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Improving Communications, Personal Presence

Three Things Co-Presenters Need to Do

So, the awards season has officially ended now that we know who won Best Actor and Actress, Best Picture and all of the rest of the Oscars handed out at the Academy Awards. Apart from being a fan of the movies, I enjoy watching the show to see how professionals handle themselves when they have to present in front of a worldwide audience of millions.

Improving Communications, Organizational Development, Personal Presence

How to Run a Staff Meeting

One of my favorite things in our Next Level Leadership® group coaching program is when the high potential participants come together in the fourth session to debrief each other on their Executive Shadow Days. Before they show up for a day of coaching on Organizational Presence, they spend a day shadowing a senior executive in their organization. During their shadow day, they do whatever the executive does. They go to their meetings, sit in on their calls and attend their presentations. The debriefs are always full of interesting stories and insights.

Improving Communications

Three Ways to Keep Your Meetings From Leaking

So, let me begin by explaining what I’m not talking about in the title of this post. I’m not talking about plugging leaks of confidential information. What I am talking about is the leakage of productivity that too often occurs in meetings.

With 15 years of management experience and 12 years of executive coaching in my rear view mirror, I have no idea how many meetings I’ve been in. It’s definitely one of those, “wish I had a dollar for” situations. It’s been a whole lot of meetings. Unfortunately, a lot of those meetings have leaked productivity like helium out of a cheap balloon.

Improving Communications, Leadership

How to Stay Out of the Weeds with Your Boss

The big idea behind my book, The Next Level, is that to get different results, leaders take to different actions. That usually involves picking up some new skills and mindsets and letting go of others even if they used to work for you in the past. For instance, one of the nine pick up and let go distinctions in the book is pick up accountability for many results and let go of responsibility for a few results. It’s the difference between owning it and doing it.

A lot of leaders struggle with this one because it calls for letting go of a personal mastery of all the details and focusing instead on putting the systems and processes in place that allow them to monitor progress without being deep into all the weeds themselves.

Improving Communications, Leadership

Five Things Leaders Can Learn from Mayor Bloomberg About Crisis Communications

While the impact of Hurricane Sandy in the U.S. spread far and wide, the New York/New Jersey area definitely took the worst hit. The scenes of flooding, fires and dangling construction cranes on Monday night and Tuesday morning were truly stunning.

In the run-up to the storm, a friend of mine wrote that we were likely to see lots of examples of leadership this week. She was certainly right. Some dramatic examples that come to mind are the U.S. Coast Guard’s helicopter borne rescue of the HMS Bounty crew off North Carolina (see the video here) and New York City firefighters rescuing residents from a waterlogged inferno in Rockaway, Queens.

A less dramatic but equally visible example of leadership this week has come from New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg. With multiple press conferences a day before, during and after the storm, Bloomberg has kept his citizens informed and, in the process, given a seminar on how to do leadership communications in a crisis. If you haven’t seen one of the mayor’s press conferences, it’s worth a look to see how he does it. I’ve watched excerpts from a few of them today and read through some of the transcripts.

Here are five lessons I’ve learned about crisis communications from Mayor Mike:

Improving Communications, Leadership

What Leaders Can Learn from How Romney Won the Debate

Almost immediately after the first U.S. presidential debate on Wednesday, practically every major news outlet from Fox News to MSNBC to the Financial Times of London declared Mitt Romney the outright winner over Barack Obama. Having watched it myself, I have to agree. Romney cleaned Obama’s clock.

As I was watching it, I thought of that scene in The Untouchables where Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness says to Sean Connery’s Malone, “I want to get Capone. I don’t know how to do it.” Malone gets in Ness’s grill and snarls back, “You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way! And that’s how you get Capone.” Romney played the roll of Malone at the debate. He brought the firepower.

Improving Communications

How to Defuse an Inbox Hand Grenade

This post will be short and sweet but speaks to something most leaders have to deal with – sometimes multiple times a day.

It’s that hand grenade that shows up in your inbox from someone (who usually doesn’t have all the facts), calling you out for something you did do, didn’t do or did wrong. And, of course, they CC the higher-ups just to ratchet up the pressure a bit.

It’s at that point that you have The. Urge. To. Kill.

Ignore it. Reacting to it is only going to make things worse. Your reactive response can lead to a flame war that you might regret for years to come. That urge is flowing from a primal part of your brain called the amygdala. It’s where the fight or flight response resides. Useful if you find yourself in the middle of the Amazon jungle. Not so much in the office.

Instead of throwing back your own grenade and risking further damage, defuse it with a calm and clear response.

Here’s how to do it:

Improving Communications, Leadership, Personal Presence, Team Building

Seven First Year Mistakes Senior Executives Make

One of the comments I hear most often from rising, high potential leaders in our Next Level Leadership® group coaching program is “I’m so glad to know it’s not just me.” Being in the leadership crucible can be a lonely experience. The group coaching participants quickly learn and take comfort from the fact that they are not alone in the leadership challenges they face every day.

I thought about that when I received an email last week from a reader of this blog who was promoted about a year ago to the Senior Executive Service (SES) of the U.S. federal government. We had the opportunity to meet at a conference earlier this month and he told me had some leadership lessons learned from the past year that he wanted to share with me in writing.

When I read his email, I immediately wanted to share it with the leaders who read this blog if for no other reason than to let you know that you’re not alone. With my SES friend’s permission (while honoring his request to remain anonymous), I’m sharing seven mistakes he thinks he made in his first year as a senior executive.

In his own words, here they are:

Improving Communications, Personal Presence

Three Ways to Lose Your Audience

A little over a year ago, I wrote a post called Three Signs Your Slide Deck Stinks. I think it got the most comments in the history of this blog as I invited readers to share their pet peeves from presentation land. The Slide Deck Stinks post comes to mind because I‘ve attended a lot of presentations lately. While I’ve heard some great good ones, I’m sorry to say that there have been some bad ones too. In an age when practically everyone has a source of endless distractions (the smart phone) at their fingertips, it’s easier than ever to lose your audience in two minutes or less. I’ve seen a lot of presenters do exactly that.

You probably have your own list of things presenters do that cause you to check out. I encourage you to share them in the comments so we can all learn from each other (or at least enjoy a good rant.) If I was writing an open letter to anyone who has to present (which I guess I am actually), here are three things I would beg them to avoid if they don’t want to lose me and the rest of the audience:

Improving Communications, Leadership, Organizational Development

3 Things You Can Learn from the Navy About Saying Thank You for a Job Well Done

Last week I had the honor to be present for a milestone in the life of a friend of mine. It was the retirement and change of command ceremony for the U.S. Navy’s Chief of Information (CHINFO), Rear Admiral Denny Moynihan. On a Friday afternoon at the Sail Loft in the Washington Navy Yard, several hundred uniformed and civilian friends and colleagues of Denny’s gathered to say thank you to him and his family for 27 years of service and to wish them all well on their journey.

Improving Communications, Leadership

How to Get Your Message Out

One of the key tasks of a leader is to make sure that everyone on the team is pulling in the same direction. Getting the message out so that everyone on the team hears it at the same time in the same way is critical to achieving that unity of purpose. I heard a great story about how to do that while working this week with a leadership team from the Department of Defense. One of the team members is retired U.S. Army Colonel Harry Scott. We got to know each other a bit over lunch and he told me how, when he was the brigade commander at Fort Lewis, he and his leadership team tested how well they were getting their message out to the 6,000 soldiers on base. I asked him for three of this most important lessons learned about getting your message out and here’s what he told me:

Improving Communications, Personal Presence

Their Perception is Your Reality

When you’re taking on the work of becoming a more effective leader, you usually will want to focus on adopting or changing one or two behaviors that will make the biggest difference. You also, though, need to focus on the perceptions that others have of your behaviors. Because you work and lead in a system full of people, your overall effectiveness will depend as much on changing their perception as on changing your behavior. Here are three things to keep in mind as you do that:

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