Communicating the Value & Impact of AI

Everybody’s talking about it.

It’s been called the most significant technology advancement we will see in this decade. Some say in our lifetime. And with all the noise, buzz and focus, communication has become a critical tool in how companies position AI within their strategies.

It’s a different conversation at a dinner party than it is on a work team or in a boardroom. Personally, we’re having a lot of fun asking AI to plan vacations and solve our everyday problems. We’re all eager for our own personal agent. It seems like Siri’s distant cousin showed up and can do 10x more!

But in our work environment, it gets much more complex and a little less fun. In fact, most technologists say that how we’re experiencing AI as consumers is confusing what we can expect from AI in our workplace. And when it comes to telling the story of corporate AI, communication isn’t quite as clear or compelling.

We’ve had a front row seat over the last two years supporting many companies with AI communication. We’ve heard groups over promise AI outcomes and lose trust with their audiences. We’ve heard groups over explain AI applications and confuse audiences. And we’ve heard groups downplay AI and disappoint audiences.

Everyone is trying to sprint to early outcomes, but by technology standards, it will be more of a marathon to integrate AI throughout our world. That’s OK. But it does mean that communication will be a critical tool to help AI leaders and business leaders manage expectations, align strategies and bring each of their key audiences along on the journey.

It’s a great example of our storyline methodology because it requires a communicator to focus on audience perspectives, clear messaging and the ability to balance a future state with an actual one. The hype of AI got everyone’s attention as a consumer, but our interest and expectations as a business audience are not the same.

Here are our insights into some of the most critical groups in terms of expectations and how to deliver on them.

BOARD MEMBERS:

This audience starts with their responsibility. And related to AI, they sit somewhere between the intrigue of what you think you can do and the reality of how fast and how well you’re doing it. They are both an internal and external audience, meaning they learn from your internal teams, but they also bring insights from their own experiences. This audience can get ahead of you, behind you or opposed to you based on knowledge they get from outside the company.

Most boards went into last year with expectations around AI investment and measurement. Your goal at this point should be consistency in how you keep them updated. You should have a storyline in place that they’ve aligned to with views of activity, pace and expected outcomes. Keep them involved enough to understand the misses and resets, so they own the learnings with you. Don’t reset the storyline every time you talk to your Board. If they don’t know your AI strategy and progress at this point, you are misaligned. Solve for that by repositioning a high-level storyline – and putting an AI report in place that gives them an enterprise view of what you’re doing.

Missteps: Your efforts around AI will pull your technology leaders into the spotlight. While it’s a strategy for a company, it is a career-defining moment for people leading these efforts. Coach them now on the language of Boards. It’s a different audience for them, and if the Board doesn’t have confidence in your AI talent, you’ll struggle to keep them in step with a strategy.

INVESTORS:

This is the skeptical audience.

Consider them the most knowledgeable in terms of industry perspective and a broad view across your competitors and partners. They’ve heard the AI hype story for a while, and they read between the lines on what you plan to do and what you’re actually doing. Generally, they believe the early adopters will win by getting ahead of everyone else.

They’re tracking progress by digging in on AI investment and AI value. They agree there is potential for AI to transform companies, but most say they don’t truly see it yet. So, they drill down to get to the core elements of what you’re doing. If it’s a new audience for you, know your AI story. It needs to represent a forward view, a current focus and measurable results. All companies are testing how they will report progress in this area. Expect to be held to these measures and get clear on how to communicate about them.

Missteps: Winning at AI from an investor view is delivering customer outcomes. For many companies, a starting point was to talk about their internal outcomes as they learned AI. Companies considered these outcomes; investors consider it activity. Repeatedly, they call out that companies aren’t proving that customers are taking the journey with them. In some cases, this is a lack of good storytelling and knowing how to tell success stories from the customer’s perspective.

CUSTOMERS

Customers are eager to hear about AI efforts. Like investors, they care less about what you’re proving internally and much more about outcomes for other customers.

They’re also focused on the role of data in this process. We’ve helped many companies illustrate the AI integration journey within a customer’s world, and it gets results. It shows understanding and effort to consider where they can expect the most value and steps toward better outcomes.

Your customers hope to learn from you and other partners, and it’s a great entry point to new relationships within a customer organization. We’re helping elevate and broaden these conversations, so sales teams can use AI to get visibility to other decision makers within companies.

Missteps: Some companies miss the mark by not building AI into their go-to-market message. They give the sales team “hand me downs” from how AI was communicated as a strategy. That breaks a golden rule: the customer comes first. Until it has value to me, I don’t really care what you’re doing to transform, improve or evolve your products and services. That’s your thought leadership and belongs at conferences, not in a sales opportunity.

EMPLOYEES

For this group, the storyline around AI should be inspiring! We all believe that AI is going to have tremendous impact on our lives, and we want to be a part of it. Share the strategy, and all the good and bad that comes with it. Talk about learnings, failings and next steps.

This is a group that is counting on you to educate them. Whether they’re literally working with AI or two steps away from it right now, they care about it. And if they learn AI in your company, it’s a huge retention tool. Too many companies are putting it in a small, exclusive space, so they can go fast. It’s fine to corner off the work, but don’t corner off communication. It’s too big of an initiative and too central to where you’re heading. Brand the journey and make AI a tool of inclusion.

This is the audience that will build a ground swell around your efforts. Make it understandable to them, and they’ll talk about it and your work around it. They’re the best PR machine you have. They’ll share stories with friends, examples with neighbors and strengthen your brand with AI efforts.

Missteps: For this group, it’s less about missteps and more about no steps. Don’t just recycle content here. Build a journey around AI that is inspiring and includes the entire organization. Employees are a captive audience right now because they want to be involved. Keep them out of the mechanics and engage them in possibilities and opportunities in their work.

 

If you’re in a position to communicate about AI, we can help you balance a future view with a current one. While your audiences have different perspectives and expectations around this hot topic, your storyline has to get to outcomes. And we can help you do that.

Join Sally on July 31 at 10:00 am EST for a Group Coaching Session!

Also Read: Can ChatGPT Write My Speech?

 

When Feedback is a Setback

We’ve all heard the adage: feedback is a gift. And in most cases, it is. But the gift itself is sometimes overlooked. Most of us think feedback is a gift because it tells us how we’re doing and how we can improve. We think of feedback as a performance measure because it’s often packaged within a performance review. But the greatest gift of feedback is the insight it provides into someone else’s perspective.

And the further along you are in your career journey, the more that perspective matters.

Early in a career, feedback tends to tie to one manager’s thinking. Performance is about skills as you learn and settle into an individual contributor role. But as careers progress, feedback shifts from skills to impact and from deliverables to influence.

Unfortunately, it’s also when feedback becomes less frequent. It’s harder to give feedback about impressions and impact. It’s more nuanced and subjective. People managers can’t look at a list of eight skills and tell you that you “check the box on six and need to improve on two.” Impressions are more relational. Do people enjoy working with you? Are you able to resolve conflict in meetings? Do you respect ideas of others, or do you do all the talking?

Feedback becomes less frequent just as the impact of those impressions matter most. And that’s when feedback can be a setback.

Once you hit a mid-management level, a single people leader doesn’t control career advancement. People leaders work in groups to discuss expectations, career advancement and succession. And impressions lead the conversation. How have a group of leaders experienced you? Have you had visibility across a management team – or only with one leader? Do they see flexibility in your skills? Could they move you from one area to another to accelerate impact?

Those impressions have been taking shape over time and if you and your manager haven’t talked about them, you may be behind or misaligned. Often, it can be an unexpected roadblock to what you’d like to do next.

So, what can you do about it?

• First, ask for feedback on impressions
• And second, follow three steps to manage feedback effectively

People leaders don’t give great feedback on impressions because it’s a harder conversation to lead. When people managers share impressions or input from others, they don’t always have clear ideas on how to get beyond it. To position an impression, they talk more broadly and less specifically, which can make it hard to change an impression.

That’s why some managers avoid this feedback and let the impression linger. That’s harder because it can build over time and become more challenging for you to address if it’s taken hold. You need this feedback, and if it isn’t a part of how your manager shares feedback today, you should broaden the conversation and ask for it.

If this has happened to you, you’re not alone. More than 75% of seasoned managers don’t have a full view of their brand and impact within an organization. It’s why most of our coaching engagements include a verbal assessment to better understand impressions, strengths and blind spots. If it isn’t something that you’ve done recently, it’s a helpful view into your brand within an organization.

And that leads to the second point. There are three things you can do to signal you’re open and appreciative of receiving subjective feedback.

First, own it. Our instinct when someone shares an impression is to react to it. And the first step to encourage an open conversation is to avoid that.

Your manager might say: “John, I wasn’t in the meeting, but I’ve heard that you were defensive as others tried to give input to our rollout plan for the integration.”

All of us want to jump in quickly and say:

“No, I wasn’t defensive. I just felt like they didn’t understand the timeline and so I went back through it.”

A quick reaction signals that you’re not really listening. You’re solving it…which your manager reads as dismissive of the feedback. Instead, listen fully. Allow your manager to get the full thought out before you respond. He or she is literally trying to share how people experienced you in a meeting. You need to fully hear it.

Pause, listen and ask for more.

Because chances are when someone tells your manager, you are resistant, they tell your manager more. If you cut off the conversation too quickly, you’ll shut down the most important part of the feedback.

Instead, own the comment and try to understand the perspective.

EX: If someone felt I was defensive, how did that impact the ideas that they were trying to share with me?

Second, clarify it.

From a manager’s perspective, this conversation is less about solving for impressions and more about raising awareness.

Once the manager has framed the impressions, you may have questions to better understand the group’s reaction or impact. Avoid getting too tactical about yourself yet. Seek deeper understanding to learn if your manager has heard this feedback before. Is it broader than one meeting? Has your manager experienced it before? Does your manager have another example?

Keep yourself in discovery mode. It’s an open conversation with your manager, not an interrogation. And the more insight that they share, the more you can process what may be leading to the impressions.

And third, resolve it.

Impressions don’t get solved overnight. Working on how others perceive you and interact with you can be a hard shift to make.

The manager’s goal was to start with awareness, not resolution. And you need some time to think about what you’ve heard. You may even validate it with input from others.

Impressions may take months to reset. Most people need a plan to become more intentional about showing up differently. In this meeting, gain a commitment from your manager of when you’d like to come back and share your thoughts on how to resolve it.

External coaching can be a great resource. Working through feedback, impressions and overall impact in an organization is one of the most effective ways to use a coach. If feedback has set you back or hasn’t even been offered, we’d love to help you gain awareness of your brand and your opportunities to continue to advance.

Also Read: Are You Being Cautious with Feedback?

 

Can Chat GPT Write My Speech?

It’s an obvious question as ChatGPT continues to show up in things we google and ways we’re learning to work differently.

But the best response didn’t come from me. It came from a client who said:

Sure, ChatGPT can write your speech – as long as your expectation is a crappy, first draft!

I agree!

Your expectations should be higher than something that would work for anyone in any setting. As I’ve played around with ChatGPT, I’ve learned that there’s an art to how you ask, how you reframe and drill down to information that’s useful. But it is an incredible resource tool that has great potential to get you to that first draft. And that’s the part many people say is the biggest drain of time.

If you’ve worked with our storyline framework, then you know the difference in setting external insights and internal perspective. ChatGPT could be a great resource to help you find those insights to broaden, challenge or expand a locked-in belief. But be wary of easy facts that may not hold up. Be sure you re-research everything you get from ChatGPT to be sure it happened as it’s quote, and the metrics are valid.

As a coach, I’m always a little skeptical when the question is ‘can ChatGPT write my speech?’ vs ‘can ChatGPT find interesting facts?’. It makes me wonder if the goal was a shortcut versus a memorable speech. I’m all for leveraging these tools – as long as your goal remains impact versus efficiency. And before you rely on AI as a viable partner, here’s a quick reminder of what your expectations of yourself should be as a communicator.

Before you align to an easy way out, think about what good looks like and how you should evaluate yourself in terms of expectations and results.

Before every significant communication, ask yourself three questions:

Is it you? – Communication should align to a communicator’s brand. Would people in your audience say –“I can see why he did it.” Or “That’s so in line with who she is.” There are several ways to make content your own from storytelling to word choice to delivery choice and many more. Authenticity is the top attribute listeners describe with presence.

ChatGPT can’t give you that.

Is it memorable? – Attracting and holding the attention of any group is more challenging than it’s ever been. Listeners are distracted, impatient and many days, flat out uninterested. Your content has to break through that. And in many cases, it takes the ability to react to people in the room more than preplanned content you set a week ago.

It’s hard work to find the thread that will pull people into your ideas. You need to know them, you need to align to them and then you need to find a way to pull their interest into your ideas.
You want the content and context you share to be memorable so that the group you meet on Monday shares it with the group they meet with on Thursday. Whether you’re the CEO or the operations manager, the goal of communication is to help information travel.

ChatGPT can’t define that.

Is it actionable? – While I often say there’s no pass/fail in communication, there is impact. And all the effort you’ve put behind a message and a speech is best measured by whether or not listeners took away an actionable insight. Internally, did they rethink the way they’re approaching a project or a work team? Externally, did they have an “aha” about your solution or a broader view based on your insights? Did you ask them for follow-up or action steps? Did you create urgency to act or build trust to work together?

ChatGPT can’t do that…But you can.

You can gauge every speaking opportunity against those three questions. It raises the bar on expectations – and challenges you to take responsibility for making something happen as a result of your communication.

So, can ChatGPT write your speech? Not as well as you can.

Crappy, first drafts seem better suited for wedding toasts than business communication. Assign ChatGPT and AI a supporting role and maybe those swirling data points will inspire you beyond the crappy, first draft. Great communication deserves a little sweat equity and the best of you.

 

Are You Going to Memorize That?

For many of us, memorizing content dates back to grade school. In third grade, it was usually poetry or an element of a famous speech in history.

Ask a third-grade teacher, and they’ll tell you why they assign it. Memorization builds confidence, it develops young brains and it helps young students think more about the meaning beneath the words.

But those values don’t hold up with business content and in business settings. In fact, memorizing is a huge liability for a speaker for the same reasons it may be a good idea for a third grader.

As a communicator, you’re not trying to think beneath the words, you’re trying to influence through them. You’re not trying to put stress on your brain to remember a word, you’re trying to leverage a thought to draw a response from an audience. And while it may feel confident as a step of preparation, it quickly becomes obvious that someone is uncomfortable with memorized content because it’s written all over their face.

If your preparation strategy is memorization, it’s time to break that habit.

What should you do instead?

Ironically, what we see on a communicator’s face is pretty consistent between a third grader and an adult. Do you remember watching young classmates stand up and recite poetry? It was clear they were searching for words, it was clear that they were trying to rush through it, and it was clear they weren’t aware of anyone else in the room.

That’s still very recognizable on any communicator’s face.

Technically, to repeat thoughts from memory requires someone to be in their head. Through the years, we can get better at stringing words together and visualizing that string of words to recite them in order. But it’s a technique that keeps your focus in your head and blocks any awareness of or connection to the listeners. That’s why it’s also the most common cause of losing your place.

Instead, start with the most basic point of communication: the listener.

The point of communication is not to push out information; it’s to pull in listeners. Think about it. That’s what you do in 1:1 conversations every day. When you talk to a colleague, your goal isn’t just to tell them something. Your goal is to get their reaction to it. In fact, when we don’t get a reaction, we tend to stop talking about a topic and move on to something else.

Years ago, I was coaching a client to get out of his head. In his case, it was easy to see what he was doing because his face was void of expression, his voice was monotone, and he looked away to get his thoughts. When I talked to him about pushing out information versus pulling in people, he was surprised by my expectation.

In fact, he told me that he’d never thought about what people did with his information. Instead, he thought of it as showing up and dumping all of his information on a conference table in front of people and assumed that they took what they needed. He hadn’t considered that the way he said it impacted how they heard it.

But it does.

Audiences only retain about 10-30% of what they hear. The difference in those percentages seems to be how hard the communicator works to influence an idea.

So, how do you prepare effectively?

These five steps will help a communicator develop an effective approach:

First, set the flow of a storyline. If you’ve worked with SW&A on content, then you know that we organize ideas with the listener in mind. This creates alignment and an easy way to engage listeners in any conversation or presentation. It also helps a communicator adopt an order to content that is easy to follow consistently.

Second, expand ideas into details. For important presentations, invest the time to build a talk track and put intention to how details are explained. This helps you add color commentary and interest with stories and examples. The level below the big ideas is where the communicator captures their own emotion and unique way of sharing points.

Third, visualize the ideas. Your visuals should follow your content, not the other way around. Visuals are a powerful part of content development if they’re used in the right place. But you can’t build the flow of content through visuals because visuals are tied to details. When you leverage visuals once the details have taken shape, you’ll use them much more effectively.

Fourth, practice from an outline. The talk track got your own words on a page, but it’s not what you use to practice. You practice with an outline. The talk track helped details take shape. The outline pulls you back to focus on leading a listener through ideas and not getting bogged down in word choice. In fact as you practice with an outline, you’ll notice that you use different words to get across the same stories and examples. And it’s much easier to settle in with what comes to mind versus keeping your mind focused to retrieve the word.

Fifth, practice out loud. That’s what builds confidence. When you hear the words, you own the words. When you feel the delivery of an idea or the ownership of a story, your style attaches to content and increases your ability to influence.

These five steps are a better way to develop content and approach an audience a little smarter than a third grader. We’ll show you how!

 

Influencing Clients Through Compelling Communication

As the second month of the year wraps up, so have the sales kick-off meetings.  Across all B:B sales teams, internal meetings have set the strategy and the revenue goals to supercharge the year ahead. New solutions and big expectations for what the sales team can accomplish. And at each of these meetings, salespeople get new product features and new demonstrations, but not always added support and coaching on how to advance client conversations. And that’s the most essential part of expanding relationships.

It’s the paradigm in relationships that every salesperson experiences.

You’ve got a group of relationships that you’ve developed over time. It started by bringing the right solution to a problem. It continued as you delivered outcomes, and at some point, it took hold as you built trust. Today, you have a base of clients who value your product(s) and trust your inputs. So much so that as time passes, complacency settles in.

Not because you aren’t earnest. More because you didn’t know how to get beyond your current reputation.

Unintentionally, as you delivered outcomes, your customers aligned those outcomes to your company’s brand. And so, you’re known by one solution, not a whole family of solutions.

Or in today’s environment, you have new solutions that weren’t even a part of your portfolio when you started the relationship. And the paradigm becomes the more you solve for one kind of problem, the deeper the impression sets as the company with that solution.

• If you sold a retailer a new e-payment solution…it may be hard to expand that relationship to offer security solutions.
• If you positioned an HR tool for tracking employee data…it may be challenging to reposition that same tool with marketing for tracking consumer analytics.
• Or if you sold a technology that simplifies finance functions…it’s hard to repackage it as an operational tool that simplifies supply chain functions.

But those are the common asks of most B2B sales teams today.

So, How Do You Solve It?

As companies expand their offerings, apply technologies to more complex problems and race to see who can embed the best AI solutions everywhere and in everything, capabilities and offerings are changing overnight. Yesterday’s go-to-market story has evolved so much that even the sales team isn’t quite sure how to tell it. And if they’re going to get to new buyers and drive increased revenue, they’re going to have to broaden the conversation.

We’ve seen many of the sales toolkits roll out this year, and that’s the tool sales teams need that’s missing.

“The methodology to broaden, expand or change a conversation”

Salespeople are armed with your company’s latest offerings and capabilities. But they aren’t given a lot of support in how to evolve conversations to get all those new solutions in front of the right people.

In the past, it happened organically over time. The more time they spent in an account, the more people they met. And they could leverage the relationship by being knowledgeable and responsive.

But time seems to be the only thing companies aren’t counting on these days. There’s an urgency to pull related capabilities together and introduce a broader family of solutions that reaches into multiple areas of a company. And that requires sales team to shift conversations faster as they compete with new players and different objectives.

That’s why we’re helping sales groups rethink how they leverage our storyline process.

Since it’s built from a listener’s perspective, the idea of setting perspective with insights is a strong starting point. It’s helped hundreds of sales teams learn how to frame expertise against a customer’s needs rather than their own capabilities. And we’re showing teams how to leverage the same concept to broaden and shift conversations. In many cases, we’re building templates for specific situations which helps a group accelerate faster.

If you’ve introduced our foundational storyline to your team, here’s how you can leverage it further:

• We coach teams to use outside insights to pivot inside beliefs. By doing this, we can help a group lift the altitude of perspective and broaden a conversation to get to other areas of a company.
• We coach teams to minimize a roadblock by setting broader alignment to an ideal state and positioning a roadblock as one element that they can resolve to get to that state.
• And we coach teams to create a bias toward action by bringing options and risks to customers rather than single recommendations.

The pace at which companies are eager to move starts with sales teams who are confident and capable of broadening conversations. It isn’t easy.  It’s a different conversation, and an essential one, to expand relationships quickly. If you’ve armed your group with new product capabilities and bigger revenue expectations, but you forgot about the communication essentials, it’s not too late.

Let’s talk about how to reset relationships and get your team in the right conversations.

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!

Do I Need a Coach?

Last year, I spent a lot of time on airplanes which can lead to a lot of introductory conversations. And when you introduce yourself as a communication coach, most seatmates have questions. The most common one is:

Do you think I need a coach?

A complex question which always gets a broad response from me: “It depends.” And from there, I learn a lot about someone’s career path and aspirations to date.

If I were sitting next to you, I’d say:

If this is the year that you want to get beyond roadblocks that have held back your career advancement and visibility…coaching is a great option.

Or if this is the year that you’ve been handed a great opportunity and it’s getting bigger and moving faster than you expected…coaching is a great option.

Communications coaching can help you push through almost any obstacle or excel at almost any opportunity.

But coaching doesn’t make sense if you’ve earmarked this as the year you want to coast or stand still. The value of coaching gets diluted when you don’t have any expectations or outcomes aligned to it.

If our practice is any indication, executive coaching is up by almost 30% in comparison to other leadership development programs. And the reason is the urgency to get results and the desire for hands-on support across leadership levels.

Our practice is built on two formats: group workshops and individual coaching. So, we’re not partial to one over the other. But where workshops rely on hypothetical situations and commonalities across a group of people to coach new skills, 1:1 coaching shifts from hypotheticals to real situations and from potential outcomes to desired results.

And I think that’s why we’ve seen such growth in executive coaching. The pace of work and expectations from work have increased significantly. And people who are in positions that carry the weight of those expectations want individual support at their fingertips.

But back to the introductory conversation. If we continue to talk about coaching, I’m likely to say:

The question isn’t really whether you need a coach because most people find value in coaching.

The most important question is how to choose a coach.

And that’s a conversation we have every day.

Chemistry Comes First: A one-on-one coaching engagement is a lot about chemistry between you and the coach. And most people set an introductory call to test this. But a lot of people don’t know how to interview a coach or consider what chemistry really means.

An initial reaction to someone is pretty easy. But more important than finding a coach you like is finding a coach who adds value.

Having been interviewed hundreds of times, many people approach the interview by diving into all their challenges or sharing all the feedback they’ve received and asking for a “diagnosis.” And it’s helpful to give a coach some perspective and focus for an engagement. But the coach doesn’t know you yet, so they won’t have all the answers.

Instead, consider one specific situation to share with the coach and see how they coach you around it. This will highlight how the coach gains insights, approaches situations and leads a discussion with you.

Learn about Approach & Process: If you bring an example as noted above, you’ll see the approach illustrated. And it easily leads to discussion of what to expect and how to manage the engagement. And that leads to process.

There are many coaches who have “fallen” into coaching as a next step to their own career experience. Expertise and experience are not the same thing, especially in the world of communication. If you want to mimic the way someone else has done something, you may prefer to have a mentor in your field or organization.

But if you want to strengthen and deepen your own skill set, then you want someone who has expertise in skill development.

Balance Process & Priorities: There’s a balance between following a process and prioritizing someone’s situations. And the best coaches do it well. But a less experienced coach may lean too much one way or the other. The “process” coach builds a plan and follows it to the letter. Each session is mapped out against goals. But there is little flexibility to shift from it. And that means your discussions will stay hypothetical or in parallel to your work, not immersed in it. And that loses a lot of value the coach can have working through situations that are in front of you.

A coach without process will let you run the show which means they react to what you bring them. This may keep your priorities front and center, but it also puts all the impetus of preparation on you. And that often adds more work versus more coaching.

In communication coaching, our formula for coaching is a balance of skills and situations. So, we drive a process that flexes to your needs and priorities. That ensures you leave us with an expanded toolkit and confidence in the application of those skills because we adopted and adapted them to your situations throughout the engagement.

As my seat mate, you don’t really want the details of our process yet. So, I don’t map it out. Instead, I wrap-up our discussion with one final point.

At some point in your career, you will leverage a coach. It may be for a peak in your career to support added responsibility. It may be for a valley in your career to work through roadblocks. Or it may be for all the steps between the peaks and valleys.

You have to decide when the timing is right for you. Communication coaching is different than coaching for tennis or golf. It isn’t about when you have the time for it. It’s about when you have the greatest need. And when you do, it’s time.

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!

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 who 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!