Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hey everyone. Welcome to the episode. So Ask a RAM flips the script one step beyond Podcast. Guests and listeners submit their questions and Ask a RAM anything. Questions can be music, life stories, business leadership advice, how to make the best vegan omelette. You name it, A RAM will unpack your questions and leave you with info you can apply. Before we get to it, please rate, review and subscribe at My company employees are working hard, but some of them seem to feel overlooked or underappreciated. Despite the high output, there's a growing concern that recognition isn't as visible or frequent as it could be. We want to ensure that every employee feels their efforts are acknowledged, whether big or small, and that their value to the organization is clear. How can we ensure that employees feel their contributions are recognized and valued within the company?
[00:00:56] Speaker B: Give specific and timely feedback using the what why, how framework. So I'll, I'll explain that specific and timely when people give like hey, good job on that, that's like not very specific. Good job is just like a vague thing. And also when people are giving feedback and they want people to feel like engaged and that they're being celebrated, you can kind of get into this cycle of being like, good job on that, good job on that. And you don't want to leave anyone out when maybe they actually haven't even done that good of a job. If you really think about being specific, what exactly are you giving feedback on? So it's something worth giving feedback on. If a team or individuals on a team, or even a team in general is doing a good job, there's probably a lot of opportunity to give specific feedback. But the timely piece is also if someone does something great and you're waiting more than two weeks to give them feedback on it, you might as well not do it. Like you're going to wait till the next big meeting to do it or their their review to do it. Why do something specific and do it in the moment or near the moment. So like within a two week window and you're better to do it either in the moment or within within a couple days of it. So specific and timely around the specificity side of it, the what why, how framework really works well. So what is it exactly that they did? So identify the thing that they did and be super clear about it. You should be able to get that done within three sentences. The why why it matters. So the why it matters is super important because like what is it about doing that thing that was a difference maker and then the how how did it make A difference. So what was the impact of it? And the why and the how are two totally different things. And an example would be last night I had a really important document that I had to put in front of a client and I had super tight timeframes for it. And one of my team not only took it on but started working on it right in the morning and kept working on it until 6:30 at night so I could send it off at 7:30 at night. And in this time the team member put that document in front of me three times for my feedback and then also asked for next steps like how they could work on it. Plus took a bunch of next steps themselves, brought in different team members. So they took something from the very beginning of the day that was like not anywhere close where it needed to be and spent essentially 12 hours working on something that was a super important deliverable. That level of accountability, tenacity, really pushing on something because they knew it was super high stakes was amazing. And they really checked most, most if not all of the boxes of like just a great process on it. So I made a point of acknowledging like their tenacity, their hard work, like really having that willingness to take it there, the high amount of accountability, willingness to take feedback.
So that's what they did. Why it matters. Well, why it matters to me is like I'm a business owner and, and sometimes from a business owner perspective it's hard. Sometimes it can feel hard to get people to care as much as you do because at the end of the day it's like, you know, I, I own the company. It really matters to me to feel that people care as much as I do. They care because they want to do a good job. And the why there is like this person who did this piece of work really showed they cared. And that like matters to me so much. It's such a difference maker to me. And then how, how did this make an impact for the company? Well, the how was we had this thing that is now going to, went in front of actually three different clients within a 24 hour period and it's going to massively increase our value proposition to them. So what they did was take a document from start to finish, huge push. All the tenacity, all the diligence, all the accountability. Why, why does it matter to me? Because it made me feel like I'm not in this alone. I've really got someone, multiple people who care as much as I do to do a great job. And how, how did it make a difference? We just put Something in front of a client that's going to be a massive value add. So I took that time to celebrate that person to them in the moment. Then I texted each person who was part of the process and thanked them. And then I went on teams and made a point of just giving a little synopsis of what happened and the three things I just talked about. Making sure you're specific about things matters rather than just like, good job, and then doing it in a timely manner matters. But that also what it was, why it matters, and how it made a difference. Anyone listening to this might be. Might be like, oh, my gosh, that sounds like a huge pain in the ass. I'd never do that. Yeah. And that's why people don't feel celebrated, because people just go, heck, yeah, good work, instead of actually breaking it down. It's less burdensome the more often you do it. And you should do it frequently, because if your team or people on your team are doing a great job, they should hear about it and they should hear about it in a specific, timely way.
[00:06:02] Speaker A: I got some feedback that some newer employees feel like they're still trying to find their place in the company. For context, we're a remote hybrid team. How can I improve onboarding to help new hires feel more involved and connected from the start?
[00:06:17] Speaker B: So for every meeting that isn't just like a yes, no transactional thing, use the video function on computers.
So to get more into that, when you have teams that are either entirely remote or a hybrid team, it's super important that you operate the same way as if you were all in the same office. So if you're in the same office with people and you needed to touch base on something, you just like, go to their office and go up and speak to them for whatever reason. Because we're, you know, online now, or we have hybrid teams now, people just text each other or they just email each other. And those things are highly transactional. You know, you just like, I need something, or I'm giving you something, and it's just that kind of thing. And when you do that, you keep yourself in transactional interactions. If you want to be in relational interactions, you actually have to have FaceTime. And FaceTime can be on video. But the thing is, is like, video by nature is a transactional thing. Like, nobody wants to be on video a second more when they need to. What I encourage people to do is a have your home office either in a state where you're comfortable about taking an instant phone call, or at least have a background Ready and yeah, you should be dressed for work at least like, you know, like from, from like the waist up. You should be ready for work and people should, for anything that's not just like a yes, no kind of thing. You should be using the video function on your, on your computer. That way people are in that relationship relational space with each other. They are constantly creating relationships. They are constantly having facetime. They are actually engaging with people. That's important not just for new employees, but also for like long term employees as well. Moving from transactional, which if you don't use the video function and everything is just like, you know, like texting or email or teams messaging. If you use that, you're slipping further into that transactional space even with long term employees. So get on video with each other frequently throughout the day.
[00:08:11] Speaker A: Over the past few months, we've started to notice a shift in team dynamics. It was subtle at first. Fewer people speaking up in meetings, a drop in the energy level during brainstorming sessions, and a noticeable lack of enthusiasm for projects that used to excite us. At first we thought it was just a seasonal slump, but it's starting to feel like it's becoming a trend. As a leader, I want to make sure we address these signs early before they spread and affect the whole company. We've always prided ourselves on our positive engaged culture and I don't want to lose that momentum. What are some practical ways we can pinpoint when engagement is slipping and take action to get things back on track?
[00:08:53] Speaker B: I'm going to answer that question in two ways. The first is just a general way around engagement, and the second one is specific to what this question is asking around their team in general, focus on having high value one to one and team meetings. And I'll, I'll discuss that more in a sec. And for this one specifically, what I suggest is something seems to have changed within your team within the past six months to a year. And rather than focusing on engagement, figure out what happened, like what changed, what was the. Either the incident or the shift that's happened and address that and engagement should follow. So I'll get into both now for high value one to one meetings and team meetings.
What's important here? When people think about engagement, it's not like hyping people up all the time, like, you know, believing in the team or believing in the company and this great grand vision. You know, very often people just want to do good work and feel like they're enabled to do good work and they've got the information they need. They work with a team that's supportive, they work with the boss who supports them. All of that stuff is accomplished not through like hyping teams up and like creating this like perfect, you know, energy. It's more just about really delivering and receiving value. So when I talk about high value meetings, there's three kinds of interactions. The first is just like a normal interaction. I call it like you call it low stakes. You can just call it a conversational interaction where you're not necessarily thinking about high or low value, you're just interacting with people, like talking about different ideas. These would be typical like one to one meetings or team meetings. If your team has already has high engagement and you're not too worried about it, you don't have to be super tucked in for your like daily meetings or your day to day meetings. You're just chopping it up, engaging. But if you're worried about engagement or you want to see engagement increase, then you should focus more on high value. So a high value meeting is when you're interacting individual like one to one or in a group meeting with people where you're trying to get great value out of the meeting and you're trying to give great value out of the meeting. That's different than like a low stakes meeting or just a conversational meeting. You're showing up, there's an agenda for the meeting. Even if it's just one to one, there's an agenda. Here are the things we're trying to cover. You're coming with questions, you're also preparing questions you think you're going to be going to be asked. You've got the data on hand. And not just that, you're going to like repeat the data. You're able to like synthesize the data into like clear takeaways for your audience. And you can expect that from your audience.
When you have meetings that are more set up to be high value one to one or team meetings, everybody's expected to show up to produce value and receive value. And that by nature is a higher level of engagement. If people aren't showing up like that and you have like an agenda and you've set that expectation, then I start going more into a performance issue. Most people will respond that if you set the bar like that and have that kind of structure of focusing on high value, they'll engage with it. And the third kind of meeting is a high stakes meeting. And a high stakes meeting is the way I define it is there's something to win or lose as a result of that meeting specifically. These would be more like high stakes presentations, like sales meetings, meetings to get funding, all of that kind of stuff. So what I would suggest for anyone in general is if you want to have a really engaged team or if you think your team's engagement is slipping, focus on those structured high, high value meetings and make that an expectation with the group. And you don't just say we're going to have high value meetings. You actually have to say, this is what a high value meeting looks like. This is how you prepare for it, this is how you build an agenda for one. And we have all sorts of learning, we can help people with that. If engagement isn't an issue for you and your team's really engaged, then you can have a low stakes meeting or again, conversational meeting where people are just more showing up and kind of chopping it up and figuring out their way together. There's not a good or a bad here. It's about if engagement something you really want to focus on, high value, one to one and team engagements. For this person who asked this question specifically, what I'd encourage you, it sounds like something's switched on the team. Something's happened and it could be like the business is experiencing headwinds. It could be there's a new personality on the team that is influencing things, or there could be an existing personnel on the team that is maybe unhappy with what's going on with the group or is unhappy in their job or is maybe having some, some challenges and they're bringing that into the dynamic. It could be a change in leadership of the company. There's some kind of change that's happened here and it could be external or internal. What I would encourage is reflecting what's happened in the past year and try and pinpoint if there's one, two or three things that have happened that have changed. And then I would focus on addressing what was the result of that, like what has happened here rather than focusing on engagement. So when people look at engagement surveys like, hey, we're not as engaged, I'm going to do an engagement survey or I'm going to do a team activity. It's like, yeah, you're kind of addressing the symptom. I would actually think of like what, what the issue is and I would do a little bit of analysis on that.
[00:13:49] Speaker A: As someone transitioning into a leadership role, I've noticed how I show up seems to impact my credibility. I want to make sure I'm projecting the right energy without coming off as intimidating. What are some practical Tips I can implement right away. How can I use my body language to convey confidence and authority during high stakes meetings?
[00:14:09] Speaker B: I'm going to give you four things to consider. First is you got to focus on tone setting. The second, you got to be thinking about your eye contact. The third is you've got to be thinking about how you use your hands. And the last is how you demonstrate expression across your face. So let's hit each one. Tone setting. So if I'm trying to essentially facilitate or lead something, so the, the question was how do I demonstrate authority? I just shifted to a idea of like either facilitating. So you're, you're the person who's facilitating a conversation or a meeting or you're leading. So for example, like maybe you're getting up and someone else is presenting, but you're really setting the tone that you're, you're leading the session or it's that you know you are the one presenting and, but you're leading the session. Facilitating and leading can be two different things. So facilitating would be I'm actually trying to get other people to speak, but I'm the facilitator of it. The other one is I'm leading the session that I'm actually leading. I'm speaking or I'm having other people speak, but I'm not trying to create a conversation. I'm just trying to get people to speak, finish their part, then another one, then another one, then another one. And that's how I define splitting those up. But from a tone setting perspective, what's important to know is that tone in any conversation, whether it's one to one or a group or presentations tone is always being set at any given time and someone is setting the tone. And it's important that if you're trying to demonstrate like you're facilitating or leading a session, you should be the one who's, who's setting the tone. Tone is set within two to five minutes and then it can be reset and reset and reset throughout a conversation. But it's the first two to five minutes of the conversations where it's set. Here's the challenging thing.
Most people when they're starting a conversation, they're kind of warming up their engines a little bit so they're not at their best as a speaker. And it usually takes us around two to five minutes to become our best as a speaker. But the tough part is our audience's attention is the crispest. It's going to be in the beginning and like the longer that we're in a meeting like that it starts going down and down. The people typically in that first two to five minutes are, are paying a lot of attention to the physical presence of the leader or the facilitator of the conversation. And if that person's not at the top of their game, they're making a value judgment of how much time I'm going to spend listening to this person, especially if they have a lot of experience with that person and that person has traditionally not had strong physical presence. So your window gets tighter and tighter and tighter. So it's super important to come in right from the get go and set your, set the tone and maintain it. And within two to five minutes they've kind of made up their mind. So you've got to, within that two to five minutes deliver your highest level of presence that you've got. You possibly can. So this is how you do it. Eye contact. Eye contact, either in a one to one setting or a group setting should be 50, 70 split. When you're speaking, around 50% of the time you should be making eye contact with people. And I don't mean like drilling into someone's eyes like laser beaming them, but conversational eye contact to delivering one sentence to someone, delivering another sentence to someone else. If it's a really long sentence starting one the ha. The first half of the sentence looking at someone, the second half of the sentence looking at someone else. But at other times it's okay to look away when you're speaking. Most people when they're speaking, they're considering, they're thinking, they're remembering.
So people typically look up and around or look down around when they're doing that. So around 50% of the time with conversational eye contact, be looking at people in the eye and then shift from sentence to sentence. Don't look people in the eye like 100% of the time because it makes you look totally intimidating and super wild. So move away from that. When I say 70% of the time eye contact when you're listening is because eye contact demonstrates that you're paying attention to people and that you're actually like engaging with their thoughts. However, most people, they do need to look away to be thinking about what the other person said. It's really important in a one to one if someone else is speaking, do not look them in the eye 100% of the time you're going to terrify them and you're going to like come across as ultra intense. Look away when you're considering things. So around 50% of the time you should Be looking people in the eye conversationally. And around 70% of the time when listening, you should be looking people in the eye, using conversational eye contact and all of those.
The second is how you use your hands.
So whether you want to use one hand or two hands, it's totally up to you. I do recommend two hands if you're comfortable with it. But there's two things. It's about how to use your hands and then where to use your hands. So how to use your hands. I have four hand gestures that I encourage people to think about. So open hand. Open hand is like a giving gesture. It's like, I don't know, Mike, what do you think? So open hand. I'm asking someone, or I'd be like, oh, I'd love to hear other people's thoughts. Open hand, engaged hand. Engaged hand is what I call like an angled palm. So imagine if you go to shake someone's hand, you don't go to shake someone's hand like this, nor do you go like this. It's an angled palm. This is demonstrating engagement. Most people should be speaking the majority of the time with an angled palm. Because you're trying to engage with people, you're giving them ideas, and you're asking them to give their attention back and even their ideas back. So it's like a handshake. You're using an angled palm, a sideways hand or side palm. This is a definitive gesture. It's like, we're going to have to make a decision on this. The definitive gesture. And the last is a negating gesture, which is down palm. These four things, up palm, giving angle, palm, engaged, side palm, definitive, and then down palm, negating. Use all of these things to engage people with your hand gestures. But where should you be using your hand gestures? Try to use your hand gestures in what I think many people have heard the term heart center. So around ish this area. And you should kind of be thinking about a rectangle. So a rectangle being like, start with your shoulder line and then down as far as appropriate. So if you're sitting at a table, then you're going down as far as the top of the table. And this is around where you're expressing yourself. If you're standing, you start at the shoulders and you go down to the top of your belt line. You can express yourself a boat above your shoulders for sure. Of course you can, but you don't want to be spending all your time doing that, nor do you want to do it in front of your face. Instead, what you want to be thinking is, I go above my shoulders with a reason, because there's a big idea that I'm talking about. Or we're going to start at a ground level, and then we're going to push it as high as we can. Right? Go above your shoulder. Otherwise you want to keep it at the top of your shoulder line and then down either to the top of the table that you're sitting at or to the top of your belt line. And then you go out about to the edge of your shoulders again, unless you're talking about something that's expansive, then you can go further. The final thing I'd encourage you to think about from physical presence is how you demonstrate expression and your face. And this one's tough. And I really encourage people to do a bunch of video work and really watch your box when you're on video with other people, the box where you're represented, and see what's going on with your face. The way that I like to talk about this is that there's two zones in how we use expression on our face. Zone one is from the tip of the chin to the tip of the nose, and then zone two is from the tip of the nose to the top of the forehead. In most cases, you want to have these things being active, and you want to be demonstrating interest and expression through these. That doesn't mean that you should be, like, looking at people and trying to figure out how to smile or, like, what to do with your eyes, because I know that's super weird. But what you should be doing is spending time looking at video of yourself or monitoring how you're showing up when other people are speaking, when you're on video, and paying attention of how you want to use the intricacies of both of these to demonstrate engagement or to demonstrate that maybe you have something to say. It does matter, because people unintentionally send all sorts of signals through their eyes or through zone one. What's going on here? And these things could be saying the exact opposite of how you actually feel and throws your audience off. What's important to know is human beings just by nature, pay a lot more attention to physical and verbal presence than they do to the content of what people are saying. That's because we're animals like any other animal on the planet, and we take a lot of our information from the surrounding environment. So really focusing on what you're doing with your eye contact, how you're using your hands, and then what kind of expression you've got going on. These are huge game changers for tone setting.
[00:22:34] Speaker A: I often find it challenging to strike the right balance between being direct and empathetic when addressing sensitive issues with my team. I want to ensure I'm fostering trust and encouraging growth. But I sometimes worry about being misunderstood. What are some effective strategies for managing my verbal presence when giving constructive feedback?
[00:22:55] Speaker B: I'm hearing two things here. One is about communication style, like having to do with directness. The other one is how you sound from a verbal perspective. What you asked at the end was around verbal presence. So that's what I'll focus on. Around verbal presence. This is ultra important.
Focus on pace, pitch, use of fillers, and how you use encouragers. So I'll get into it. So pace or rate of word delivery is how quickly people are speaking.
How quickly people are speaking says a lot to our audience. And it's always important to remember human beings tend to pay attention mostly to physical presence. And again, I'm not talking about standards of beauty. It's about whether or not someone's physical presence is matching what they're saying, the content of what they're saying. And there's a disconnect between those two things. People often overtly focus on physical presence. They focus on physical presence first, then quite a bit of focus on verbal presence. So how you sound when you're speaking and the last thing people focus on is what you're actually saying. And the higher degree of drift between these things, the more that people struggle with, like, really connecting with that content or understanding to it or committing to it, or even thinking what you're saying is actually true, like, you believe it.
So around verbal presence, pace is a huge indicator if people rush through things. So their rate of word delivery is super, super fast. And it's something sensitive that you're talking about. People tend to view it in negative lights. Like, for example, you're super nervous about it. And if nervousness might mean that, oh, like, they were afraid of it or they don't believe in it, or they may even take it as far as, like, they don't respect me to give me the time to have that conversation. And frankly, like anyone who's been on the receiving end of tough news and the person just, like, bolts through it. I think we can all relate to that being a pretty negative experience. But on the flip side, maybe that person's just speaking fast because, yeah, maybe they are nervous or they don't know what to do, or they're not sure how to handle themselves, or they're not even aware they're speaking quickly, but that rate of word delivery really, really matters. This can be challenging for people because some people are just by nature, they just. They. How they grew up, they speak very, very quickly. Other people, they're more paced out. Sometimes the way people speak, it can take longer. That makes people feel comfortable and it feels like it's taking a long time. So pace is like a really difficult topic for people. And what I really encourage is, you know you're going too fast if you're using a lot of fillers. And I'll get to fillers in a. In a little bit. But fillers are like. There's filler sounds such as, ah, er, any of these things. There's filler words such as like. And there's filler phrases such as, you know, if you're using a ton of fillers, you're speaking too fast because you're speaking faster than your mind can keep up with and construct sentences. You also know if you're speaking too fast, if you have to take big gulps of air when you're speaking, because you got to.
So you start taking these big gulps of air and finally, you know you're speaking too fast if your mouth is getting really, really dry. The biggest indicator, though, is how much filler you're using. So you gotta pace down. Pacing down is easier done when you've done a lot of recording. And I really encourage people to record. Write down what you want to say, record it. Use a video function, though, so you can actually see how you're showing up. And practice it, practice it again, and practice it again. And you should be looking at the time signatures and trying to make those time signatures a little bit longer, a little bit more spacious. The more you do this, the better you'll get at it and you'll kind of build a muscle memory around it. And if you don't do it, you're just going to be like a live band that has a really bad drummer who doesn't know how to keep time, and you're just going to be doing blast beats the whole time. Instead, practice. Get that pace and pace yourself out. Let's go over to pitch and then I'll get to filler in a second. So pitch is what frequency you're talking about and it gets mistaken with tone a lot. Tone is the quality of the sound. Pitch is like what. What frequency you're speaking at. So if you want to have a tone that shows a lot of accountability, and I don't mean authority, I mean accountability. Like I'm Here I'm owning these words. I'm in this moment with you. You want to be thinking about speaking a bit more at the base of your throat than the top of your throat. So right now I'm speaking at the top of my throat. So almost imagine I'm speaking where my tonsils used to be, like higher up in your throat, and you can actually feel it. If I'm going to have a difficult conversation or if I'm in a room where it's loud and I just need to make myself heard a little bit more, I don't push at the. At the top of my throat like I am now, because that's where the tone starts to get impacted. Because your voice starts getting a little, like, raspy, and you can even kind of hear it here, my voice getting a little raspy at the edges. Instead, I start speaking more at the base of my throat. So now I'm speaking more at the base of my throat, and I can actually feel it now I'm feeling it here rather than feeling it at right where my tonsils are, kind of like down here, where almost you'd imagine like mid. Mid throat at this space, the pitch is more rooted, it's deeper, it's showing more ownership. It's also way easier to be heard in a room, especially a loud room, if you're speaking more at the base of your throat in this space. This is strong physical presence, and there's nothing wrong with speaking at the top of your throat like I'm doing now. This is super conversational. So if I'm just like, chopping it up with people, I'm typically speaking here. But if I'm in a more sensitive conversation, a conversation where it's really important that what I'm saying is heard, that I'm demonstrating lots of ownership here, lots of presence, that I'm thoughtful of what I'm talking about, that I really want the other person to know that I'm taking this conversation serious. I'm speaking more at the base of my throat. In learning how to do this, you want to make sure that you don't let go really low, get into a weird space about it. It does require some ability to shift from here to here. You have to spend some time doing it and you've got to feel the physicality of it. This is more of accountability voice, though, and being with people voice. Next, I'll focus on filler words, sounds, and phrases that I talked about earlier. In North America, very specifically, we can speak really, really, really quickly. But this is something that's kind of like culturally relevant in a lot of different places.
When we're speaking fast, as many of us do, our minds can't keep up with creating strong sentences. So what our mind does is they're like, whoa, you're going too fast. Make this sound, or put in this word or put in this phrase. And when you do that, you're giving your mind enough time to construct the rest of the sentence. So if you're doing that a lot, you're speaking too fast. But it can come across as overtly casual to people. And especially if you're talking about something super serious and you're doing tons of filler, like filler sounds or filler words or filler phrases, it can make you sound like you're unprepared, you don't care, you're treating it casually, all those things. So really important to pace down. But also know what you're going to say in advance. And I don't mean scripted, but you should really have a sense of what you're saying because that will have a great reduction in those filler sounds, phrases and words. And by the way, if you say like, or, or, or, you know, a few times in a conversation, it's not a big deal.
However, if the pressure's on and it's super important that you're showing up the right way and you're doing it, it is a big deal. The last thing I'd say is your use of encouragers. So encouragers are what I refer to when, if I say something or ask a question and someone else is speaking.
If I'm going, huh, that's an encourager because I'm encouraging someone else to keep speaking, like, huh? Because I'm saying, yep, I'm listening, I've got you. And then there could be physical encourage as well, but physical encouragers would be like eye contact, nodding, those types of things.
I'm going to focus just on the, on the verbal right now. When you're using encouragers in a conversation, the intent is to encourage someone. So if you're in like a high stakes conversation and especially a difficult conversation, and you're asking questions or trying to get engagement from your audience and they start speaking and you go, that sounds like what you're saying is shut up, go faster, get to the point. And any sensitive conversation, especially if you're viewed as being overtly direct or worried about that and you start using encouragers like that, it's going to shut down your audience or at least make them feel unappreciated rushed, any of those things. Me even hesitant to speak. Encouragers should fall either at the natural middle point of a sentence. So if someone's saying a long sentence, there's usually some kind of pause or brief pause in a sentence. It should fall kind of in the middle of the sentence or it falls at the end of a sentence or at the end of essentially what would be a paragraph if someone was speaking. When encouragers fall off beat. So someone's literally still speaking like they're in the middle of a word and you go, uh huh. That's jarring for your audience. So it falls in natural pauses or at the end of sentences or blocks of dialogue listening to how you speak. So again, I really encourage people that when they're speaking, if you're in a, for example, if you have a friend or a partner or a family member, that you can do some practice with getting them to speak.
And seeing where your encouragers fall is a really, really good thing. Encouragers are great to use, but if they're used inappropriately, you can give your audience the sense of you just want them to like, get out of here. So those four things, pace, pitch, filler, and encouragers, those are all a part of having a really accountable present, but also I'd say, like welcoming. Physical presence.
[00:32:49] Speaker A: My role requires me to work with people across various departments and levels of authority. I've realized that what works in the boardroom doesn't always resonate with frontline employees. How can I tailor my approach? How can I adjust my physical and verbal presence to better connect with different audiences?
[00:33:08] Speaker B: I'd encourage you to not think about audiences, but think of types of engagements. And your physical presence should be linked to that. It's not that C suite people always want everyone to show up, like totally buttoned up. And then frontline people want everyone to be like totally relaxed and cool. It's, well, what's the nature of the engagement and what are you talking about? So, you know, I talk about this a lot. I think there's three kinds of different conversations or meetings or speaking engagements. And they're either conversational slash, like low stakes or high value or high stakes. And that's how you should be thinking about your preparation and your physical presence. Your physical presence should be the most tucked in and high stakes. So if you're going to, let's say a boardroom for a serious presentation or a serious conversation or a serious meeting with C suite people. People, yeah, you should be in a high stakes situation, which means your presence should be the most buttoned up. The most practiced, like you should be showing up at your highest level of being really attentive to what signals you're showing off and how you're engaging with people. But again, you could be working with, you could be with C suite people and you could be at a company dinner or a retreat and you're not going to show up like, like with the highest level of physical presence. You're going to be more relaxed. Maybe you're going to be like, oh, maybe I'll treat this as a high value one. So you're a higher level engagement. But maybe you're going to be like, hey, this is low stakes and this is conversational and I just want to be in that space. You could be with a frontline person in the most high stakes of conversation. You want to retain them. They're a great, great employee. They're someone who's wonderful to work with and they could be at an entry level job, but they are wonderful for the company. They're a great person. But that's a high stakes conversation because based on that conversation you could lose them or retain them in a company. You should be showing buttoned up. But buttoned up in that sense isn't showing up like you're in a boardroom. Buttoned up in that sense means you're demonstrating caring, you're being attentive. So physical and verbal presence should really be focused on what kind of conversation I'm having at a given time. So is it conversational? It's just like conversational doesn't mean casual, it doesn't mean sloppy. It just means conversational is that you're chopping it up. You're in like just an organic, normal conversation. There doesn't have to be a high level of like ultra prep or like overt thinking, but it should be professional and it could be warm and friendly and all those things. High value is about giving and receiving value. So you gotta be a little bit more plugged in, you gotta be more focused and you gotta have the physical and verbal presence that supports that. And then high stakes is the highest stakes or something to win or lose. That's what you should focus on rather than levels. Because you know, you could put someone at the most senior level and they're actually quite a conversational person in most settings. And you could put someone at a front line and they might want their leaders to show up super buttoned up. It's less about the position of the person, it's more about the type of conversation.
[00:36:03] Speaker A: We want to hear from you. Our audience to submit your questions. Send us a message, drop us a DM or a comment on our social channels.
