So you finally made it to a 10. After years of study, hard work, and deliberate practice, you can reasonably say you’re among the top in your field. Great news, and good for you.
Here’s the bad news: it won’t be good enough tomorrow. Ten is a moving goalpost. It’s not a fixed standard; it’s a number set by the top performers in any field, and they aren’t stopping just because you got yourself to their level. While you’re congratulating yourself on reaching ten, they’re blazing trails to twelve and higher.
The world is getting more competitive every day in every way, as I’ve just been clearly reminded. I’m writing this on a plane returning from a two week swing through Asia, where I had the privilege of training some very impressive and driven individuals. They’re a half day ahead of us on the clock, and in some ways it seems like they’re half a day ahead of us in their striving and their learning and work ethic. So while you are sleeping, they are working hard to get what you have, to master what you know, and eventually to beat you in every way they can.
Sitting next to me on my return flight is an accounting professor who just spent a week teaching in Taiwan, and I suspect a decent percentage of returning passengers have been over there teaching or training in some capacity. It seems completely natural to us: we have the knowledge and skills and they pay us to teach them. But how long will it be before the planes are full of teachers going in the other direction?
But I’m just using Asia as an example. The man or woman down the street from you is also working hard to stretch that ten to a higher number. And it’s not going to stop. Today’s twelve becomes tomorrow’s ten, and ten becomes eight, the treadmill runs faster and steeper, and there’s no red stop button.
Don’t ever get complacent. Remember the words of baseball great Satchel Paige: “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”
In the previous post we saw that the most important component of credibility is sound content. But that only works if you sound like you know what you’re talking about, and if people can understand what you say. Clarity causes understanding, and understanding promotes trust. Let’s look at the flip side of that statement: when we do not understand what someone is saying, we may either doubt our own intelligence, or we may wonder what they are trying to hide. Which do you think is more likely?
Unfortunately, confusion is usually the order of the day, especially in business communication, as anyone who has ever tried to decode many corporate mission statements has found. And if the topic is technical, good luck with that! Fortunately, there are a number of powerful strategies and techniques you can use to counter these factors and promote crystal clarity.
Three keys to being clear are, language, length and layout.
Language
Speak plainly and use short, common words that anyone can get a grip on.
You may think you’ll sound smarter by dressing up your message in fancy words, especially the many forms of business buzzwords that are so prevalent today. Unfortunately, this tactic can backfire, as demonstrated by an experiment that asked readers to evaluate the intelligence of writers using passages with different word choices. Surprisingly, the writers who used shorter, common words were judged to be more intelligent on average.[1]
Use concrete words. Use concrete words as much as you can without oversimplifying. The definition of concreteness is that it can be felt by one or more of the senses, and this allows the listener to assign more “hooks” for the word in their memory. That’s why you see news programs that will illustrate a story on inflation, for example, by comparing the price of a stick of butter from one year to the next. Charities know they can get far more with a picture of a starving child than with pages of (abstract) statistics about world hunger. This is known as the Mother Teresa Principle: “If I see one, I will act.”
Use their language: Use the listener’s own language and frames of reference if at all possible. For example, if you are dealing with someone from a different company, use terms that are familiar to them, such as industry-specific terms and examples. Or you can wrap your message in some of their initiatives; show them how your idea supports their key goals.
Use analogies and visuals. Anything that makes it more familiar to your listener will be clearer and easier to understand.
Length
Distilled water is perfectly clear because all the impurities are removed. It’s the same with a distilled, concise message. Clear expression begins with clear thinking, and the discipline it takes to try to express your message as concisely as possible will force you to figure out the essence of every message.
Strangely enough, achieving conciseness takes time. Mark Twain once received this telegram from a publisher:
NEED 2-PAGE SHORT STORY TWO DAYS.
Twain replied:
NO CAN DO 2 PAGES TWO DAYS. CAN DO 30 PAGES 2 DAYS. NEED 30 DAYS TO DO 2 PAGES.
Conciseness emerges only after careful thought. If you merely do a “data-dump” of everything you know about a topic for your listener, you’re putting the responsibility for thinking on to them. And if they do your thinking for you, how credible will you be?
Here are a few tips for keeping it concise:
Have a purpose for what you say. Be clear on what you want to accomplish and what you want to say. Be clear in your own mind what your key point is.
Find the core of the idea. In 1992, political operator James Carville told the Clinton campaign that, “If you say three things, you say nothing.” He helped Clinton boil down his key message to one core idea: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Take a moment to think before speaking. Because of the difference in the speed at which we think versus the speed we speak, you will have plenty of time to focus your message even in the second or two that you take before responding. If nothing else, it will certainly make you look more thoughtful when you answer!
Practice. If it’s important enough, take the time to practice what you want to say. You will find yourself becoming clearer with each pass through, especially when someone else listens and tells you which parts are unclear.
Layout
One of the best ways to communicate clearly is to provide a transparent structure. A clear structure helps both your listener and you to make sense of your ideas. Think of it this way: if someone handed you books one after another, and asked you to file them in their proper shelves, how quickly could you complete the task if you had to build the shelves simultaneously?
When you make the structure transparent for someone, you are giving them the ready-made shelves in which to store the information, which frees up their working memory capacity to concentrate on the information itself. By giving them the structure, you are in effect adding value to the information by doing part of their work for them.
Start with the headline. What’s the key point you want to be absolutely sure your listener gets? Start with that. You can always add context if necessary. It makes you look decisive and confident, which is credibility-building.
Also, by stating your main idea at the beginning, you provide a general picture in their mind which you then help them fill in with color and detail. Without this picture, it’s like trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle without referring to the box.
The discipline of thinking through the structure of your arguments will make you more credible because it will expose gaps in your logic or evidence—gaps you can fill before someone else exposes them for you.
[1] “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly”, Daniel M. Oppenheimer. Applied Cognitive Psychology 2006.
There’s an old joke about a battleship cruising through the fog at night when the bridge sees lights approaching. The ship signals: “Move to the right.”
Morse code from the light signals back, “You need to move to the right.”
The Captain signals again: “I have the right of way. MOVE TO THE RIGHT!”
The mysterious light replies: “I suggest you move.”
As the lights begin to converge on a collision course, the Captain signals: “I am a 50,000 ton United States Navy battleship! MOVE TO THE RIGHT!!!”
The light replies: I am a lighthouse. I suggest you move immediately.”
If you want to achieve max cred, your aim should be to make sure that your presentations and your conversations are like the lighthouse in that story: so rock-solid that they have the right of way in any question. As John Adams said,
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
I put credentials first in this series because they get you in the door, but content is the most important factor in keeping you there; it’s what delivers on the promise of your credentials. Ultimately, your personal credibility will rest upon the quality of your ideas. Therefore, the first and most important factor in personal credibility is the truth, logic and relevance of what you say.
Content is hugely important for practical and ethical reasons. It’s supremely practical because it’s based on reality, and reality can be tested and verified. As long as you say things that make logical sense, and are backed up by verifiable facts, your credibility can not be undermined. It will stand on its own.
You also have to keep in mind that people may not act or decide immediately on hearing you, so even if you can get them fired up, the excitement might wear off but the facts on the ground won’t change.
Of course, content is also ethical. Unfortunately, the world has too often fallen victim to people who managed to appear credible even though the content of their messages was false and or harmful. These manipulators know how to pull the levers of credibility for their own immoral ends; I hope you are not one of them, and that’s all I’ll say about that.
Of course, we all know that content is important, so how can we actually use this to improve our credibility?
Be sure of your facts
The power of internet search engines gives us more information at our immediate disposal than anyone in history could have ever dreamed possible, but at the risk of filtering out the BS from the truth. Make sure your information is from a trusted source, or cross-check it against other sources whenever possible.
Know them cold
Of course, you don’t always have to have knowledge at the tip of your tongue. It might be enough to know where to get the relevant knowledge to bring to the table, but far more impressive and credible to others is the person who has a firm grasp of the relevant material and can discuss it fluently and at length from memory.
Get your own
Even more credible is knowledge gained through personal observation; it’s difficult for anyone else to challenge, because you may have had unique access to it. The key here is to make sure you have a personal acquaintance with the facts, by getting to the scene and observing first-hand as much as possible.
Anticipate depth, breadth and height of questioning
Superficial knowledge of your material may be just enough to get you into trouble. You don’t want your presentation to be like a movie set of a western town with all front and no back. Any favorable initial impression can be quickly lost if you can’t answer the deeper questions others might have. And, you can be sure that if your audience consists of higher-level executives, they will drill down to help themselves understand what you’re saying, or to test your mastery of the subject.
Pressure-test your ideas
Research and analysis are not enough—you’ve got to test your position against challenges for maximum confidence. Ideas are like organisms: survival depends on adapting effectively to competition. Carefully consider the position of the listener, think of their counterarguments and then write down effective responses. Expose weaknesses and shore them up, and then enlist others to try to pick holes in your position.
Don’t get out in front of your facts
The surest way to avoid credibility loss is to thoroughly master your material, or to speak only about that which you are expert in. That is not always possible, of course, so the next best thing is to make sure that you don’t overstate your expertise or claim more than your facts allow. Be honest about your limitations if asked, or even before you deliver the material. (There is a fine line, here, of course, because admitting your limitations up front can damage your credibility.)
Keep facts and opinions separate
There is nothing wrong with using personal opinion to support your arguments. In fact, in most persuasive efforts you will not have an airtight case that can be proven with mathematical rigor. Some of the information you might need is simply unavailable, unknowable, or untested.
If you do use opinion, make sure you are transparent about it. Be honest about the difference between fact and opinion with others. More importantly, perhaps, be honest with yourself about the difference.
If you follow these rules carefully, you will have lighthouse content and you’ll be able to defend your credibility against any battleship bully in the room.
We begin with credentials because they are the one element of credibility that precedes you into a presentation or persuasive conversation. They’re the minimum ticket price to personal credibility, because without some credentials you probably won’t get an audience. Your credentials tell the listener why you are better qualified to speak about the topic than anyone else in the room. They are something you have already earned that contributes to credibility, but the audience still decides how to perceive them and how much weight to place on them to grant belief.
Your actual and perceived credentials make it easier for listeners to buy into your ideas because they give you an elevated status relative to that particular instance or situation. That’s important because people won’t easily surrender their opinions to someone they consider equal or below them; that’s too much of a personal threat to their status and ego. They will only open their minds to someone who has a superior claim—not just education, experience or title, but any credentials that are directly relevant to the discussion. I may think my brother in law is an idiot, but if he has been to Burundi and I haven’t, I’m willing to listen to his views on their political system. (If one of my BIL’s is reading this, I didn’t mean you—I meant the other one.)
What constitutes a valid credential?
You can think of your credentials as your personal value proposition for why they should listen to you. What special advantage do you have that makes you the person most qualified to be speaking about that particular topic to that audience at that time? There are a number of ways to differentiate yourself:
Education/certification: These are what most people think of as formal credentials.
Experience: If you’ve been at it longer than others in the room, or have unique experience.
Organization or Brand: Representing a particular organization or brand can confer vicarious credentials on a speaker.
Commonality with the group: You can speak for them because you’re one of them; but you are also different enough that they should listen to you.
Special expertise/information/research: You have specific information that they don’t.
Delivering your credentials
First, they want to know what your credentials are, but it’s not always a simple matter to just tell them. In some cultures, for example, it’s considered bad form to talk about yourself too much, and listeners may look for an excuse to knock you down. Sometimes you come across as trying too hard. In my early days of sales training I used to take pains to explain my experience to “earn the right” to teach experienced salespeople, until one day I heard another instructor doing the same thing and got a sense for how bad it sounded.
On the other hand, introverts tend to shy away from tooting their own horn, and that can cause them to leave some credibility on the table.
So, how do you find the right balance and approach?
If it’s a formal presentation, it’s a good idea to have your sponsor introduce you to the group and tell them your credentials. That way it doesn’t come across as bragging. But if you do this, make sure you have gone over with them how they should introduce you. I’ve had someone introduce me to a class at one of my clients by citing my education which they gleaned from my web site; since every student in that particular class had a PhD and I don’t, and because my formal education has almost nothing to do with the topics I train, they found it amusing and I found it embarrassing. But it was my fault because I hadn’t taken my own advice.
Weave them in. The most subtle way is to use stories, examples and questions that demonstrate to the audience that you have “been there and done that.”
Don’t overreach. The quickest way to shatter your credibility is to overpromise and underdeliver, which you can prevent by being clear—first of all to yourself—about what you can and can’t do. When I first began sales training for an established company, I was terrified to face an audience of seasoned sales professionals because, as I told my boss, they had much more sales experience than I did. He said, “That’s true, but you’re teaching them a process they have never seen; you know it cold. So just go out there and teach the process.” If I had tried to represent myself as having more experience than I did, I would have been skinned alive.
Frame your credentials. I don’t specialize in a specific industry so when people ask me how much expertise I have in their industry, I usually have to tell them it’s roughly none. But then I tell them that allows me to bring a fresh approach and ask the stupid questions that may not sometimes turn out to be so stupid after all.
