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You may have been selected by your executive to initiate and see through some change program in your organization. Or you may have decided that the time has come to make your mark by dusting off the cobwebs in your workplace. However your change role came about, you have a challenging task ahead of you.

Consider this sobering thought. In spite of the importance of successfully implementing workplace change for maintaining your business’s competitiveness, most change initiatives fail to deliver the expected organizational benefits. This failure occurs for a number of reasons:

• absence of a change champion or one who is too junior in the organization

• poor executive sponsorship or senior management support

• poor project management skills

• hope rested on a one-dimensional solution

• political infighting and turf wars

• poorly defined organizational objectives

• change team diverted to other projects

Do you recognize one or more of these in your organization from previous initiatives? You have probably experienced already one major cost of such failure. The cynical and burned out employees left behind only make the next change objective even more difficult to accomplish. It should come as no surprise that the fear of managing change and its impacts is a leading cause of anxiety in managers.

Your first step in becoming a successful change leader is fully understanding your organization and matching the initiative to your organization’s real needs. This means not just adopting the latest management fad. Recognize that bringing about useful and meaningful change is fundamentally about changing people’s behavior in certain desired ways. It is not primarily about installing a new system or rearranging the organizational structure. If people in the end do not behave and work differently, then the money and time spent in “doing stuff” is wasted.

You will see from the above list of reasons for failure that lack of technical expertise is not the main impediment to successful change. Leadership and management skills, such as visioning, prioritizing, planning, providing feedback and rewarding success, are key factors in any successful change initiative. Concentrate on these skills that will help you get people on board and to keep them on board for the life of the project and beyond. Get your mentor or a training consultant to perform an honest gap analysis on your skill set and then get the coaching or training that you need.

Whatever change program you are implementing, one key area in which you need to pay close attention is the identification and management of your change program stakeholders. A stakeholder is any person with an interest in the change process or the outcome of your proposed change. Be politically savvy. Your stakeholders will bring a mix of competing interests and will often act to further their own power, influence and survival. An added challenge for you as change leader is that such political maneuvering is often disguised as impartial and rational argument. Think about who are your major stakeholders. Think about what you will say to them to get each of them on side. When you have done that, write up a stakeholder communication plan and make sure you follow through.

Another essential activity you would do well to not neglect is setting clearly defined and measurable objectives. Goal setting done well engages stakeholders and commits them to the program. Other benefits include focusing effort to where it is important and providing a yardstick for measuring program success. Are your program’s goals fuzzy and hard to put a finger on, or are they specific and measurable? Do they link to the strategic objectives of your organization? Get all of the key stakeholders to work with you in devising the goals that will define the success of your program. Getting their input during the initial stages will give them a genuine “stake” in your program.

Fundamentally, it is people and not money or infrastructure that will make your organizational change happen. Change initiatives fail where roles and responsibilities are left unclear or not agreed. In organizations with a toxic performance culture, many employees and managers spend much of their time and effort in hiding from responsibility. What are the key roles and responsibilities for bringing about the needed change in your area? Have you identified the key tasks for each person belonging to each of the four key change role groups: Change Driver, Change Implementer, Change Enabler and Change Recipient? Selecting the right people for the right roles is also critically important. Find out all you can about selecting, leading and managing teams.

I mention teams here because no matter what your change program is about, most likely the people working in the various change roles will not be working in isolation. More and more, results can only be achieved through people working collaboratively – in teams. Are your teams of the optimal size of around five to eight members? Is each team being led by the right team leader? Do they have the necessary technical and interpersonal skills? One reason why teams are much more productive than individuals working in isolation is that team members leverage off each other’s strengths and compensate for each other’s weaknesses. So, do your teams have the right balance of natural working styles? There will be times when one or more of your teams get stuck. When they hit a brick wall, make sure that you have a strategy in place for moving them forward. As you have already guessed, a permanently stuck team leads to a permanently stuck change program.

All this talk about the value of teams highlights the importance of training in skilling up teams and bedding in change. Many organizations, however, fail to benefit from the resources spent on training. Soon after the training is completed, employees continue to cling on to the old way of doing things. Review how successfully your organization is using training to improve people capability. Ensure that your change program has a well-articulated training plan based on a thorough analysis of skill gaps. I said that successful change is about changing people’s behavior. So, make sure that your training programs focus on behavior change and are not simply about delivering the most content in the shortest possible time. To help bed in the new behaviors, budget and plan for lots of back in the workplace support. Change will not happen if your managers do not actively support the training. Make sure that they “walk the talk” and are not simply feigning approval in front of the executive.

Even if your training is well delivered and supported, a proportion of your employees, customers and suppliers will resist your change efforts. Unless you have a well thought out strategy for dealing with negative reactions, these resisters will wear your program down until it fizzles out or ends with a bang. Find out which of your resisters are actively fighting out in the open and which are working from the underground. Sometimes the reasons given for resisting change are a smokescreen. In these cases, you will need to do some digging to reveal the real reasons for the resistance. In some instances, resistance is a natural reaction to the proposed changes. Help these people work through the psychological process of denial, resistance and finally acceptance. Importantly, develop a strategy before implementation for identifying sources of resistance and for turning it around.

You have before you a huge task fraught with uncertainty, but filled with incredible opportunity. The above guide to being a triumphant change leader is not the last word on how to bring about successful organizational change. In fact, it is just the beginning for you. Read all you can about leading, coaching and influencing people through change. Your most important and rewarding lessons, though, will be learned as you apply your new found knowledge to your real-life change initiatives. I suspect that the most important lesson that you will learn is that to be successful your change program must not be your change program. I wish you well on your journey.

The art of clear thinking is a learnable technique that will help you to sharpen your mind and allow you to cut through rhetoric and evaluate the reasoning (if any) behind the words.

To initiate this process, I want to show you six common fallacies, which blur accurate analysis of ideas.

Learn them and apply them every day.

Democratic fallacy

Unreliable reasoning that stems from the idea that the “majority opinion” is a source of truth and a reliable guide for action.

This is a very dodgy way to discover “Truth”

For example;

Imagine a passenger aircraft is having engine trouble.

Would it be right for the pilot to hold a vote as to whether they should attempt an emergency landing?

If not, why not?

Is the majority opinion in the office a reliable guide to intelligent action?

Can a million people be wrong?

Be careful if you are tempted to reinforce your argument with the cry “everyone else thinks so, too.”

Correlation-cause confusion

Correlation-Cause confusion is a common trap that people fall into. Just because two things occur at the same time does not necessarily mean that one caused the other.

It is a mistake to treat a correlation as a causal connection

If I put on my lucky ring, and I go out and find a ten pound note, did the ring cause it to happen?

If a new boss comes to work and the sales next month go down, what does it mean?

Getting personal

Getting personal is the mistake of dismissing an idea because of the person suggesting it.

Imagine an overweight scientist has done research to prove that exercise reduces the risk of heart disease.

You could be tempted to say, “What does he know? Look at the state of him!”

Or you could say “He should practice what he preaches” and dismiss the valuable idea.

Halo effect

Halo effect is the reverse of the above. It means that you give extra credibly to an idea because of the person.

For example Elvis Presley was asked whether he thought the Americans were right to be at war in Vietnam.

He wisely answers ” I don’t want to get into that. I am an entertainer. Ask me about my music”

I remember a radio programme asking agony-aunt Claire Raynor what she thought about the state of the criminal justice system in England and Wales.

What specialised knowledge does her opinion carry?

Separate ideas from the person proposing them and evaluated an idea as a “thing” in its own right. Determine if the idea can act as a guide to intelligent action.

Arbitrary assertion

Is an unsubstantiated statement of belief with no principle, reasoning or sensory evidence to support it.

It is a mistake to grant plausibility to an assertion simply because it is forcefully delivered or repeated.

Frequency and volume should never take the place of logic in your decision to accept an idea as true.

Napoleon once quipped “Repetition is my strongest argument” (and then lost 250,000 in his disastrous Russian campaign)

Equally, it follows that you should avoid trying to convince someone else by simply becoming louder and more passionate. Instead strive to make your reasoning inescapable.

Gamblers fallacy

Is the mistaken belief that your chances of winning increases the longer you play.

This is a false idea.

If you are doing the wrong thing it makes no difference how long you do it. It still will not work.

If your current plan has not been yielding any meaningful results, it will not change fortunes tomorrow.

* Change your ideas.

* Change the plan.

* Change the actions.

* The results must and will change.

Critical reasoning to develop clarity of thought will cause you to do three things:

You will:

* Listen more intently

* Ask more questions

* Think more before you make your decision

All of these will help you get better results

Four step formula for constructing an argument

1. Make sure that the reasons/evidence you offer are relevant to the conclusion. (Ensure your reasoning has no fallacies).

2. Is your conclusion the best based on the reasons or evidence? Ask, Is this conclusion justified.

3. If your conclusion is for some new action or policy, can the policy be carried out practically?

4. Consider the counter arguments that could weaken your position. Make sure you have accessed all relevant information.

Chris Farmer is the leader of The Corporate Coach Group, and a publichsed author in Business Coaching. His training courses through the Corporate Coach Group have helped hundreds of managers become immediatly more effective.

When projects do not make it to deadlines, there are many things going on behind the scenes. As an accidental manager, you are tasked to keep the boat on an even keel with few resources and people. Project management training can help you man the ship effectively and take on more projects.

When Do You Need Project Management Training?

The boss has tossed you a small scale project, which turns out to be a titanic assignment for you because you do not have the skills to manage different capabilities and organize the whole show. Yet you take on the task hoping you pass muster and reap accolades for a job well done. You are one of the thousands of befuddled managers needing project management training.

Here is why you need project management training:

* You cannot produce a credible project plan

* Your project goes helter-skelter in different directions

* Your risk management techniques are outdated or implausible

* You cannot estimate work schedule confidently

* Your monitoring tools are inadequate or inapplicable

* You cannot run a motivated team

* You lack leadership skills

Can tell your boss no? Or do you take the project and hit the books because your boss expects you to effectively run a project with few people and resources, on a tight schedule, and get maximum results?

What Is Project Management Training?

The project management training educates project managers to foresee dangers that may derail project plans and activities. They should be able to minimize risks and solve problems head on to make sure that the project is completed successfully notwithstanding the risks. If you had the opportunity to have this training early on, no projects would be too big or difficult to handle.

The training also takes up management of IT skills when overseeing a project. This is a convenient and faster way to keep tabs of what is happening to all actors participating in the project. Instead of lugging journals, logbooks, and calendars, you log on to your PC and look at the worksheets of everybody to check how the work is going.

Knowing the IT part of project management training is just an aspect, but the bigger picture is effectively managing resources and meeting the project deadline because extended or delayed project activities incur more expenses, and the company loses revenues.

Why is the Project Management Training Important?

Projects, big or small, need a good manager to keep the project going on schedule. There is the competition to think about and the revenues to be earned from the project. During the course of the project, there will be slip ups or the project may go full steam ahead; a good manager will answer the following questions:

* What factors contributed to the success and failure of the project?

* What were the frequent problems that cropped up and why?

* How much resources were used and how were these used?

* Were resources available at the right time or not, and why?

* Were the skills required available and competent?

* What were the lessons learned?

* Were all aspects of project implementation documented accurately?

* Did management respond to issues quickly?

Project management training will help you see the big picture. The questions mentioned earlier are your guideposts to become an effective manager; hence, the training is important on two counts - career advancement and project success. Need you ask more?

Don’t pass up project management training. You can always get PMI exam prep to help you hurdle your PMI exam. Get more details from threeo.ca now.

I don’t want to be taken in by the latest fad in leadership development, but neither do I want to be behind the times when it comes to leadership thinking. Can you give me the inside track on where the experts are at with the research and what’s important for me to consider when it comes to leadership development today?

If you read many of the reviews of how the science of leadership development has evolved, you could be excused for thinking that what we’ve learned has followed an ordered path, with the development of a new approach coinciding with the abandonment of the existing one. For example, the early 20th century was a time when personality was the main focus of research on leadership, while the 50s and 60s saw a shift in focus to what leaders did in the workplace. This was when leader behaviours became the main focus of research efforts.

The challenge for experts at that time was the inconsistency of many of the research results. While certain behavioural styles and specific personality traits did predict leader effectiveness, they did not do so in all situations. But it wasn’t all bad news. There was unrealised value in the approach of the trait theorists, and the researchers of leader behaviours never really went away. Those in the field of leadership began to realise that under different situations, different personality traits and different leader behaviours were more effective at predicting leader performance. This led to the so-called ‘contingency’ theories of leadership. These theories identified the situations under which the different combinations of leader personality traits and behaviours predicted performance. Today, it is widely accepted that both leader personality and leader behaviour are important predictors of leader effectiveness. Far from being conceptual cul-de-sacs, both traits and behaviours are critical to our understanding of leader effectiveness, and both approaches ought to be included in your leadership development programmes.

For you to use personality and behaviour effectively, we would make a couple of recommendations based on the research literature and our experience:

• The first is with regard to personality. You need to interpret profiles of multiple personality traits, rather than looking at single dimensions of personality. The rational here is simple. Whether a leader is effective or not is likely to be judged on multiple dimensions. These dimensions are likely to be predicted by different aspects of a leader’s personality – so we need to look at the whole of leaders’ personalities.

• The second recommendation is with regard to the way leader behaviour is assessed. Up until now, there has been a tendency to focus on broad dimensions of leader behaviour, for example, whether a leader is task focused or relationship focused. This has served leadership development researchers well for a long time. But there is a need now to move to a more finely grained model of leadership behaviour that focuses on specific aspects of being relationship or task focused. For example, being relationship focused may mean that you are good at developing people, or it may mean that you have high empathy. These different aspects of being relationship focused will predict different leader outcomes.

If you are able to consider the above when using models of personality and behaviour in your leadership development programs, you have a great chance of improving your effectiveness at identifying and developing organisational leadership capability – and not being taken in by the latest fad!

Tim Kennedy is writing for CHPD. Founded in 1996, CHPD teams up business and academic partners, including the London Business School and scholars from Harvard, to develop their leadership and developmentprogrammes. The management training company has offices in the UK, Australia and the States, and is now intending to open an office in India. Having grown from four initial members, there are now 60 full time staff and 150 external consultants working in 25 countries across the globe to provide exceptional leadership and team training, helping to find the leaders of tomorrow.

I don’t want to be taken in by the latest fad in leadership development, but neither do I want to be behind the times when it comes to leadership thinking. Can you give me the inside track on where the experts are at with the research and what’s important for me to consider when it comes to leadership development today?

If you read many of the reviews of how the science of leadership development has evolved, you could be excused for thinking that what we’ve learned has followed an ordered path, with the development of a new approach coinciding with the abandonment of the existing one. For example, the early 20th century was a time when personality was the main focus of research on leadership, while the 50s and 60s saw a shift in focus to what leaders did in the workplace. This was when leader behaviours became the main focus of research efforts.

The challenge for experts at that time was the inconsistency of many of the research results. While certain behavioural styles and specific personality traits did predict leader effectiveness, they did not do so in all situations. But it wasn’t all bad news. There was unrealised value in the approach of the trait theorists, and the researchers of leader behaviours never really went away. Those in the field of leadership began to realise that under different situations, different personality traits and different leader behaviours were more effective at predicting leader performance. This led to the so-called ‘contingency’ theories of leadership. These theories identified the situations under which the different combinations of leader personality traits and behaviours predicted performance. Today, it is widely accepted that both leader personality and leader behaviour are important predictors of leader effectiveness. Far from being conceptual cul-de-sacs, both traits and behaviours are critical to our understanding of leader effectiveness, and both approaches ought to be included in your leadership development programmes.

For you to use personality and behaviour effectively, we would make a couple of recommendations based on the research literature and our experience:

• The first is with regard to personality. You need to interpret profiles of multiple personality traits, rather than looking at single dimensions of personality. The rational here is simple. Whether a leader is effective or not is likely to be judged on multiple dimensions. These dimensions are likely to be predicted by different aspects of a leader’s personality – so we need to look at the whole of leaders’ personalities.

• The second recommendation is with regard to the way leader behaviour is assessed. Up until now, there has been a tendency to focus on broad dimensions of leader behaviour, for example, whether a leader is task focused or relationship focused. This has served leadership development researchers well for a long time. But there is a need now to move to a more finely grained model of leadership behaviour that focuses on specific aspects of being relationship or task focused. For example, being relationship focused may mean that you are good at developing people, or it may mean that you have high empathy. These different aspects of being relationship focused will predict different leader outcomes.

If you are able to consider the above when using models of personality and behaviour in your leadership development programs, you have a great chance of improving your effectiveness at identifying and developing organisational leadership capability – and not being taken in by the latest fad!

Nigel Guenole is writing for CHPD. Founded in 1996, CHPD teams up business and academic partners, including the London Business School and scholars from Harvard, to develop their leadership and developmentprogrammes. The management training company has offices in the UK, Australia and the States, and is now intending to open an office in India. Having grown from four initial members, there are now 60 full time staff and 150 external consultants working in 25 countries across the globe to provide exceptional leadership and team training, helping to find the leaders of tomorrow.

All leader managers share six common characteristics:

1. Purpose

2. Communication

3. Plan Ahead

4. Conflict

5. Inspire Self towards the positive

6. Inspire Others towards the positive

These six can be summarised as;

“Be clear, treat people and problems according to the laws of reason and then, within reason, maintain a positive mental attitude.

Clarity is the most important characteristic of the leader manager.

Clarity relates to developing two specific forms;

1. purpose

2. communication

It means knowing what goals you want to achieve and the ability to focus your mind without distraction for months and years.

Any person, who takes the necessary time to achieve a state of definite purpose, has the potential to lead others to that purpose.

Communication

You may have clear ideas, but you may not be able to express those ideas to others such that they understand the full meaning.

Anyone wanting to develop their skills as a leader should develop their ability to use language:

* With accuracy

* With persuasion

The leader needs to be able to simultaneously be able to clearly explain complex ideas, and do so in language that will inspire other people to act.

Reason is the ability to think clearly

It means developing the ability to build plans of action that are likely to achieve the goal.

There are two main aspects where you may want to use your powers of reason;

1. Planning

2. Conflict resolution.

Planning

Planning is the ability to;

1. Prioritise tasks according to value and deadline

2. Delegate relatively lower value tasks

3. Handle interruptions

4. Make accurate decisions

5. Get the maximum value from every hour spent

Planning is a prerequisite of continued achievement.

Conflict

Conflict is inevitable and even beneficial, provided conflict is resolved rationally with no anger or enmity.

If conflict remains rational, better solutions emerge. When two people’s ideas contradict each other, through synthesis, a new idea emerges.

The team leader must be able to resolve conflict;

1. Quickly

2. Objectively

3. In a factual way

4. According to rational principles

This takes careful thought and careful language.

Emotions

The Positive emotions such as;

1. Enthusiasm,

2. Confidence

3. Energy

Are the spark that transforms logical plans into action.

Most people live in the hope that something outside of them will inspire positive emotions inside of them.

But the environment has a tendency to de-motivate, because bad news sells more copy than good news.

We are fed “fear messages”

To keep going through the disappointments the leader must create enthusiasm

The ability to manage the emotions has two aspects;

1. Your own emotions

2. The emotions of others

Manage your own emotions

If it is the leaders job to inspire others, then who inspires the leaders?

Nobody.

The leaders inspire themselves.

That means;

1. Constantly being positive

2. Setting up challenges that they can meet

3. Expecting things to be better in the future

4. Refusing to accept the words “I can’t” and replacing them with “We can, if…”

5. Taking defeat as temporary and always coming back stronger with a better plan.

This is each person’s individual choice: to be as confident in the future as his or her present circumstances reasonably permit.

This takes mental discipline, the ability to control your own mind, and the constant practice of the art of positive affirmation.

The ability to inspire others.

In this regard there are three types

The person who does inspire you. You may know at least one person that you can rely on to raise your spirits,

These people represent the ideal.

The second type is the person who is up one day and down the next,

On a good day this person is optimistic.

On a bad day this person is equally negative.

This does not represent the ideal because the moodiness creates uncertainty.

The third type is consistent but they are consistently down and pessimistic.

You can present this person with any situation and they will see the reasons why it is bad news.

This type represents the antithesis of the ideal.

In summary these virtues are;

1. Clear Goal

2. Clear communicator

3. Planner

4. Rational conflict manager

5. Ability to inspire self

6. Ability to inspire others

Our suggestion to you is;

Memorise the above six, and consciously develop yourself in each area.

Chris Farmer is an expert in Leadership Management Training. His training courses through the Corporate Coach Group have helped hundreds of managers become immediatly more effective.

The Canadian Society for Training and Development (CSTD) is a not-for-profit membership association dedicated to the profession of training, workplace learning and human resources development. The CSTD offers awards to honor Canadian-developed stand-alone learning products and programs once a year. These types of training products must have learning objectives, instructional material, and methods to evaluate learning.

Criteria for Winning the Canadian Society for Training and Development Awards

1. Originality - Entry addresses current need in an enterprising manner.

2. Instructional Design - Entry respects Adult learning principles

3. Evaluation Strategy - entry measures Kirkpatrick’s 4 levels of evaluation.

4. Packaging - Entry has visual appeal

5. Communication Style - entry is well-organized, clearly written and easy to follow in language, grammar and content.

6. Overall Value - Entry offers value to the organization/purchaser and to the training profession.

The awards are given based on merit of submission, not in comparison with other submissions.

Entry Categories for the CSTD Award

1. WOW Award - Process or program that introduces a new idea into the marketplace in the form of a new product or service or n improvement in organization or process.

2. External Learning Program - Classroom based programs and/or a blend of learning modalities designed for sale on the open market.

3. Internal Learning Program - Classroom based programs and/or a blend of learning modalities designed for exclusive use within a company.

4. External E-Learning Training Program - Instructional content or learning experiences that are delivered, enabled, or mediated by electronic technology and designed for sale on the open market.

5. Internal E-Learning Training Program - Instructional content or learning experie4nces that are delivered, enabled, or mediated by electronic technology and designed for exclusive use within a company.

Award Benefits

As a member of the CSTD, you gain professional recognition, educational resources, services, networks and international partnership with others in your industry. You will find validation that your learning product uses “best practice” learning principles as well as receive feedback outlining merits and areas of improvement at the Canadian Society for Training and Development Conference. Recognition of your learning product through being awarded the CSTD Award for Training Excellence will enhance your marketing through a profile in the Award ceremony booklet during the presentation at the CSTD

All of these things will benefit your company or organization as well as give authority in your industry. Your clients will have confidence that your learning program or products will provide above industry standard training for their employees. With this confidence of authority in your field, your company is sure to guarantee superior training methodology to future clients.

The CSTD Canadian Awards for Training Excellence have honored innovative, Canadian-developed learning products and programs since 1995. This program is open to all member organizations. Entries are judged on originality, instructional design, evaluation strategy, packaging, communication style and overall value. The CSTD is a strategic world leader, striving for excellence in the workplace learning and performance business applications. Validation through peer feedback is an ideal way to ensure your learning product or training program uses best practice learning principles.

A Canadian Society for Training and Development Awards gives your clients and peers confidence that your Management Training program exceeds industry standards.

Passion

Although developing proper eye-contact technique and learning how and when to pause are absolutely essential to acquiring “The Skills” - you’re not finished yet. The last element involves adding the emotional to the mechanical. What we’re referring to here is the element that works to lock in your audience once you’ve successfully engaged them with your eye-contact and person-to-person approach. What we’re talking about is passion.

The truth is, you can break almost all the ‘rules’ about proper delivery if, in the end, you deliver your message with true passion. There are even some great speakers out there whom you’ll notice will occasionally break some of the rules, but they get away it because they wrap you up so tightly in their passion that you don’t notice.

With the easy availability of information today, there are many people who know a great deal. But knowledge matters very little if you can’t convey what you know with a level of passion that drives people to sit up and listen.

After all, it’s not likely that anybody in the audience is going to care more about your topic than you do, so to ensure that audiences come away interested and motivated to learn more, it’s incumbent upon you, the speaker, to stretch to the point of almost going over the top with passion and enthusiasm for their topic.

So how exactly do you convey passion?

Gestures

One way to let your audience know how you feel is to demonstrate it physically. In our on-site classes we have a lot of fun with the gestures module. What you need to know about gestures is that in keeping with Rule #2, when you incorporate meaningful body movement into your presentation, it provides a win-win for all.

The presenter wins, because every time you move the muscles in your upper body it burns some of the excess energy running through your body. In a modern world one-against-many environment, it’s not healthy for your career or your freedom if you choose to either fight your audience or flee the scene. So what do you do with that excess energy? You move your arms and hands in concert with the words coming out your mouth. You paint pictures of the words or the action you’re describing. We say in concert because, unfortunately, most of the body motions we see presenters use tend to distract from the message rather than add to it:

If you’re not guilty of any of the above, you probably err on the other side - in fact, most people don’t gesture at all. Or their gestures are so reserved that they fail to either burn off energy or signal enthusiasm. What you want to do is put enough energy into your gestures that you both burn calories and let the audiences know that you care enough about your topic to actually get physical about it.

So far, we’ve talked a lot about what not to do. Now its time to examine (and practice) the type of physical skills that will project your professionalism. As easy as it is to define distracting gestures and nuances, it is also fairly easy to adopt the practices that can define you as a professional presenter. In this lesson, we’ll work on the basics of maximizing your impact on the audience.

The first thing is to adopt a stance that both appears balanced and also allows you to keep from needing or wanting to rock or pace back and forth.

The Neutral Position

Then, figure out exactly what you are going to do with your hands and learn to gesture from the shoulders, not the elbows. Use your hands to describe and emphasize. Drop your hands down gently to your side (known as the neutral position) when you’re starting your speech or when you’re finished gesturing.

When you gesture from the neutral position, your gestures become more emphatic. If everything comes from the middle magnet position it looks like you are stuck in a phone booth. Dropping your hands down to your side is of course extremely difficult to do. With most people the hands immediately come back together like magnets or start grabbing things like clothing, various body parts like your face, or they jump back into your pockets.

So when you’re talking about an increase in sales, show us your hand up in the air. To demonstrate lowering costs, extend your other hand down below it. And here you might mention that the space in between represents profit, which is a good thing, because that’s where profit sharing comes from!

Studies have shown that gesturing lightens the cognitive load while speaking and actually helps you think. This may be why its not unusal to watch someone become very physically animated while talking on the phone, even though the person on the other end can’t see them.

For maximum impact, then, balance your stance, feet shoulder width apart. You want to use your hands, but you want to use them appropriately. You want to use them in a way that helps to further your message. And then you want to increase your volume, increase your inflection as much as possible to show how strongly you believe in the words you have to say.

Passion is the driver.

J. Douglas Jefferys is a principal at PublicSpeakingSkills.com, an international consulting firm specializing in training businesses of all sizes to communicate for maximum efficiency. The firm spreads its unique knowledge through on-site classes, public seminars, and high-impact videos, and can be reached through the Internet or at 888-663-7711.

The process that sets you on your way to speaking like the best speakers in the world, speakers who possess The Skills, goes like this: You find a target in your audience and you lock eyeballs. You deliver a complete thought to that one person, and then you do the hardest part, you pause. You pause before turning to the next person, and speak to the next person with your next thought.

Here’s a tip to begin the whole process correctly: Whenever you get up to speak, before you ever get out of your chair to come to the front of the room, know which person with whom you’re going to begin speaking. Have that person picked out before you get up there. Otherwise, you’re going to start off on the wrong foot: you’re going to start scanning around for those “friendly faces”. Choose the person you’re going to deliver your opening line to ahead of time, and begin your talk by looking at that one person and letting it flow.

Let’s be clear - one thing you definitely don’t want to do is to look for and speak to only a few “friendly faces”. That might be advice that works well for the few faces, but what about all the other less than friendly mugs? How do you suppose they feel when they notice that you are engaging other people but not them? Do you suppose it might get them thinking about something other than your message? Do you want a few people buying into what you’re saying, or the whole group? Your job, remember, is to look at everyone in the audience. Everyone in the room needs to leave feeling that you took the time to personally engage them as individuals.

If you’ve been to a speech or a presentation by someone with The Skills, you have no doubt noticed that they did this. In fact, have you ever been to a large event with perhaps hundreds of people and come away feeling that throughout the program the speaker kept coming back to you? That for some reason the speaker picked you out personally for special notice, and repeatedly?

This is perhaps the most powerful advantage you will have with The Skills, but it’s also the easiest to acquire, because it happens all by itself! One great thing about The Skills is that they are infinitely scalable. That is, the larger the crowd, the better they work for you, but you don’t work any harder. You engage in exactly the same behaviors with twelve people as you do with twelve hundred!

Parallax Universe

The reason is this: thanks to the ways our eyes are built, from distances as short as ten feet, a phenomenon known as parallax kicks in, and for the very same reason we see railroad tracks converge in the distance, our eyes see the other person’s eyes converging on ours even when they might be pointed a few feet away. Speakers with The Skills are always only looking directly at one person at a time. But from a short distance, and increasingly with greater distance, people sitting around the person to whom the speaker is actually looking believe the speaker is looking directly at them.

So from, say, fifteen feet away, the four people around the one person you’re looking at will feel the benefits of your engaging them as individuals. From thirty feet, twelve people around your target will swear you’ve singled them out for attention! Your circle of influence keeps getting larger and larger, but you’re just doing the exact same thing you’d do in a small conference room. In our classes we enjoy asking the women if they’ve ever been to a concert where the singer sang directly to them, and we inevitably get at least one response of, “Yes, but how did you know?”

Rock stars know how to create and keep fans, and this skill is a big tool in their box.When you lock on one person, everything else kind of fades away. You focus all of your attention on that one person and nothing else. For the moment, your entire universe is composed of the one person to whom you are directing your one thought. And when you do that, for those three to nine seconds or so, your brain isn’t making new threat calculations all the time, trying to get you cranked up, cranked up, cranked up. Everything kind of fades away.

Advantages

Just as when you work from a nice, clean desk, or as when you’re given just one task to do, and that’s all you have to do, by talking to only one person at a time, it creates a nice, strong point of focus. All of your attention can be given just to this one moment, so that nothing else that’s going on affects your brain. Focusing on one person creates an environment that helps you focus on one thought - the thought that you’re delivering to that one person.

You’re also able to pace yourself. When you learn how to pause, when you learn how to say what you have to say and then stop talking for a moment, move on to the next person and only then begin speaking to them, it helps to create a smooth pace that the audience can follow, and also one that doesn’t foul you up.

One of the problems people have when they get up to speak is that, with adrenaline in your veins, your metabolism is elevated. Consequently, your perception of time slows down. You thus tend to speak much more quickly when you’re up in front of a group, when our juices are all flowing high. And unfortunately, with your somewhat diminished cognitive ability it’s not impossible for your mouth to overrun your brain. You know, you can push the words out so fast that your brain is not be able to replenish the queue quickly enough. And so you do end up finding yourself with nothing to say.

When you find yourself with nothing to say, that can be quite an anxiety-producing situation. It starts cranking up the whole fear juice thing again. The more you get cranked up, the more time slows down. That’s one of the reasons most people don’t pause. In your slow-motion state, you feel your pauses to be much longer than the length of the pauses your audience hears. But when you’ve been speaking on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on, and then all of a sudden, you just stop, the pause then becomes very, shall we say, pregnant.

By working pauses into your speech from the very beginning, you’re able to establish a pace that seems natural to the audience, and will actually mask any moment when you might not be able to think of what to say.

J. Douglas Jefferys is a principal at PublicSpeakingSkills.com, an international consulting firm specializing in training businesses of all sizes to communicate for maximum efficiency. The firm spreads its unique knowledge through on-site classes, public seminars, and high-impact videos, and can be reached through the Internet or at 888-663-7711.

In order to present at the top, in order to acquire The Skills, you must remember three rules that govern everything you do whilst presenting. They’re really quite simple, but sometimes it’s easy to forget the simple things, and these rules must remain in the forefront of your consciousness at all times.

Rule Number 1 states: If you’re working too hard, you’re doing it wrong!

Rule #2: When you’re doing it right, it’s always Win-Win.

The sad truth is, typical speaker behaviors more often fall into the category of Lose-Lose. Whether it be the way the speaker engages the audience with his eyes, or what she does with her hands, or the pace with which either cranks out the word stream, most things that speakers do work both against their feeling comfortable and the audience’s ability to follow and buy into what is being said.

For instance, think about what you see presenters do with their arms and hands. Instead of using the opportunity to throw off excess energy by using the full swing of their arms and hands to paint pictures of the words they are saying, your average speaker locks them up in some position that not only keeps the excess energy trapped in a re-circulating loop, but in a position that translates to a body-language signal that is off-putting to the audience.

Luckily, as is the case with the other counter-productive behaviors in which speakers engage, these can all be changed simply by engaging in other, learnable behaviors that produce positive outcomes. You don’t need talent to do it right, you simply need to know how to do it right, and then practice those physical behaviors.

When you employ the behaviors that comprise The Skills, not only are you more relaxed, authoritative and convincing, but your audience has a much easier time hearing, seeing, and ultimately agreeing with the message you are trying to impart.

One thing to remember is that audiences, as Yale’s Professor Edward Tufte likes to point out, “are lazy, and audiences are fragile”. You can’t ask audiences to work in order to get your message because they won’t. And you can’t make them feel uncomfortable because they’ll spend their small amount of energy trying to get comfortable and won’t have anything left to spend on trying to comprehend your point.

Proper eye-contact, gesturing, tone, inflection and volume all work to make for a great experience for both speaker and listeners alike. When you’re using The Skills, it’s always a Win-Win.

Rule #3: People only START listening when you STOP talking.

This is an easy concept to understand, but a very difficult one for most people to implement. If you stop to think about it, you don’t so much hear what is being said as you do to what was just said.

In fact, the left hemisphere of your brain, where speech and text are processed, is programmed to not absorb information immediately, but rather put it through a process of analysis before storing or acting on it. It’s a momentary process to be sure, but nonetheless one that is immensely aided when a moment or two of silence follows the words or phrase that the speaker wants his audience to really hear and comprehend.

Think for a moment of what happens when someone tells a joke. Jokes are structured to get the listener thinking that the action in the setup will proceed along the expected path, and the humor comes when the listener realizes that the punch-line has altered that path in an unexpected way. But you don’t laugh at the moment the punch-line is delivered. You laugh only when you realize your line of thought has been diverted, and that always takes a moment, or sometimes, if the joke is really good, two. You only hear what was actually said when the joker stops talking and your mind has the opportunity to recognize the misdirection.

Of course, what most speakers do is continue with an endless stream of verbiage from the moment they open their mouths until they discover that the talk is over and they can (Thank God!) take their seats again. Once people start talking in front of a group it is very difficult to get them to stop, as it goes against what they’ve taught themselves to believe: that as long as they continue to hear words coming out of their mouths they’re still OK. A very common fear is that somehow that stream will stop and they won’t be able to get it started again. But why is this so?

A stitch in time

Because of the physiological changes that occur in the body when you are facing an audience, your perception of time actually s-l-o-w-s d-o-w-n. The universe doesn’t change - just how you perceive it. So although the audience is listening to you in real time, you perceive even a momentary lapse in your word-stream to be much longer that it actually is. A 1-second pause for the audience might feel like 3 or 4 to you.

This is where umm’s and ahh’s are born. We hear that dreaded silence, and in a desperate need to fill it immediately, we grab for the closest thing - a non-word that we don’t have to structure into our word track.

It might be hard to believe, but time goes by quite nicely even when it’s not filled with your words.

As you develop your eye and an ear for The Skills, you will come to see that ALL great speakers not only know Rule #3, but also embrace it. They not only embrace it, it is at the forefront of their thinking whenever they are speaking. It is the Number 1 issue on their minds. And that says a lot, because Rule #1 says that we can’t be thinking about too many things at once.

Being able to resist saying the next thing on your mind immediately after you offer your last thought is the most difficult idea for participants to learn, but it is an absolutely essential.

J. Douglas Jefferys is a principal at PublicSpeakingSkills.com, an international consulting firm specializing in training businesses of all sizes to communicate for maximum efficiency. The firm spreads its unique knowledge through on-site classes, public seminars, and high-impact videos, and can be reached through the Internet or at 888-663-7711.