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Understanding your audience is important for selling anything. Presentation skills training helps you do that.
When we were young, our parents told us to treat each other in the way we would like to be treated. It made sense. In essence it was about being nice to each other.
But I don’t think that works well as adults. (We should still be nice to each other, but in a different way.)
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What can romantic comedies teach you about leadership? For one, emotion plays a role in both.
The title of this might sound silly to you, but take a moment to think about it. There is a time-tested formula for the making of a romantic comedy—and it works every time. Whatever each particular story arc happens to be about, rom-coms work because they drag people in, on an emotional level, and force them to care.
As a business leader, your job is so much easier when you get your clients, your customers, your employees, etc. to truly care about what you have to say. Once you have people invested at an emotional level, they will actively want to follow you, to help you, to listen to you.
So what’s the secret of the romantic comedy, and how can it be applied to your business world? Well, let’s break out down step by step.
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You can use the traits of #HarryPotter, #LukeSkyWalker and #Superman to improve your leaderships skills.
Most are familiar with the stories of Harry Potter, Star Wars and Superman.
If you’re a fan of these stories you might be aware of the striking similarities between the three main characters – Harry Potter, Clark Kent, and Luke Skywalker.
The similarities with these three characters are striking.
All three lost their parents at a young age. They lived their young lives with no idea of their true, remarkable identities.
As each grew older, their true identities were revealed to them. This put the characters on remarkable journeys.
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Many companies use bonuses as the carrot to drive performance. It makes sense. Money is the common denominator across society – we need it just about everywhere. It is also easy to compare. If you do twice as much work as I, it’s fair that you get twice the bonus.
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The more the world changes, the more it stays the same. It’s the same in the work place.
With ever-increasing ways to communicate – social media, online videos, snap-chats – the more powerful face-to-face communication has become.
We want to be able to look people in the eye, ask them the tough questions and see how they react. People who master this interaction will be the ones that dominate the market.
When we meet face-to-face, three things happen.
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Preparation can help you take flight when speaking in public.
Even the most seasoned business executives get nervous.
Many people get nervous at the prospect of speaking in front of a large audience. They tense up. Some lie awake for nights before dreading the moment when we step in front of the crowd.
For a brand new leader in business, facing the challenges of public speaking for the first time, the nerves might seem overwhelming.
Nerves might seem like a strictly psychological problem, but it doesn’t stop there.
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A poor slide presentation will do more harm than good.
For many years I’ve used presentation tools to help with presentations.
Handouts, slides, props and more have made appearances with me in front of audiences.
There were tons of little devices I used to make the presentation more effective. I, like many others, have even used the overhead projector that beamed images onto a screen from those plastic pieces of paper-looking sheets.
On some levels it seems silly to use presentation tools. After all, if you’re confident in yourself as a leader and speaker you shouldn’t need tools to help you speak in front of people.
In my years of experience I’ve learned that presentation tools not only help the person in front of the audience. When used properly, presentation tools can help those in the audience comprehend what is being presented.
Since that’s the goal of a presentation it makes sense to use tools whenever appropriate.
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It can be difficult to gauge how others perceive us.
We believe we are acting in one way and others see us acting in another. This is the basis of most workplace communication issues. It is the problem of perception.
Perception is driven from a reference point. The easiest reference point for us to use is our own. After all, we have immediate access to the knowledge we need to justify our position, behaviours and motivations.
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Knowing when to move on from existing business models is a sign of leadership.
Google has retired over 70 products in the last 3 years. That’s a lot of failure for one of the world’s most successful companies. There is an important reason why Google embraces failure.
This is what we can learn from it.
In the post about company culture we examined difficult decisions. Retiring a product is a difficult decision. Google seems to have no issue making difficult decisions when it comes to doing what’s best for the company in the long-term.
In another post we looked at failure and how leaders need to know when to change course when a business model is not working. Again, Google understands how to learn from products that don’t work.
In the article about failures there was a statistic that was quite interesting. The stat was the fact that Google has closed 70 products in just the last few years.
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Accepting failure and moving on to greater prospects is a sign of leadership.
In a previous post about company culture it was noted that leaders often have to make difficult decisions.
One of the most difficult decisions leaders need to make is stopping a bad investment.
The examples given included some hyped Google products – Wave and Buzz. If you haven’t heard of these products, don’t worry: Google pulled them from the web almost as quickly as they launched.
It’s a hallmark of strong leadership when a company is able to pull products and services when they see that things aren’t going to work out. The tendency is to try and persevere to make the product work, but those efforts usually result in a lot of lost money and energy.
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