A first impression is like a headline. People are going to check you
out and decide immediately if they are interested in knowing more—so
it’s vital to make an impactful first impression at the start of every
conversation. People often relate a first impression with a face-to-face
meeting, yet initial impressions often precede in-person meetings.
Every type of communication with someone new shapes his or her overall
impression of you. Here’s how you make every first impression
memorable—in person, on the phone, via video chat or in plain old
writing…
1. In-person
Presentation is the key to a strong face to face first meeting.
Everything from appearance, body language and how you speak will affect
how you come across. You know how important it is to dress appropriately
and be well-groomed, but do you sit up straight and keep from
fidgeting? Do you make direct eye contact and exude confidence? All of
these details will factor into your impression. How you handle
conversations is extremely important. Balance being a good listener with
being an engaging speaker, and most importantly, be interested in what
the other person has to say!
People often confuse being professional with being boring or dry.
Showcase your personality, just keep it appropriate. Whether it‘s a job
interview or meeting a potential client, people are more impressed with
vibrant personalities than flat and uninteresting ones.
2. Over the phone
If you are speaking to someone you’ve never met, the entire
impression is contingent on your conversation skills. To begin, make
sure that you are speaking in the right environment. If the phone call
is scheduled, be sure to take it in a quiet place without any
distractions. If you are being called at a specific time, don’t answer
the phone with a hesitant or too-casual greeting. You already know who
is calling, so answer authoritatively. If you’re making the call, always
begin by asking the other person if it’s a good time to speak.
Organization will help make your initial phone call a success. Have a
list of questions and any other materials you need at the ready. Take
notes on the call for later reference. Being prepared will allow you to
speak confidently without “um’s” and “uh’s” derailing the conversation.
3. Through email
The subject line is often the most-neglected part of an email—don’t
disregard its importance. Work on writing a subject line that is
specific and personable. Ask yourself, “Would I want to open this
message based on the subject line alone?” Tone is also critical. Be
professional but personable. When reaching out to someone for the first
time, you want the person to get a sense of who you are. Don’t use
improper English or text message-style abbreviations. Read the message
out loud to yourself before sending it to help you catch mistakes and
let you hear how you are coming across.
4. Via video chat
Video chat first impressions combine the attributes of in-person,
phone and email interactions. As with an in-person meeting, it is
important to focus on your appearance when meeting virtually. You want
to be well-organized and conduct the meeting from a quiet spot without
distractions. Your setting will factor into how you come across. If you
are sitting at a messy desk, you might give off the impression that you
are disorganized. Look at your space from an outsider’s point of view
before the chat begins. Technology can be fickle, so always check your
connection, your speakers and your microphone before the video
conference is scheduled to begin. Give yourself adequate time to fix any
problems ahead of time so that you don’t have to struggle with it while
the other party waits.
5. Follow-up
A proper follow-up is the final component of a first impression.
Sending a thank you note or a follow-up email shows that you appreciated
the person’s time and that you’re thinking about next steps.
The best first impression is about more than being memorable. You
also want to show people that you remember them. It is two-sided, so the
strongest impact relies on a mutual appreciation for the meeting. Be
yourself, be kind and be ready to connect. Don’t forget, every
impression counts.
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
How Great Leaders Communicate
You’ve just been promoted into one of your organization’s Big Jobs. Now you’ve got an impressive office, a hefty budget and vast expectations about how you will lead dozens or even thousands of people. Can you stick with the leadership style that brought you this far? Or do you need to recalibrate your approach, starting with the way you communicate?
Some fascinating rethinking is under way on exactly that topic. Scholars such as Harvard Business School’s Boris Groysberg argue that effective leadership no longer revolves around brilliant speeches and heroic exhortations. (We can call that the Fidel Castro approach – and it doesn’t work especially well in either government or mainstream business.) Instead, Groysberg and co-author Michael Slind argue in their 2012 book “Talk Inc.” that the higher you go in an organization, the more you must engage other people in conversations, rather than trying to shout them into submission.
I’m in favor of traveling 70% of the way down that road with Groysberg and Slind, without becoming so chatty that you lose the ability to stretch people’s horizons. Over the past 25 years, as a business-book author and writer for the likes of Forbes, Fast Company and The Wall Street Journal, I’ve seen a lot of corporate leaders in action. Here are seven ways that the best leaders increase their effectiveness by the ways they communicate.
1. Bring the vision to life. Anyone can write a mission statement, full of lofty words that sound good. But you aren’t communicating that vision unless you repeatedly signal how those values translate into concrete actions. What people learn from your routine decision-making matters far more than what you pack into your speeches.
A case in point: Jeff Bezos’s insistence that Amazon.com is “the most customer-centric company in the world.” Nice slogan. What does it really mean? Hang around the Amazon CEO for a while, and you will notice that he vetoes sassy ads that mock customers. He insists that mid-level meetings include one person serving solely as the customer advocate – with the power to veto actions that undermine customers’ interests. And when Amazon reorganizes departments, which it does fairly often, each regrouping is justified as a way of serving the customer better.
In the same spirit, bring your bedrock values into the daily workplace. Salute other people’s actions that reinforce what you prize. Call out conduct that doesn’t. And infuse these principles into other people’s thought patterns by referencing key values as decisions are being made.
2. Ask smart questions. In his new book, “To Sell Is Human,” best-selling author Daniel H. Pink cites studies showing that when you want to persuade someone, questions can be more powerful than statements. The reason: you engage another person’s heart and mind more strongly. You get him or her thinking about the ideal answer – and then all the steps necessary to get there. By being less dogmatic, you let people on your team build game plans that they believe in, rather than trapping them in a helpless state until you issue your next command.
While developing my most recent book, “The Rare Find,” I was impressed with the way that David Evans, the former head of the computer science department at the University of Utah, got great work out of his graduate students by asking simple but profound questions that pointed the way to revolutionary advances. He inspired the engineers who later built Pixar, Adobe and Netscape. Often that could be done simply by pointing at a big goal on the horizon and saying: “How would you get there?”
3. Take time to read the room. Once you’re in senior leadership, you will meet a lot of outsiders that you hardly know ... but whose support or forbearance is crucial to your company's success. Do 90% of the talking, and it’s tempting to think that you carried the day with Washington regulators, Chinese suppliers, that big customer in Dallas or the investigative reporter from New York. Guess what? If you don’t know what the other party really wanted, all that bluster was in vain.
Take a tip from Silicon Valley executive Meg Whitman, early in her career, when she was building eBay into a global e-commerce powerhouse. Some of her most important meetings were with eBay’s Power Sellers. These merchants booked huge amounts of business on the site, yet for a time they felt the company didn’t understand their frustrations with fees and service issues. Every few months, she would visit Power Sellers on their turf, looking for ways to fix their problems or at least offer sympathy. Her keen ear helped eBay stay ahead of its competitors.
Don’t fall prey to the belief that careful listening is only for the little people in the room. When you listen carefully, you win people’s trust – and that’s crucial to everything else you want to accomplish. There’s a maxim in the public speaking business: “The more your audience talks, the more they think they have learned from you.” Use that sly insight to your advantage.
4. Create a climate where things get done. In any organization, there's a huge gap between projects that are headed to the finish line, right now -- and ones that live indefinitely in limbo, hardly moving forward. Which do you prefer? If you're looking for results, make sure your employees and front-line managers are repeatedly aware of your top priorities. Help set interim mileposts. Get roadblocks out of the way. Walk through the areas where specific tasks are being done. Even a 10-minute visit by the boss conveys the clear and uplifting message: "This is important."
Be mindful of how many "top priorities" your organization can handle successfully. Better to win two big campaigns a year than to stumble in the midst of 20. I've seen ambitious but unfocused organizations end up with overcrowded agendas that create internal strife -- with the unpleasant consequences of missed deadlines, constant changes of directions and ugly battles for resources and recognition. The higher up you go in an organization, the more important it is for you to communicate key goals with clarity and brevity.
Tim Boyle, the CEO of Columbia Sportswear, is remarkably good at peeling away the clutter. I’ve chatted with him since 2005, and he keeps his business centered on three simple concepts: innovation, enhanced design and compelling marketing. Zoom in on each idea, and details abound. He’s a remarkably hard-working and well-read boss. Those core concepts, however, help ensure that Columbia’s 4,000 employees are pulling in the right direction.
5. Use stories to get your points across. When you’re at the top of an organization, you can seem pretty distant from the people on the front lines. Now you’re in a job where it may be impossible to schedule enough face time with everyone you’d like to influence. One of your best ways to compensate: sharing teaching anecdotes, so that even people who hardly know you will still feel they know your human, authentic side.
Nobody does this better than Warren Buffett, the 82-year-old chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. His conglomerate has $143 billion in annual revenue, with interests that range from insurance to energy, furniture and chocolate. But when you read Buffett's annual letters to shareholders, his dry wit and wise-uncle judgment come through on every page. Countless investors and managers who have never met him still feel that they know him – and like him.
You don’t need to be nearly as polished as Buffett to succeed in this domain. Just think how you would explain your week’s battles and goals to a neighbor, a spouse or a college roommate, and you’ll find the right tone.
6. Be mindful of what you don’t know. If your subordinates are any good at all, you often won’t know the fine-grain details as well as they do. Expect to be learning constantly on the job. Find ways that your in-house experts can quietly bring you up to speed on emerging issues that are catching your eye. You’ve got vital strengths that other people don’t, particularly in terms of experience, broad perspectives and judgment. As you work toward important decisions, make sure your remarks and conversations are opening the way for other people to keep augmenting your knowledge base.
Two of the most skillful learners I ever encountered are Sheryl Sandberg (the chief operating officer of Facebook), and Lou Gerstner, the former CEO of RJR Nabisco and then IBM. I traveled with Gerstner during his RJR era as part of a Wall Street Journal front-page profile. He was still mastering the company’s endless product line, but he got up to speed shrewdly, calling some meetings on a supermarket floor so he could walk the aisles as people talked, looking around to see whose brands dominated each category.
7. Make people feel they work for a winner. Can you single-handedly improve your organization’s morale – in ways that genuinely translate into better performance and innovation? That’s one of the great mysteries of leadership. Some executives try smothering their employees in perks. Others praise good work, hoping that it will lead to greater doings in the future. Still others scold slackers and kick out the weakest performers, believing that some situations call for toughness.
Any of those approaches can work; yet I’ve seen executives try all three and still come up short. A memorable insight here came from John Young, who was CEO of Hewlett Packard for many years during its prime. We chatted after his retirement, and he contended that what shapes morale the most is employees’ conviction that they are working for the best company in their field. Earn that honor, he said, and you gain a level of employee commitment that cash and perks alone can’t buy.
All the other six techniques in this article point toward this final priority. If you’re conveying a clear vision, asking good questions, setting the right priorities and so on, you’re creating that winners’ aura that is the ultimate reward for great leadership communication.
For more great posts like this, follow LinkedIn's Leadership & Management channel.
Best Advice: What I Learned From Jack Welch Hanging Up on Me
One afternoon over ten years ago, I was talking on the phone to my boss, former GE Chairman and CEO Jack Welch, when the line went dead. I called his assistant Rosanne Badowski to say we had been disconnected.
“No you weren’t,” she said. “Jack hung up on you.”
"Huh?"
"He wants you to know that's what it's like to be in a meeting with you, " Rosanne said. "You're too abrupt."
We both got a good chuckle out of that. Point well made, and with humor as the tutor. Jack himself had been pretty abrupt a few months previously, when he called me into his office.
“You have to wallow in it.”
That’s
what he said. I had just left a decade-long run in media to hop to the
corporate side of things at GE, working with Welch on communications
strategy.
My life in
media—especially network news—had been an adrenaline rush, racing from
deadline to deadline. If you don't make it to air, there is nothingness.
You're dead. And making it to air first brings an added sense of
accomplishment. Not to mention bragging rights. For me, it was a
constant whirl: making sense of the constant stream of information
coming in, calling reporters covering us to tell them what was happening
and why we were doing it best. I’d think sometimes, if only I could
field phone calls with both hands and both feet, all would be good (we
didn’t have email yet, but the newsroom did have an archaic forerunner
of instant messaging that satisfied my need to multitask).
Moving
fast and being organized were my strong suits. The more there was to
do, the more I felt alive. Productive. Efficient. Every to-do list item
was checked, with urgency as my soundtrack. I loved the thrill, and I
was good at keeping up with it.
Who better than me, then, to land a plum assignment working for Jack Welch, Mr. Speed and Simplicity.
Imagine my surprise when he called me into his office that day and admonished me for being too efficient.
My zeal to do everything on my to-do list—along with my reserved, even
shy nature—made me come across as abrupt and cold. I started every
meeting by jumping right in and left with every action under control.
"You have to wallow in it," he said. "Take time to get to know people. Understand where they are coming from, what is important to them. Make sure they are with you."
At best, my colleagues didn't know what to make of me—and I certainly didn't give them time to find out.
I
heard Jack loud and clear. But honestly, it took a long time for the
impact of his words to sink in, and even longer to change my behavior.
After all, those same attributes had led to my being in the role in the
first place.
I cringe sometimes
when I think of how I must have come across at times, and how long it
took me to change my ways. And even now there are times when I forget
Jack’s advice (it is a decade old). But yes, I’ve learned to not only
wallow in it, but to enjoy it. Time to think and time to connect with
people are as important as getting everything done. Sometimes you have
to go slow before you go fast.
I
will be forever grateful for the time and humor Jack invested to teach
me these important work and life lessons. Many happy returns.
11 Simple Concepts to Become a Better Leader
Being
likeable will help you in your job, business, relationships, and life. I
interviewed dozens of successful business leaders for my last book,
to determine what made them so likeable and their companies so
successful. All of the concepts are simple, and yet, perhaps in the name
of revenues or the bottom line, we often lose sight of the simple
things - things that not only make us human, but can actually help us
become more successful. Below are the eleven most important principles
to integrate to become a better leader:
1. Listening
"When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen." - Ernest Hemingway
Listening is the foundation of any good relationship. Great leaders listen to what their customers and prospects want and need, and they listen to the challenges those customers face. They listen to colleagues and are open to new ideas. They listen to shareholders, investors, and competitors. Here's why the best CEO's listen more.
2. Storytelling
"Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today." -Robert McAfee Brown
After listening, leaders need to tell great stories in order to sell their products, but more important, in order to sell their ideas. Storytelling is what captivates people and drives them to take action. Whether you're telling a story to one prospect over lunch, a boardroom full of people, or thousands of people through an online video - storytelling wins customers.
3. Authenticity
"I had no idea that being your authentic self could make me as rich as I've become. If I had, I'd have done it a lot earlier." -Oprah Winfrey
Great leaders are who they say they are, and they have integrity beyond compare. Vulnerability and humility are hallmarks of the authentic leader and create a positive, attractive energy. Customers, employees, and media all want to help an authentic person to succeed. There used to be a divide between one’s public self and private self, but the social internet has blurred that line. Tomorrow's leaders are transparent about who they are online, merging their personal and professional lives together.
4. Transparency
"As a small businessperson, you have no greater leverage than the truth." -John Whittier
There is nowhere to hide anymore, and businesspeople who attempt to keep secrets will eventually be exposed. Openness and honesty lead to happier staff and customers and colleagues. More important, transparency makes it a lot easier to sleep at night - unworried about what you said to whom, a happier leader is a more productive one.
5. Team Playing
"Individuals play the game, but teams beat the odds." -SEAL Team Saying
No matter how small your organization, you interact with others every day. Letting others shine, encouraging innovative ideas, practicing humility, and following other rules for working in teams will help you become a more likeable leader. You’ll need a culture of success within your organization, one that includes out-of-the-box thinking.
6. Responsiveness
"Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it." -Charles Swindoll
The best leaders are responsive to their customers, staff, investors, and prospects. Every stakeholder today is a potential viral sparkplug, for better or for worse, and the winning leader is one who recognizes this and insists upon a culture of responsiveness. Whether the communication is email, voice mail, a note or a tweet, responding shows you care and gives your customers and colleagues a say, allowing them to make a positive impact on the organization.
7. Adaptability
"When you're finished changing, you're finished." -Ben Franklin
There has never been a faster-changing marketplace than the one we live in today. Leaders must be flexible in managing changing opportunities and challenges and nimble enough to pivot at the right moment. Stubbornness is no longer desirable to most organizations. Instead, humility and the willingness to adapt mark a great leader.
8. Passion
"The only way to do great work is to love the work you do." -Steve Jobs
Those who love what they do don’t have to work a day in their lives. People who are able to bring passion to their business have a remarkable advantage, as that passion is contagious to customers and colleagues alike. Finding and increasing your passion will absolutely affect your bottom line.
9. Surprise and Delight
"A true leader always keeps an element of surprise up his sleeve, which others cannot grasp but which keeps his public excited and breathless." -Charles de Gaulle
Most people like surprises in their day-to-day lives. Likeable leaders underpromise and overdeliver, assuring that customers and staff are surprised in a positive way. There are a plethora of ways to surprise without spending extra money - a smile, We all like to be delighted — surprise and delight create incredible word-of-mouth marketing opportunities.
10. Simplicity
"Less isn't more; just enough is more." -Milton Glaser
The world is more complex than ever before, and yet what customers often respond to best is simplicity — in design, form, and function. Taking complex projects, challenges, and ideas and distilling them to their simplest components allows customers, staff, and other stakeholders to better understand and buy into your vision. We humans all crave simplicity, and so today's leader must be focused and deliver simplicity.
11. Gratefulness
"I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder." -Gilbert Chesterton
Likeable leaders are ever grateful for the people who contribute to their opportunities and success. Being appreciative and saying thank you to mentors, customers, colleagues, and other stakeholders keeps leaders humble, appreciated, and well received. It also makes you feel great! Donor's Choose studied the value of a hand-written thank-you note, and actually found donors were 38% more likely to give a 2nd time if they got a hand-written note!
The Golden Rule: Above all else, treat others as you’d like to be treated
By showing others the same courtesy you expect from them, you will gain more respect from coworkers, customers, and business partners. Holding others in high regard demonstrates your company’s likeability and motivates others to work with you. This seems so simple, as do so many of these principles — and yet many people, too concerned with making money or getting by, fail to truly adopt these key concepts.
Which of these principles are most important to you — what makes you likeable?
For more great posts like this, follow LinkedIn's Leadership & Management channel.
For a FREE collection of Dave's most inspirational stories on leadership, marketing and more, click here.
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If you liked this article, you will like:
The 1 Thing a Business Leader Must Do to Succeed
25 Quotes to Inspire You to Become a Better Leader
6 Secrets to Better Networking at Conferences
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Dave Kerpen is the New York Times bestselling author of two books, Likeable Social Media and Likeable Business. If you like this post, please share it and please click the FOLLOW button above or below for more great posts from Dave.
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