Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “CEO communication skills”
Speak with more confidence
When you are speaking, which do you believe Is more important? To feel confident or to appear confident? Think about that. You probably want both, but you can’t have both all the time. The question is which is more important? The answer is, it’s more important to appear confident. Why? Because that is the perspective of your listeners. Once you recognize that it’s about the audience experience and not your experience three factors work in your favor.
Your chief executive officer, CEO, could be the most powerful spokesperson for your organization. The market wants to hear from the leader. Customers and clients want to know the CEO. The media are often eager to interview and quote an effective leader. Is your organization getting the best return on the speaking skills of your leader?
Let’s review the results of a few effective speakers and a couple who were not.
If you are a leader or hope to be a leader in your company, organization or community – your words matter. It matters what you say and were wise enough not to say.
Are you paying attention to your words and implications? Guess what? Your audience pays attention and draws inferences and conclusions from your words. Here are five phrases that are counterproductive to your message because they can confuse or distance your listeners. People might not consciously notice these flaws, but these phrases can cause unconscious dissonance in your message.
Mind your words because they matter. Be precise and prudent with your choice of words. Remove words that are wasted, distracting or annoying.
What I do for them is I observe how they come across and I think about who’s their audience. What does their audience need? What’s the mindset of their audience? And I help the executive deliver the message in a way that the audience gets it and understands it and acts on it. I saw one of your videos where you put it nicely. These senior executives are technicians. They know what they know, and they don’t know how to convey that effectively.
They’re not effective communicators. Yeah it’s true many leaders are leaders because of their technical expertise. They could be an accountant, an engineer or operations person and that’s how they got to lead their department and maybe eventually the company, but they are grounded in the technical part and that’s the language that they use. When they become the leader of an organization they need to speak the language of the common person the common person in the company and the common person in their market.
Pause right before an important point to create suspense and heighten the value of the important point because they need to catch their breath and wait a few seconds for the message.
What can you learn from the worst presentation? There is no Perfect Presentation. The goal is to deliver an effective presentation. An effective presentation is one that informs and moves the audience. As a presenter you can learn from the techniques of effective presenters. What did they do that worked well and you might be able to use in your presentations?
We Can’t Hear You. The next flaw was that we didn’t hear or understand many of his words. Why? He mumbled often. Mumbling is a sign of incomplete thoughts and the lack of editing your words for a clear message.
His voice often trailed off at the end of his sentences. That’s a common mistake made when a speaker is thinking about their next thought instead of finishing the current thought. He wore a lapel microphone and often turned his face away from the mic which meant that his voice faded. That’s a mistake made by novice speakers. He didn’t know how to use a microphone.
Imagine the worst presentation ever. Now, read this post to compare. Read on to discover what not to do during your presentation. Learn from the mistakes of this Harvard professor.
He had impressive credentials. He was Harvard educated and a Harvard educator. He’d authored at least 15 books. He was endorsed by Jack Welch and had spoken to business executives around the world. Wow! Sounds impressive! But… he was a lousy speaker. Calling him “lousy” is being kind and polite to him but not to his audience. He certainly wasn’t kind and polite to the audience.
People say silly and ridicules things in their Linkend profile.
This is an example of both silly and ridicules. Would you hire this person? Would you even invite this person to have a conversation? The Linkedin profile is vague, cliché and lacking in accomplishments.
This could easily be text that was lifted from a university text book.
Notice that not a single accomplishment is stated nor measured.
What can you do when facing a hostile audience? How can you speak so they listen? How might you connect with them so they see your side of the message? Those are difficult challenges that we can learn to face by learning from Shakespeare – in particular the speech that Marc Antony gave after the death of Julius Caesar.
Notice the shift in tone of the audience and the techniques used to persuade the audience to change their thinking. Let’s visit the scene and listen to the speech and the changing tide of the audience.
