Six Habits That Separate Compelling Communicators From Everyone Else
What you will learn when you read this story:
Why even experienced leaders fail to influence audiences despite strong delivery.
Six proven communication strategies that drive clarity, emotion, and action.
How to tailor your message for impact, whether you’re in the boardroom or on the front lines.
I watched the company president speak at a town hall meeting and saw that it wasn’t going well. He was a competent communicator delivering an important message, but he wasn’t a compelling communicator. And when I held focus groups after the event, it was apparent that he’d failed to influence and impact his audience in the way he had hoped.
In my subsequent coaching sessions with him and other leaders in the organization, we discussed six strategies to communicate for influence and impact. These are the same strategies that are effective for any level of leadership: executives, managers, supervisors and team leaders.
The “Get to the Point” Strategy
Attention spans are so short today that you must be able to express your point of view in a way that’s both compelling and brief. Simplicity isn’t just a nice-to-have communication skill; it’s a necessity. If you ramble or beat around the bush, any hope of holding people’s attention is lost. Ask yourself: “In 10 words or less, what is my key message?” If you can’t state it succinctly to yourself, you’re not ready to communicate it to others.
And don’t overwhelm your audience by beginning with too much detail. Practice structuring your comments as if you were writing a newspaper article. Start with your main point — the key message or “headline” — then add supporting information.
The Head-Heart-Hands Strategy
When preparing for an important presentation — leading a meeting, making a formal presentation or pitching your idea to potential investors — think through what you want people to know, feel and do, then structure your remarks with those goals in mind.
Head: What do you want people to know? What facts, data or examples do they need to hear for you to get your main points across?
Heart: What do you want people to feel? What specific emotional reaction are you after? Do you want them to leave appreciated, enthused or reassured?
Hands: What do you want people to do? What action step do you want them to take? Do you want them to buy your product, try the new software or give you suggestions? Whatever you want your audience to do, remember to ask for it in your closing comments.
The Benefits Strategy
People are listening to what you say through their own WSIC (Why Should I Care?) filter. Don’t get so focused on explaining the features of your proposal that you forget to highlight the benefits for your listeners.
To do this successfully, you need to understand your audience: the challenges they are facing, what they want and need to know, how they feel about you and what they already know about your topic. Different audiences, even within your own organization, have different challenges, needs, emotions and knowledge. Your task is to find ways to be relevant to whomever you are speaking.
The Plain Talk Strategy
Nothing makes a listener’s eyes glaze over faster than a leader who overuses clichés like “team player,” “outside the box” or “move the needle.”
Instead of “bleeding edge,” say “technology that is so new it hasn’t been proven yet.” Instead of “let’s touch base,” say “let’s discuss this again at the next meeting.” Instead of “our bandwidth,” talk about your team’s capacity to resolve a problem. It may seem like everyone uses jargon, but you’ll be more compelling if you master the art of clear and simple communication.
The Story Strategy
Compelling communicators know that good stories are more powerful than facts. This is not to reject the value in facts, of course, but simply to recognize their limits in influencing people. Facts are neutral and aren’t influential until they mean something to someone. Stories give facts meaning.
Here is another way to explain why compelling communicators tell stories:
Trying to influence and impact people through analytics is a push strategy. It requires the speaker to convince the listener through cold, factual evidence.
Storytelling is a pull strategy, in which the listener is invited to join the experience as a participant and to imagine the story as it unfolds.
The Face-to-Face Strategy
In this fast-paced, techno-charged era of email, blogs, wikis, instant messages and virtual meeting technologies, face-to-face is still the most powerful communication medium to influence and impact others because it’s the richest.
In face-to-face interactions, our brains process the continual cascade of nonverbal cues that we use as the basis for building trust and professional intimacy. Meeting with someone gives you the opportunity to put your point across with compassion while being sensitive to the other person’s verbal and nonverbal reactions to gauge how well your ideas are being received. In fact, the more business professionals communicate electronically, the more pressing becomes the need for personal interaction.
You can immediately improve your influence and impact skills by following the advice that a compelling communicator once gave me: “If it’s not that important, send an email. If it’s important but not mission critical, pick up the phone. If it’s critically important to the success of your project, go see someone in person.”
