A fate worse than death?
Mesmerising an audience
There’s an urban myth you've no doubt heard: more people fear public speaking than fear death.
Yet, for every person for whom that's true, there are also those who'd rather be on stage, than in the audience, nine times out of ten. I used to be phobic about public speaking, but (incredibly to my 20-year old self) I now make my living from leading strategic discussions and, almost daily, am presenting to groups. And, nowadays, I happen to love it.
But whether you’re terrified of, or fascinated by, public speaking, it's instructive to watch Bill Clinton presenting Barack Obama’s re-nomination as the Democratic Presidential candidate back in 2012.
This isn’t new of course, but this week I spent 50 minutes enthralled by Clinton, as much by his message as by his style. Clinton wrote it himself, delivered it without notes, and if you track carefully, you’ll see him liberally using all Top 10 Presentation Golden Rules:
don’t take your eyes off your audience;
punctuate with spaces;
emphasise by varying voice tone;
repeat important words and phrases (Clinton is almost hypnotic at times);
vary your facial expression (I saw everything in him from disgust to delight);
be provocative;
tell great stories;
invite the audience into your own world (“We all believe . . .”)
be humble and acknowledge failures
be magnanimous and acknowledge others
enjoy yourself (that’s a bonus 11th, if you were counting)
Question: When you speak, what do listeners hear and see?
Experts are changing
Last time you had a strange pain, what was the first thing you did? Visit your GP? Ask a friend or family member? Or look up Google? Today, most of us will look on-line for health information, on subjects as diverse as whether we should take probiotics, to whether a cat vomiting is a problem or not, or whether smacking a child will damage them psychologically in the long-term.
What this means is that the job of the expert is changing.
Many 'white coated' professions still exist: in medicine, allied health, psychology, veterinary science. Most of them don’t, of course, wear white coats (although some still do) but their philosophy of care is drawn from mid-20th century best practice: "Trust me, I'm a doctor".
Today, it's not that we trust doctors less, but we are better educated and have far more sources of information at our fingertips. There are 230,000 health and fitness apps in the Apple App Store alone!. This technological tsunami has ridden on the seismic shift in society which, since the 1960s, emphasises self-determination and personal empowerment. (Of course, this creates many vehicles for mis-information as well - note the many ways in which anti-vaccination hysteria is peddled).
These dramatic shifts gave birth to today's customers, who expect fundamentally different things from health experts (and all forms of experts, from our landscape gardeners, to architects, to accountants). I want to be treated as a peer of the expert, I want the practitioner to work with me not just to solve a problem and move on, and I expect an intelligent (if brief) discussion about options. Most of all, I want to manage certain aspects of my condition myself.
Regardless of whether the expert is our GP, our psychotherapist, the home care worker visiting our aged parent, or the speech therapist working with our child, they are increasingly working this way with us for three reasons:
- people who manage themselves get better outcomes;
- it's far cheaper to deliver services to self-maintained individuals;
- clients who self-manage report dramatically higher satisfaction with services.
If your company employs experts, here are some guidelines for this century's expert interactions. In other words, each client-expert encounter should leave the following four imprints with the customer, or client, or service user:
1. They know something about themselves or a means of action that they didn’t know before (the interaction is educative);
2. They've been shown something helpful about their progress to date (thereby heightening the person’s self-efficacy).
3. They feel better off (with that 30 or 60 minutes they’d rather have spent with you than not);
4. They have something to do (a pragmatic, action-based task that unifies the kinaesthetic, visual, and auditory world in which the person lives).
And, it doesn’t matter what service you are offering: financial services, design services, legal services, or personal development services, the four imprint above apply to you and your colleagues.
Question: How are you helping your customers self-manage?
Distributed leadership
We need fewer geniuses at the top of our organizations. Geniuses at the top of organizations who know they are geniuses fall into three traps. Firstly, they are very good at what they do. The second trap is that they are very hard workers. The third trap is that they think they are right.
A tremendously successful entrepreneur shocked his audience once by stating: “The secret of my success is that I am stupid and lazy. Being stupid means I surround myself with people smarter than me. Being lazy means that I find others to do the work.” Now, he’s speaking largely tongue in cheek, but this is the essence of distributed leadership.
But you don’t always want this. In crises you want an autocrat, someone powerful who can rally people around them via charisma and charm - or threats. “There is a fire. Get out! Do it now!” This is the way someone like Rupert Murdoch runs a News Corporation.
Bureaucratic systems don’t work on distributed leadership either. The founder of the English post office, Sir Roland Hill, was a bureaucratic genius. Mail delivery in the 1840’s was deeply corrupt and deeply inefficient. Hill had two single insights: prepayment and fixed prices. His system was simple: a penny per letter anywhere in the UK. These principles enabled an entire system of bureaucracy which we recognize almost 200 years later: postboxes, letterboxes, stamps, post offices and mail deliveries.
Of course, many of today’s dilemmas are much more complex than running a global media empire or delivering mail. For these sorts of complex tasks we do need more than autocrats and more than bureaucrats. We need geniuses of distributed leadership where the head is important not as a decision maker or an authority or the highest pinnacle of expertise but in four other ways.
The first form of genius is the leader is as a designer of key concepts. This is the Steve Jobs model, and this was his real job at Apple.
The second form of genius is as a mobiliser of people in the community with shared values. This was Barack Obama’s talent. And, dare I say it, Donald Trump’s too.
The third type is a very powerful channeler of resources. The microfinancing genius, Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, exemplifies this.
The fourth form of genius is a collaborative genius: A.G. Lafley, CEO of Proctor and Gamble, has entered into literally hundreds of collaborations ensuring that that company continues as a global leader. I call this genuine distributed leadership because while the Lafleys and the Jobses and the Gores and the Yunuses are rightfully recognized in the press, they actually do their best work by creating conditions within which others can do their best work.
Question: How do you cultivate distributed leadership in your organisation ?
Do let me know your thoughts on the questions above in the comments. And, click the heart to let me you’ve enjoyed reading this week.
Have a great weekend, and I’ll be with you again next Friday.
Andrew