success

the one skill to develop

Want a leg up professionally? Need a career boost? Become a better public speaker.

I can hear the collective response: Ohhh, ugh, groan. Not public speaking. Yawn. That’s lame. Give me career advice I can use. Maybe more school or certifications. I hate public speaking.

And that’s a big reason why it’s such a powerful skill. So many people hate and fear public speaking that even a mediocre speaker really stands out.

Why public speaking?

It’s valuable in all fields and every position I can think of. Any position that involves speaking to another human benefits from better communication.

I have met leaders from numerous countries and cultures and cannot think of a single one who wasn’t an adequate public speaker. Speaking and communication skills are crucial to being an effective leader.

Your skills get noticed much more quickly. Who does leadership remember: the talented wallflower or the talented person who speaks up, interacts, and leads discussion?

It’s (relatively) easy to learn. You’ve already been speaking to people almost your entire life.

You can use it personally and professionally. In fact, if you are involved in community, school, or church groups, you’ll find plenty of opportunities to put your public speaking skills to use.

 

Suggestions?

This is a big topic and books can and have been written on it. That said, there are a couple of things that really helped me:

1. Your audience is pulling for you. Most of the people listening hate public speaking so they empathize strongly with you. They feel your pain and want you to succeed. Unless you are a professional speaker, they are very forgiving of mistakes.

2. They don’t know what they don’t know. This was the most freeing realization for me. The audience doesn’t have a script. They aren’t verifying that you are saying what you intended to say. They will never know if you make minor mistakes or leave something out. Relax.

3. Know the central point and always speak from there. There’s two sides to this. First, when preparing, always stay focused on the central point and strip away anything that doesn’t directly support it. Second, if you get off track, don’t worry about what you had intended to say, just speak from the central point and you’ll be ok.

4. Put some heart in it. No matter how dry the topic, you can find ways to connect to the audience’s humanness. People respond to their emotions, not logic. You are speaking for a reason – to offer insights, inspire, persuade, influence – otherwise you could just send an email.

5. The audience is always asking themselves, “Why do I care about this? What’s in it for me?” so you should always be answering that as you speak.

6. Introverts can have a great advantage as speakers. Never confuse being introverted with being shy because it’s not the same thing at all. And being talkative can be counterproductive when it comes to public speaking. Introverts seem to be good as staying on track, keeping it concise, and providing great insights and analysis.

7. Good speakers work hard at it. You never see all the preparation that went into even a short presentation. That speaker who looks relaxed and glib and gives a great presentation likely spent hours preparing and practicing and worrying and sweating. Very, very few can ad lib a good presentation. Those who can are almost always relying on years of experience. Rest assured, it is completely normal to need to invest a lot of time getting ready.

Like any skill, no one is great at public speaking right from the start. It takes time and practice and patience to improve. But, it is also well worth the effort because it’s a skill that sets you apart.

how do i know what to do? priorities for success

It is possible to show up early, stay late, be busy, and work hard on all the wrong things. It’s possible to give it your booty kickin’ all on some pretty stupid things. Spend enough time and effort on the in the wrong places and you can turn the bottom line into a sieve.

So, how do you know if you’re focused on the right things? Only you know your business, goals, and priorities, but I can share some guidelines to help you sort things out.

ONLY spend time, thought, and effort on actions that are:

* Legal, moral, and ethical. This is a baseline given. If you can’t get this one right, the others don’t matter. I realize that only taking actions that are legal, moral, and ethical would shut down major chunks of entire industries, but we find over and over again that the short-term gains of taking legal or moral shortcuts are crushed out by the potential long-term consequences. Cut corners long enough and someone is going to find out and make your life absolutely miserable.

1. Beneficial to the customer experience. Take care of your customers and they’ll take care of your business. Hurt the customer and they’ll hurt your business. Be indifferent to the customer and they’ll hurt your business. My tip to all businesses: Spend your time and effort worrying about the fifth sale to me, not the first. I might buy from you once but if you make it painful or forgettable I probably won’t buy from you again and I certainly won’t recommend you. Make the process so remarkable that there is no question that I’ll be making my second, third, fourth, and fifth purchases from you.

2. Beneficial to the employee experience. Ultimately, your business lives or dies based on your employees. Treat your employees as though you need your them more than they need you. Operate from that philosophy and you’ll be fine. Treat your employees as though they are easily replaced cogs and you’ll soon have your company staffed with the people who have so few options left in their lives that they are easily replaced cogs.

3. Beneficial to the long-term success of the business. Yes, certain reports and paperwork must be done. No, you can’t buy every employee a Porsche as a signing bonus. No, you can’t operate without a balanced budget. Yes, decisions and tradeoffs and compromises must be made according to the mission and vision of the business. Just don’t confuse “convenient and short-sighted” with “long-term success.”

Anything else is box-checking bureaucracy. If you can’t justify an action under one or more of these conditions, why are you working on it? If you can’t show a direct connection between an action and a legal and ethical benefit to the customer, employee, or business, that action is doing far more harm than good. Stop it.

[Note: this is an expanded version of a response I made on Laurie Barkman’s “Passionate Performance” blog post People Say (and Do) The Darndest Things. She had a great example of a manager whose actions probably followed policy but were a stupid waste of time and hurt the employee experience (which hurts the customer experience, which hurts long-term success).]

vacation, holiday, time away

You might have noticed I haven’t been around lately. I disappeared from twitter, haven’t commented on other blogs, and haven’t posted any of my own. I’ve been on vacation and it was nice.

I’m getting better and better about taking vacations and getting away. In the past I was a consultant or contractor and very rarely took more than a few days off at a time. If I wasn’t working, I wasn’t making money. Now that I’m with a company that actually encourages getting some time away, I find myself enjoying my vacations more and more each year.

My vacations are pretty low key – return to the high desert, spend time with friends and family, mountain bike, eat too much, etc. Others would find that a bore and instead seek out cities, cruises, casinos, and nightlife. Others still might prefer to completely get away and go camping, hiking, fishing or hunting. Or take a camera, journal, and passport and travel the world. Or…

Actually, it doesn’t really matter what you do as long as it works for you. Just as rest and recovery is an integral component of a serious athlete’s training program, I suspect that active and conscious rest and recovery is a necessary part of a successful career. Time away NOT THINKING ABOUT WORK allows us to come back refreshed and attack the issues, problems, and challenges with a new zeal and fresh perspective. It allows us to step back and approach it from a different angle. To step away from the grind, reconnect, and refocus on the parts that make our jobs worthwhile.

What recharges your batteries?

easy or great?

It’s been said that you become like the five people you spend the most time with. Is that good news?

Did the last person you hire make you think, “Man, I’m going to have to raise my game! I love being around people who inspire my best!” OR did you think, “I’m glad that slot’s filled. Next.”

The people you’re filling the company with – the people you’re surrounding yourself with – are pulling you up or dragging you down. There is no neutral, there is no holding steady – they are forcing you to be better or letting you slack. Do you go for easy and comfortable or do you go for greatness?

just show up

“80% of success is just showing up.” ~ Woody Allen

 

“Did you get out and run this morning?” The guy at the gym locker next to mine knew I often liked to get out and run through the neighborhood in the morning.

I told him I had. But admitted I’d been lazy and hadn’t run much this past month but was enjoying getting back in the groove.

“It happens.” He said. “I’ve been pretty uninspired the past couple of weeks, too. I just keep coming in. The hardest part is just getting here.”

Such a great perspective. I had gotten out of the habit and slacked off. He had some less than great workouts but showed up daily. Any guesses to who is better off? He’s maintaining while I’m rebuilding.

This morning’s conversation serves as a great reminder that work and life is going to be tough sometimes. We won’t be able to fine the new employees we want, we won’t know how to deal with the employees we have, passion and joy will be replaced by gutting out another day, we’ll forget our vision and inspiration and start watching the clock. It happens.

It’s so easy to back off, so easy to justify, and so valuable when we don’t. Keep coming in. Keep the habit going. The hardest part is just showing up.

descent // death spiral

Profit equals revenue minus expenses. To increase profits you can increase revenue, reduce expenses, or both. Any savvy business strives to be fiscally responsible and keep a close eye on expenses. However, it is possible to cut the wrong expenses and save money right into bankruptcy.

As a regular customer, I have a front row seat watching a formerly solid corner store / gas station implode under the management of new owners. It’s sad, but they are providing a nice case study on how to run a successful business right into the ground. Some things you might want to avoid doing in your own business:

Ask the long-time manager to take a 50% pay cut. Get a new manager willing to accept management responsibility for a shade over minimum wage.  Instead of paying staff well, “save” money by hiring and training new employees who lack the skills, experience, or options to command a living wage. Ignore the cost of excessively high turnover and horrendously poor customer service.

Assume employees are interchangeable and replaceable and treat them poorly. Refuse to realize that in a small community the your customers are friends and family of your employees. Don’t notice how a negative reputation is rapidly spreading throughout the area. Don’t keep shelves stocked, even when the items are clearly sitting in inventory in the back room.

Defer maintenance and repairs. Instead, just hang “out of order” signs on everything that doesn’t work.

Irritate your vendors by not paying them reliably and / or don’t restock key items to save a few dollars. For example: be the only gas station in the area going into the weekend without gas.

Create a noticeable drop in both the number of customers, the number of regular customers, and the sales per customer.

As sales and revenue drop at avalanche speed, accelerate your savings by cutting employee hours so you are perpetually understaffed, allowing more items to be out of stock, and perhaps becoming even slower to pay your vendors.

It’s a neat cycle: the more corners you cut to save money, the lower your customer service drops, the fewer the customers you have and the more corners you need to cut to save money. Repeat until annihilation.

run what ya brung

It was his first time sparring in front of judges and the first of his age group to compete and my son wasn’t faring well. His opponent, the eventual second-place finisher, was clearly experienced with martial arts tournaments, knew what was expected, and was significantly taller. With about 8 extra inches of legs, his competitor had a large advantage and knew how to use it. My son made a great attempt, but there would be no trophy for him.

If it were a movie, he would have won against the odds and earned the respect of his mortal enemy while learning to appreciate true friendship, etc., etc. In real life, he was just a slightly overwhelmed six year old trying his best and probably wishing he were somewhere else.

We all have different strengths and weaknesses. No matter how hard we try, we may never fully get rid of weaknesses or be able to learn or develop to the level of other people’s strengths. We’re not all 6’ tall, we don’t all have 150 IQs, we don’t all start life with a nice trust fund, we haven’t all been to an Ivy League school. Yes, life is not fair. Agreed. Move on.

It’s cliché to say, but it doesn’t matter where we start or what our innate limitations are. Not because with enough heart and perseverance we can create a Hollywood ending. No, that’s the happy myth we are routinely sold.

It doesn’t matter because there isn’t a thing we can do about it. NOTHING. We cannot change our starting point. So not much use putting any thought into it.

The more important question is: What are you going to do about it? How can you use your strengths, weaknesses, and the package of brains and heart and talent and interests and life experience that is you to your advantage?

 

 

imperfect action beats perfect inaction

“I can’t remember how it begins.” My six-almost-seven year old son was warming up for his first martial arts tournament and he was pretty nervous. He had been practicing a form – a pattern of movements – for a couple of months, but he went completely blank.

One of his instructors pulled him aside and said, “When you get out in front of the judges, if you can’t remember what to do, just make it up. Just do some moves until you get to a part you remember. That’s better than freezing up.”

Great advice for life. You can stay frozen, not starting until you can do it perfect. Or, you can jump in, get moving, do what you think is right (or close), and correct on the fly. There are very, very few situations where doing nothing is better than doing something and improving as you go.

Words to live by: imperfect action beats perfect inaction.

no more surprises

Nobody likes to be surprised by bad news. Surprises can be a career limiting event. From this day forward, do all in your humanly power to make sure that two types of people are never, ever surprised:

1. Your boss. Your job is to make your manager’s life easier. The #1 way to make their life (and your life) more difficult is for them to be surprised or blindsided by what you have done or not done. We will all make mistakes and drop the ball from time to time and the first step to retribution is making sure your boss isn’t surprised.

2. Your customers. Your job is to make your customer’s life easier. Nobody buys from someone who makes their life more difficult. Surprises make things difficult. Changes happen, there are things outside our control. Customers are far, far more forgiving if they know about potential issues in advance. Delivering bad news in advance is difficult, but letting them call to complain after being surprised by bad news is a far more challenging situation.