How to Be Yourself in Front of an Audience

What’s the best way to engage an audience? Be authentic.

Leaders who can’t be themselves in front of an audience create an authenticity gap, and an authenticity gap is a real problem. If you don’t appear or sound genuine, people pick it up and tend not to trust you or listen to what you have to say.

The authenticity gap creates a disconnection between a leader and the audience. The audience doesn’t buy it so the leader has a hard time building real relationships. People don’t like or trust people who don’t seem genuine.

How do you close the gap? Share your beliefs. Talk about your values. Be candid. Reveal your challenges. Share yourself. Allow that to extend to style as well as substance. If you’re from Texas, you talk like a Texan. If you’re a bank CEO, you wear a conservative suit. If you’re a family person, you put photos of your kids on your desk. There is no formula; you just have to let a little of you shine through.

Authenticity is about letting people “see” you, and you have to be consistent. While you adapt your message to the audience, you should not be a chameleon or adapt your persona, but, instead, be yourself and tailor your message to each audience’s unique interests.

The best advice in absolutely any situation is to be you. If you have a hearty laugh, then laugh. If you love loafers, wear them. If you would rather play squash than golf, then play squash. Being you always works. Being somebody else never does. To be authentic is to bring YOU into a leadership role.

One of the primary ideas we try to convey to the people we work with is that leaders need to be genuine. Honor your uniqueness, and share it with others. Don’t be afraid to let a little of you shine through. With authenticity, you will win trust and respect from colleagues, clients, audiences and employees.

There’s an adage in the performing arts that you have to sell the performance in order for it to be believed, and public speaking is a performance. What would you think if you went to a movie and the actor was reciting lines robotically or the actress in an emotional scene didn’t cry or have any inflection to her voice? You have to sell the emotional response you want out of people. If you want them to be excited and enthusiastic, you have to be excited and enthusiastic. If you’re talking about something emotional and powerful, lots of eye contact with pauses and softer tones can do the trick. If you appear disingenuous or distrustful, your audience will pick up on that as well.

Here also is a link to Suzanne Bates’ Power Speaker Blog.

Palin E-Mail Hack Reveals Obvious Vulnerability

I commented a couple of weeks ago how someone could hack into your personal accounts by simply using information off of one’s Facebook page. Well, it appears that the recent hacking of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s e-mail account on Yahoo could have been done the same way.

Yahoo lets an individual change his password if he claims to have forgotten it, and if he can answer a single “challenge question.” When someone needs to retrieve his lost Yahoo e-mail password, he gets a challenge question like this one. But is this the kind of question that anyone who knows this person can easily answer?

In this case, the source said, the question was where the account holder first met her sweetheart? The answer was known to anyone who saw Gov. Palin’s recent interview with ABC News: Wasilla High School.

Asylum-Seeker Rejected Based on Wikipedia

People wonder why I’m so down on Wikipedia. It’s not that I’m down on it. It’s just that I could create a page about myself saying what a great guy I am, how I cured cancer, and how I’m the long-lost heir of Johnny Carson’s fortune, and then try and take it to court and prove that his estate owed me money.

Or, maybe I could try and get into the country with legal immigration documentation only to have an intrepid employee of the Department of Homeland security use Wikipedia to keep me out of the country.

The Department of Homeland Security should not use the user-generated Wikipedia to decide whether an asylum seeker can enter the United States, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

That judicial statement of the obvious from the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a ruling by the Board of Immigration Appeals, which said DHS committed no big foul in using a site editable by anyone with a computer to decide the fate of a woman named Lamilem Badasa.

DHS decided to deport Badasa after consulting Wikipedia to decide whether a Ethiopian travel document known as a laissez-passer was adequate to prove her identity. Using the Wikipedia page as evidence, the government convinced an immigration judge that the document did not prove her identity, calling it a one-way travel document based on information provided by the applicant.

The three-judge panel of the appeals court found that split decision disturbing. The court reiterated that anyone can edit Wikipedia and there’s no guarantee that the information on the page at the time the government officials looked at it had any correct information at all. The site may have misled and tainted government officials’ decisions in the case, the judges ruled.

So, if you ever have a complaint about my policy, that’s why.

Making Sense of Reorgs

Reorganizations are a popular way of saying, “We’re going to streamline our business activities in order to attain or sustain financial growth,” and a less frightening way of saying, “We’re going to dump some underperforming divisions and fire a bunch of people.” And, in this business climate, it’s probably going to be a buzzword for the next couple of years. So, how do you survive one? Better yet, how should you implement one?

1. Reorganize as infrequently as possible and make it count when you do (surprisingly, many executives just don’t get this)
2. Develop a complete reorganization plan and timeline; execute it crisply and in a timely manner
3. Give appropriate level executives some advance notice and train them in what to communicate to their people (see #6 below) at the appropriate time
4. Timing is everything–too little notice to key managers and they’ll feel cut out of the loop, too much notice and news will leak into the organization
5. In the case of public companies, material information must be communicated to all shareholders simultaneously, so the staging of an external release followed by internal communication must occur as rapidly as possible to minimize disruption
6. Have a complete communication plan for managers and employees, including the strategic or operating reason for the move and the new organizational structure
7. The goal is to have all employee questions adequately answered–in person–by appropriate levels of management at the time of the announcement

For executives: To be effective, reorganizations must be undertaken with the utmost consideration and respect for managers and employees. Timing is everything, planning is critical, and the devil’s in the details.

For employees: Under the right conditions, reorganizations are necessary and critical to any company’s continued growth and success. That said, if your company suffers from frivolous and disruptive reorg-du-jour, you might consider a change of venue.

The Power in Meekness

It seems these days that our kneejerk reaction to any wrongdoing is that the person ought to be fired. Granted, there are certain situations where that may be warranted, such as the failure of a product that causes a death or a CEO ruining a company to the point it requires a Federal bail-out.

I’ve seen some people in public, though, who will demand that the cashier at the grocery store be fired for not counting out the correct change or the bagger for placing something on top of the eggs. I’ve see people berate managers in restaurants for not firing their server because they got their steak well-done when they wanted medium rare or they wanted something added to their entree that was forgotten.

What happened to simple civility in business? What happened to acknowledging that no one is perfect (no, not one), mistakes happen, accept a fix, and move along. Instead, you can probably find entire web sites devoted to people sharing their stories about their bad experiences at Applebee’s for the world to see with the permanence that the Internet affords.

Here’s a perfect definition of meekness: power under control. People who think they have power try to use that power to get what they want by bullying, being loud, threatening their business, and causing a scene of embarrassment to the one being attacked, who simply wants to get this person away from them and will do anything to placate them so they will shut up.

Instead, it is the meek who “kill them with kindness”, and the meek who get what they want with a soft word, while the proud only stirs up anger and wrath (Prov. 15:1).