A Listening Exercise to do Next Time you Watch a Movie

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AppId is over the quota

Leading by listening requires developing two kinds of awareness. There’s self-awareness, which involves getting a handle on personal triggers so you know what sets you off, what makes you pay attention, etc. And then there’s awareness of others, what we like to call “other-awareness” where we learn to observe and interpret the emotions of others so we can wipe out any wrongful assumptions we might otherwise make and just stay focused on the facts.

There are two parts to developing other-awareness. The first is developing our observational skills, which is all about focusing and paying attention, and the second part is interpreting those signals. Now, I’m aware this all sounds amazingly easy: we just pay attention and that gives us more other-awareness… piece of cake, right? The problem is we observe all day long, but we typically don’t pay that much attention to what we’re seeing. Consider, for example, a dime. You’ve handled dimes plenty of times in your life, and you’ve had ample opportunity for observation. But can you really describe a dime? “It’s silver and ridged on the edges,” most of us will say. Fewer will know it’s Franklin D. Roosevelt’s face on a dime. And even fewer will be able to correctly say which direction his profile faces, or what’s written on the back of a dime. This is where other-awareness comes in; it’s keying in and really paying attention and more accurately processing everything that’s going on.

Build other-awareness with this fun exercise 

To build other-awareness, there’s an exercise you can do the next time you watch a movie. The movie just needs to be on DVD or on-demand, any format that allows you to pause and repeat a scene a few times.

Here’s how the exercise works. First, pick a movie (it can be one you’ve seen before, but it’s more fun with a film you’ve never seen) that includes a scene with two or three people interacting. Avoid big action movies, as we’re looking for strong dialogue between human beings. You’re going to watch this scene where people are interacting twice: once with the sound off, and then a second time with the sound on.

The first viewing, with the sound off, you just want to observe. What are the people on screen doing? Without any sound to help you out, try and key into what is happening with these characters. Check out their facial expressions: are they smiling, staring, frowning, eyebrows raised, blinking rapidly? Are they breaking eye contact or are they holding eye contact? What’s happening to the color of their faces? Is one person’s face suddenly getting red? Who has tight lips or relaxed lips? Is someone wetting their lips?

Next look at gestures: maybe someone is nodding, or shaking, or covering their mouth or eyes, scratching their face. Where are everyone’s hands? Maybe a character is cracking his knuckles.  What about their bodies? What are the angles of everyone’s heads? Are the characters close to each other or far apart? Are they slumping? Are they leaning forward? Are they shrugging? Doing this without sound removes all other distractions and just lets you observe. Then, with the sound still off, start to make some interpretations. Assess which emotions you think are present just by watching body language, facial expressions, etc.

Now watch the same scene with the sound on. And again, you want to key into the gestures, facial expressions, etc. while now also listening to the words and assessing what emotions you think are present. How do your silent observations compare to the observations you made when you had audio cues to help? How observant are you?

Now take this exercise back to the workplace

Meetings are a great place to do this, so the next meeting you are in, observe all the facial expressions, the gestures and the body display, and start to mentally note what emotions you think are present. What’s neat about doing this at work is you can test some of your hypotheses.

So after you’ve made your observations and started to figure out the emotions you think are present; come up with three possible explanations for those observed behaviors; three hypotheses. Maybe hypothesis #1 is: I’m watching Jane and maybe she’s feeling sick, and #2 is: Maybe Jane’s upset because we’re talking about her new assignment and she’s confused by the directions, and hypothesis #3 is: Maybe Jane’s tired. What we want to do is come up with various hypotheses for the behaviors we see because when we develop alternative and multiple hypotheses, it prevents us from getting fixated on just one type of solution. Once we get fixated, it’s very hard to keep an open mind about anything. But when we have multiple hypotheses for things, that is, by definition, having a much more open mind, it automatically amps up our listening abilities.

Next consider the likelihood of each of your three hypotheses by observing some more. See if you can find additional evidence, for example, in the “Jane is tired” hypothesis, you might observe: “Jane has two cups of coffee on her desk and she doesn’t usually drink coffee. She has been working late the last few nights, maybe she is tired.” If possible, you can even go to the person and say, “Listen, just curious, but I noticed you’re staring off in the sky, your arms were closed off, etc. Since we’re friends here, I wonder if I can ask you what’s going through your mind, what were you feeling right then?” That way you can find out which of your hypotheses were correct.

The goal of this exercise is to teach you how to be a more effective observer of human behavior and more effective at correlating those observations to your assessment of what emotions other people are feeling. This allows you to develop a more effective sense of the causality of those behaviors and those emotions. Because the more aware of yourself and others you become, the more effective you will be at distilling everything you hear so you can get right to the nugget of the information you need.

For more tips on improving your listening skills, including a 7-part checklist that tests whether you’ve truly heard all the information you need, attend our webinar Lead by Listening.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

View the original article here

Delivering Presentations: The Rules of Dating Apply Here Too!

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AppId is over the quota

Imagine you’re out on a date and your goal is to really impress. You want to be the only person in the room your date can see or hear. Given that goal, what would you say is the best way to start the date:

Start the date by sharing your life history including all your great accomplishments and the things that matter most to you.Start the date by talking to your date about the kinds of things he/she finds valuable.

Now, in the dating world, pretty much everybody gets it right, you talk about “them.” But here’s the shocker: once we move into the world of business presentations; another place where winning quick audience favor is critical, pretty much everybody gets it wrong. Because instead of using what we know works, most folks begin their business presentations by talking about “themselves.” In fact; over 90% of the presentations we’ve studied began with a slide that looks like this…

And unless you’re attending a narcissist’s convention, this is just a terrible slide and horrible start to your presentation. You don’t even have to read every bullet point to feel the automatic turn off. This slide is all about “you”: when you were founded, how many clients you have, how big you are, how many awards you’ve won, etc. If you used a personalized version of this slide in a dating situation, I guarantee you’d be sitting alone at the bar before the first round of drinks arrived.

It doesn’t matter if you’re presenting to one person or a room of a thousand, the only way to grab your audience’s attention is to spend the first 10 minutes addressing issues that matter to them. Neurologically, those first 10 minutes are when your audience forms their opinions about you. It’s when their brains absorb all the incoming data (that would be you) and then decide whether or not to allocate any more neurological energy to listening to that big noise coming at them (again, that’s you). And because you know this little tidbit of knowledge that comes to us from the world of brain science, you can use it to your advantage.

Dating Research that Proves Affect of Opening with Messages About “Them”

Let’s jump back to dating for a minute. Perhaps you’ve heard of a free online dating site called OkCupid that was created by a couple of guys who met while at Harvard. Now, I married my high school sweetheart, so I don’t go there trolling for dates. But back when the founders were still actively blogging, I used to check out OKTrends and I was pretty impressed with the statistical research they shared. Like the study where they looked at the kinds of words men use in their opening messages to women, to learn what does (and doesn’t) generate a reply. As you can imagine, some of the opening messages were incredibly cheesy. For example, some of the words the study revealed that DON’T work (i.e. women did not reply to the man’s message) were: “sexy”, “beautiful” and “hot.”

I’m happy to report that there’s a redeeming flip side to this. Because there were some words and phrases the guys used in their emails to women that generated huge numbers of responses.  For example:  “You mention…”, “noticed that…” and “curious what…” all got fantastic responses (statistically, messages with those phrases get double the normal response rates). So basically, if a guy appears to have read a woman’s profile, and he shows knowledge and interest in the things she’s interested in, he’s got a much greater chance of hearing back from her. A good “guy message” would sound like this: “You mention that you like cooking and I noticed that you travelled to Italy. I’m curious what your favorite region was in terms of cuisine?” That’s a guy I might let my daughter go out with—when she gets to dating age, and luckily, that’s far in the future.

The lesson in all this is: whether you’re dating or making million-dollar presentations, start by talking about the other person and their interests. Let them know that you know what they want to hear about, that you are sensitive to what they want to gain from this interaction and that you care about the same things that they care about.

In my upcoming webinar, The Secrets of Killer Presentations, you’ll learn how to assess the four personality types you’ll find in your audience so you can begin every presentation knowing exactly what your audience wants to hear from you. And if you’re addressing multiple personality types, you’ll learn how to time a presentation to safeguard those different attention spans so you know when to deliver the bottom line, when to be to linear, when to stick to the facts and when to get warm and fuzzy to build an emotional connection.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

View the original article here

Consider these 4 Communications Styles When Delivering your Next Presentation

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You may be presenting to a group from within the same industry or even department, but that doesn’t mean everyone in your audience has the same preferred communications style. Different people have very different ways they prefer to give and receive information. Which means that the kind of delivery that engages some people may send others in your audience scrambling for the exits.  One of the big challenges when presenting to a mixed group is correctly adapting your communication style so your whole audience stays focused on what you’re saying.

To make it easier, we distilled it down into four basic default communication styles people can fall into. These are not personality types; this deals specifically with how you like to give and get information. Here’s a brief description of each default communication style:

The Intuitive type refers to those people who are not terribly emotional, but who are quite free form. Intuitive types don’t necessarily like things to flow from A to B to C and so on. They like to cut to the chase, so it’s best to skip directly to the end: what’s the real value you are bringing this person today? If you can get the Intuitive types in your audience to buy in on the end result right away upfront, you’ve got a much better shot at getting them to listen to all the other stuff you’ve got to say.The Analytical type refers to those people who prefer things unemotional but linear. These are your “just the facts” kinds of people. They don’t want to hear a lot of warm-and-fuzzy feeling words, so don’t waste the Analytical-type communicator’s time by telling them you understand their pain; instead just give them the numbers and data they need and want.The Functional type refers to people who generally like their communication to be emotional and linear. These folks like to have control of the process so it’s always best to move in a linear fashion: from A, to B, to C and then follow through right to the end. If you try to skip around in your presentation or jump to the enticement of your “wow” finish, you risk losing the attention of the Functional-type communicator.The Personal relater is both free form and emotional. These are the folks who want the warm-and-fuzzy emotional approach.   So feel free to dive right into all the details such as: Who else is going to be involved/ how getting involved will make them “feel”/ who else they will touch by getting involved, etc.  You can’t just come in and dump a bunch of facts on personal-type communicators, even if they are startling facts. These folks are still going to need a more interpersonal connection.

Even from these brief descriptions of the four communications styles, the conundrum is obvious: they all want something different. The good news is that, by knowing what the 4 types are, you can plan your next presentation knowing you need to hit all 4 types in your delivery. And we’ll teach you how to do that in our upcoming live webinar The Secrets of Killer Presentations.  But here’s a quick little take away secret you can start using now:

When great speakers present to a new or unknown audience, they assume all four communications styles are present. And there’s a certain order they present their information, in order to communication to each style. They begin by addressing the Intuitive types, then they speak to the Analytical types, then to the Functional types and they close by speaking to the Personal types. We see this often in presidential speeches or wherever there’s a mixed audience of preferred communication styles. Working in this order, from the Intuitive to the Analytical to the Functional to the Personal addresses attention span: Intuitives have the shortest attention span, then the Analyticals, then the Functionals and the Personals have the longest attention spans.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

View the original article here

Motivate Employees at Review Time by Asking “What Are Your Proudest Moments?”

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Employee performance reviews are notoriously painful, but they don’t have to be. Reviews can actually be useful, productive, meaningful conversations that do what they’re intended to do: improve employee performance. Some of the changes leaders need to make to have more effective reviews are pretty easy, like knowing which to talk about first: performance, goals or money. (It’s money). Another key tip is to start every review by asking “What are your proudest moments?”

Some of you may be wondering: how does asking for their proudest moments differ from a self-appraisal? When you ask for a self-appraisal you ask for the proudest moments, but you also ask for the biggest failures. And while it might not be a bad thing for your low performers to have to bring you an honest evaluation of their biggest failures, it’s actually quite harmful to your top performers.

Psychological dynamic different for high and low performers

There’s a different psychological dynamic that happens when high and low performers experience failure. Low performers might not know about the failure, they might not care, or they may have even intended for the failure to happen. High performers, on the other hand, have a high degree of critical self-awareness. This is wonderful, because most of the time these valuable employees already know they messed up—even before you tell them. And they get right to work on fixing the problem and making self-corrections so they never mess up like that again. However, most high performers are also prone to beating themselves up pretty hard when they mess up. And that can quickly turn the focus of the review back onto stuff they’ve already corrected and moved past. Plus you might get swayed listening to a high performer beat himself up and give lower marks than are deserved.

Proudest moments also ensures you don’t miss the greatest thing your employees did that year

Keeping things focused and balanced for high performers is only one reason to ask about proudest moments. Starting reviews with this simple question also helps leaders avoid the biggest employee de-motivator: missing the greatest things your people did that year. What you learn by asking this question gives you great information to work from during the review. Let’s face it, it’s nearly impossible to remember what every one of your employees did 12 months ago, so have your people make the list and tell you their proudest moments. It makes a big difference to them if the two great things they did get remembered and talked about a bit.

Another benefit is that by asking about proudest moments, you get clued in to the kind of meeting you’re in for. If an employee tells you, “I am just so proud of myself because I made it on time for work 70% of the time this past year which is a huge improvement over the 50% I managed the year before,” it tells you what kind of conversation you’re in for.

So before your next performance review period starts, simply ask your people to make a list of their proudest moments. If your organization conducts 12-month reviews, ask employees for their proudest moments from the past year. Or if you do six-month reviews, have them look back on the past six months and answer the question in writing. And just like self-appraisals, always do your own evaluation of the employee before you read their proudest moments. This allows you to avoid neurological biases that can skew your evaluation and make the review less objective.

Learn more about how to make employee reviews less painful including why talking about money should be done in a separate conversation by attending our webinar Taking the Pain Out of Performance Reviews.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

View the original article here

One Thing Leaders Can Do to Be Better Listeners

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AppId is over the quota

One thing we as leaders can do to be better listeners is to acknowledge that there are certain emotions that, when we feel them, we shut down and stop listening.

We need to be aware of these patterns in our own behavior so that when we experience the triggers that set us off, we can anticipate that we’re probably going to have some bad reactions and circumvent that from happening. At the core of all this, of course, is that when we have those bad emotions, we need to figure out what caused us to feel that way so we can avoid having it happen again in the future. 

This is the essence of listening

If you know that when you hear somebody talk about something in a particular way that causes you to feel something negative, and as a result of that negative feeling, you react badly and it shuts down your ability to listen, you’ve just established an emotional chain that you need to break. Because once you know there are certain things that when you hear them, they set you off and cause bad reactions, you are prepared to recognize it coming and say “Oh wow, this is going to spark an emotion I want to avoid.” This allows you to handle that emotion differently so you stay plugged in and listening to what’s being said instead of wandering off into a negative emotional reaction.

It is fascinating and amazingly reinforcing that when you start to become more aware of an emotion, you become more aware of yourself. And the more self-aware you are, and the more aware you are of others, the more control you have. So, try to anticipate the situations that are going to set you off so you can put yourself in the right frame of mind to be able to compartmentalize your own emotions, bracket them, and key into what other people are saying. This way, you do hear that critical nugget of information that you absolutely need to hear.

For more tips on great listening, including how to stop yourself from making snap judgments and learning to dissect every conversation in order to ensure you hear the message that’s truly being delivered, attend our webinar Lead by Listening.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

View the original article here

A Listening Exercise to do Next Time you Watch a Movie

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AppId is over the quota

Leading by listening requires developing two kinds of awareness. There’s self-awareness, which involves getting a handle on personal triggers so you know what sets you off, what makes you pay attention, etc. And then there’s awareness of others, what we like to call “other-awareness” where we learn to observe and interpret the emotions of others so we can wipe out any wrongful assumptions we might otherwise make and just stay focused on the facts.

There are two parts to developing other-awareness. The first is developing our observational skills, which is all about focusing and paying attention, and the second part is interpreting those signals. Now, I’m aware this all sounds amazingly easy: we just pay attention and that gives us more other-awareness… piece of cake, right? The problem is we observe all day long, but we typically don’t pay that much attention to what we’re seeing. Consider, for example, a dime. You’ve handled dimes plenty of times in your life, and you’ve had ample opportunity for observation. But can you really describe a dime? “It’s silver and ridged on the edges,” most of us will say. Fewer will know it’s Franklin D. Roosevelt’s face on a dime. And even fewer will be able to correctly say which direction his profile faces, or what’s written on the back of a dime. This is where other-awareness comes in; it’s keying in and really paying attention and more accurately processing everything that’s going on.

Build other-awareness with this fun exercise 

To build other-awareness, there’s an exercise you can do the next time you watch a movie. The movie just needs to be on DVD or on-demand, any format that allows you to pause and repeat a scene a few times.

Here’s how the exercise works. First, pick a movie (it can be one you’ve seen before, but it’s more fun with a film you’ve never seen) that includes a scene with two or three people interacting. Avoid big action movies, as we’re looking for strong dialogue between human beings. You’re going to watch this scene where people are interacting twice: once with the sound off, and then a second time with the sound on.

The first viewing, with the sound off, you just want to observe. What are the people on screen doing? Without any sound to help you out, try and key into what is happening with these characters. Check out their facial expressions: are they smiling, staring, frowning, eyebrows raised, blinking rapidly? Are they breaking eye contact or are they holding eye contact? What’s happening to the color of their faces? Is one person’s face suddenly getting red? Who has tight lips or relaxed lips? Is someone wetting their lips?

Next look at gestures: maybe someone is nodding, or shaking, or covering their mouth or eyes, scratching their face. Where are everyone’s hands? Maybe a character is cracking his knuckles.  What about their bodies? What are the angles of everyone’s heads? Are the characters close to each other or far apart? Are they slumping? Are they leaning forward? Are they shrugging? Doing this without sound removes all other distractions and just lets you observe. Then, with the sound still off, start to make some interpretations. Assess which emotions you think are present just by watching body language, facial expressions, etc.

Now watch the same scene with the sound on. And again, you want to key into the gestures, facial expressions, etc. while now also listening to the words and assessing what emotions you think are present. How do your silent observations compare to the observations you made when you had audio cues to help? How observant are you?

Now take this exercise back to the workplace

Meetings are a great place to do this, so the next meeting you are in, observe all the facial expressions, the gestures and the body display, and start to mentally note what emotions you think are present. What’s neat about doing this at work is you can test some of your hypotheses.

So after you’ve made your observations and started to figure out the emotions you think are present; come up with three possible explanations for those observed behaviors; three hypotheses. Maybe hypothesis #1 is: I’m watching Jane and maybe she’s feeling sick, and #2 is: Maybe Jane’s upset because we’re talking about her new assignment and she’s confused by the directions, and hypothesis #3 is: Maybe Jane’s tired. What we want to do is come up with various hypotheses for the behaviors we see because when we develop alternative and multiple hypotheses, it prevents us from getting fixated on just one type of solution. Once we get fixated, it’s very hard to keep an open mind about anything. But when we have multiple hypotheses for things, that is, by definition, having a much more open mind, it automatically amps up our listening abilities.

Next consider the likelihood of each of your three hypotheses by observing some more. See if you can find additional evidence, for example, in the “Jane is tired” hypothesis, you might observe: “Jane has two cups of coffee on her desk and she doesn’t usually drink coffee. She has been working late the last few nights, maybe she is tired.” If possible, you can even go to the person and say, “Listen, just curious, but I noticed you’re staring off in the sky, your arms were closed off, etc. Since we’re friends here, I wonder if I can ask you what’s going through your mind, what were you feeling right then?” That way you can find out which of your hypotheses were correct.

The goal of this exercise is to teach you how to be a more effective observer of human behavior and more effective at correlating those observations to your assessment of what emotions other people are feeling. This allows you to develop a more effective sense of the causality of those behaviors and those emotions. Because the more aware of yourself and others you become, the more effective you will be at distilling everything you hear so you can get right to the nugget of the information you need.

For more tips on improving your listening skills, including a 7-part checklist that tests whether you’ve truly heard all the information you need, attend our webinar Lead by Listening.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

View the original article here

Delivering Presentations: The Rules of Dating Apply Here Too!

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AppId is over the quota

Imagine you’re out on a date and your goal is to really impress. You want to be the only person in the room your date can see or hear. Given that goal, what would you say is the best way to start the date:

Start the date by sharing your life history including all your great accomplishments and the things that matter most to you.Start the date by talking to your date about the kinds of things he/she finds valuable.

Now, in the dating world, pretty much everybody gets it right, you talk about “them.” But here’s the shocker: once we move into the world of business presentations; another place where winning quick audience favor is critical, pretty much everybody gets it wrong. Because instead of using what we know works, most folks begin their business presentations by talking about “themselves.” In fact; over 90% of the presentations we’ve studied began with a slide that looks like this…

And unless you’re attending a narcissist’s convention, this is just a terrible slide and horrible start to your presentation. You don’t even have to read every bullet point to feel the automatic turn off. This slide is all about “you”: when you were founded, how many clients you have, how big you are, how many awards you’ve won, etc. If you used a personalized version of this slide in a dating situation, I guarantee you’d be sitting alone at the bar before the first round of drinks arrived.

It doesn’t matter if you’re presenting to one person or a room of a thousand, the only way to grab your audience’s attention is to spend the first 10 minutes addressing issues that matter to them. Neurologically, those first 10 minutes are when your audience forms their opinions about you. It’s when their brains absorb all the incoming data (that would be you) and then decide whether or not to allocate any more neurological energy to listening to that big noise coming at them (again, that’s you). And because you know this little tidbit of knowledge that comes to us from the world of brain science, you can use it to your advantage.

Dating Research that Proves Affect of Opening with Messages About “Them”

Let’s jump back to dating for a minute. Perhaps you’ve heard of a free online dating site called OkCupid that was created by a couple of guys who met while at Harvard. Now, I married my high school sweetheart, so I don’t go there trolling for dates. But back when the founders were still actively blogging, I used to check out OKTrends and I was pretty impressed with the statistical research they shared. Like the study where they looked at the kinds of words men use in their opening messages to women, to learn what does (and doesn’t) generate a reply. As you can imagine, some of the opening messages were incredibly cheesy. For example, some of the words the study revealed that DON’T work (i.e. women did not reply to the man’s message) were: “sexy”, “beautiful” and “hot.”

I’m happy to report that there’s a redeeming flip side to this. Because there were some words and phrases the guys used in their emails to women that generated huge numbers of responses.  For example:  “You mention…”, “noticed that…” and “curious what…” all got fantastic responses (statistically, messages with those phrases get double the normal response rates). So basically, if a guy appears to have read a woman’s profile, and he shows knowledge and interest in the things she’s interested in, he’s got a much greater chance of hearing back from her. A good “guy message” would sound like this: “You mention that you like cooking and I noticed that you travelled to Italy. I’m curious what your favorite region was in terms of cuisine?” That’s a guy I might let my daughter go out with—when she gets to dating age, and luckily, that’s far in the future.

The lesson in all this is: whether you’re dating or making million-dollar presentations, start by talking about the other person and their interests. Let them know that you know what they want to hear about, that you are sensitive to what they want to gain from this interaction and that you care about the same things that they care about.

In my upcoming webinar, The Secrets of Killer Presentations, you’ll learn how to assess the four personality types you’ll find in your audience so you can begin every presentation knowing exactly what your audience wants to hear from you. And if you’re addressing multiple personality types, you’ll learn how to time a presentation to safeguard those different attention spans so you know when to deliver the bottom line, when to be to linear, when to stick to the facts and when to get warm and fuzzy to build an emotional connection.

An expert in aligning goals and people to create thriving organizations, Mark leads one of the world’s largest studies on leadership and employee engagement.

Mark’s award-winning work has been featured numerous times in publications including The Wall St. Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the Washington Post. His media appearances include CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News and NPR. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, University of Rochester and University of Florida. Mark is the author of five books including the McGraw-Hill international bestsellers, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your People to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More and Hard Goals. Mark’s most recent book, Hiring for Attitude, reflects the team’s latest research and insight into how hiring decisions can align with engagement goals and culture characteristics.

Leadership IQ’s turnaround, culture change, and performance enhancement through employee engagement work has been recognized in a diverse set of industries including healthcare, financial services, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and hospitality. From his roots as a turnaround specialist, Mark created Leadership IQ to address problems in performance before they hit the bottom line.

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