4th February 2012 Saturday 
As I work with leaders on change projects and strategy execution I always make it a point to talk with the people on the front lines of the organization. Whether I am conducting one-on-one interviews, focus groups, or larger input meetings one theme emerges in company after company: “Our leadership makes decisions without understanding what we really do and how those decisions impact us.”
Hundreds of others have said it, but apparently the point bears repeating: If you want your people to accept and support change, you must first show that you understand the organization from their perspective.
When we try to motivate others or mobilize energy for a change, the most important element is being able to connect with people. An authentic connection has a lot of ingredients, including understanding:
- What matters to this person;
- What is this person’s reality;
- What is this person trying to accomplish at work;
- What is getting in the way?
I’ve been busy this fall working on several initiatives for a variety of clients. While the nature of the projects varies, three recent projects have involved sessions where we brought together the leaders who were working on a change with the people who were impacted by the change. This in itself is not that unusual. What is unusual is that in three successive weeks, three different leaders in three different industries all had the same epiphany. After spending a day in working session with the people on the front line, all three leaders realized that while they thought they had been doing a good job communicating, their people did not share their own level of awareness and understanding. Here’s what the three leaders said:
“Wow. I realize employees don’t see the support and successes we see at the leadership team level.”“This has been helpful. What I thought we had communicated didn’t come through.”
Are you a leader? CEOs from around the globe say it is time to a) unleash creativity and b) change how you communicate.
Between September 2009 and January 2010, IBM researchers interviewed 1,541 CEOs, general managers and senior public sector leaders who represent different sizes of organizations in 60 countries and 33 industries.
According to Samuel J. Palmisano IBM’s Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer:
What we heard through the course of these in-depth discussions is that events, threats and opportunities aren’t just coming at us faster or with less predictability; they are converging and influencing each other to create entirely unique situations. These firsts-of-their-kind developments require unprecedented degrees of creativity — which has become a more important leadership quality than attributes like management discipline, rigor or operational acumen.Here are some highlights from Capitalizing on Complexity, IBM’s report on their annual Global Chief Executive Officer Study.
Several years ago a good friend of mine sent me an article about using the art of Akido in coaching. The author of the article, Juan Riboldi, is an Akido teacher and founder of DecisionWise. According to Riboldi:
Aikido is based on the philosophy of creating harmony by mastering oneself and respecting another’s energy. Aikido is quite unique in that it has no formal technique for attack. Instead, Aikido teaches how to overcome conflict through minimal resistance and provides ways for a defender to redirect an attack, thus avoiding injury to themselves as well as their opponent. Unlike many fighting techniques that focus on defense while disabling the opponent, Aikido focuses on finding unity. The intent of Aikido is not acquiescence, but to establish a relationship of peace in the face of conflict.If you give presentations or plan meetings, conferences, or events you can’t afford to neglect the growing trend of audience engagement. To me, audience engagement goes far beyond using involvement techniques such as call and response or “turn to your neighbor and discuss. . . “ Genuine audience engagement means the audience plays just as much of a role in the program as the presenter. It means the audience helps to design the program. They participate during it. They, not the speaker, are the focus of attention.
Two articles I read this week do a nice job of making the case that you can’t afford to neglect audience engagement.
In her recent article, the Future of Meetings, Kristin Arnold, author of Boring to Bravo: Proven Presentation Techniques to Engage, Involve, and Inspire Your Audiences to Action, asserts that the very nature of meetings is evolving. Design and networking are among the trends Arnold discusses:
Fellow consultant and leadership expert Dan McCarthy posted this week about how important it is to clearly communicate expectations and how rarely we do it.
His post reminded me of a point that I made in an earlier blog post, “If we want to see it, we need to say it.” In other words, often our expectations aren’t met because we haven’t communicated them in the first place.
He also shared the story below – and while you may have heard it before – I think it is a good reminder:
A CEO was getting very frustrated with one of her senior managers. She was so fed up, she was about to fire him. But before she did, she felt she should give him one last chance and hired an executive coach to work with the manager at a cost of $20,000.
Any presenter today faces the challenge of getting and keeping their audience’s attention. Thomas Airways does a brilliant job of engaging their (often cynical) audience of travelers with this adorable and effective video:
Next time you have to present, consider whether you can use something surprising to keep your audience tuned in!
On Saturday I attended an all-day workshop for educators. Our first presenter was an attorney who did such an excellent job with his opening that I feel compelled to write about it!
In my experience, if you want to engage your audience, it is critical to begin any presentation with the Three C’s: connection, credibility, and common cause. Here are a few thoughts on each, along with examples from our attorney.
Connection
With most audiences, I recommend starting with a personal connection. What do you have in common with the group? How are you similar in thinking, background, approach, etc? Our Saturday presenter started his talk by letting us know that he had been a teacher (with Teach for America) and that he is married to a teacher. You could see the smiles spread around the room of educators instantly!
Credibility
A few days ago I published a post about communicating with people, not to them. Just today I came across a terrific video slideshow from Les Landes that reinforces this point. Landes is an expert in marketing communications, employee engagement and alignment. Check out his video: Closing the Distance below.
Earlier this week I posted about a successful workshop I and several colleagues ran for 800 managers as part of a major transition. My previous post was about senior leader involvement. Today, I will address the topic of training.
For this particular transformation effort, our client recognized that mid- and frontline managers would play a pivotal roll in communicating the details of the change to employees. Therefore, the client hired my colleagues and I to facilitate over forty 4-hour workshops for managers. The response to the workshops was overwhelmingly positive – which surprised a lot of people because the change the organization is introducing is highly sensitive and counter to the way things have been done in this organization for more than 30 years.
After running 19 workshops myself, I reflected on what made the sessions work well. Here are my thoughts:
