SELF REFLECTION: Raising the Bar on Your Influence & Impact

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2026 promises to be a year focused on momentum and outcomes. We see efforts around AI multiplying, and expectations around pace accelerating. In every corporate strategy, we hear transform, pivot, accelerate, and disrupt. Every message is energized like we’re competing in the great race to reach better outcomes and growth.

And it’s why as you set goals for the new year and evaluate individuals and teams, you’d be smart to evaluate yourself as well. Because whether you’re a senior leader, a seasoned manager, or an individual contributor, your ability to influence and impact is dependent on and rooted in the ability to communicate effectively. In fact, as you consider the year ahead, ask yourself what would change if your skills as a communicator shifted from competent to compelling?

Everything!

And that’s why we believe raising the bar on your own skills should be a top priority. Here’s how we evaluate and guide a competent communicator to become a compelling one.

INSIGHTS VS. OUTCOMES

If you’ve worked with SW&A, you know the storyline framework. And we’ve coached you to use insights to shift perspectives and gain alignment with listeners before positioning options and a recommendation. But the blind spot we continue to see is defining value from a listener’s perspective. Some of this comes through in a message, but it’s also about learning how to define value from the perspective of different audiences.

Consider your role in communicating outcomes.

Senior Leaders:
Senior leaders say it’s easiest to align value for internal audiences and harder to position value with external ones. To gain traction beneath outcomes, you’ll have to bring messaging close together for audiences from the inside looking out and outside looking in to buy into results. For many leaders, it’s less about getting it right the first time and more about staying consistent every time.

Raise the bar this year by setting the direction so clearly that you can stay consistent with the big goals as you move through the year. It’s how you avoid confusion with too many redirects and gain believability and memorability to outcomes.

Seasoned Managers:
We describe you as “the mighty middle,” and you will feel it in the year ahead. You sit at the intersection of big goals about where the company is headed and the work required to get there. In every communication, you need to connect the dots between them. If your senior leaders communicate direction effectively, it will sound so clear that the path feels defined. It isn’t. For your team, the path ahead will be full of dead ends and potholes. They will have to reset, restart and sometimes totally turn around. If your communication focuses only on the work of your team, it can feel like they’re floundering when what they’re really doing is resetting against bigger goals.

Raise the bar on yourself by learning to connect specific actions to bigger outcomes. Set a repeatable structure for communicating progress, setbacks and continuous learning so the group feels intention to their efforts.

Individual Contributor:
Whether you’re delivering presentations or collaborating through discussion, connect your thoughts to a bigger picture, whether it’s an overall strategy or work by other team members. Be the communicator who is valued for connecting ideas that help any group move forward. Focus less on talking about why things won’t work. Focus more on ideas to get beyond hurdles.
Raise the bar on how you listen and how you contribute.

COMFORTABLE VS. INVESTED

This is about raising the bar on how people experience you. A lot has changed about how we work and formats we use for communication. But the power of impressions has stayed constant. And your presence is the foundational tool that differentiates you as a communicator. So, what’s the difference between being comfortable versus invested? It comes down to body language. When I see you as comfortable, you seem experienced. When I see you as invested, you seem inspiring.

Consider how your style conveys inspiring.

Senior Leaders:
If you’d say most groups would describe you as comfortable, we’d say you’re relying on years of experience as a communicator. But it isn’t enough because it isn’t about you. It’s about everyone else. And every time you communicate, you need to be motivating enough that listeners will follow you, align with you, and maybe shift how they’re feeling because of you. Your style and presence can erase uncertainty with employees, investors, board members and every other audience you face.

If you’re asking your organization to move mountains, raise the bar on yourself by ensuring you know how to get physically and emotionally invested in every message you deliver.

Seasoned Managers:
Employees feel a difference in being told what to do and being inspired to do it. It has a lot to do with the conviction that comes through in how your manager communicates. Do you communicate in a way that says work is due by Friday? Or are you inspiring in a way that says that work is making a difference?

You are the connective tissue for your team, and you should raise the bar on how you illustrate conviction before you ask them to move the needle on what they’re delivering.

Individual Contributor:
All companies are assessing how to use resources differently and who to keep on teams as roles evolve. As an individual contributor, your direct manager knows your capabilities. Everyone else makes assumptions about capabilities based on how you show up in meetings. You can influence those impressions if you know enough about your personal presence to add intention to how people experience you.

Raise the bar on yourself by investing in work on personal presence to better understand impressions and choices.

IMPRESSIONS VS. IMPACT

Our beliefs and our coaching centers around the impact to listeners. A compelling communicator knows that and makes an intentional shift from focusing on themselves to focusing on listeners. Our coaching on presence starts with awareness, but it never ends there. It goes much further in helping someone explore their ability to impact others. It’s not an easy shift. It takes awareness, intention and practice. And it takes a little vulnerability to start the journey.

We measure impact by asking listeners for input on communicators. When we get inputs on how someone looked and sounded, we know that the listener is stuck on impressions. When we get inputs on actions that a listener plans to take as a result of the communicator, we know the communicator had real impact. Listeners don’t distinguish a communicator’s ability to impact based on their responsibility in a company. But as you think about yourself as the communicator, you might distinguish the risks you have in not delivering on this.

As a senior leader, if the year ahead is relying on your ability to inspire an entire organization toward bigger outcomes…your risks may be that employees who don’t feel inspired won’t deliver results.

As a seasoned manager, you will be the epicenter of things that have to be reset and reconsidered. If you can’t inspire…your risks may be employees who get defeated early and give up on the challenges ahead.

And as an individual contributor…your risk may be missed opportunity. As companies think differently and work differently, it will create more moments of visibility in meetings and discussions. Don’t miss your chance to be seen and heard as a voice that wants to be a part of the changes ahead.

It’s the right time to raise the bar on yourself as you raise the bar on an organization or a team.

Make this a priority for yourself, and we’ll ensure that you get there.

Click here to schedule a call to talk more about this topic!

Also Read: Communicating the Value & Impact of AI

 

AI Stories in Sales: Is Your Team Ready for 2026?

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If your company runs on a calendar year, you’ve just entered the final quarter of the year. And if you’re in sales, that means about six weeks of selling time left. Some salespeople may still be selling fourth quarter deliverables. Most are selling into next year.

And someone in the sales organization is focused on the official launch of the new year.

They’re planning for the big sales kickoff, whether it’s in December or January. They’re building the sales toolkit for 2026. And if you’re in sales, you know how important that toolkit can be. It provides guidance on new products and tools, it provides packaging and messaging for new conversations, and it makes a big difference in how quickly you feel confident about the sales goals for the new year.

So, what’s new in that toolkit this year?

Every sales team that we’ve talked to says there’s an AI element.

• Whether they’re asking their sales team to position products that are AI enabled… they’ll need the tools to do it.
• Whether they’re asking their teams to illustrate internal efficiencies and innovation within the company…they’ll need the tools to do it.
• Or whether they want their sales team to illustrate AI capabilities in the sales process itself…they’ll need the tools to do it.

Some companies are leading with AI initiatives, and they put that toolkit in place last year. Others have the foundation of it but expect to expand it this year. And still others feel a little behind and rely too heavily on their product teams to cover it.

But they all agree: AI capabilities and proof points have entered the sales conversation.

As we’ve worked with sales teams, we’re seeing some early challenges that will have to be addressed.

Consistency – Because many capabilities are really still experiments, salespeople aren’t consistent in how they talk about AI. I don’t think you can blame them. They haven’t been given very robust tools to support this conversation. But if they aren’t consistent in what they say, your AI strategy isn’t very repeatable. And that creates an easy way for a competitor to take the lead.

Confidence – Chances are everyone within your team isn’t really using AI yet. It’s a learning curve in every organization. Some know it from their own personal experience. Others know it’s in a product, but they need a product person to explain it as part of the sale. And many say they’re waiting until it shows up in the toolkit. Confidence is a leading skill for sales teams. They sell what they know. And if you’re counting on them to position AI well, you need to build their confidence around it.

Proof points – Sales teams have always sold products and services without deep technical knowledge. They understand pain points and outcomes. And their ability to communicate pain points and align a product or service to challenges helps them build credibility around your outcomes. AI feels different. Today’s communication is deep in HOW and not very clear on outcomes. That leaves a sales team without great proof points.

There’s a communication theme to these challenges.

Throughout 2025, we worked on AI storylines and storytelling, and what we saw was a small group of people in a company tend to own the message. And they’ve assumed that others will pick it up. It doesn’t work out that way.

Clarity builds momentum in communication, not the grapevine.

It’s always easier to invest in momentum at your starting point than to reset messaging after confusion sets in.

If any of these challenges resonate with your group, here are few things that you should add to the 2026 toolkit:

First, an updated, go to market storyline. You may have several of them to address different verticals or customers. But if you’re introducing new concepts and capabilities, it all has to align to what you’re telling customers about your future state in the GTM storyline.

Nothing signals change and innovation more to a customer than the way you communicate with them. Whether AI is prominent as a new enabler and gamechanger in your products or simply a story that illustrates a future state, be sure your team has a compelling storyline that expands your GTM view this year.

Second, your story bank. Stories illustrate how you get to great outcomes. We see sales organizations lose opportunities because they don’t tell great stories.

The examples just aren’t compelling or repeatable because they’re focusing too much on how they solved something rather than setting up a need and an outcome. When we go into a sales organization and coach how to tell stories, it leads to repeatability.

Most companies are tentatively talking about AI outcomes right now. And yet sales teams will tell you customers buy outcomes. So, companies have to find a way to talk about product differences and paint a picture of a future state that customers can buy into.

For many sales kickoffs, we lead story workshops to show groups how to bring outcomes to life, especially at a time when those outcomes may still be tentative.

And third, strengthen personal confidence. For an experienced sales team, confidence comes with discussion, roleplays and a communication strategy to back up AI. For a less experienced team that may be trying to gain visibility and exposure to different levels within a prospect company. And they may need coaching on customer audiences and personal presence.

Sales success in 2026 isn’t just about communication, but communication may make a difference in how your team feels about the year ahead.

And I have a personal story that validates that:

After thirty years of coaching, you get to know industries pretty well. And one of those industries for SW&A has been Fintech. In fact, once we get to know leaders, we tend to follow them from one company to the next. And the concepts you read in this newsletter are concepts we’ve set many times for sales groups: set the storyline and build great stories as illustration.

This year, I got a call from a leader within the industry who had never worked with me. But he told me he felt like he knew me. Because he said I’ve heard your name time and time again when I’ve asked peers in the industry how they learned how to tell great stories.

In fact, he said, “You’ve now beat me three times.

I’ve competed against organizations that you supported, and those organizations have won contracts over me in three different situations. In each of them, I’m fairly confident I had the better product. I just didn’t have the better story. And I want to know how you do that.”

You can see why I love the story!

But I was the supporting role. It’s really a story about well-led sales organizations that had the right toolkit to bring pain points and outcomes to life.

In each instance, it was a leader who understood the impact of communication and the power it plays as a differentiator. We can help your team get there, and your 2026 sales kickoff is a great time to get started.

Click here to schedule a call to talk more about this topic!

Also Read: Communicating the Value & Impact of AI

 

Technology & Coaching: Friends or Foes?

As 2026 planning gets underway every department in an organization is talking about how technology, specifically AI, might improve processes, might drive efficiencies and ultimately might lead to better outcomes.

Learning and development is no exception. In fact, conversations about technology within learning started before COVID and really accelerated when all training switched to a virtual format. It’s led to a lot of learning in the last five years about what works and what doesn’t. And it creates the question that teams considering coaching need to consider:

Do technology and coaching go hand-in-hand or does the value of one negate the value of the other?

It’s a conversation and a perspective we’ve shared with many L&D groups, and with planning top of mind in the coming weeks, it seemed like a good time to share those insights.

Our work on AI storytelling has helped many leaders and companies build understanding of what AI actually is and how it will play out in different ways and across different processes. We think of it as selling to the outcome and painting a clear picture of the end result. That’s how you get people aligned for the effort and work that may be required to get there.

Technology in coaching is a similar comparison. If you think through the outcome you want coaching to deliver, you’ll make better decisions about how technology partners with coaching.

But that wasn’t the approach five years ago. When the outcome was about finding ways to keep people involved in learning, technology served its purpose well. Give employees access to a platform, and they can find resources and short-form courses on many different topics. But as development goals have reset, giving people access to learning doesn’t seem to be enough. And that’s why many organizations are rethinking how they leverage coaching and technology together.

While the big coaching platforms provide coaching to everyone, anywhere and at any time, it comes at a cost of continuity and expertise. When the priority is reaching everyone, technology wins. When the priority is getting results, the 1:1 relationship with a consistent coach is essential. And in most companies, it’s a combination of both objectives reached in different ways that seems to be the best choice.

Specific to communication coaching, technology is very limited. There are innovative AI tools in the market that are exploring ways to assess the habits of a speaker– the number of um’s, the pace of speech, eye movement, etc. But it can’t adjust the habits, and that leaves a communicator with awareness of bad habits but little direction on new ones. More importantly, the emerging tools leave out the most essential ingredient of effective communication, the listener.

Communication is about influence and impact and less about preset patterns of voice modulation. In fact, when coaching focuses only on patterns for a communicator, you’re training to a standardized model rather than someone’s unique skills and strengths. And while it may be efficient, you won’t get great adoption or outcomes. For the best results, coaches and technology need to work together.

Consider these three Cs that we use to blend technology into our practice:

CONFIDENCE – The starting point of measuring results is a participant’s own feeling of confidence and competence about a new skill. We use technology to measure a starting point and end point. Regardless of frequency of sessions or activities someone does through an app, if someone isn’t feeling more confident, they won’t invest the time to strengthen a skill. Technology can track that measure and encourage an individual to see progress.

The coach notices the nuances that technology misses. A participant may say they feel more confident, but a coach can read the non-verbals and the subtle input that suggests the competency isn’t coming through. Working together, technology can give a coach added insights to enrich the engagement.

CONSISTENCY – To develop an effective communicator, you focus less on the occasional home run and more on consistent base hits. That’s when you know that skills are being adopted and adapted into an individual’s approach. A coach hears the results of different settings but doesn’t always see the progress first-hand.

Technology can complete the picture. Video recordings of live events taken from the perspective of a listener can help us assess how the communicator came across and how the listener felt in response to the message. Over a series of recordings, we’re tracking more than the habits of a communicator. We’re getting to group response and engagement with a communicator.

COMMUNITY – Videotaping opens the door to the listeners’ perspective which is the most accurate measurement of ROI. A communicator needs a 360 view to continue to assess and understand impressions.

Over longer engagements with high-profile leaders, we build a feedback loop to capture impressions after high-visibility events. This allows us to blend response to the communicator’s style as well as effectiveness of a communicator’s message. And on all engagements, we can add a pre and post assessment to measure how a communicator’s community is feeling about impact and takeaways.

Again, technology helps us blend anecdotal feedback with measured and tracked impressions. The coach leads the engagement, and technology adds the supporting inputs to validate impact.

So…is technology a friend or foe of coaching?

I would say a great friend, as long as you leverage the strengths of both to better outcomes. AI itself has a great term for how to think about technology in coaching: human in the loop.

Essentially it means keep the coach front and center and focused on guiding adaptable changes for an individual. Leverage technology to track improvement or catch the lack of it across a coaching engagement.

If you’re considering the role of technology in your L&D plans, we’d love to help you consider how you balance efficiencies with outcomes. And specific to communication, how technology and coaches can work together to deliver an impressive ROI.

Click here to schedule a call to talk more about this topic!

Also Read: Communicating the Value & Impact of AI

 

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.

Click here to schedule a call to talk more about this topic!

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!