Your big presentation is going brilliantly. The audience is engaged and inspired: Heads are nodding; eyes are lighting up. As you conclude, the audience erupts in applause. Triumphant and glowing, you now prepare yourself for a spirited question-and-answer session.

“Does anyone have questions?” you say, smiling at the crowd.

You wait. Silence.

“Any questions?” you repeat.

More silence. Someone in the back coughs.

Your triumphant mood is slowly soured by doubt. (Why isn’t anyone asking questions? I thought they were with me.)

Nothing can put a damper on that after-speech glow like a silent Q&A session. But a quiet crowd doesn’t necessarily indicate a lack of interest. Often, they simply need a minute to warm up.

You can help with that. Instead of fearing Q&A silence, prepare for it.

During his 24-year tenure as the head of Saint Mark’s School, Stand & Deliver faculty member Damon Kerby learned valuable lessons about understanding  audiences’ needs. Damon says his meetings with prospective parents were among his most important talks of the year, and when it came time for Q&A, he made sure to have a few questions ready to offer as examples—just in case there were no questions right away.

“The key is to put yourself in their place,” Damon says. “Often, parents came to these meetings with some anxiety—worried they might be judged. And for many of them, the simple act of asking the first question might feel pretty intimidating.”

To prepare for this possibility, Damon always made certain to have a few “idiosyncratic” questions ready to ask himself. He might say, for example, “Here’s a question some of you may have: ‘What are some of the eccentric traditions at Saint Mark’s?’ Let me tell you about a few ….”

Damon says he’d choose slightly unusual questions like this because once he’d primed the pump, the standard questions would inevitably emerge.

So as you prepare your next talk, be sure to plan a few questions to ask yourself. Instead of a source of dread, that silent beat at the beginning of Q&A will become another opportunity to give your audience a gift.

As We Speak has been selected as a New York Post Notable Career Book!

Full story here. 

When you’re in a conversation, a presentation, an interview or a meeting, how often are you truly paying attention to your audience — and how often are you thinking about the next thing you’ll say?

When we worry too much about our own words, we miss valuable signals our audiences are conveying with their bodies, faces and eyes.

The ability to tune into non-verbal cues is a critical tool for police detectives. It’s also an invaluable skill for any leader — and one that’s too often neglected.

Actor, trainer, improviser, and longtime Stand & Deliver faculty member William Hall helps us understand how we can apply a police detective’s eye to everyday conversations. 

William has worked for years with detectives-in-training in the San Francisco Bay Area, role-playing witnesses and “persons of interest” in simulated interviews, and then offering feedback to the officers on the subtleties of his character’s physicality and facial expression.

Often, during the debriefs, William will ask an officer if he’d picked up on a slight physical tic or shift — William’s position in the chair, for example, or the way he’d crossed his legs.

William says that when officers admit they did not notice this kind of non-verbal data, they’ll usually explain that they were thinking ahead to their next question. For a detective, focusing on his own interrogation strategy at the expense of noticing and adapting to a suspect’s body language can mean missing critical data about whether someone is telling the truth.

While you may not be engaged in high-stakes lie-detection, your ability to pick up on physical cues can have a serious impact on your connection and engagement with others.

“In order to communicate well, we have to maintain our curiosity about our listeners,” William says.

Here are three tips for noticing and responding to non-verbal cues during a conversation:

1.  The Slouch. “One sign of disengagement is the slouched posture,” says William. “If I’m talking to someone and they’ve sunk back into their chair, I’ll often ask, ‘Do you mind if we get up and walk?’ Changing the physicality can change the tone of the conversation.”

2. Happy Feet. “The further the body part is from your chest, the more difficult it is to control. If someone’s hands or feet are jittery, it may be a sign that the person is not completely in the conversation with you,” says William. “If you notice your listener’s body is out of synch with yours, take a moment to check in, verbally. Ask if the conversation is resonating; check to see what you’re saying sounds relevant.”

3. The Crossed-Leg Defense. “When someone crosses their legs away from you, it can be a sign of disconnection or defense,” says William. “Their thigh becomes a big wall separating you from their body.” 

How to respond? Again, you can check in with the person, verbally. (“Am I answering your question? Is this making sense?”) But you can also monitor yourself:  “Sometimes we psych ourselves up about merely getting through a conversation, especially a difficult one,” says William. “This drive can override to our ability to be present and be in the room.”

I once sat in a five star restaurant in Paris and watched a waiter move through the room. He moved as if he were on skates, gliding so smoothly, with such balance, that it was a pleasure to watch him.

As he put the food down on each table, he said something to the people sitting there. Each diner’s face would light up as the waiter spoke. I watched the other waiters, and no one seemed to be having the same impact on the people they were serving. I caught this waiter’s eye, and he came over to my table at once.

“May I help you, m’sieur?”

“I know this sounds like a strange question,” I said, “But I’ve been watching you, and you seem to be having a huge impact on the people in this room. What are you saying to them?”

He smiled. “As a young man, when I first came to work in a fine restaurant, I was instructed by the head waiter to say ‘Bon appetit’ after I served each table. Because I was in such a rush, I would usually just put the plates down, repeat ‘Bon appetit,’ and leave quickly. One day I noticed that there was one second, after I put the plate down, when the diners would look up at me. I found that in that moment, I could look into their eyes, say ‘Bon appetit,’ and mean it. I could tell them without words, ‘I wish that you have a good meal. I want you to be happy.’ Through this simplest gesture, I could make them feel wonderful. It took only a moment to do this, to put the plate down in front of them as if I had cooked it myself. I went from serving food, to serving a sacrament. I am the most fortunate of men, m’sieur. What an honor it is to host a meal, to bring nourishment to people, to offer things that brought them joy and delight! That’s where I learned that with the right intention, you can transform anything into the opportunity to give a gift.”

This is good news for you as a speaker. What it means is that you don’t have to be perfect. Your intention to give a gift trumps the necessity to be flawless. Yes, it’s nice to get the words right. But it’s okay to flub a line, or to make a mistake, because it’s the overall experience that will linger in their mind.

WHEN: Tuesday, 10/4, at 8:30 am; Thursday, 10/6, 7:30 am PST

TO ENROLL: email casondra@standanddelivergroup.com

The Stand & Deliver team hosted a dinner in San Francisco last night to honor George Kohlrieser, a guiding influence and inspiration in the work we do.

George is on the faculty of IMD in Switzerland, where he is the program director of the High Performance Leadership program.

He’s also a veteran hostage negotiator, and last night he shared with us the story of the first time he was himself taken hostage, while he was working as a psychologist for the Dayton, Ohio Police Department. Here’s how George recounts the story in his book, Hostage at the Table:

While I talked with this man in a [hospital] treatment room, he suddenly grabbed a large pair of scissors and took a nurse and me hostage, saying he would kill both of us. For two hours we pursued a dialogue focused on him, his life-threatening injuries, and the care required to keep him alive. The turning point in the crisis came when I asked, “Do you want to live, or do you want to die?” “I don’t care,” was his answer. I then asked, “What about your children losing their father?” He visibly changed mental states and began to talk about his children rather than his anger at his girlfriend and the police. In the end, he agreed to put the scissors down voluntarily and allowed the nurse and a surgical team to treat him. In an even more surprising moment after putting the scissors down, this very violent man then approached me, with tears in his eyes, gave me a hug, and said, “Thank you, George. I forgot how much I love my kids.” His words of gratitude wired my brain forever to believe in the power of emotional bonding, dialogue, and negotiation with even the most dangerous person. I also surprised myself with the power I had to regulate my own emotion from sudden terror to calm, focused resolve.

George’s work in emotional bonding and directing the “mind’s eye,” among many other concepts, are critical to the work we’ve done with leaders and their teams around the globe during the past 10 years.

If you’re interested in engaging and influencing others, we highly recommend you check out George’s work. Last night we learned that George is well underway with his second book, about the concept of the “secure base.” We’re eagerly anticipating the publication of these words of wisdom from our mentor and friend.

Are you worried about your team, your organization, your job and your future? Are your colleagues and customers anxious and disengaged?

I can assure you you’re not alone.

In these uncertain times, the biggest risk isn’t in the volatility of any market or currency or government — the biggest risk is in letting your people and your customers get stuck. Stuck in their fear, stuck in their doubts, and stuck in a mindset of retreat.

Lately I’ve been receiving calls and emails from clients and colleagues who are on-edge and exhausted from dealing with demotivated and disengaged teams. They’ve been clamoring for advice on how to communicate during crises. They want to know there’s a way to navigate through these tough times and come out on the other side, excited to meet the next challenge.To offer some insight, I’ll share with you the lessons I’ve learned during the past decade of coaching Fortune 100 leaders and their teams around the world:

On Monday, Sept. 19th and Tuesday, Sept. 20, I’ll lead a FREE Webinar on Crisis Communication.

The Most Important Lessons You’ll Learn in this FREE Webinar:

Why you are hard-wired to fail during moments of distress.

How you can avoid the three most common pitfalls of crisis communication.

How great leaders bring people together in the face of adversity — and the critical tools you can borrow from them.

FREE Webinar with Peter Meyers “How to Avoid the Three Fatal Mistakes in Crisis Communication”

WHEN:

Monday, Sept. 19th, at 8 a.m. PST (3:00 GMT)

or

Tuesday, Sept. 20, at 7 a.m. PST (2:00 pm GMT)

The Webinar will be quick–50 minutes–and powerful. Join us if you want to change how you handle change.

COST: FREE

Email Casondra Prince (casondra@standanddelivergroup.com), to let her know which session you’d like to attend. She’ll send you a link. It’s as easy as that.

In this Webinar I’ll also share an important story with you — one that will save you an untold amount of time and stress. When we worked with a major international financial institution (who shall, of course, remain anonymous), they were facing a moment of reckoning — a crisis that threatened their very existence. At the eleventh hour, we developed a concrete plan for crisis communication. They stuck to the plan, made it through the crisis, and today that organization is thriving.You don’t need to wait for an hour of darkness to figure out a what to do — I’ll share with you the tools we developed to communicate during their moment of truth.

If you’re curious how to solve problems, avoid paralysis and drive growth and innovation now, you should join us in this free Webinar.

In a world saturated with information, your ability to communicate effectively, face to face, is more important than ever.

We’ve been saying this for a long time — but there’s now hard data to show that interpersonal communication is an essential job skill in the 21st century.

Yesterday, Robert Seigel of NPR’s “All Things Considered” interviewed Tony Carnevale, of Georgetown University about data from Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Carnevale said that the data show us that, compared with previous generations, there has been a “fundamental shift … from physical skill to skill that has more to do with cognitive function, and more to do with interacting with other people.”

One of the competencies that is now much more important than it was back in the 1970s, said Carnavale, is something called active listening. “The difference between listening and active listening,” said Carnevale, “is what your wife or a partner or a friend will always tell you you don’t do, which is to hear what they say and act on it; that is, to incorporate what they’re telling you into your behaviors.”

This is a skill that the Bureau of Labor Statistics finds is important in 75 percent of jobs, up from 50 percent back in the 1970s.

Carnavale explains why: “People in those days worked shoulder to shoulder, and not face to face. And they were looking at the machine. There are very few of us now who don’t spend time listening to each other to get our work done. And when we don’t hear well or don’t listen well, it makes us ineffective.”

Here is the full interview at NPR.

In our work with leaders around the globe, we talk to many people who think of themselves as good speakers. “I’m comfortable talking in front of groups,” they say. “I  just get up there and wing it.”

What we often find with many of these confident speakers is that they are mistaking their own comfort for effective communication. In reality, although they may be perfectly happy to just “think out loud,” their audiences are less than thrilled to listen to them. An improvised speech often lacks clarity and purpose — and this will leave your listeners at best bored, and at worst angry and resentful.

Now, there certainly are rare geniuses who roll out of bed every morning full of brilliant, beautifully formed sentences. Those singular leaders who can just open their mouths and effortlessly bring clarity and insight to others, all day long.

But, statistically speaking, the chances are that you are not one of them.

Which means you need to prepare.

Before you know what you’re going to say, you need to know why you’re saying it.

If you’re in a leadership role, you will touch hundreds of lives every week. In the absence of preparation, you will probably default to talking about what you want to talk about, rather than what the listener needs to hear. If you haven’t stopped to think about the needs of your listeners, your return on investment is probably a fraction of your potential.

Think of it like a dinner party. You wouldn’t invite people over for dinner, wait until they arrive, and then fling open the fridge to see what’s inside. If you’re a good host, you take the time to think about your guests: Who’s coming? What’s the occasion? What kind of menu would be appropriate? You’re not there to just cook a meal – you’re there to provide an experience. You design a structure for the evening – how many courses? What kind of wine? How do you end the evening on a high note, with a fabulous dessert? The secret is in the preparation.

And communication is just the same.

Emotion comes from motion.

While we often think of the mind controlling the body, in reality it’s often the other way around. The way we hold our bodies and faces has a tremendous effect on our psychological state.

No one understands this better than Stand & Deliver faculty member Kay Kostopoulos, who teaches in several departments at Stanford University. This month, Kay is featured in an “O.” magazine story about the ways that “physical adjustments can profoundly alter the course of an interaction.”

Here’s an excerpt:

Like many other species, humans tend to behave in either a dominant or deferential manner—a preference that’s determined by some combination of our personality and ingrained expectations about where we belong in the social pecking order (expectations conferred by gender, class, birth order, geographic origin, and so on). It’s easy to get stuck in character, perpetually enacting roles we didn’t consciously choose. (Picture the overly smiley coffeepot replenisher at work who’s also a doormat at home.) But this afternoon, Gruenfeld and her co-teacher, drama instructor Kay Kostopoulos, aim to help us shed the automatic physical habits that go along with those roles.

Read the full story here!