Edited transcription of “Credible Communications – Effective Communication in the 21st Century” webinar for the University of Denver Alumni Association.
Part II of IV
I want to share a model with you something that I have found helpful. I share this with all my clients in my workshops and in my coaching, and I wanted to share it with you today because I think it’s a really good way if you are trying to speak to a large audience. If you’re trying to get buy-in on a particular topic, if you’re in a meeting with a few individuals, or even one on one – this works for a variety of different communications. You should be answering four key questions and they are the following…
- Why are we having this conversation?
- Why are we doing this?
- Why is it important?
- Why are we here, and why are we here today?
This explains the desired outcome and it’s so interesting, but I see people at meetings and you think everybody is on the same page, when they’re really not. Getting the why out and making sure everybody understands why we’re here, why we’re having this conversation in the first place and ultimately what our desired outcome is. Then, we start with the what.
- What are the facts?
- What do we know?
- What we’re trying to get accomplished here is what is the objective?
- What are we specifically trying to accomplish?
If I use a real-life example, maybe in a business setting you’re trying to get buy-in on releasing a new product, you might say we’re here today to discuss why it’s important for us to introduce this product. The competition is offering this product to our customers, and if we don’t offer something then we’re going to be behind the eight ball. It’s really important that we do this. Here’s how it’s priced, here’s how it’s positioned, here’s who’s buying it so that’s all the facts.
Then we go to the Who.
- Who’s impacted by this?
- Who needs to who needs to be a champion?
- Who can be the person who’s going to buy into it?
- Who might be a naysayer that we need to be aware of so that we could bring them into the fold?
In this example, if we’re introducing a product we would need to be able to communicate to the sales force. To other people in the organization what the impact of releasing this, and how it’s going to be positioned, how it’s going to be priced, etc. And then, last but not least, we have the How.
- How will you execute on this?
- How will you go about it?
- What are those next steps?
This is important because this is really the wrap up for accountability and ownership. If you look at these four questions they really do go in order, but you might go back and forth. You might state the why goes into the what. You might have to go back to the why just to maybe clarify something. The what is linear, it’s actually circular in nature. One other thing I want to mention on this, and again I really like this approach no matter what you are communicating about. I have people that tell me they use this with their teenagers. Try it out – it’s really effective in your personal life as part of this network of DU, Volunteer Network work, but whatever it is, remember that this is a great in effective approach to communications.
One last point before I move on. I want to mention the how, and it might seem strange to you about how we go about this. What’s our plan? What are the next steps? All those ‘how’ things are last, because usually we walk in knowing what we need to do. The really big issue here and the challenge is, if you walked into a meeting and said, “This is what we’re doing, and by the way, we want to get your feedback”, you probably wouldn’t get really good feedback, because people would say well you’ve already got, got it figured out, why do you need me?
So, the ‘hows’ at the end it doesn’t mean that you don’t go in with a plan, but it means you don’t share the plan until you’ve really set the stage for the why, the what, the who and then you go into the how. I’m going to move on, and I think it’s a great way to close out the verbal part of what we’re talking about here today, and if you can’t explain it simply you don’t understand it well enough. And that’s Albert Einstein. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention anything about the virtual world because that is your day to day.
We’ve got everything from all kinds of social media, whether it’s LinkedIn, a Facebook, Instagram or whatever it is that you use. I just want to do a quick mention of Professional Presence as it relates to the virtual world. I know that most of you know this, but I will tell you I deal with lots and lots of companies and they had not hired people because of what’s been on their LinkedIn or their Facebook or pictures that they posted on Instagram. Be aware that forms what your Professional Presence is and to really be aware of that. Virtual is extremely important in making up our entire presence. Remember again, presence is about how we show up.
I have a few things on here that you might say well, cell phone, why is that virtual? Where to put it so it’s here, because I want to make sure we touched on it. But just how you use your cell phone, do you take calls in a meeting? Do you put it on mute? All the things that are wrapped up in your cell phone. I’ll never forget, I was in a meeting and somebody had a funky ring tone, and it made everybody just stop what they were doing, and turned and looked at this person and they said, “whoops, whoops, you know my daughter always reprograms my cell phone, and I never know what’s going to play”. We need to think of those things. If you’re trying to sell a really big good idea, these are the things that could take you maybe in a different direction.
Email. And I’m not going to spend a lot of time on email. I simply want to mention email is a form of communication, and sometimes people misunderstand what your email is saying. Do you have lots of caps? Do you have exclamation points, lots of smiley faces? You know all of those things take away from your message, and what you’re trying to say. And then voicemail, sort of the same thing you know. I’ll never forget, I recently had a client who was in sales, and when I met them, I said to him “So tell me how would you describe yourself, if you were going to in three or four words or phrases describe yourself”. He said, “I’m friendly, I’m approachable and I’m easy to get to know.” And so I said, “That’s great, but you know I called your voicemail before you and I met, and it seemed kind of maybe abrupt, and not really very friendly and a little direct, and your voice was very strong”. We called it together, and he listened to it and he said, “you know what, you’re right, it sounded rushed it sounded, impatient and it didn’t sound friendly and approachable”. The message that I wanted to leave you here is all of the things go into your Professional Presence. All of this makes up your presence, and it’s all about communication and how you communicate.
Let’s now talk about my favorite part, which is the non-verbal. If you remember, we talked about non-verbal represents fifty five percent of the way in which a message is received. One of my favorite things that I’ll do in the workshop when I’ve got people in a room is I’ll show a video, turn down the volume and I let people see the body language and then give me a sense of what they think the person is saying. Invariably, you can see that the gestures, the body language, the facial expressions don’t always match what they’re trying to communicate. I love this quote. “A gesture is understood by everyone. You need nothing else. No words.” Think about this, maybe you’re in your car. You’re rushing to the office, or you’re rushing to a meeting, or maybe you’re rushing if you have to pick kids up or something along those lines and you cut somebody off. Maybe they’ll beep their horn, but I bet if you turned and looked at them you would see this definitive gesture.
We’re not going to go ahead and name it here. But the point is a gesture is understood by everyone. You don’t need any words. And that’s why non-verbal is so important. You see some of the faces here, and we’ll talk about those in a minute, but let’s look at all of these elements. First and foremost, physical appearance. I’m not here to tell you how to dress. You know what makes sense for your office environment, for the types of functions that you go to. The point is, if we are making a first impression of you and it’s formed instantaneously, one of the things that we’re looking at is your physical appearance. Is your hair styled. Are you neat in appearance? Are you all wrinkled and things don’t match? Shirt’s un-ironed, you’re sticking out of your pants. If you look disheveled, then people are not going to have that trust factor. Physical appearance is extremely important.
Next is space and distance. And I think about space and distance, first and foremost let’s talk about space and how important space is. When you think about how you take up your space, and not to make this into a male versus female thing, but men typically can take up more space than a woman. I think of it this way – if you’re sitting in a chair, a man will typically be more open. If the chair has arms or have their arms on the chair, they’ll be sitting open so they’re literally taking up more space. Where a woman typically will cross your legs, look demure, and so what happens is when we do that, we tend to fold into ourselves and we don’t take up our space. And space really represents confidence and that we own our space.
Next is distance. I’m from New York originally, and we kept our distance. You don’t say hello to strangers, you stand far apart. When you go into some other countries, you find that people stand much closer to you. I’m now in Atlanta Georgia, and people tend to close that distance a little bit. It’s friendlier, and so people tend to stand closer to one another. Understand what the distance requirements are. Just be aware of this. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, but I’ve had instances where I felt like somebody was literally in my face, and you tend to walk it back a little bit. What happens is that person loses their effectiveness when they’re communicating.
Next let’s talk about body language. There’s lots that goes into body language, and I’m going to save some of this for my next slide, but ultimately when we’re talking about body language, we’re talking about all kinds of thing. Gestures, how you hold yourself. Your posture and your stance – all of those things go into body language. We’ll talk more about that in a minute. There’s also hands and gestures. If I’m just gesturing all around, it could take your mind off what I’m actually saying because you’re looking at my hands. Maybe you have some gestures or some things that you do. Maybe you twirl your hair. Maybe you have a pen in your hand and you click off, on, off, on. What happens is those things are distracting, so if you realize what are the gestures and the things that you do that can take away from your message and to keep those in mind.
Then there’s facial expressions, and you see some of those here just in these pictures. The first one might be somebody who’s serious or just sort of level. The second is maybe somebody who’s, “Oh my God! is that what you mean?” Maybe annoyed or shocked about how could you say that. Maybe a little anger mixed in there. Next comes happiness. Then you see smiling going to the bottom. Somebody who’s maybe a little sort of disappointed, thinking that they were going to get that big promotion and they didn’t. A little surprise is the next one, and then ultimately someone who’s a little sad. Maybe they got some bad news, or something terrible is happening. But what I want you to notice is that just simply by our facial expressions, we are able to communicate so much, and that’s what people are reading when they first meet you, as well in lasting impressions.
…Stay tuned for Part III coming next.
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