“Shh”

When you need to present important information, what you don’t say is just as important as what you say.

I’m not talking about physicality here, although body language plays a big part, of course. I’m talking about the pauses between words.

When you speak to inspire, giving people time to think is absolutely vital. It’s completely obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people believe they are pausing when they are doing nothing of the sort.

We often have a misplaced perception of how we come across. And please don’t think you’re an exception to the rule! Unless you are a naturally brilliant speaker, or you’ve had professional support, you are unlikely to use pauses as effectively as possible.

There is no need to beat yourself up about this, however. It is due to a level of faulty sensory perception, which is completely natural, and which we all possess.

Do you REALLY know what you are doing?

The Alexander Technique teaches that our understanding of how we use our bodies can be so “untrustworthy as a guide, that it could lead us to do the very opposite of what we wished to do or thought we were doing”. That’s according to the Technique’s founder, F.M. Alexander, in his 1931 book Use of the Self.

So does this mean that you shouldn’t believe your own ears when you are assessing your verbal performance? If you haven’t been properly trained, then the answer is probably yes.

If we look at physicality for a moment, it is easy to see how this might apply. For example, if you habitually slump at your desk, this position will feel right to you, even if you see yourself in a mirror and realise that your posture is poor.

When it comes to pausing, most people truly believe they are allowing a couple of seconds of silence for their words to sink in. Unfortunately the vast majority fail to stop speaking even for one teensy, tiny little second. The culprit is faulty sensory perception.

At the start of a leadership communication coaching process, that faulty sensory perception often raises its head. People can initially experience their new way of speaking as feeling wrong, even though they can hear and see in the recordings that it creates more impact for the listener.

It takes practice and persistence to change the habits of a lifetime and get it ‘right’. That said, you can also get there very quickly. And when you do, however you achieve it, the world is your oyster.

Speak to inspire with effective pauses

Pausing really does make a difference when you speak to inspire. It contributes to the speed and rhythm of your speech, your intelligibility, and therefore your impact.

Academic research shows that to convey a message effectively, you need to pause correctly.

A peer reviewed paper published in July 2015 compares the pauses used by two US Presidents in public addresses. In a speech given by Barack Obama, the longest pause was more than six seconds, while in a speech given by George W Bush, the longest pause was three seconds.

Now that doesn’t mean that longer is better, but Obama is always praised by the media for his oratory skills, while Bush is not considered to be a proficient speaker.

Pausing slows down the rate of speech. And research shows that slower speech is easier to understand because people have more time to process the information.

Obama speaks significantly more slowly than Bush. You can draw your own conclusions.

World leaders who speak to inspire

Whether you’re an advocate of Obama, Bush or anyone else, it’s important to appreciate the value of the pause.

Most recordings of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech have had the pauses shortened in the editing process. Radio and TV audiences don’t appreciate pauses as much as those who are actually present. But here’s a rare glimpse of a 9 second pause after Luther King’s assertion that “all men are created equal”. There are also brilliant pauses all the way to that point and beyond.

Like Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill used pauses to build confidence in his words, particularly in his morale-boosting broadcasts to the British public during World War II.

In fact politicians have been using the pause for centuries as a powerful tool. And as a business leader you can certainly take advantage of this political technique.

The king of the business stage, Apple’s Steve Jobs, now sadly departed, held his audience in the palm of his hand with his long, long pauses. Silence gave flavour to his speeches, and there is no doubt that Jobs could speak to inspire. In 2007, when he introduced the iPhone, you could have heard a pin drop as he paused, while people sat with bated breath wondering what he was about to say next.

Pausing is power

Pauses at moments of tension, interest and excitement increase gravitas and Executive Presence, impact and influence.

Use pauses wisely, and they will serve you well. They are a silent, golden tool which can give credibility and authority to your words and make you a much more powerful speaker.

The benefits of biscuits for effective meetings

Biscuits are apparently the king of effective meetings. Survey after survey has underlined that the better the biscuit, the better the meeting.

This doesn’t mean that the world’s most expensive biscuit will net you that multi-million dollar deal. In fact the world’s most expensive biscuit is probably inedible, as it is well over a hundred years old. (It was taken by Sir Ernest Shackleton to the Antarctic in 1907 and sold for £1,250 GBP in 2011.)

But if you’re really trying to impress, then a £30 GBP box of 15 gold-leaf chocolate cookies might well do the trick.

Choosing your biscuits with care

The average Brit prefers chocolate digestives  to any other biscuit. But while this might initially seem a good choice for the boardroom table, a survey for this year’s National Biscuit Day reveals that the true biscuit of UK leadership is shortbread.

When 2,000 business people were questioned by biscuit manufacturer Thomas J Fudge’s, a quarter of all respondents said they closed deals more successfully with the right kind of biscuit on the table – and shortbread was the most profitable business biscuit.

The study also found that the type of biscuit you eat says a lot about your personality.

Leaders are more likely to go for custard creams, while risk-takers opt for chocolate bourbons. And do watch out for flapjack lovers – they’re likely to have a short temper.

Biscuits to avoid

While it seems important to have a range of biscuits on offer, some biscuits are an absolute no-no.

Pink wafers are considered too be “far too outrageous for a work environment”, and there is no place for crumbly biscuits in a professional meeting.

There’s nothing worse than spluttering crumbs at a potential client, or wondering whether to wipe them off the table when it starts to look like a two-year old’s eating area. It is difficult to run effective meetings with people’s attention on tidying the table rather than the matter in hand.

My personal dislike is individually-wrapped biscuits, where you get a couple of Viennese swirls in a little cellophane pack. With two biscuits at your fingertips, it’s far too easy to gobble them both in quick succession and then wish you hadn’t. Or perhaps that’s just me.

Biscuit etiquette for effective meetings

Stuffing yourself with an abundance of gorgeously sugar-laden treats is perhaps something best done in private.

All the business biscuit surveys show that most business professionals think it is only acceptable to take two biscuits during the course of a meeting. Any more and you’ll look greedy.

In the Thomas J Fudge’s survey, one in five professionals confessed they had been involved in a biscuit-related argument when a colleague had ignored business etiquette and acted “out of line” by eating more than three biscuits, or scoffing the last one. Be warned!

To dunk or not to dunk?

Dipping your biscuit into your tea or coffee is a business turn-off.

Some people will find this a shame, as dunking biscuits to eat the soggy result is a popular British pastime, which is reflected in many countries around the world.

The trend in South Africa and India is rusk-dunking, while Australians enjoy sucking tea through chocolate-coated, chocolate-filled Tim Tams (a process known as the Tim Tam slam). And in the Netherlands you’ll find stroopwaffels sitting above people’s steaming drinks to melt the caramel inside before they’re dunked.

But the advice for effective meetings is to keep your dunking out of the office.

Do better biscuits really mean more effective meetings?

Biscuit surveys tend to be carried out by those with a vested interest in getting people to eat biscuits. Thomas J Fudge’s makes and sells biscuits. Holiday Inn (which surveyed 1,000 business professionals) provides more than 3 million biscuits a year for the business meetings it hosts.

It’s a great feel-good factor story that biscuits can close deals, but is it true?

We can all get a sugar high and an immediate energy boost from a biscuit during a long working day, but this can be detrimental rather than positive, depending on the rest of your diet.

Psychologists have found that raising your blood sugar levels while performing a mentally challenging task also raises your stress levels and reduces your ability to think clearly. It produces high levels of cortisol – a stress hormone which impairs memory.

So if you’re trying to close a business deal when you’ve had a sugar-rich lunch or breakfast, and you’re chomping on biscuits due to greed or habit rather than hunger, think twice.

That said, sharing food is extremely important and has significant effects. Eating with others makes us feel good, and “makes us feel more positive towards those with whom we do it” according to anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, quoted in The Telegraph. “The quality of the biscuits we share says something about how much we value each other.”

So if offering better biscuits sends out a subtle but very convincing message to those you are trying to persuade, the return on investment is potentially huge.

Just avoid eating too many yourself!

Powerful connections make all the difference

This week I’ve been considering the issue of creating strong interpersonal connections while speaking. It’s the most important way to engage, influence and inspire those around you.

Connecting effectively with others helps people take your message on board, and this increases the likelihood that you will influence and inspire them while achieving your own aims.

To make a great connection you have to truly believe in your message, and focus purely on communicating it. No other thoughts or feelings should cross your mind while you are speaking.

But the words shouldn’t just appear in your mouth and float out into the air.

If you can link the inspiration of your breath with the inspiration of your thoughts, your words will become a part of your whole physical self.

This will allow you to experience a true connection with what you are saying. It will also enable those around you to experience a true connection with you as an individual, and with the message you are trying to convey.

Being true to yourself

The bottom line in creating any sort of connection is to be genuine while you speak. Using your personal experience to communicate your unique, deeply-felt understanding of your subject will help you connect with your words and gain trust from others.

Your emotions will enhance your delivery. They will boost your connection with your audience and make your words more impactful, whether you are talking in a one-to-one meeting or speaking at a large conference.

Take a listen to the father of the digital age, Apple’s Steve Jobs, for example. Or to media queen and philanthropist Oprah Winfrey. Their belief in their message is obvious. And that’s what drives their success. It empowers them to influence and inspire.

We can also learn valuable lessons from those outside the corporate and media world. The teenage winner of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, female education activist Malala Yousafzai is a great example of someone who speaks from the heart. And so is Neil Baldwin – the subject of the award-winning UK drama “Marvellous” – a man who refuses to let his learning disability get in the way of his absolute joy for life.

The intangibility of connection

Explaining how it feels to be connected with your words and your audience is rather like trying to describe an emotion to someone who has never experienced it. It is abstract and intangible until its force hits you directly.

You know you are connected in the moment but you cannot grab hold of that connection. If you start thinking about it, it will fade away, as your focus will no longer be on your words.

The constituent parts of connection are unquantifiable. But acting together as a whole, they are incredibly powerful.

Creating energy to influence and inspire

When you really focus on others, with the sole aim of conveying your message, you will lose self-consciousness and gain a sense of energy instead.

Sharing your words will help those around you to feel and understand your meaning. You’ll be totally involved in your listeners, taking them on a journey from an unfamiliar place to a new comfort zone where they really “get” what you’re saying and want to run with it.

There’s no need to force anything. Your message doesn’t need exaggerating, over-emphasising or pushing. If it comes from the heart and if you really believe it, you won’t need to put any effort into speaking it. You’ll be able to communicate with a firm, easy commitment and all your attention.

Ensuring you get it right

Executive Communication Coaching can be very a powerful tool as you work towards achieving your goals. Professional feedback, support and guidance will take you much, much further than you can ever go by yourself. 

So if you want to be absolutely sure that you communicate in the most effective way to influence and inspire your colleagues, clients and stakeholders, do drop me a line or give me a call.

And remember, the business of business is relationships. The business of life is human connection. 

The active listening habits of leaders

"Most of the successful people I've known”, said Bernard Baruch, financier and political adviser, “are the ones who do more listening than talking".

His observations were astute. Academic research indicates that leaders really are better listeners. They listen with an open mind, without becoming emotional or defensive.

Studies show that confident people are better at listening to communication content, while those who lack confidence listen more to the emotional meaning behind the spoken message.

But strangely, although business people recognise that listening is one of the most important skills for an effective professional, only 1.5% of articles in business journals are about listening effectiveness. And in a survey of 1400 executives and business leaders, more than 81% said they had come across leaders who failed to listen. 

Do you really listen?

While hearing is easy, listening is hard. As journalist and author Ernest Hemingway stated “most people never listen”. Are you one of that majority?

Listening really is the Achilles’ heel of leadership. You may not know there’s a weak spot until something goes wrong. But then, of course, it’s too late.

Remember BP's CEO Tony Hayward after the 2010 oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico? 11 workers were killed and nearly 800 cubic metres of oil flowed into the sea with catastrophic results both to the environment and to marine-based industries. Many lost their livelihoods and local communities suffered immeasurably. But Mr Hayward failed to listen to their pain.

He may have been overworked and overstressed at dealing with the catastrophe. But instead of responding to what people were saying, he focused on himself, infamously telling the media "There's no one who wants this thing over more than I do. I'd like my life back." He then proceeded to go sailing with his son. 

Unsurprisingly, Tony Hayward lost his job. 

Of course that's an extreme example, but the book ‘Listen Up’ by Larry Barker and Kittie Watson, asks whether you ever find yourself guilty of any of the following:

1. Interrupting the speaker
2. Not looking at the speaker
3. Rushing the speaker and making him feel he’s wasting your time
4. Showing interest in something other than the conversation
5. Getting ahead of the speaker and finishing her thoughts
6. Not responding to the speaker’s requests
7. Saying “Yes, but…” as if you've made up your mind
8. Topping the speaker’s story with “That’s nothing, let me tell you about…”
9. Forgetting what was talked about previously
10. Asking too many questions about details

If any of these points ring true, then perhaps you need to take a long, hard look at your listening skills. Better active listening will make you a better leader.  

Leaders who listen

So why should you listen? It’s a fairly obvious question, unless you happen to be Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, who failed to hear the very strong advice to abdicate, and was savagely murdered instead. (I attended his official funeral, 80 years later, but that’s another story…)

Perhaps the IBM story is closer to home. In the 1990s IBM almost went bust. It was losing billions. The personal computer industry was taking off, and IBM’s core mainframe business was in crisis. The company wanted to look inward and reconfigure itself into separate entities, but the new CEO, Lou Gerstner, started listening to clients. They explained the market and the issues, and Mr Gerstner heard what they said, steered the business in a new direction and turned it into a highly profitable company once more.

Today, IBM’s shares are in decline again, but if history repeats itself and IBM listens once more, it might manage to resolve the situation.

The importance of active listening

A good reason for active listening is that your staff, colleagues, clients and stakeholders are more likely to listen to you if you listen to them. Leaders who do not listen tend not to be heard themselves.

If you listen and take other people’s ideas seriously, they will feel valued, and you will inspire loyalty. Without this, you will have little or no respect as a leader.

As a leader it’s also important to listen to those lower down the business hierarchy so you know what’s going on. If your life revolves around other leaders and managers you’re in danger of missing the wider picture and your decision-making can lose focus.

Listening statistics and active listening

The web is peppered with statistics about listening. Some may be accurate, others are probably wildly inaccurate. As a former science journalist, I only ever rely on stats from peer-reviewed journals, and even then with the premise of ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’. But it’s interesting to see the figures quoted, urban myths or not.

So, according to that highly unreliable source, the internet, we listen at between 125 – 250 words per minute but think at 1000-3000 words per minute. (More conservative estimates say that we think four times as fast as we listen.) Apparently we’re distracted, preoccupied or forgetful about 75% of the time we should be listening, and most of us only remember about 25% of what we hear.

The process of active listening – one of the skills I teach – has its own set of figures, according to professional mediator James Cull, from Decisive Mediation. He believes that active listening is based on a 70:30 rule: “you focus your efforts on the speaker and aim to talk no more than 30% of the time whilst encouraging them to make up 70% of the conversation”.

That sounds a pretty good rule to me, and one which I’d be very happy for my clients to follow.

Healthy listening

A highly respected Professor of Integrative Medicine, Rachel Naomi Remen, tells us that “the most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention.”

I think she makes a great point. While active listening is fundamental to business success, it’s also fundamental to social and relationship success. If we all listened to one another more effectively and productively, the world would be a happier place, a healthier place and a better place to work. 

My thought for the day is this: give it a go – try to give someone your full, focused attention today, and see what comes back to you. You have nothing to lose, and potentially loads to gain. And of course the better your active listening skills, the more you'll achieve. 

The significance of a strong voice

 I lost my voice this week. It totally disappeared and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it apart from remain quiet. Even communication professionals can fall victim to vocal cord viruses, although this was a first for me.

But never one to let an opportunity slip by, I used this ironic situation and my enforced silence to contemplate the importance of a strong voice, and how its significance is often lost or ignored.

The misconceived importance of a strong voice

There’s a much misquoted research paper by psychology professor Albert Mehrabian, who studied how university students recognised the emotions expressed by other students. He found that:

• Body language accounted for 55% of their understanding
• Voice accounted for 38%
• Words accounted for just 7% of how students’ emotions were understood by their peers.

Since 1971, when Professor Mehrabian conducted his research, this 55%-38%-7% pattern has been wrongly extrapolated worldwide, by organisations trying to make a fast buck ‘scientifically proving’ their approach to communication training.

The pattern is regularly misinterpreted to demonstrate that when you want to make an impression on someone, 55% of your meaning comes across in body language, 38% comes across in voice, and only 7% comes across in words.

Unfortunately that’s total rubbish. Professor Mehrabian himself has complained that using figures out of context is completely inaccurate. For example it is impossible to extrapolate from an understanding of student emotions to an explanation of financial data. It’s like comparing oranges with curry. They may both be foodstuffs but they have very little in common.

And yet the urban myth persists. It’s difficult to dispel a myth. But it’s also important that the truth comes out. So that’s what I’m reflecting on today.

The fundamentals for a strong voice

Apart from whispering, I’ve been silent for several days now, in an attempt to let my vocal cords heal from the bug that attacked them.

I normally have a rich, strong voice, which is such an integral part of my everyday life that I very rarely think about it as a tool – it’s as much a part of me as my arms and legs.

Of course a strong voice is something that anyone can achieve – it’s just a matter of understanding what to do with your body to make your voice ring out properly. But you do need a healthy set of vocal cords at the outset.

The independent value of body language

As a quasi-experiment, I’ve been trying to communicate without speaking. And I can categorically confirm that people do not understand me by body language alone. They certainly do not get 55% of my meaning that way.

It might be useful if I spoke sign language, but I don’t. And neither do those around me. So I’ve reverted to the Christmas-afternoon type of charades, which is usually played with mince pies aplenty and overflowing sherry glasses.

Sadly, my wordless attempts to make myself understood have met with confusion and bewilderment. Body language alone just doesn’t cut the mustard. Perhaps I should have tempted people with alcohol and sugary carbs for better results.

Adding a strong voice to effective body language

Many years ago I lived and worked in Russia for the BBC. English was a rarity on the borders of Siberia, and as I spoke no Russian when I arrived, the potential for misunderstanding was high.

It might have been easier had I stayed in a hotel, but the BBC allocated me a Stalinist apartment in a grey concrete block, a bus ride from work. So I had to communicate with bus conductors, shop assistants and market traders, none of whom understood my language, and in whose own mother tongue I was completely lacking.

As you might imagine, body language played a large part in these encounters. But my voice helped too. People tended to recognise my tonality when I spoke in a clear, strong voice, and they could often glean my meaning from the ups and downs, the stresses and inflections of my voice. A question in most languages ends on an upwards tone. A negative response is usually short and authoritative.

My words were incomprehensible and therefore irrelevant to those around me, but my body language mixed with the sound of my voice provided people with equal measures of understanding.

Of course my communications were very basic: “I’d like that cheese please” (pointing and verbalizing). “No, not that one, the one next to it”… and “Water?” (tilting an imaginary bottle).

Words play a fundamentally important role in communication, so it would have been impossible to have held a coherent, interesting conversation at first. But at least I didn’t starve.

After a year or so in Russia, I’d picked up a considerable amount of the language, and could happily converse about miners blocking the railway lines or teachers going on hunger strike. As a journalism trainer these were my topics-de-jour, but small-talk would still have been all but impossible.

Strong voice, effective body language plus impactful words

When I compare my silent body language experiment of this week (no words, no voice) with my ‘Russian’ body language and speech, the Russian version wins hands-down.

Trying to communicate with people who speak my language, but without voice or words is much, much harder than communicating in a foreign country with a strong voice to add to the body language.

When words are taken out of the equation, it seems the importance of voice and body language are roughly equal in helping people understand meaning. And when words come into the picture, they play a similarly important role.

It seems that words, voice and body language are all just as valuable as one another when it comes to getting a message across. And that blows the Mehrabian myth right out of the water.

Party leaders resign: the final leadership communication

Well who would have thought it? The pollsters are navel gazing and self-flagellating for getting the election results so overwhelmingly wrong. For the first time in nearly 20 years, the Conservatives are in charge of the UK, sweeping aside memories of the past 5 years of coalition government.

And the party leaders who were buoyed up and egged on by the media frenzy around the profusion of ‘too close to call’ polls? In acts of broken-hearted acceptance, the three main players have delivered their last acts of leadership communication – each resigining from the party they hold so dear.

Leadership communication to end all leadership communication

The likelihood is you’ll never have to resign in front of a large crowd and a panopoly of international TV cameras. But you can learn a lot about leadership communication (or the lack of it) by watching the different techniques employed by the three outgoing party leaders. Their methods of delivering uncomfortable news – recognising publicly that people didn’t like them all that much – varied significantly.

Ed Miliband: from phony to authentic

Before the election I slated Labour’s Ed Miliband for playing up to the camera, overperforming and coming across as fake and disingenuous during a TV debate between party leaders. I couldn’t bear his technique of  purporting to address the Prime Minister while taking every possible opportunity to stare robotically at the camera in an attempt to communicate directly to people at home.

Contrast that with his performance as he tells the party faithful that he’s stepping down. After an exhausting campaign with no sleep the night before, he is unpolished but somehow real. We can see genuine emotion. He is truly connected with what he’s saying, and it shows. That’s what leadership communication is about. Pity for him that he didn’t learn it before the election.

Nick Clegg: from compelling to unconvincing

Unlike Ed Miliband, the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, gave a very disappointing resignation speech. I’d praised him in the leaders’ debate for being credible, real and connecting with his audience. I was impressed with how well he performed.

But directly after the election, he deflated like an elderly balloon and social graces seemed to fail him. He found it difficult to make eye contact, and he read rather than spoke his words. Leadership communication it was not. And it certainly didn’t make the audience warm to him.

Perhaps the whole situation was just so difficult that the underlying cracks in his performance appeared. So perhaps it was best for that he withdrew from the leadership of the party.

Nigel Farage: consistent in defeat

Today’s third resignation came from the UKIP leader Nigel Farage, whom I’d cited previously as the leader who appeared the most genuine in April’s TV debate. (I must stress that this assessment was based on his performance alone, rather than the content of his communication.)

His resignation as party leader, announced al fresco on the Kent coastline, also appeared genuine and completely off the cuff . This is a man who does not need notes to speak his mind. His leadership communication style works for many people. And his passion (misguided though some think it is) may be why 1/8^th of voters across the UK placed their cross in the UKIP box.

But just a word of advice… If, like Mr Farage, you ever find yourself in the position of being interviewed by the national and international media, try not to position yourself in front of a bad tribute act to Reservoir Dogs. Farage might be able to carry it off, but it doesn’t exactly add to his credence and as far as I can work out, it doesn’t support his message.

The new generation of leadership communication

As the Cameron wolf blows down the houses of the three little pigs, it’ll be interesting to see who replaces them at the top of the political elite, and whether the newcomers will learn the lessons of leadership communication that their predecessors might have been wise to take on board. As the new government steps in, I’ll definitely be watching this space…