252: The Persuasive Leader

<p>A friend of mine was lamenting that he had not taken the time to complete our High Impact Presentations Course.  He had had it in the back of his mind for some time, that he really ought to work on these key skills, but had never managed to lock it down and actually do it.  Now he is facing a really, really big pitch and he knows his capacity isn’t where it needs to be. He is not fully confident he can be successful.  Uh oh!</p> <p> </p> <p>As the leader we represent the “face” of the company.  People judge the whole thing on what they see us do.  Our public persona is usually contained and controlled.  Internal meetings are internal and we can be a bumbling, horrible communicator and only our long suffering staff are any the wiser. </p> <p> </p> <p>Public forays do pop up in the most unexpected places though.  It might be the school PTA meeting and you make a point or even a presentation and then people suddenly connect the dots.  How did so and so become the top of their organisation, when they are so hopeless at representing the company?  Our verbose, rambling, incoherent offerings are total personal brand killers.  We in fact might be the least articulate person in the whole firm, but everyone watching us in action, now pegs the whole organisation at our level of incompetence.  Sort of the “Peter Principle” in reverse. We drag the whole organization down to our level of incompetence.</p> <p> </p> <p>The idea that we can be technically highly competent and therefore don’t have to be competent as a presenter is a complete fallacy.  Technical people in particular, really cling to this false dawn as their salvation from being hopeless presenters. This is the age of media, especially now we have access to video for everything, be it YouTube, Instagram, Facebook Live, Snapchat etc.  Everyone has their own media channel.  We are all seeing a lot more people “presenting” than we have ever done in world history.  Up until a few years ago, we only had live performances, television and video recording, but now we hav