Heroic Voice - Blog , Delivery Skills

The 7 Voices of Leadership

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0700

An Introduction

In this article, you will learn about the 7 voices of leadership. Each voice plays a specific role and answers a specific leadership question. Learn and master these 7 voices, and you will be fully prepared for all your high stakes presentations.

The 7 Voices of Leadership

There is more than one voice of leadership. The voice that we are most familiar with is strong, authoritative and confident. This voice is perfect for presentations to the board, journalists, analysts, and to your team members. However, these are not the only presentations a leader will be asked to make.

A Portfolio of Leadership Presentations

The Message Portfolio is a set of core presentations than answer seven specific leadership questions:

"WHO are you?" Answer this question when introducing yourself or your company. Specific situations also include the opening section of a keynote presentation or conference panel discussion.
"WHAT is the Vision (for your audience)?" This answer is used during conference breakout sessions company strategy meetings. Other situations include presentations to potential investors, partners and sponsors.
"WHERE are we going?" Answer this question during internal presentations such as Board Meetings and Company Town Hall Meetings. This question is also relevant to external audiences: industry analysts, members of the media, and potential team members.
"WHICH path do you recommend?" Popular applications for this answer are sales presentations, recruiting conversations and budget meetings.

"HOW will we get there?" This question commonly arises during training presentations, and conversations with potential investors and partners.
"WHEN we we succeed? " These include personal stories of overcoming adversity and company case studies. Stories have the power to help your audience envision the journey and reaching the destination.

"WHY is this important?" This composition is used for Keynote Presentations, Annual Kickoff Meetings and Main Stage presentations.

Message Portfolio #1: Your Brand

By mastering this presentation, you will be fully prepared for opening remarks, podcasts & media interviews, and conversations with prospective team members or partners. Success means that the audience trusts you for your voice.

"WHO are you?" (What do you stand for?) This question arises when you are meeting your audience for the first time. Your audience is interested in the your vision, values and vows. Use the voice of a contributor, and illustrate how you can make a difference in their lives.
WHAT is the vision (for your audience)?" This question is often asked in meetings focused on brainstorming new ideas, designing new products, or creating new solutions. Speak with the voice of a visionary to spark imagination, inspiration and creativity in your audience.

Message Portfolio #2: Your Pitch

By mastering this presentation, you will be fully prepared for client conversations, meetings with potential investors, and opportunities to demonstrate your product or service. Success means that your audience recognizes you as a Trusted Authority for your industry.

"WHERE are we going?" During times of uncertainty, this will be a central question from your team, your company and your industry. Speak with the voice of a leader, who has a crystal clear vision of the direction and destination for their audience.
"WHICH path do you recommend?" When confronted with a problem, your audience will be exploring potential solutions. Speak with the voice of a trusted advisor. Establish trust by first acknowledging the solutions provided by your industry and your competition. After sharing an unbiased and trusted perspective, share the merits of your solution.

Message Portfolio #3: Your Solution

By mastering this presentation, you will be fully prepared for your most important internal presentations: company town hall meetings, sales kickoff events, board of director presentations, and crisis communications. Success means that your audience respects you for your leadership.

"HOW will we get there?" In training events, your audience is there to learn how to solve a specific problem. When you speak with the voice of a teacher, you empower your audience with the knowledge and skills required to complete a task, achieve a milestone, reach a destination.
"WHEN will we succeed?" You audience is looking for evidence and social proof that you have a track record of success. Use the voice of a storyteller and share examples of how you've overcome adversity, reached a milestone, or achieved a mission. Stories have the power to communicate character, credibility and competency.

Message Portfolio 4: Your Keynote

By mastering this presentation, you will be fully prepared for your most important external presentations: conference breakout presentations, panel discussions, and keynotes on the main stage. Success means that you have generated Presentation ROI (money, support, reputation) to fuel your mission.

"WHY is this important?" This question is the focus of keynotes delivered at industry conferences, TEDx events, and company kickoff events. Speak with a voice of a changemaker, to move the audience from seeing problems to seeing possibilities. Shift their emotions from feelings of doubt to feelings of confidence.

Summary

Each voice plays a specific role and answers a specific leadership question. Learn and master these 7 voices, and you will be fully prepared for all your high stakes presentations.

Who are you? - Contributor
What is the vision (for your audience)? - Visionary
Where are we going? - Leader
Which path do you recommend? - Trusted Advisor
How will we get there? - Teacher
When will we succeed? - Storyteller
Why is this important? - Changemaker

Synchronize Your Voices of Leadership

To synchronized your voices of leadership, consider joining our Synchronized Communications MasterClass. Over the course of 12 sessions, your team will develop a Habit of Practice and an Ecosystem for Practice. The goal for each leader is to be Fully Prepared for their most important presentations and conversations.

Schedule an appointment with one of our executive communications coaches, and learn how the MasterClass will prepare you to generate money, activate support and accumulate recommendations from all of your leadership presentations.

The Connection Triangle

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0700

An Introduction

Instead of maximizing content, focus on maximizing connection. In this article, we highlight 3 sets of communication skills from our Connection Triangle. These skills prepare you to connect with your audiences, connect with your message, and connect your audiences with your message.

Overview

As a leader, you are invited to speak because of your level of expertise. This is an opportunity to deliver value to an audience by sharing your knowledge, skills and experiences. Whether you are delivering a message to your team or a keynote at an industry conference, you want to honor the time that your audience has invested in you.

A common strategy is to take the stage and share as much information as possible. After all, information is power. However, the goal of maximizing content often backfires. Instead of walking away empowered with the content you've shared, your audiences walks away feeling frustrated, confused, and overwhelmed.

Connect with Your Audience

The first part of the Connection Triangle includes two specific conversation skills. Relatability connects you to the minds in your audience, while empathy connects you to the hearts in your audience.

Relatability = How Well You Know Your Audience

How well do you know your audience? The first preparation step is knowing your audience. Spend time researching who they are. More specifically, find out their vision for the future, their most important values, and their level of commitment to achieving their vision. Invest the time to read their LinkedIn profiles, published articles , interviews given and company websites. Schedule time to speak with key stakeholders, conference producers and your supporters.

Empathy = How Much You Care About Your Audience

As you are doing your research, listen for the emotional experiences that your audience members are having. While in the middle of a problem, the emotions of fear, uncertainty and doubt will certainly be present in the room. When you identify and articulate the emotions associated with a problem, you create an empathetic connection with your audience.

Using the skill of empathy allows you to communicate trust and create an emotional connection with your audience. Share times from the past when you've experienced the same emotions, and the audience will have confidence that you know what it feels like to be in their shoes.

Connect with Your Message

The second part of the Connection Triangle includes two specific presentation skills. Expertise is showing how much you know about know about your message, while passion illustrates how much you care about your message.

Expertise = How Well You Know Your Message

As a leader, you have an incredible amount of knowledge that can help your audience solve a problem or overcome a challenge. Your job: curate specific nuggets of wisdom that will make the most impact in their lives. Quality of content is more important than quantity of content. Depth of content empowers your audience to move beyond surface level understanding and achieve new levels of mastery.

At sporting events, we often see coaches call a time-out to have a brief meeting with their players. Great coaches are great curators of information. In a few minutes, they are able to identify and share specific elements of their strategy for their players to succeed in the game. As a leader, you can do the same when you are coaching your team, company or industry. Curate a precise and concise information to share, whether it is during a brief conversation or a hour long presentation.

Passion = How Much You Care About Your Message

Think back to the most enjoyable presentations you've attended. What made these presentations stand out? In addition to the quality of the content, you likely experieced the speaker's energy, enthusiasm and passion. Contrast these experiences with times when the speaker rushed to deliver their message, spoke in a monotone voice, and wasn't excited to be there. What can you do to avoid creating that experience? Practice. A lot.

"The purpose of practice is not to achieve perfection. The purpose of practice is to create a habit of practice."

In the beginning of your practice sessions, allow it to be messy. Make lots of mistakes. Experiment with content. Have fun. With every practice session, you will shift the focus from remembering the content to delivering the content. Once you've mastered the content, you can access a variety of tools to demonstrate passion. Smile and use humor. Use the full range of your voice, vary your pitch, volume and pace.

Connect Your Audience with Your Message

The third part of the Connection Triangle includes two specific interaction skills. Comprehension is how much your audience knows about your message, while engagement is how much your audience cares about your message.

Comprehension = How Well Your Audience Knows Your Message

Remember that maximum content is not the objective. We certainly don't want our audience to ever have the experience of "drinking out of a firehose". Define success by the amount of audience comprehension you create. Design content that can be easily learned, remembered and applied. When your audience achieves comprehension, they are able to share your content and amplify the reach of your message.

In our presentation gym, we regularly share accelerated teaching tools that help your audience quickly learn content that you share. For example, we teach the "3 second rule": Design slides with memorable images rather than a lot of words. Audiences can easily absorb these types of slides in 3 seconds or less, and then give you their full attention.

Engagement = How Much Your Audience Cares About Your Message

When your audience engages with your content, it transforms theoretical knowledge into practical tools. This quote from Confucius beautifully summarizes the learning journey:

"What I hear I forget, what I see I remember, what I do I understand."

In the presentation gym, we encourage the use of various ways to engage the audience. Ask questions to elicit answers from the audience. Conduct real time polls by having the audience raise their hands to vote. Invite the audience to repeat key phrases. Other forms of engagement include written exercises, visualizations, and conversational exercises.

Summary

Instead of maximizing content, focus on maximizing connection. Use these 6 communication skills to connect with the hearts and minds in your audience:

(1) Relatability and Empathy connect you to your audience

(2) Expertise and Passion connect you to your message.

(3) Comprehension and Engagement connect your audience to your message.

Synchronize Your Voices of Leadership

The Engagement Loop

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0700

Engage Your Audience

How do leaders use their voices as instruments of change? They communicate in a way that connects with the hearts and minds in their audience.

The Engagement Loop is a communication framework that creates three experiences of synchronization: a call to think, a call to feel and a call to act.

Introducing the Engagement Loop

Audience bring more than just their minds into a presentation to learn. They hearts and bodies are also available to take part in the learning experience. Leaders who engage with all three prepare their audiences for success.

The first synchronization happens with a call to think. Using the voice of an advisor or teacher, presenters spark curiosity with well curated content. As the conversation progresses, brain waves become synchronized.

The second synchronization happens with a call to feel. With the voice of a storyteller or visionary, presenters introduce potential futures that inspire and energize the hearts in the audience.

These third synchronization happens with a call to act. After successfully connecting with hearts and minds, the presenter can use the voice of a leader or changemaker to invite their audience to take action.

A Call to Think

In an article from Scientific America, "Brain Waves Synchronize when People Interact", there is a graphic showing the brain waves from two different situations. The left side has no engagement, resulting in three separate brain waves. The right side features two people interacting, and their brain waves synchronize over time.

In the world of presentations, the left side happens when a leader takes the stage and speaks at their audience. Unfortunately, these speakers define success as delivering a memorized script without mistakes.

On the right side, you can see why the most successful speakers are the ones who go beyond memorization. They interact with their audience for the purpose of creating connection.

A Call to Feel

The second part of the Engagement Loop is a "Call to Feel". Research from the HeartMath Institute shows that different patterns of heart activity have different effects on our thoughts and behaviors. These patterns are called Heart Rate Variability (HRV).

Unskilled communicators find themselves creating the emotional experiences of Frustration, Anxiety and Stress, which are found in the top pattern called HRV Incoherence. However, leaders who are skilled in synchronized communications create the more effective pattern of HRV Coherence, which promote feelings of Gratitude, Love and Compassion.

A Call to Act

Mistakes often happen when transitioning to the final part of a presentation. The speaker loses the pace, and their "Call to Act" falls flat. This mistake can also occur when passing the microphone to a teammate, who struggles to maintain the pace that you've set.

When a presenter successfully synchronizes with the hearts and minds in the audience, they can proceed to the final part of the Engagement Loop. Focus on synchronizing the urgency of now with your audience's desire for change. Extend a precise and concise invitation detailing the next step. Make it easy for them to integrate the content of your presentation into their lives.

Summary - The Engagement Loop

The Engagement Loop is a communication framework that creates three experiences of synchronization: a call to think, a call to feel and a call to act.

Open your presentations with the voice of a teacher or advisor, and issue a "Call to Think" about new content or new perspectives. Continue with the voice of a storyteller or visionary, prompting the audience with a "Call to Feel". Finish with the voice of a leader or changemaker, and confidently issue a "Call to Act".

Use the Engagement Loop to prepare your audience for success. When you've synchronized the minds, hearts and bodies in your audience, they will leave your presentation knowing exactly what to do, where to go, and how to win.