communication problem?

    When a copilot fails to speak up after noticing ice build-up on the wings, is that a communication problem or a leadership problem?

    When a coach delivers a pregame speech that inspires the team to play better than they thought they were capable of, is that leadership or communication?

    I was recently asked by a client to develop a talk on leadership communication, which I delivered last week for the first time in Tokyo. I don’t usually “do” leadership; I leave it to my friend John Spence and to all the other experts who study leadership traits, skills, strategy formulation, etc. I don’t consider myself in their rarefied circles—all I study, teach and write about is clear thinking, persuasively communicated.

    Yet, as I worked on my material for the talk, I realized that clear thinking, persuasively communicated, is basically all that leaders and managers do. Their subject matter may be strategy and organization, they may have to know how to arrange and pull the right levers for profitability and growth, but those are just the content they work with. They need clear thinking to give them an accurate understanding of the situation and to use their judgment to make good decisions; they need persuasive communication to make sure those decisions get translated into action by others.

    Even top leaders need to communicate persuasively to get things done in today’s world. No one has absolute authority and even if they did, command and control is not the best way to get the best effort out of knowledge workers. That’s why CEOs spend about 85% of their time communicating and only 15% of their time working alone. And it’s worth it: there is a clear link between internal communication effectiveness and business performance, and as the first example at the beginning of this article demonstrates, words said externally can have a multibillion dollar impact on a company’s market share.

    It’s ironic that leadership communication is not seen in a better light, considering that persuasive communication is the primary reason that leaders achieve their positions in the first place. I’ve always said that people who can communicate persuasively, who can influence others even if they have no formal authority, who can command a room while delivering a presentation, are leaders. In fact, the very first post I wrote to launch this blog was entitled “Your Leadership Moment”. The best salespeople lead their customers’ thinking by bringing fresh ideas and challenging the status quo. The most brilliant engineers or scientists won’t get the recognition they deserve if they can’t sell their ideas.

    Persuasive communication skills can make you a leader regardless of your role, and supply the reality without the title. But that ability gets you noticed, and the title may soon follow. When top managers decide whom to fast-track for promotion, they look for the ability to clearly articulate good ideas and to get things done through others. So, they equate persuasive communication skills with leadership. The ability to communicate propelled a junior senator from Illinois to the most powerful leadership position in the world.

    So, to be a good communicator, you have to think clearly and transfer your belief to others. Is that any different from what it takes to be a good leader?

    While the skill may lead to the title, it’s possible that the title can weaken the skill. You may be tempted to use fewer of the skills that got you there. Research shows that people in power are less likely to listen to others’ opinions, although they will tend to overestimate their communications ability. One study showed that only 31% of employees rated their internal communications as effective.

    One reason for poor leadership communication may be that its nature is much different today than it has traditionally been for business leaders. In the old days, the most important communication skill was the ability to convert your decisions into clear directives that others could understand and follow. Whether they agreed with you or not did not matter. They definitely did not need to understand the reasoning behind your decisions, and any attempt by a subordinate to do so was seen as borderline insubordination. The ethos of the follower was “ours not to reason why”.

    Clear speaking, or “transmission” is still important, but it is no longer enough. People who get paid for their brains rather than their hands have to be led differently; they have to be persuaded not just told, and their opinions and ideas must be solicited. Leaders have to spend much more of their time in communications, and they have to use a much richer variety of skills: asking questions, listening, negotiating, cajoling and even pleading. Listening and questioning are hard to do, especially when you’re in charge.

    So, if you want to be a leader, study and practice the arts of persuasive communication. If you want to be a good or even a great leader, study them even more.

  • Test Your Presentation for Customer Focus

    No, it’s not all about you

    Everyone talks about the importance of customer focus, but very few salespeople apply the idea to their sales presentations, according to my interviews with top executives who have sat through hundreds of sales presentations. They complain about presentations that focus primarily on the presenting company, with slide after slide detailing their story and showing pictures of their corporate headquarters. Or, the presentation is all about the product being sold. Even if they do care about your company, they probably already know all they want or need to know—buyers are better informed than ever.

    It’s easy to fall into the trap when you’re preparing your presentation. First, you are justly proud of your company and of your offerings, so it’s altogether human to want to talk about them. Second, you probably have no shortage of presentation templates available to you, put together by your marketing department, so it’s very convenient—maybe even mandatory to use them. Out of habit, you fail to realize how seller-centric your presentations might be.

    So, here are a few filters you can use to test your own presentation before you go out and bore yet another prospect. They broadly fit into two categories: content and demeanor.

    Customer-focused Content: Problems, Processes and Profits

    Problem first, then solution. Solutions are unnecessary without problems. You might think that the problem is understood by everyone, so there is no need to talk about it, yet that’s wrong for two reasons.

    First, talking knowledgeably about the customer’s problem is the best way to establish your credibility, far better than touting your credentials or telling them how many locations your company has. And I’m not just referring to a generic description of the problems your solution addresses—you have to show that you have done the research to understand this specific customer and their perspective on the problem.

    The second reason is that even when the audience agrees on the description of the problem, they don’t all agree on its impact. In fact, everyone in the room may be impacted slightly differently, depending on their function or position within the company. Buying a solution represents change, and change is risky. So, your goal is to make the listeners feel that not changing is the greater risk.

    Take a look at your presentation: do you talk about their problems, challenges and opportunities? How many slides are about them vs. about you?

    Process improvements. Another excellent way to gain credibility and respect is to talk about their processes. Most B2B sales opportunities are about improving some aspect of the customer’s business processes. Show your expertise in their business by describing a day in the life of a process owner, both before and after, using their own language or terminology when possible. In my own sales processes, I try to spend time with a typical sales rep during the fact-gathering stage, and when I talk about this in my own presentations, it’s usually the most engaging part, especially when I can bring up anecdotes or examples. Showing that you’ve been on the scene where the process takes place is enormously credible. Do you talk about their business processes? Do you understand their steps, inputs required, outputs, and limitations? Do you talk about how to make their processes faster, better or cheaper?

    Talk profits, not products. The language that resonates with the highest-level decision makers is that which talks about their own personal scorecards: the financial impact of their decisions. If solution selling is about solving problems and fixing processes, consultative selling is mostly about understanding and being able to express the business impact of your product or service. How much of your presentation addresses the business impact? What is the effect on revenue, costs, or asset efficiency?

    Customer-focused Demeanor

    Besides content, the way you present yourself can also demonstrate how customer-focused you are.  Although it may appear to contradict what I said earlier about showing your knowledge, you have to be careful how you do it.  If you try too hard to show how much you know about the customer, they may decide to cut you down to size a little. Be confidently tentative when you present your perception of the problem, and invite their comments. This will put you on the same side of the desk with the people in the room and ensure a shared understanding of the situation.

    Another very simple test is to pay attention to your pronouns. How many times do you use “I” or “we” vs. “you”?

    Finally, don’t be so focused on getting your message out that you forget to monitor messages in. Are you paying attention to the audience’s reaction and adjusting your talk accordingly? Are you encouraging questions and interactivity?

    If you apply these test to what you are saying and how you are saying it, every member of the audience is likely to come away feeling that you have been speaking directly to them, and that is a wonderful thing to strive for in any presentation.

     

  • Stories Don’t Always Work

    Everyone loves stories, but be careful how you use them

    Everyone loves to hear stories, don’t they? We’re in the era of story for business presentations. All the experts tell us that stories are the best vehicle for making your content engaging and convincing audiences, and for making your points stick in their memories. Use stories for persuasive presentations, we’re told, because so much of our decision making takes place in the fast, intuitive System 1 thinking process in our brain. For the most part, I agree with this advice, and I can personally attest in my training and speeches that using stories to illustrate my points can boost credibility, engagement and retention. (It also boosts my instructor ratings—not that I pay any attention to that)

    But stories do not always work for every audience, and may even backfire in some situations.

    Audiences can differ in their need for cognition, which is a fancy way of saying that some audience members like to think carefully and deeply about the points that are being presented to them. In fact, everyone has a need for cognition in the right circumstances. If you are being asked to make an important decision that requires considering various complex factors, you are much more likely to engage your slow, deliberative and analytical System 2 thinking. But some audiences place much more emphasis on careful thinking than others, especially if you’re presenting a proposal that will cost a lot of money or require major change.

    Besides, not everyone in the audience is the same. When you consider the social styles of individual audience members, roughly half may be analytics or drivers. In some audiences, you will have a much higher proportion of analytics and drivers. If you’re presenting to a high-tech company that has a very engineering-driven culture, you will often have a majority of analytics in the room. Or, if you’re presenting to senior managers, they will tend to have a higher share of drivers than a regular audience. Analytics will be automatically suspicious of stories because they think they are being deliberately used to hoodwink them, and drivers will become impatient for you to get to the point.

    Once, after running a sales training class, I received a complaint from their sales director that I should have told fewer stories and finished the class earlier. Yet, I later heard from others that he often repeated a couple of the stories he heard during the class to make his points in sales meetings. So, I’m definitely not advocating that you dispense with stories altogether—just make sure you modify your approach to match the needs of your audience. For analytics you should lead with data to earn the right to follow up with an anecdote to make it real; for drivers, keep the stories as short as possible, and be prepared to cut one short if you notice signs of impatience. Above all, make sure they are spot-on relevant to your point.

    What if the audience is mixed? That’s where your preparation and audience analysis are critical. Make sure you know the style of the most important decision-makers in the room and plan your use of stories accordingly.

  • How Complete Is Your Questioning Toolkit?

    Have you ever known a leader or manager who was an expert questioner? It seems like some people have the rare and valuable skill of being able to ask the right question at the right time. You go to them to approve a proposal and they get right to the heart of the matter. Or, you need advice about a situation and they ask you questions that get you to see things from a different perspective and find your own solution.

    These people seem to have a natural knack, but nobody is born fully equipped to ask the right questions for every situation. It’s a skill that only looks effortless because it has been developed over years of experience, practice, and maybe even formal training. As you go through your business and personal life, you may pick up the skill by trial and error, learning which questions seem to get the best results, or you may develop the critical thinking skills that allow you to spot the weaknesses in a proposal, or you may evolve standard algorithms/checklists for specific situations, over time you accumulate a toolkit of effective questions.

    You need a complete toolkit because you face a variety of tasks, and the types of questions that work very well for one task may be exactly the wrong ones you need in another. For example, the questions that find flaws in a proposal may be helpful if you’re a CFO deciding how to allocate resources, but they will get you thrown out the door if you’re a salesperson.

    Fortunately, a lot of smart people have developed excellent questioning protocols and have written about them, which allows everyone to cut the time and pain needed to develop and practice the skills.

    A complete questioning toolkit addresses the major tasks that a leader has. Here are some:

    Decision-making and problem-solving questions are used to make sure you’re getting the best thinking out of your people, so that you can make the best possible decisions. I’m biased because I teach it, but the best set of questions I have come across for this are Vervago’s Precision Questions, which comprises seven categories of questions, arranged under these general questions:

    • Do we talk about this now?
    • What do you mean?
    • What are you assuming?
    • How do you know?
    • What caused it?
    • What are the effects and consequences?
    • What should we do?

    Persuasive questions are used to get people to talk themselves into the direction or solution you want by making it their idea. Whether it’s motivational interviewing used by psychologists, or some variant of SPIN questioning, the basic aim is to bring out gaps between what is and what could be and guide the answerer in the right direction:

     

    • What are you doing today and/or what would you like to be doing?
    • What needs to change to improve the situation or to  achieve your goals?
    • What happens if you don’t?
    • What do you need to do next?

    Coaching questions are used to develop your people. They’re similar to persuasive questions, in that they are meant to steer the conversation toward change talk, preferably making it the answerer’s idea so that they are more likely to fully commit to it. The principal difference is that the initial questions are used to test the perception of the person being coached to assess whether they know their current behavior needs to be changed. There are many different effective models, such as the GROW model:

    • Goals: Where do you want to be?
    • Reality: How far away are you from your goal?
    • Obstacles/options: What obstacles are in your way and what options can you think of to remove them?
    • Way forward: What specific action steps will you take?

    Columbo questions are not a formal questioning process, but I’ve learned from being on the receiving end that they can be the most effective general questioning technique of all. Inspired by the famous TV detective, they are merely the application of intense curiosity and almost naïve simplicity:

    I’m not sure I get it, could you please explain it again?

    How does that work?

    Probes are different from these other questions in that they are more reactive, following the thread of the conversation, and because they are useful for all purposes. Here are three simple types that you can use to squeeze the juice out of just about any conversation:

    • Clarify: Can you explain what you mean? Can you give me an example?
    • Dig: Can you give me more detail about that?
    • Extend: What else?

    This is not meant to be a complete list of all type of questions for all occasions, but if you can master these you will be one of the people who come to mind when others are asked who is the best questioner they know.