Sheryl Sandberg’s Four Lessons In Savvy Communication

Sheryl Sandberg has kicked up a hornet’s nest of controversy about women and work, ambition and success in her first book  ‘Lean In,’ published this week. Responding to her own question, why more women aren’t in leadership roles, Sandberg tells women to step up, lean in and own their success. As Facebook’s chief operating officer and first and only female director, critics accuse her of breathing elite oxygen.

“I’m not blaming women,’ she said in an interview on ’60 Minutes’. “But there is a lot more that we can do.”

Whatever you think about her message, Sandberg is a role model for savvy leadership communication. Career success requires taking risks and advocating for your own best interests, which Sandberg points out are the very behaviors that our culture discourages in girls and women. She speaks and writes about getting over these cultural biases, finding her leadership voice and the courage to use it.

Along the way , she has earned admiration for her strong communication skills, telling a Harvard Business School class last year, ” . . . more than anything else, you’re going to need the ability to communicate authentically, to speak so that you inspire the people around you and to listen so that you continue to learn each and every day on the job.”

Sandberg’s transformation offers women four lessons about leaning in to make a statement and an impact:

To move up, communicate up. Women tend to manage down and across, while men keep their eye focused squarely up at the next rung on the career ladder. One of Sandberg’s great strengths is managing her boss, Mark Zuckerberg, the quirky founder of Facebook. They work on their relationship as hard as any married couple and it’s widely believed to be the secret sauce in Facebook’s success.

If you want to lead, take a bold point of view.  To make an impact means stepping up to a bigger playing field and you may have to step outside your comfort zone.  Through her own experience in Silicon Valley, Sandberg began to advocate for women and leadership,  developed a strong point of view and took it live and public.  She tested the waters at a TED conference in 2010 and later fine tuned her ideas in her commencement speech for the 2012 graduating class at Barnard.

Connect with people through a clear and simple narrative.  Sandberg projects that she is accessible and trustworthy by using simple language, avoiding technology and financial jargon, and bringing her message to life with personal stories.   The mundane — looking for the women’s bathroom at an investment banking firm — becomes a powerful point about gender inequality at the executive level. Careers are no longer a climb up the ladder, but a climb through a jungle gym.

Develop thick skin. Nothing feels riskier than self exposure, but feelings can be managed and risk is nothing more than a matter of perspective. Leadership demands thick skin and Sandberg seems able to handle the slings and arrows of her critics with grace and professionalism.

This article was written By Bess Gallanis for The Huffington Post, where it ran on March 16, 2013.

Bess Gallanis is a corporate communications consultant and executive coach to high performing companies and their leaders. When the stakes are high, communication performance is a game changer or a deal breaker.  To gain a competitive advantage, contact Bess today. 

Who Would You Follow Into Battle?

In a recent meeting with a business reporter the conversation turned from business news to business communication skills.  Between interviewing CEOs about the day’s news and attending investor conferences, this reporter complained about sitting through ‘too many lousy speakers, mumbling CEOs and jargon-spewing financial executives.’

The message here is crystal clear: If  you want to be heard, communication style matters.

Just how much it matters may surprise you.  Almost half of a company’s reputation relies on its CEO. Despite these high stakes, Edelman’s 13th Annual Trust Barometer delivers this disturbing news: fewer than half of those surveyed trust business leaders as credible spokespeople.

As the economy improves and executives emerge from their crisis cocoons, stakeholders won’t tolerate poor communication performance. It’s too costly. Reputation is no longer a soft public relations concept as companies like Oxford Metrica/Aon and Steel City Re develop credible research linking corporate reputation to a company’s market valuation and use these insights to to sell sophisticated reputation risk management products.

The risk insurance premiums would be better spent on a little more strategic corporate communication. ‘Communications that strengthen reputation are far more valuable than is recognised. We can make companies worth hundreds of millions more simply by making them better understood,’ according to the Oxford Metrica/Aon 2012 Reputation Review. 

After two decades in the media and communications, I’ve seen far too many executives take what they believe to be the safe communication route. Safety is a double-edged sword. Compliance is not communicating and if you are to believe OM/Aon, it’s not a cliche to say that a missed communication opportunity is a missed business opportunity.

To appreciate just how much communication style shapes reputation, stakeholder confidence and valuation, look to Jamie Dimon, CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase (NYSE:JMP), and Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America (NYSE:BAC).

Dimon is candid, confident and can be combative. He played a pivotal role in Washington during the darkest moments of the financial crisis, but even Dimon was not immune to crisis at J.P. Morgan. A $6 billion trading loss last year could have destroyed his public reputation. A lengthy feature story written by Bethany McLean for the November issue of  Vanity Fair quotes Bill Daley, who sums up why Dimon’s reputation is still intact: “I have not seen a C.E.O. ever handle a crisis so effectively … Jamie didn’t let a cover-up become worse than the crime.”

By contrast, Bank of America’s Moynihan is on everyone’s list of worst corporate communicators. He thoroughly underestimated his customers and how they would respond to a new $5 monthly ATM fee, explaining it as “… the bank’s right to earn a profit.”  Moynihan appears short on emotional intelligence, which may be why he gets few kudos for keeping BofA afloat under the complex circumstances that he inherited.  Meanwhile, the drumbeat for his job is growing louder.

An article in American Banker  defines the difference between these two CEOs: ”The Jamie Dimons … of the world, there’s very few of them …. you want to go into battle with [them]. … I don’t think you’re going to go into battle with a Brian Moynihan.”

No executive can communicate his way out of poor performance and the best — like Jamie Dimon — don’t even try. The larger point is who would you follow into battle? Comparing the stock price performance of both companies over the last three years isn’t final proof, but is one indicator of  leadership and reputation: JPM’s three year total return is up more than 25 percent. BAC’s three year total return is down more than 20 percent. 

Consider this thought from the Oxford Metrica/Aon 2012 Reputation Review: ‘We can make companies worth hundreds of millions more simply by making them better understood. And in these troubled times, that is a pretty good return on investment.’ High caliber communications skill is a core competency for a modern CEO and for any executive within a few levels of the C-suite. The best communicators are not big talkers, they are students of the human condition. They get what makes people tick and can craft a clear and simple narrative that is meaningful to their audience. They choose their words carefully, looking for a metaphor or a turn of phrase that makes their stories memorable – and repeatable.

Disclaimer: I do not have a business, financial or client relationship with any of the companies in this post.

This article was written By Bess Gallanis, corporate communications consultant and executive coach to high performing companies and their leaders. When the stakes are high, communication performance is a game changer or a deal breaker.  To gain a competitive advantage, contact Bess today. 


How to Give a Great Ignite Talk

Photo credit: Justin Barber. http://justinbarbin.com/

Last month I spoke at Ignite Chicago, where I debuted my new presentation – ‘Got Mindfulness?’  It was a lot of fun. It also was a lot of hard, but satisfying, work.

For presentation junkies, Ignite is one of the most popular live events. Produced by local volunteers in more than 100 cities around the world, Ignite provides the stage, then it’s up to the speaker to enlighten, stimulate and entertain the audience. Presenters are screened, which keeps the quality high enough to draw a geeky-creative-techy-designer-startup kind of crowd. Think of it as more like SXSW than TED.

Ignite’s motto, ‘enlighten us, but make it quick,’ is the perfect balance of form and function. Ignite speakers get five minutes and 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. Speaking at a just-comprehensible clip of 160 words a minute, you get about 40 words per slide for a total of 800 words.

With this kind of verbal economy at play, talk is not cheap.

This may sound simple, but trust me, to someone who usually gives 20-minute talks, the Ignite format was a challenge. The five-minute format forced a ruthless discipline that got me closer to my goal of making mindfulness make sense to a general audience.

Here are some things to keep in mind as you prepare your own Ignite talk:

1.         You must have unassailable faith in the power of focus to carry your story.  Backstory is irrelevant. Jump into the deep end of your story and find a single focal point. Use your five minutes to chisel and polish until it sparkles with a deep, brilliant glow.

2.         Know your audience and speak from their point of view. The Ignite audience is high caliber, driven and focused – and constantly plugged in.  I used technology metaphors to compare and contrast how stress leads to burnout and how my own crash-and-burn experience led me to mindfulness.

3.         Make like Homer and become an oral storyteller.  I used an entirely different creative process to shape ‘Got Mindfulness?’ I set up my video camera and started talking. Talk, watch, more talk. After a few days of this, I had a good sequence and it was enough to put together a PowerPoint. I used high-concept, full-screen images to create visual metaphors that reinforced and supported my presentation.

4.         Don’t underestimate the need to rehearse.  A lot of the success of a short-format presentation rides on performance. My rehearsing time was interrupted by a bout of the stomach flu just three days before Ignite. I resumed rehearsal the day of the event and I was still rehearsing in the ladies’ room at Catalyst Ranch up until the time the program began. I had one small ‘Madonna moment,’ but otherwise everything went smoothly. All in all, I spent about 20 hours rehearsing.

5.         Lead strong. Engage your audience right away. I was the last presenter before the break and followed some very high-energy speakers. I took the stage ad libbing:  ‘Wow, after all that great energy, I’m going to dial it way down.’  Get on the same wavelength with your audience, literally.  Do something to synchronize your mirror neurons.

6.         Finish strong. Start with the end in mind. How do you want to feel at the end of your presentation? How do you want the audience to feel at the end of your presentation? At the end, when I asked everyone to take a nice, deep breath and the collective inhale was loud, I knew my audience was engaged.

7.         Don’t get camera shy. The video will live long after the live event. As soon as you take the stage, look directly into the camera and start talking. From time to time, look directly at the camera as if it’s another member of the audience.

8.         Watch how fast you talk. Many Ignite presenters speak like it’s a race against the clock. Five minutes is enough time to say what you have to say. If it’s not enough time, your presentation needs more work. 160 words a minute is slightly faster than normal speech and a good pace for presenting.

9.         Dress the part. Whatever dressing up is for you, do it. Looking the part enhances your credibility. Determined not to wear black created a sartorial crisis because almost everything I own is black. I tried on and dismissed several outfits before settling on a sleeveless sheath dress the color of stone. I was dressed, not over dressed, and the color actually worked really well on stage.

By Bess Gallanis. Versions of this post appeared on The Huffington Post,  Indezine and Built in Chicago.

TED Talks Drive Presentation Crisis: How To Master a TED Talk

The TED Talk format has rapidly influenced business communication.  TED has upped the presentation ante, and anxious executives and curious onlookers want to know how to TED Talk.

TED talkers are witty, irreverent, passionate, brilliant storytellers.  TED talks can transport you to another dimension or ignite your ACT NOW button with the power of nuclear fusion. The opportunity to present at the annual TED conference in California has made celebrities of obscure academics and conferred credibility on some we might scoff.

Now that TED talks are available on a snazzy Internet site, the impact on reputations and ideas is amplified. More than six million viewers have propelled TED Talker Jill Bolte Taylor to the number one position.   A neurological researcher, she delivers a jaw dropping account of reaching nirvana during her own brain stroke. After all the hours I’ve spent on meditation cushions and yoga mats, I thought I had a sense of what nirvana may look like if I ever reached it.  Watching Dr. Bolte Taylor revealed the limits of my imagination.

These amazing 18-minute presentations appear effortless but actually require a great deal of effort.  If you are interested in TED talking, the place to start is with these TED Commandments:

• Thou shalt not simply trot out thy usual shtick.
• Thou shalt dream a great dream, or show forth a wondrous new thing, or share something thou hast never shared before.
• Thou shalt reveal thy curiosity and thy passion.
• Thou shalt tell a story.
• Thou shalt freely comment on the utterances of other speakers for the sake of blessed connection and exquisite controversy.
• Thou shalt not flaunt thine Ego. Be thou vulnerable. Speak of thy failure as well as thy success.
• Thou shalt not sell from the stage: Neither thy company, thy goods, thy writings, nor thy desperate need for funding, lest thou be cast aside into outer darkness.
• Thou shalt remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
• Thou shalt not read thy speech.
• Thou shalt not steal the time of them that follow thee.

Legendary Value Investor Warren Buffet Pays Up for Communications Skills

Not many investors would bet against Warren Buffet — with good reason.  Buffet’s ability to spot long term value has earned him great wealth and sincere admiration in equal measure.  He put his legendary reputation on the line in a televised Town Hall meeting with MBA students at his alma mater, Columbia Business School.

During Q&A, a sharp second-year student asked ” . . . what did your Columbia MBA not prepare you for?”

Confessing that he took a Dale Carnegie course after graduating from Columbia, the Oracle of Omaha used an investment calculation to make his point:  ”Right now, I would pay $100,000 for 10% of the future earnings of any of you.  You could improve your value by XX% just in terms of learning communication skills. “

What’s the value of that XX%? Link here to learn how much more Buffet will invest in communication skills.