THE BEANS ARE JUST THE MEANS! PART 1

SECRETS OF THE GREATEST COMMUNICATORS

Friends, last week we talked about culture building and how important it is, even as a one- or two-person business, and especially as a competitive advantage and brand differentiator. If you’re still not quite sure about the ‘why’ and importance of killer culture development, listen to that episode over and over and over until it starts to sink in and make some sense. I can’t stress enough how important the topics of leadership, company culture, and communication are in building a successful and sustainable company. Please note, I did not say it’s important in building a business. There are millions of businesses around the world that consist of 1 person to thousands of people with little to no leadership, no real defined culture, and little to no communication beyond company memos and orders to get the work done. Almost everybody needs to work. Most people have bills to pay, mouths to feed, some semblance of goals, dreams, aspirations and desires of their own and they end up where they end up for a variety of reasons. Money is a very strong motivator for most people, and there are a lot of people who simply cannot leave their jobs, regardless of how untenable they may be. Looking at companies with no real definable culture, no real definable or recognizable leadership, and poor communication styles and thinking that they’re successful because they have people working for them and might even be profitable is a form of logical fallacy. 

If you want to emulate the best companies and businesses around the world you have to research what it is that makes those companies and businesses successful, and I can almost guarantee you that the secrets of success lie in three primary areas: leadership, culture, and communication. You might be tempted to say something like product or service, but you’d be wrong. You might be tempted to point to Apple, Chik-Fil-A, or maybe Zappos, and their specific products and service, but you would be missing a bigger point. Certainly, all three of those companies have good products and service. However, when you dig deeper what you find is that all three of them had tremendous leadership, powerful company cultures, and powerful and inspiring communicators within each of those organizations. If you want to really dig into the weeds of a company that is never really thought of for exciting products, delicious food, or amazing service, study up on Cisco systems, the networking and IT systems company. I guess, maybe if you’re really into routers and switches and that kind of thing, you might get excited when the name Cisco comes up, but, if you’re like me, I couldn’t really care any less about them. That is until I started studying up on their former CEO, a man named John Chambers. Just Google or search on YouTube for talks by John Chambers and take a listen to a man who had to overcome dyslexia, speech and communication challenges, and a crippling fear of public speaking to become one of the companies most inspiring leaders the company has ever had. He took Cisco from 400 employees and $70 million in sales to 70,000 employees and $47 billion in sales. He thought deeply about what business they were really in and decided that Cisco wasn’t just selling routers and switches, they were selling life, the ability to bring voice and data to areas of the world that never had a dream of communicating on a bigger scale. Cisco was bringing speed and lifesaving data to the medical industry, and they were bringing together the globe so that humans from one culture could communicate with their brothers and sisters in another culture. He learned how to connect with that greater mission and then communicate that to company in a dynamic way. He took a highly technical product and service and learned how to break it down into a bigger mission, a bigger vision, and in terms that every employee at every level could relate with. 

The message in this episode, my friends, is about how you communicate. I’m not going to tell you that you MUST become a great public speaker to be successful. For one, that’s not true. There are lots of very successful people that aren’t good at public speaking. Public speaking, as you’re probably aware, is one of humanity’s number one fears. Most people would rather eat a live rattle snake than stand in front of a crowd and give a speech or a talk. I get it, it can be scary. Some people are good at it and enjoy it, others not so much. However, aside from public speaking, the way you communicate your message is of vital importance, especially in the increasingly digital world we all live in. I’ve been talking in some of the past episodes about differentiation in the market, about culture as a competitive market advantage, and about your ability to articulate what it is you really do. What your company does, why it does what it does, why you do what you do, and then why others should either want to do that with you, or pay you to do what it is you do. We all know that some people are better at telling their stories than others and that’s ok, we can learn from those people, and should. The message for you today is not only that anybody can develop and enhance their communication skills, but also that I believe its imperative for anybody interested in growing, scaling, improving, attracting and retaining better people, and just generally experiencing more success in almost every aspect of life and business to get better at speaking, articulating a message, and communication in general. With that, lets talk first about what constitutes a great communicator, and then I’ll give you three questions to ask yourself, the answers to which will help you become better at speaking, leading, and communicating a message.

I said something a bit ago that I want to reiterate and that’s that in an increasingly digital age, communication skills are becoming even more important than they were just a couple short decades ago. With the advent of the internet and the proliferation of social media, having the ability to communicate well is a strategic differentiator and a competitive advantage. We’re exposed on a moment-to-moment basis pictures, videos, posts, and a host of other people’s thoughts and ideas that rob of us of our time and our need to formulate our own thoughts and ideas about things. We allow our brains to shut down for longer and longer periods of time while scrolling social media and while looking for ways to frame our breakfast so a world of uninterested people can see what we ate this morning. None of which requires us to utter even one word. Today, the ability to influence somebody’s thoughts and ideas comes down, more often than not, on how prolific you are in their social feeds. I know I’m painting with a broad brush here, but the point I want to keep making in this episode is that studying the art of public speaking, of communication, and the secrets of moving people to take some kind of action is one of the most important skills one can develop today, especially if you consider yourself a leader in some way. The great news is that anybody can develop these skills. You don’t need to have excelled in school. You don’t have to have even gone to college and gotten an advanced degree. It just has to become important to you and then an area that you set aside some time for to study, and then practice. So, let’s talk about just 3 simple things in this episode that all great communicators do that make them great communicators. And then I’ll give you 3 questions to help you on your path to becoming a great communicator. 

I mentioned John Chambers, the former CEO of Cisco Systems earlier, because of his overwhelming success as the leader of that company. The scoreboard tells the story in many of these case studies and success leaves clues. Steve Jobs of Apple, Howard Schultz of Starbucks, Jack Welch of GE, Richard Branson of the Virgin Group, Chris Anderson, the founder of TED Talks, and the list goes on. All well known as great communicators who were able to communicate their vision, their passion, and their energy unlike anybody else. However, all of them also had a special skill that is often discussed when talking about these people, and that is (was) their ability to get people to care. Every single one of those leaders mentioned had a deep emotional connection to their story, and then the ability to make that emotional connection infectious. Let’s talk for a minute about what I mean when I say they have a deep connection to their story. Becoming a great communicator means having the ability to look at what you create, what you sell, what you do, and then see beyond that to what it is you really do, what you really sell, what you really create. Steve Jobs, for example, didn’t sell computers and he knew that. He was in the creativity and efficiency business. His passion was in building tools that helped people first unlock, then unleash their creativity and get work done. Just Google any of Steve Jobs Apple events keynote speeches and you’ll hear somebody who had the ability to take a piece of hardware and then turn it into a magical piece of heaven that millions of people just had to have at higher-than-normal prices. Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks knew it wasn’t about the beans and he said as much. It was about the sense of community that he experienced while sitting at cafes fellowshipping with friends and acquaintances. It was about how he felt life should be lived and experienced through the act of drinking coffee that he sought to recreate with Starbucks, the beans were just the means to that end. 

So, that first lesson of the great communicators is that you have to get them to care. If you can’t get them to care, your words will be lost. Your energy will be wasted, and you’ll be ineffective in communicating your message, whatever that might be. If you can get them to care first, you’ve engaged them at a deeper level than just their brains, you’ve engaged them in their hearts, which is one of the most important keys, in my opinion. How do you get other people to care about what’s important to you? Simple, it has to first be important to you and then there has to be some passion around the topic. No passion, nobody will care. You can’t hope to inspire if you’re not inspired yourself. You have no hope of evoking passion from your people or an audience if you have no passion for the subject. Howard Schultz is famous for saying, “its our collective passion that provides a competitive advantage in the marketplace.” He knew that if he could infect his leaders with the same energy, passion, and vision that he had around this greater sense of community, they would then positively infect all of the people under them with that same energy and that would become their competitive advantage in the marketplace. In a world where you can get a cup of coffee on virtually every street corner, another café will certainly need a competitive advantage in the marketplace. As an appraiser, a Realtor, a lender, having a competitive advantage beyond price, speed, fee, or some other commoditized pressure is vital for success and longevity. Get people to see what maybe they can’t on their own and then inject some passion to help raise their energy around the topic. That’s why the leaders I’ve mentioned are often referred to as visionaries. Not only because they could see a different world and future than others, but also because they had the ability to get large amounts of others to see and buy into their vision. Get them to care first.

The second lesson of these great communicators has already been mentioned in the first point, I’ll just make it clearer for you. It’s that to be a great leader and a great communicator, you’ve got to find the object of your inspiration and enthusiasm. For Howard Schultz, it wasn’t the beans, it was the idea of fellowship, the sense of community, and building a company that cares about its employees and treats them with dignity. For Steve Jobs, it wasn’t about building computers and Ipods, it was about changing how people think and live through the tools his company created. For Chris Anderson, it wasn’t just about the TED talks, it was about unleashing the vast knowledge, wisdom, and experience contained within all of the world’s great minds through the TED talks platform, and all for free! Its available to everyone! For John Chambers of Cisco, it’s not about the routers and the switches, it’s about global communication, connecting the world of voice and data, saving people that had no hope of being saved through the speed of medical information and lifesaving data being accessible in areas of the world that are very remote. It’s always about something bigger than the equipment, bigger than the platform, bigger than the product or the service. It’s how the leaders and great communicators found the object of their passion and enthusiasm and were able to articulate something beyond the obvious, beyond the known, and beyond the view and vision of the audience. 

Great communicators have the ability to awaken something in their audience that even they didn’t know existed. Tony Robbins is a great example of this. Not only is he a massive physical presence, but he has a massive communication presence because he understands how to tap into the sleeping passions and enthusiasms of his audience in order to create massive change. Again, the scoreboard doesn’t lie and all of these people have gotten massive results based primarily on their ability to communicate a vision, a mission, an idea, values, and their own enthusiasm and passion. There’s a famous story about a conversation between Steve Jobs and former Apple CEO, John Sculley, while Jobs was trying to recruit him to come over to Apple. As they both sat on a terrace overlooking the Hudson River, Jobs turned to Sculley and said, “do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” Needless to say, Sculley left Pepsi and ran Apple for 10 years after that. For Steve Jobs, it was about changing the world and he truly believed it. That was the object of his passion and enthusiasm and those around him felt it. More importantly, he communicated that passion daily. Love him or hate him, he was a great communicator. Just Google ‘WWDC’ and watch any of the last 20 worldwide developers conferences that Apple put on. Watch and listen to Steve Jobs give the keynotes and unveil the new products coming out. A master communicator. If you want some contrast, watch Elon Musk give a keynote or product unveiling. Uber successful, for sure, a horrible communicator without question. Just really smart. 

The third lesson for becoming a great communicator is simply to study great communicators. It doesn’t matter If you like them or hate them. There have been many people throughout history that were not well liked but considered great communicators. Study all of them to uncover the secrets of how they communicated. I’m not a religious person at all, but I have no problem sharing that some of my favorite great communicators have been televangelists, preachers, and pastors I’ve come across while studying great communicators. Every Sunday I used to watch a man named pastor Fred K. Price. His son has since taken over his ministry since his passing, but he was a great communicator, in my opinion. I would study his body language, his voice inflections, the questions he would ask his congregation, and his overall speaking and teaching style. Mike Murdock is another great religious communicator. Again, I’m not interested at all in what they’re saying as much as I’m interested in how they’re saying it. Study the greats and even the not so greats. Separate your emotions from the art and the study and just be an observer of those who, throughout history, have had the ability to move an audience, either with their particular speaking style, or because of their ability to articulate an idea that may have otherwise been lost on everybody else. There are thousands of great communicators on YouTube now that you can observe and take notes from. Google great speakers and communicators and make it a part of your weekly study. 

I’ll leave you this week with three quick questions for your own assessment and growth in this area. The first question is this: why do you believe in your product, service, your company, or your cause? What is it about any or all of those that fuels and drives you to do what you do every day? The corollary to this question is, ‘why should people care?’ If you can’t find your own passion, why should they? 

The second question is: what’s your connection to your story? What’s your background, your history, your passion, the reasons that drove you to do what you do? What are your anecdotes and stories you have to support your passion in the telling of your story? Again, why should people follow you, buy from you, engage you for your services? Dig deep because great communicators are typically also great storytellers, and its usually through story that they connect with the heart of the audience first, then engage their minds. 

The third question is: Have you been sharing your connection and your story with your audience? If not, why not? And if you say, “Blaine, I ain’t got no audience!”, we may have found one of the big problems for those of you seeking some kind of growth and expansion; you have no audience, which means you’re not putting yourself out there. If you have one person working in your business, you have an audience to practice with. I talked about this in the episode on culture. It starts with anybody who will listen. You get better with each at bat and you have to force yourself to take lots of at bats to get good. You have to take some risks to get better at anything, and becoming a great communicator is no different. You have to risk embarrassment, you have to risk being wrong and learning how to own up, and you have to risk not getting the message right. That’s how you learn and grow. If becoming a better communicator is important to you, and I highly recommend that it become important, you have to start practicing at every opportunity. If you don’t have good opportunities being thrown at you, you have to create them for yourself. How are you sharing your story?

Until next week my friends, I’m out…