Who Owns Your Conference Throughline?

Every year, we support conferences, sometimes helping with a few keynotes and sometimes supporting the entire three-day production. Regardless of our role, our first step is to ask for the messaging document. But we rarely get it when we ask for it.

Instead, we get the run of show from the production company with a well-mapped timeline. Or we get a framing document from the internal team that explains the conference theme and experience. And occasionally, we just get a list of speakers with their topics and what we need to improve.

What we’re asking for is a view of how messages align, overlap and lead to key takeaways for the listeners. That’s what we call the throughline.

And more than half of the time, no one really owns it.

If that’s hard to believe, consider the key players who are pulling conference details together:

• The production company is focused on the event…and they deliver on the look and feel in a ballroom.
• The marketing team is about the experience…and they deliver on the look and feel outside the ballroom.

And it continues across technology support, events teams etc. People deliver on what they’ve been asked to do. But the throughline isn’t embedded in the process.

In fact, if you walked into a rehearsal the day before the conference begins, you’d see that a lot of what the audience will experience works well without speakers at all! The energy in the room comes from music. The visual concepts within the room create an experience and illicit emotion without words. In many cases, the quality of the production is well ahead of the quality of the messaging.

And the obvious question is: Is that OK?

It depends on your expectations for the conference.

If the outcome you’ve agreed on is that clients and employees feel entertained and connected to each other, then your goal may be accomplished with energy and entertainment. You may not need to worry about aligning messaging at all. Speakers can bring individual thoughts and worry less about being part of a total picture. But if the outcome you want includes follow-up actions, peaked interest in a new product, buy-in to a new approach, or sales calls to accelerate deals, you’ll never get there if messaging is not aligned and repeated consistently in the midst of all the entertainment and energy.

And that’s what a throughline is designed to do.

By helping internal teams align to six key steps, we ensure that conferences are developed around best practices that set the bar higher than a fun experience and deliver on outcomes and momentum that continues well after the event itself has wrapped up.

Here are our best practices.

STEP ONE: Set the Content Team & Process
The sweat equity required to align messages to a theme should happen as a first step. Messaging should lead the production element, the entertainment element, and everything else that happens in the room. But often, a production company is engaged before the theme is ever considered. And when you do that, you lose the flexibility to imagine the experience that best supports the outcomes you’re trying to deliver. This is when the throughline is developed.

STEP TWO: Align the Communicators to Messaging
Your communicators need to be aligned to a full picture of what you are trying to accomplish rather than treated as a separate component. Do you get their buy-in right up front as the throughline takes shape? Or do you get their attention in the last mile when you’re trying to nail down key points you want them to cover?

They are integral pieces of the through line, and that’s where challenge comes in. When conferences are treated as productions and events, the good thinking and talent resource goes toward planning the event. But if the theme isn’t talked out with the key communicators, you don’t have buy-in to the concept. And you’ll hit misalignment when they come in later in the process. Before anything else moves ahead, agreement to the throughline helps everyone support the event based on messaging. The throughline creates a clean and clear blueprint that should drive all the other components.

STEP THREE: Build Content & Context
While the creative teams join the conversation in step one, they leverage the message document to bring an experience to life. Once the messaging and throughline is set, it’s much easier to allow creative teams to do what they do best – without input or friction from the content owners. We create a separation between the two elements for production which gives the creative side full ownership for context and keeps the content creators very much in the lane of messaging.

When the content side tries to leverage a creative document to drive their process, roles get blurred and inevitably the creative side gets too much input into their process.

STEP FOUR: Blend Content & Context
Midway through the development, the content and context sides come back together. This gives both distinctly different elements a chance to see the full picture framed up and to gauge and adjust how well each component delivers the desired outcomes. If done at a midpoint, it also gives the creative team time to enhance the experience with elements leading up to and following up after the event. This step evaluates and edits at the midpoint to support repeatability and extend the memorability of what’s said. It also identifies the transitions and simple add-ons that can help ensure takeaways.

STEP FIVE: Add Supporting Roles
For most big events, companies rely on an MC to make all the transitions.

It’s a hard role. MC’s may be hired talent or someone inside the company who’s got a good stage presence. When step four happens at the right time, the role of an MC is defined clearly and linked to the throughline and flow of messaging. When it doesn’t happen, the MC becomes more of a comedian or stand-alone element that keeps the audience engaged and gives out details of what happens next throughout the day.

When this is seen as an intentional step after the blend of content and context, the MC role is leveraged more effectively. And it can be a more focused guide through the content rather than just an entertainer transitioning from one speaker to another.

STEP SIX: Measure Outcomes
Before you wrap it up, ask for feedback. And if you’re driving toward outcomes, you need feedback on two components: content and context. Measure context first. This can be done on the final day as people head to the airport. They’re thinking about the event itself and what they experienced. It’s good measurement against what you wanted the experience to deliver.

But more important is measuring the content impact. And that’s the outcome you wanted to reach. One month after the conference, what do your attendees say? Have they booked a follow-up meeting or moved exploration of a product further? Measuring content and context separately helps you gauge whether you’re investing too heavily in one or the other. And if you’re really delivering against all expectations for the conference.

 

The steps above make a big difference in moving from high entertainment to high impact. And we can help you do it. Whether you leverage us for two steps or all six, we can help your conference gain repeatability and memorability that will deliver outcomes throughout the year.

We’re here when you need us!

Want a free 15-minute consultation with us to see how we can help you or your leaders? Book a call now!

2025 Priority: The Leadership Team

It’s time to plan for the year ahead, leadership and L&D teams are outlining their plans against business priorities and focus. Since we work across a broad spectrum of clients, we can be an indicator of trends that are beginning to emerge and how other companies are prioritizing them. And we’re often asked: “what do you see as the priority?”

The group that’s emerging as a priority for development focus in many companies is the leadership team itself. And it’s not surprising when you consider the pace of work and expected acceleration in results, the change in work with transformative capabilities like AI and the ever-evolving way of working across the workforce. Add to that, almost half of the leaders sitting in the top seats are new to those seats based on acquisitions, early retirements and C-Suite movement.

Individually, top leaders have always been a priority in terms of upleveling communication skills, approaching new settings and new audiences, and driving impact with messaging and storytelling. But this focus isn’t on the individuals as much as the team.

Over the last year, we’ve been asked to help the senior team:

• Carry a message across a company
• Collaborate more effectively for faster decisioning
• Balance likeability and accountability with employee base
• Strengthen their visibility and authenticity in video communication

Essentially, it’s working better as a team to manage communication going up to their Board and key stakeholders to gain support, across to their peers and business partners to balance different perspectives, and down to employees to keep engagement high with their employees.

As we worked across different teams, here’s what we learned beneath each of those requests.

Leadership Brands:

Leaders have to stay visible within companies and industries to have impact. They have to position a point of view and reinforce it almost as a campaign to be sure it takes hold within their organizations. It’s gotten harder to do that as new ways of working settle in. And they’ve had to rethink how they communicate in terms of format to be sure their communication has reach and impact.

We’ve helped leaders think about where authenticity shows up best, how messaging is best reinforced, and the intention communication takes to add flexibility to how everyone else consumes it. One area we’ve focused on a lot is the use of video. And while a lot of this coaching happens individually, we’ve worked with entire teams recently to consider their reach collectively and to streamline formats for consistency across the company.

The Enterprise Voice:

This is one of the hardest areas to align a leadership team. Most have had distinct voices as leaders, and as senior leaders, they recognize the need to align as one voice. It makes sense conceptually, but it’s hard to get a group of leaders to follow it. It takes a process and an understanding of how to balance their voice and the company’s voice on key topics. And they can get lost in understanding it takes all of them to carry a message forward.

In most cases, we aren’t producing the messaging for clients. We’re coaching this team to work with the messaging they’re given by internal teams to find ways to align to the enterprise voice while still staying authentic to their individual ones. Leaders often feel they lose their own voice to the company voice, and we coach teams how to effectively balance the two and distinguish between them.

Peer Decisioning & Alignment

One sound bite we heard throughout the last year was “we have division leaders, not enterprise leaders.” And what they mean is that their leaders are very skilled at leading their functional areas. But they often get stuck gaining alignment across their peer group because they don’t take the time to balance perspectives.

Our coaching has focused on finding common ground and aligning to another leader’s value. Peers aren’t always quick to say yes, and they say it’s because they don’t see value for their own organization or the full enterprise. It’s one of the most critical communication skills needed on top teams because it’s the only way they can move quickly.

The Employee Base

Bench strength got thin following the pandemic as seasoned leaders took early retirement and allowed some to catapult quickly to top roles. In many cases, they haven’t learned how to manage  communication with large groups of employees. It isn’t a new skill need, but it’s become a more  apparent one. Companies are just busy and they’re moving fast. The catalyst of that movement is top down, but communicating what’s happening and why it’s happening isn’t always met with the same priority and focus.

Leaders miss an important opportunity and sometimes even set themselves up for risks when they aren’t well prepared. We help teams build the rigor of preparation and the skills of storytelling to make sure they gain repeatability and impact with one of their most important audiences.

The leadership team isn’t the only priority we’ve experienced.

Middle managers are still a focus as companies see increased visibility as a benefit and a liability. Expectations haven’t changed around how managers communicate with leaders, both in terms of the ability to structure a storyline and to lead a conversation with confidence. We continue to tailor the format and focus of our Leading Executive Conversation programs, and it remains one of the most popular ways to combine content development with executive presence.

We have lots of new topics on our mind and enjoy learning ourselves as companies plan for the year ahead. And we hope there’s a conversation ahead with you about leadership and communication as a part of your planning.

We’re here when you need us!

Want a free 15-minute consultation with us to see how we can help you or your leaders? Book a call now!

The Evolution of People Leaders: What They See & What They Miss

Our interest in people leaders and managers continues.

So much so that it was our introductory topic for a recent Chief Learning Officer conference in Boston. As we opened the discussion, we wanted to know if the top learning leaders had the same observations inside their companies as we’ve had as coaches all year.

We asked them to choose the statement below that best represented their companies:

1. Managing people has never been a more challenging role in our company.
2. Managing people is one of the strongest skills we have in our company.
3. Managing people has become a continuous learning curve that we can’t stay ahead of in our company.

Only one attendee felt the second statement fit their company. Everyone else felt statement one or three applied. So, we went a little further.

We asked them to choose the statement below that best represented their people leaders:

1. Our people leaders are set in their ways and frustrated by a broader set of expectations from us and our employees.
2. Our people leaders are inexperienced and haven’t developed the skills needed to manage how employees want to work and what they need to feel valued.
3. Our people leaders are exhausted by trying to stay aligned to demands in our business and expectations of our employees.

The start of our discussion confirmed what we’ve observed for the last few years. People leaders are under pressure and don’t have the right tools or skills to manage all the expectations coming their way.

And while we expected the responses to the opening questions, the discussion surprised us.

Even for those it’s a top pain point, supporting people leaders is not a top priority. Many of these leaders talked about it as an employee problem more than a manager’s challenge. And it validated our biggest observation which is that people leaders are begging for support, and no one has an easy answer. In fact, the pressure on people managers is getting worse.

Gallup measured the changes that people managers said they navigated last year:

• 64% said they were given additional job responsibilities, not promotions.
• 51% said they were restructuring teams.
• 42% said they were managing “budget cuts,” which often has a resource implication.

And the HR teams, for the first time ever, have the highest turnover of any functional area within a company.

Why is this such a gap?

Because companies reset a work model, and a rigor, without a manual. Senior leaders are pushing harder for results, and they don’t have a view of how that gets translated or implemented three levels below.

Remote work has done a lot of good things from reducing costs to expanding talent pools. But it takes more effort in coordination, teamwork and culture. Managers bear much of the responsibility of overcoming those challenges. We didn’t see it in a strong labor market because people just left if they didn’t like their manager. But job hopping has slowed down, and disgruntled employees are staying. Soon, we’ll all feel the frustration inside companies.

Why is it so hard to manage?

Because we introduced so much flexibility during the pandemic that managers don’t have guardrails to put any sort of team expectation back in place. Companies thought flexibility was temporary; employees thought it was permanent. And there continues to be friction to find balance.

Employees say their needs are unmet. They aren’t getting opportunities for development, and managers aren’t delivering on their expectations. And many employees have big expectations. Some are not realistic, but they still create challenging conversations. And companies have a limited view of how their managers handle them.

And why aren’t people managers catching on?

That’s the hardest part. Most people managers would say they are sitting in the middle of a perfect storm…increased demand from the company and higher expectations from employees. They’re trying! They’ve asked us for help handling conversations about:

• Limitless vacation and employees who’ve taken advantage of it.
• Requests for a sabbatical in the second year of employment.
• Employees who don’t like traffic, don’t like mornings, need fitness breaks, quiet rooms, and space away from a difficult colleague.
• Employees who go around managers if they don’t get the approval they want.
• Employees won’t don’t fly, who don’t turn on virtual cameras, who don’t answer cell phones, who don’t always seem to be working.

It’s harder than it’s ever been. Not because employees don’t have needs and expectations. But because the rules have shifted, and the interpretation of those new rules sits squarely with the people managers.

As our conversations continued at the conference, we heard more about gaps within companies and different situations managers were dealing with.

It’s handling conversations, demands and feedback. It’s knowing when to be firm and when to be lenient. And it’s being confident enough to pause and think before you respond.

It put us into coaching overdrive sharing ideas to:

• Reset teams to working as a team, not just as individuals
• Coach a manager to feel confident and stay settled in a challenging conversation
• Communicate a difference in a promotion and a development opportunity
• See, listen, and understand before you solve
• Set the difference in a general expectation and a specific request
• Adopt a conversation model to uncover the WHY underneath a skill or behavior gap
• Define parameters so exceptions don’t evolve into patterns

And while the spontaneous conversations were lively, we can do more than sketch an idea on a napkin! We’ve embraced this challenge, and we’ve developed workshops to help people managers evolve, expand and reinvent their skills. We meet them right in the middle of their experiences and responsibilities, and we coach a new way of communicating options and decisions. And I hope we’ve built confidence to help managers move through the perfect storm.

If your people managers could use a little support, we’d like to learn more about their challenges. And as we continue to talk to companies about building a better manager toolkit, we’re considering different formats which may include an open enrollment program that brings managers from different companies together. Let us know your interest by joining us on a call to explore the topic further.

We’re here when you need us!

Want a free 15-minute consultation with us to see how we can help you or your leaders? Book a call now!

When the Company Story Becomes a Financial One

When a company is up for sale, three key players take center stage: the current investor, the banker and the top executives.

And while the PE firms and the bankers know their roles well, the company leadership team is walking into a setting that’s less familiar to them. As the key spokespeople for the company, they should be the company’s best communicators. And in most settings, they are.

They bring credibility to a big prospect presentation. They add inspiration to an employee all-hands meeting. And they establish buy-in with their current investor and Board on strategies and new opportunities.

But pitching the company as a financial story is something they haven’t done often. And it’s different enough that they lose some confidence and conviction around how to do it well.

Here’s why:

It’s not the way they tell the story. – The storyline is created by the bankers. And it’s much less about solving needs for clients or inspiring a culture behind a vision. It’s focused with a critical eye on the value of the company and the potential that value has to expand in the future. It’s much less about where you’ve been and much more about proving where you could go. It’s a sum of details that have to add up. And it’s a way of positioning the company and assessing it that the founders or current leaders haven’t considered.

It’s heavy on data and details. – Most leaders don’t use slides in a lot of what they do. They’re the inspiring element of the company, so they speak from the heart, they speak from an outline or they speak off the cuff. They do not speak from heavy data slides. So, when the bankers hand over a deck for a management presentation, it’s overwhelming to them. Many leaders say they don’t see “their story” within it.

The story’s there, but it’s a different way of presenting it. It’s full of insights. It’s full of data points. It maximizes landscape with 9 or 10 points on every page. And that’s different than how a business leader has been coached to inspire and engage an audience.

And it’s more of a team effort than they’re accustomed to. – That’s a nuance that matters in communication. Leaders present together, but they stay in their own lanes and talk to their areas of responsibility. They might call it a team presentation, but it’s more five focus areas coming together. In a management presentation, they need to align to the same core messages and the same sound bites. They need to be well-aligned on handling questions so that there is a consistent response and belief across the team.

And it’s the ability to solve those three differences that brought us into the investment coaching space more than a decade ago. The role of the key players remains the same: positioning the company for a successful exit from one investor to another. Our role is an added addition: helping the communicators, as individuals and a team, find their confidence in a tougher setting with a different lens on content.

We do it with a three-step process that focuses on: the talk track, the communicators and the team.

The talk track doesn’t mean the deck or the positioning. That’s the bankers’ role. Our work focuses on helping each leader find their voice in a storyline that is less familiar to them. While the slides are dense to leaders, it’s common place in a sell position. These decks are used to position companies as pre-reads and as documentation to set the story without the leaders. So, the slides won’t change. But we can help leaders consider how their voice comes through and how to work with headlines and foot lines to avoid getting bogged down in the details and losing their train of thought or their audience as a result of it.

The seasoned communicators need some support in thinking through how they want to position themselves along with the story. Most of this work is on personal style and leveraging great communication skills to be clear, concise and compelling. It’s a high-pressure setting. So, each leader wants feedback and a few coaching adjustments to be sure they bring their “A” game to the setting.

And finally, the team. Learning to manage key messages and sound bites in a messaging document is a new skill for most leadership teams. It’s pulling everything into a few big concepts that help them consider how to make points repeatable. And it’s a rehearsal that helps them see the flow of the talk track, their ability to tether back to key points and appear as an aligned team in a high-stake setting.

We’re the added addition that allows the bankers and current investors to stay focused on attracting buyers while we stay focused on helping the leadership team find their voice in presenting a financial storyline. So, whether your role is exiting a company in your portfolio or building the financial storyline to pitch it to other investors, we can ensure that the communicators you’re counting on bring their best to the opportunity.

Call us when you need us.

 

Want a free 15-minute consultation with us to see how we can help you or your leaders? Book a call now!

The Language of Business

Do you speak the language of business?

If you’re in a corporate function, there’s an easy way to tell.

• As a finance manager, are you the last person included in discussions of an upcoming initiative?
• As a lawyer, do people get careful with details when you’re in a meeting?
• As a communications director, did you miss the strategy discussion and only felt looped in the week of the all-hands meeting?
• Or are you the marketing lead who is pulled in to launch a new product after decisions have already been made about the target audience?

Limited exposure happens every day inside of companies, and it’s often because the functional areas don’t speak the language of business. They have deep expertise in their areas, but they don’t easily translate that to business outcomes that are common across operational areas. And unintentionally, that can create an impression of being narrowly focused or missing the bigger picture that a leader needs to resolve because they are influencing without authority at work.

The finance guy speaks budgets and numbers and forecasting and risks. The lawyer speaks regulations, compliance and contracts. And marketing speaks lead generation, website statistics and clicks and open rates.

In fact, for a subject matter expert, technical knowledge can be so entrenched as a language that others in an organization don’t think they can speak anything else. And that limits influence and visibility in an organization because peers and leaders won’t pull them into conversations until their functional expertise is needed. That means someone else is determining when the functional leader can add value. And it’s almost always narrower than it could be and later than it should be. And that’s a disservice to the SME and the company.

I first saw the gap in the language of business through executive coaching. At the start of most engagements, I learn about teams and resources that add value to a leader. And as they talk about different resources, you can hear the difference in how they describe people who support them and people who partner with them. It’s a gap that many SMEs don’t understand, and most leaders don’t work around.

And it’s why we developed a program called Influencing Without Authority to shift the language of function areas to the broader language of business outcomes. And we coach to three specific things that can broaden perspectives and align to business language.

1. The Difference in Perspectives.

This is the most common blind spot in all the coaching we do. People communicate from their own perspective rather than aligning their thoughts to a listener’s perspective. If you’re a subject matter expert, you can assume that no one in the room understands what you understand. So, speaking in your language will always create distance with listeners.

We help all communicators consider a listener’s perspective and align it before they bring their own perspective into a conversation. And as we introduce a model for outlining conversations, it helps many communicators think beyond governing through their lens and get to a more common ground and suggested alternatives for leaders.

2. The Journey to Value.

In fact, more than just understanding a listener’s perspective, we coach SMEs to attach to what those listeners value. The expertise of many SMEs can be a narrow lane. Too often, they listen with only that lens and focus more on what a leader shouldn’t do versus aligning to the priorities and outcomes the leader has to deliver.

We call it the journey to value, and we help groups go a step further in perspective to understand the goals and priorities beyond the current conversation. When a communicator can see that, they quickly understand how to fit their discussion into a broader picture. It changes their input and shifts them to partnering with a leader on options.

When leaders hear a communicator who is trying to solve a challenge or create an opportunity, they hear insights beyond the area of expertise.  And they notice the skill of communicating with the broader business in mind. And the communicator shifts from a subject matter expert to a valued utility player. That’s someone who has knowledge that can be leveraged in many different ways.

3. Activities and Outcomes.

Our third area of focus gets specific in helping any expert build messaging that aligns to business outcomes. And it challenges every SME to think beyond their activities to broader business outcomes. That’s the final step to align to the language of business. And it may be the hardest because it positions the functional efforts more as a means to an end or a part of a broader outcome.

Here are specific examples:

I’m a finance manager talking to a business unit leader about her budget. She’s requested three additional head count that don’t fit within budget guidelines. My role is to communicate that she can’t add those costs. In this instance, she’s focused on a means rather than an outcome. And if I understand what she’s trying to accomplish, I can help her consider ways that she could get to an outcome without additional headcount. If you delay your project launch by four months, you’ll have a better view of first quarter results and could adjust your spend to better align to the project needs.

I’m a lawyer talking to the senior leadership team about compliance training.  The legal team has been very focused on getting people through the training, and we’re pleased that we plan to have half of the organization trained by the end of the year. But that’s the legal team’s activity and not the value to the business.  So, the message to the leadership team should be: By training half of our employees on compliance risks, we’ve updated awareness of new risks and built confidence in their ability to prevent those risks in the year ahead. 

I’m the marketing director, targeting a specific demographic for a new product. My efforts produced a 15% increase in leads from the targeted group. When I meet with the sales leader to report on that progress, I’m likely to mention the 15% increase in leads as the outcome.  But to the sales leader, it’s one step towards a broader outcome which is to generate product sales from the leads. To attach to the sales leader’s value, I’ll say that: By increasing leads by 15%, we should be able to generate an additional 10% in product sales to this demographic.

Speaking the language of business is a valued skill and a critical skill to help someone in a specialized area continue to gain visibility and advancement in an organization. If you run a functional area and think your team could improve communication, we’d love to share more about Influencing Without Authority and how we’ve helped teams expand their influence across an organization.

Call us when you need us.

 

Want a free 15-minute consultation with us to see how we can help you or your leaders? Book a call now!