He walked in and transformed his team before he even said a word.

The team of 20 was stressed. Agitated. A reorganization had been announced and they didn’t like where it was going. Their tension was palpable, even in the silence as they waited for him.

Evan walked in, stood in front of his team, and calmly looked at each person. A calm moment of simply connecting with each one.

The whole room calmed down.

I was coaching a small group of women for a “Women in Leadership” program in a high-profile energy company. One of them raised a difficulty about working from home and how much she disliked communicating virtually, how much better it was to be in person, and how you lose the essence of a human connection when you’re looking at a computer screen. She felt she wasn’t communicating as effectively through this technological medium.  The experience caused her stress she didn’t experience in person. Others in the group agreed, they felt the same way.

And then I had them make one change that created a complete transformation.

Today I was coaching Daniel who’s working on closing a $10 billion deal. What’s the difference between working on a $10 billion deal and a much smaller one?

Besides all the zeros to the left of the decimal point, and the fact that with a $10 billion deal you’re probably working with a team of excitable people who are sometimes even more of a challenge to manage than the customer, other than these things, there’s not going to be much difference in the skills you need to close either one.

Both will take the ability to connect with another human being. 

“Um’s” are what’s known as “filler words” during a presentation. They’re unnecessary and distracting. As in, “What we learned was important because … um …. what customers were saying was that … um… they wanted faster service.”

She turned to me and said, “Can you help him with the ‘um’s’?”

I told her yes, but not to worry about it right now. She trusted me and nodded.

I coached him on other things and within an hour they had disappeared.

Victoria’s fate for the next five years hung on what happened in the next 90 seconds.

Those 90 seconds would shape her future for the next five years, the future of her team, the future of the organization and very possibly the future of the industry.

Victoria wasn’t nervous. She was calmly enthusiastic. This is what mastery looks like.

Victoria’s coaching sessions had prepared her. Good coaching does that. It builds your confidence and makes you fearless. Real confidence is built on solid, consistent demonstrations of competence.

Being close to Silicon Valley, we have had many senior executives send engineers and other technical leaders from various disciplines, including finance, to us for coaching on their presentations to leadership.  Their biggest complaint is also their top goal for the people they send. They phrase it like this: There’s too many details in their presentations.

What they mean is, too many unnecessary details. It drives executives crazy. And engineers are at a loss as to what to leave out.

There is a big disconnect between “engineering logic” and “executive logic”. I’ll explain what that is.