10 Elements of Leadership - Element 1: Communication

Hi! I'm Tom Tischhauser from Wynstone Partners Executive Coaching.

Great leaders exhibit 10 elements of leadership consistently. Today I want to talk about communication because great leaders are great communicators, and great communicators are great storytellers.

Whether you're in a one-on-one critical conversation or addressing a big group, many of you are good communicators. You wouldn't have gotten as far as you've gotten if you weren't. But yet I suspect there's a number of you that still dread that big presentation.

What I'm going to do today is give you some counsel on how to put together a critical conversation or a presentation to a large audience.

When we put a presentation together, we typically put our message together and transmit it to the audience. Although the audience hears what we're saying, retention is pretty low.

To improve the audience's retention and to create a positive net impression, first thing about the objective of your presentation. Before you start in on the message, what is the objective of your presentation? And it's typically one of three things:

• to inform,
• to motivate, or
• to persuade.

Or some combination thereof. Let's face it: it would be pretty hard to get someone to approve - persuade - a major expenditure without informing them first.

But think about what is the objective of your presentation. And then once you know that, think about your audience and how does your audience feel about what you're going to say. What are the feelings or emotions tied to the message that you're going to give them?

The reason these feelings and emotions are so important is, everyone is listening through the lens of "What's in it for me?" They need to hear something that affects them.

So let's take an example. Let's say you were bringing people up to speed on the new process for coming back to work after work from home. So clearly some of the audience is thrilled to get back to work, while the other half of the audience may have some concerns.

So it might look something like this:

"Thank you for coming in today. We're going to talk about the process to come back to work. Now, I know several of you are thrilled to get back to work and get out of the house, while others may be very stressed because they have childcare concerns, maybe they acquired a pet over the pandemic. So I recognize that there's a mixed feeling in the audience. Well, today we're going to go through the process and procedure, and make sure that we address your individual concerns."

So, you see how we addressed what was important to this half of the audience as well as what was important to that half of the audience. The audience is listening for what's in it for them.

Because you had a clear objective for your presentation and called out their specific emotions, the engagement from the audience is much higher, and thus the retention is very high, which results in a positive net impression for you as a speaker.

Thanks for taking the time to sharpen your communication skills. If you'd like more leadership counsel, subscribe to our YouTube channel, follow us on LinkedIn, or visit our website.

And remember: better leaders, better business.