Practical Eloquence

Good traiing for future politician or business leader

The news media this week have been buzzing with discussion of Mitt Romney’s remark, “I am not concerned about the very poor…”  Taken out of context, it was clearly very damaging to Romney, at least in the short run.

The Romney camp complained that the quote was taken out of context, and indeed it was. When you read the entire statement he made, it’s not quite as bad, although it’s still a statement he probably wishes he could take back.

The real point is, that anything a leader says can and will be taken out of context, and you don’t even need a “media conspiracy” for that. Even without the press as an intermediary, listeners can filter anything you say through their own biases and desires. They will provide their own context to interpret your statements. That’s why you have to constantly use outside-in thinking to anticipate what your words will sound like to your listeners.

At least politicians know this is a professional hazard and try to be on guard against it. Business leaders may not be as sensitive to the danger. They may not realize that they are being scrutinized just as carefully as a politician, in everything they do or say.

Does this mean that a leader has to be careful about everything he or she says or does in public? Absolutely.  It’s not a comfortable feeling, but it is a responsibility that comes with the job—and the bigger the job, the heavier the responsibility. You are always on stage.

Parents know this. Although it may seem that your kids ignore you unless they want something, they are always watching you carefully. When my son Andrew was about two, he was strolling on the sidewalk with his grandmother when a driver went speeding down our neighborhood street. As I heard from my mother later, Andrew shook his fist and yelled out a choice word. Wonder where he learned that?

Authenticity is wonderful, but it should be calculated or strategic authenticity. I’m sure Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, thought he was being authentic when he said, “I would like my life back” after the Gulf oil spill.

Gerald Ratner, the soon-to-be ex-CEO of the Ratner’s jewelry store chain in the UK, no doubt thought he was being authentic when he said, “Ratner’s has got very little to do with quality. … I say so because it’s total crap.”

One last example: my friend John Spence was running a training program once for the employees of a small family-owned firm when the owner popped his head in the door and asked, “Are you idiots learning anything?” Maybe he thought he was being funny, but no one in the room took it that way.

You also need to be prepared for what people will ask you. An off the cuff answer to a seemingly harmless question can have huge repercussions. In 1989, a spokesman for East German prime minister Krenz told the media that travel restrictions between East Germany and the West would be eased. A reporter asked when the new rules would go into effect, and the spokesman hesitated, shrugged, and said, “Immediately, I suppose.” Hearing this, thousands of people swarmed to the Berlin Wall, where confused guards, lacking instructions, opened the gates and the rest, as they say, is history.

I’ve worked with thousands of bright and articulate people in my twenty plus years of training, people who are justly confident of their ability to rise to the occasion and think fast on their feet, whether it is in a sales call, an important presentation to their boss, or the give-and-take of internal meetings.

That confidence is usually an asset, but it often veers dangerously into overconfidence which leaves them vulnerable to error and discourages the preparation that could make them even better than they already are.

Here’s just one example. In teaching sales call planning I have salespeople list the top objections they expect to hear from their customers during the call, and next to it, jot down the key points they would use to answer the objection. Most salespeople find the first step easy to do, because they’ve heard some of the same objections over and over hundreds of times. Yet, because they’ve heard them so often, they usually resist writing something in the second column, because the answer is so obvious to them in their own minds. Unfortunately, when they role-play the call, and get the same objection they have heard over and over, they almost always fumble a little, as if they are re-inventing a good answer every single time. When we debrief the role plays, they will usually admit that they could have expressed the answer better.

Why does this happen? When we’re anticipating explaining something, our minds are working with far more information about that topic than the listener will have, and we are also processing thoughts about that information about four times as fast as the rate of normal conversation.  As a simple example, we can visualize the route from home to office in milliseconds, but it might take much longer to describe all the streets and turns. We might even know to turn at the third street past the bent stop sign, but not know the name of the street.

Turn that scenario into a sales situation: for instance, the customer might object to our higher price. We know the higher price is more than worth it because it allows us to provide additional features which will reduce the customer’s total costs—in milliseconds we can visualize the “route” of our argument, because our minds have crossed that familiar mental ground many times. But remember, the customer may be hearing it for the first time; how much are you leaving out or taking for granted?

The context we take for granted may make all the difference. Last week I taught a class for a group of engineers who, in addition to their day jobs, run classes to teach their technology to other engineers. These are very smart people teaching other very smart people, so they tend to overestimate both their own ability to teach the information and the ability of their listeners to grasp what they’re saying. Using a trick I learned from Made to Stick, I asked a volunteer to think of a simple tune and then tap out the tune so the others could guess what it was. Before he began, I asked him how confident he was that they would get it, and he guessed the majority would figure it out easily. Sixteen of us listened intently, and precisely zero of us could hear “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” in his random-sounding noise. I’m sure it sounded a lot better in his head than it did in our ears.

I had the same problem when I sat down to write this article. Forty-five minutes ago, I got this idea in my mind, but it took about fifteen minutes and several false starts before I finally got some traction and figured out what I wanted to say; and then more time to tease out how I wanted to say it.

That’s why it’s so important to write things down, or at least practice saying them aloud. As Barbara Minto says in her book, The Pyramid Principle: “No one can know precisely what he thinks until he has been forced to symbolize it—either by saying it out loud or by writing it down—and even then the first statement of the idea is likely to be less precise than he can eventually make it.”

Remember, the test of effective communication is not whether it sounds good in your head, but how it sounds in their ears.