Read The Mobile MBA: 112 Skills to Take You Further, Faster (Richard Stout's Library) Online
Authors: Jo Owen
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How to read—and seeing the invisible
162
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Communicating: finding the right medium
163
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Communicating: principles and practice
164
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The dirty dozen: the language of business
167
The daily skills of management appear to be trivial: speaking, listening, writing, reading. Learning about them is beneath the dignity of any self-respecting manager, let alone an MBA course. But you can be sure that CEOs are not made or broken by their knowledge of the more sophisticated management tools like Bayesian theory or the Black Scholes option pricing model. They are made or broken by the basic daily skills of management. Similarly, top soccer players are not the best because they have perfected the overhead kick. They perfect their basic skills and will train on the basics every day, just as all top athletes, musicians, and performers do. Only managers think that the daily skills of management are beneath them.
The problem with the daily skills of management is that we all think we know how to speak, read, write, listen and do all the other things managers have to do all day. At a simplistic level that is true: you are reading this, so you know how to read. But now step back. You may know how to read, write, listen, and speak. But what about your colleagues? How many of your colleagues:
• Fail to read, understand, and act on your very clearly written emails and messages?
• Talk a form of incomprehensible management speak, or are just plain confusing and jumbled in their thought processes and what they say?
• Never bother to listen even when you go to great lengths to explain clearly what you mean?
• Write garbage which is either over-familiar gossip or unintelligible and endless prose?
Look around you and there is plenty of evidence that no one else can read, write, talk, listen, or perform the other basics of management well. That is not because they are dumb. It is because the management world is different from the leisure world. We have to learn new ways of using old skills. That does not mean becoming a parody of management: using long words which mean nothing, and pretending to achieve things while doing nothing. So what follows is an unfamiliar take on familiar tasks.
focus on the most basic tasks and you will shine
The good news is that so many of your colleagues perform the daily tasks of management so poorly that it makes it easy to stand out by being less incompetent. Forget notions of “in search of excellence” and other guru-speak. All you need is to be less incompetent than your rivals and you will succeed. Focus on the most basic tasks and you will shine.
Good managers need to be great persuaders. Some people have natural charisma, wit, and charm. The rest of us have to learn how to get our way. Fortunately, the persuasive conversation is not like a social conversation which rambles off in unexpected directions. Nor is it like a sales pitch where you try to bamboozle your opposition into submission. It is simply a structured conversation. You do not have a script: you have a structure that tells you where you are and when you can proceed to the next step. Once you have mastered the structure, you will find it easy to herd people into agreement with you.
Below are the seven steps of the structured conversation. Think of each step as a set of traffic lights: do not proceed until you have a green light for that step. The seven steps even have an acronym: PASSION.
PASSION: the seven steps
1. Preparation and purpose.
Be clear about your goal and the purpose of the meeting. The goal may not be to get full agreement, but simply to agree what the problem is. Sometimes it takes a few seconds to persuade someone. Other times you may need several meetings. Understand what their expectations are; adapt your message to their needs. Make sure you have the logistics of the meeting right: right time, place, people, and materials. Finally, once again make sure you have a plan B in case things turn out unexpectedly.
2. Alignment and rapport.
Get onto the same wavelength as the other person. If you know them well, this may be no more than a quick check to make sure you have them at a good moment: if they are barking with rage because of their previous meeting, they will not be in a receptive mood for your great idea. If you are less familiar with someone, invest time in getting to know them. They are more likely to respond to someone they trust than they will to a stranger. Build rapport.
3. Situation review.
Understand the situation as your partner sees it: agree how your idea can fit into their agenda. You should be listening more than talking, and when you talk you will be asking questions. As they talk, work out how to present your idea so that it fits with what they want.
4. So what’s in it for me?
You know what you want, but do you know what they want? Maybe all you can offer is an easy life if they agree and hell if they do not. But find something that makes it sensible for them to agree. Something sensible may be a call to the greater good of the firm and profitability; more powerfully it will be to make them look good personally.
5. Idea, stated simply.
State your idea in the language of the other person, and briefly explain how it works. Done well, your explanation will pre-empt all their likely objections (see 6).
6. Overcome objections.
If you have been listening properly in steps 2 and 3, you will already know what their objections are. Even better, you will have pre-empted their objections. You can do this by recognizing their concern; suggest that you had the same concern until you realized whatever the solution may be. Never fight objections: you invite retaliation. Treat objections as a chance to work together to find an acceptable solution.
7. Next steps.
Be very clear about what happens next and then check that the other person agrees. If they do not agree, go all the way back to step 3. The chances are that the ground work was not done properly.
As you follow this structure, remember some simple principles about how to conduct the conversation:
• Listen more than you talk and act on what you hear.
• Understand the world from the perspective of the other person.
• Act as a partner and a colleague: if you try the sales hustle you invite resistance.
• Don’t hide behind PowerPoint, which immediately sets up an “us and them” situation.
• Follow the structure, using each stage as a set of traffic lights which you need to turn green throughout.
• Persuade in private, which allows people to change their mind. As soon as the meeting is public (which means there is a third person) it becomes very hard for people to change their first, casual, opinion without losing face.
All great leaders, sales people and managers have one secret in common. They have two ears and one mouth. Hopefully you share their secret already. Even more important, they use them in that proportion: they listen twice as much as they speak.
Weak sales people and managers think they have to speak to impress and try to talk over everyone else. Shouting longest and loudest does not work. True power whispers and does not need to raise its voice all the time.
true power whispers
To find out how to listen well, blow off work this afternoon and go down to a local coffee shop. Tell your boss you are doing some vital research into a key management skill. You will normally find a couple of people gossiping: often one person does all the talking and the other does all the listening. Observe how the listener listens. The listener will:
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Look interested:
by maintaining eye contact and leaning forward into the conversation.
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Mirror the body language of the speaker:
naturally.
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Empathize:
“How one earth did you get through that?”
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Encourage:
“I don’t believe it! Really?!” (contradictions like this are a wonderful way to make people talk more.)
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Paraphrase:
“What? They did that straight after breakfast?!”
Back in the office, use the same disciplines. Even the cup of coffee helps if you want them to talk. The most important skill in the office environment is paraphrasing. When you have been listening, summarize what you have heard and replay it back to the speaker using your own words. Paraphrasing helps because:
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It forces you to listen:
you cannot paraphrase if you have not heard what was said.
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It helps you remember:
by saying something, it is naturally committed to memory.
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It gives the speaker confidence:
that you have both heard and understood what they said. This builds trust. It also means that they shut up: they no longer feel the need to go on repeating themselves to get their message across. So your meeting becomes shorter and more productive. In large meetings, this is a good way to cut short anyone who is being verbose: once they know they have been heard, they can relax and stop trying to make their point.
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It avoids misunderstandings:
if you summarize incorrectly, you will hear about it very quickly.
Paraphrasing turns you from a passive listener into an active listener. Importantly, listening is not agreeing. It is gathering intelligence and understanding, so that when you decide to speak, you speak from a position of knowledge and power instead of ignorance. Listening makes your speaking far more effective.
There are few good ways, and many bad ways, to die. Perhaps one of the ugliest ways to die is with a hundred bullet points to the head. PowerPoint offers every manager a compelling reason to retire early and start a vegan farm in the sticks.
When offered the chance to present and inflict PowerPoint hell on fellow executives, managers typically fall into two dangerous camps.
First, there are the zombies who have 300 pages of densely written slides, which they proceed to read out loudly and far slower than the audience can read them. After 20 minutes the audience sees that the presenter is still on slide six of 300 and the collective will to live expires totally. The zombies miss the two basic tenets of writing slides for a presentation:
• It is better to have dumb slides and a smart presenter than to have smart slides and a dumb presenter. In other words keep each slide very simple and then let the presenter explain and bring it to life.
• Any presentation or document is like a diamond: it benefits from good cutting. A presentation is only complete when it is not possible to say any less. Many presenters believe the opposite: they think it is complete only when they can say no more.
The second group are nearly as bad. These are the self-important who fill the air with nothing more than their own self-importance. They can bore on any subject, but most of all they like to be boring about themselves. They normally exhibit zero awareness of the three basic principles of presenting well:
• Energy
• Enthusiasm
• Excitement
If you show energy, enthusiasm, and excitement, there is a risk that other people will feel the same way about your presentation and they may even enjoy it. If you are not energetic, enthusiastic, and excited, do not expect anyone to feel enthusiastic for you. If it sounds difficult to achieve these three Es, try the following exercise:
• Present to your spouse the details of the latest cost allocation system in your company. If you fall asleep before your spouse does, you have failed. It is difficult to show energy, enthusiasm, and excitement about topics that do not interest you.
• Tell some of your peers about the most exciting (legal and decent) thing you have done in the past year. The three Es will come entirely naturally to you.
When called on to present, try to find a subject, or a point of view on a subject, which genuinely interests and excites you. The secret of achieving the three Es often comes down to one more E: expertise. If you really know your material, then you will exude confidence and every question will not be a threat, but a chance to shine.
try to find a subject which genuinely interests and excites you
None of us are likely to be great orators, but by keeping things short and simple and working on energy, excitement, and enthusiasm tempered with a little expertise we may well save our colleagues from a very ugly death.
It is 25 years since PowerPoint first inflicted itself on the world. Whether the world is a better place as a result is open to debate. In the past 25 years we have discovered plenty of ways to use PowerPoint badly. Here are 10 tips for making the most out of it.
Ten tips for making the most out of PowerPoint
1. Throw it away.
You are much more powerful without the crutch of PowerPoint. Really important things never get discussed over PowerPoint. PowerPoint leads to one-way communication, not to discussion. If you want a presentation aid, use a blank piece of paper. Drawing or writing on a blank piece of paper draws people into your magic show, and encourages interaction rather than passive listening and surreptitious texting.
2. Minimize the number of slides.
A presentation is not complete when you can say no more. It is complete when you can say no less. Focus on the one big message you want your audience to remember. Eliminate everything else. If you have four points per slide and 25 slides, that is 100 points you will make. The chances of people remembering them all, or the one you think is most important, are close to zero. Focus, focus, focus. And the best way of doing that is to tell a simple story which can be summarized in not more than 12 words. That is the most that you can expect anyone in your time pressed audience to remember. And then keep hammering away at the same basic message.
3. Minimize the words on each page.
Your audience can read faster than you can speak. The idea is to have a smart presenter and dumb slides: the presenter brings each slide to life. Hell is the smart presentation and dumb presenter: highly detailed slides that the presenter slowly reads out loud, without adding any insight. My best presentation is a series of photographs: zero words.
4. Present to the audience.
No one wants to listen to a presenter who is looking at the screen and talking to his beautiful presentation, with his back to the audience.
5. Know the purpose of your presentation.
What do you want to be different at the end of the presentation, and for whom? If there are many people in the room, focus on the one (or maybe two) people who you really need to persuade. Your presentation will become more focused, more dynamic.
6. Energy, enthusiasm, and excitement.
If you are not enthusiastic about your presentation, no one else will be. I once heard Patrick Moore, the astronomer, give a talk. I hate astronomy and loved the talk, simply because he was so enthusiastic about his topic.
7. Engage the audience.
Make eye contact; encourage interaction. As you prepare your presentation you should keep on asking yourself one question: “Why would person X want to listen to this?” If you are not sure why they would want to listen, then either drop the slide, or make it more relevant and engaging.
8. Cut the fancy graphics, slide transitions, and other funky stuff.
Do not let the technology get in the way of the message. The fancy PowerPoint technology may look cool to you; it will look juvenile to senior executives who will probably conclude that you have too much time on your hands to waste if you spend it all on fancy PowerPoint graphics.
9. Rehearse.
Then rehearse some more. Then really get serious about rehearsing. The more you rehearse, the more confident you will become; the easier it will be to engage the audience rather than talk to your slides and the better you will appear.
10. Start well and end well.
I always have my first 30 seconds scripted in my head so that I can start well, however nervous I may feel. Most people then fall into the trap of not knowing how to finish: they just give up with “any questions?” Make sure you have a good finale which makes your main point and leaves on a high: script it as closely as you script the start.