I’m going to give you a tip. Any feedback you get that makes you feel bad about yourself is off the mark. So is any feedback that makes you feel you’re not good at something.
This meeting, however, was virtual with seven people Isabella had never met. None of them had their camera on. She was looking at a wall of little black squares with names written on them. They looked more like gravestones than people.
How do you build rapport with that?
Standing ovations are the hallmark of highly skilled presenters. They occur in proportion to how precisely you reach your audience, whether you hit a true bull’s eye with your delivery and your message. They start long before your final sentence. There’s only one driving element that produces them. Simply put, the depth of your skill in both message and delivery determines the depth of your audience’s response.
That email came from Vikram, a senior leader who had sent his top team to our Art of Executive-Level Presentations workshop.
Before that, everyone was frustrated. The ELT was frustrated with long, unfocused presentations that buried the point. Vikram’s direct reports were frustrated because they couldn’t get anything approved.
They had an abundance of good ideas, intelligence, and spent hours preparing their presentations to the ELT. None of these were working because they weren’t playing by the rules.
Everything changed once they learned The 10 Rules of Executive-Level Presentations I’m making available in this PDF. (Free Download)
David leads a large group in an organization that has over 80,000 people. They’ve been getting hammered in the news for months now, trying to recover from mistakes made by the then-CEO five years ago. Unfortunately, they’ve just had to announce layoffs. There’s a tremendous amount of unsettling re-organization and re-shuffling going on. Where people will land is up in the air. The future of the organization is uncertain and morale is at an all-time low.
David’s group is the only inspired group in the whole organization. They’re engaged, focused, forward-looking. And helping the new CEO turn the whole organization around. That wasn’t always true.
They’re inspired not because conditions are better for them, but because David changed the story he was telling them.
When David first came for Beyond Persuasion, his attempts to “inspire” his team were falling flat. He was saying all the right things: the new vision, the plan, the priorities, the outcomes, the call to action. All good, but none of it was working.
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