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- How to Speak More Confidently, Tactics to Build Great Company Culture - Tactician: #0089
How to Speak More Confidently, Tactics to Build Great Company Culture - Tactician: #0089
"To speak confidently, you need to practice. It's like being in a school play. You don't just show up and wing it. You stand in front of your mirror, recite your lines, and convince yourself you're the best darn tree in the forest."
01/04/24
How to Speak More Confidently
Why Read:
Learn effective techniques for impromptu speaking, such as using structured frameworks, visualization to reduce anxiety, and reframing nervousness as excitement.
Authors:
Lenny Rachitsky, Author at Lenny’s Newsletter interviews Matt Abrahams, Founder and Principal at TFTS Communication LLC
Link:
Key Concepts and Tactics:
Prepare for spontaneous speaking by practicing structures and frameworks
“… you actually have to prepare to be spontaneous and that's counterintuitive but it is through preparation that we get better at it. When an athlete is doing their sport they are responding to the conditions that present themselves. What helps them do well is all the preparation and practice that they've done… the only way I have found to help people get better at this is to to look at how we approach it our mindset and then how we actually craft the messages through structure."
“Structure is critical in spontaneous speaking to most of us because when we feel the intense pressure, the anxiety we just talked about we just spew out information. We list and itemize information we take our audience on the journey of our own discovery of what we want to say as we're saying it.”
“The structure that almost everybody listening in is familiar with is one that comes from the world of advertising most advertisements are set up as problem, solution, benefit.
There's some problem in the world
Here's how we solve it with our product or service and
Here's how you benefit from it.
That's a structure it's a logical beginning, middle and end. these items have a connection. So by finding a structure that you can rely on when put on the spot it helps. You have to think about what to say, the structure tells you how to say it and then you just have to think about what to put into it.”
More Examples:
“One of the structures that I like is called Prep:
Make your point
Give a reason for making that point
Give an example
And then restate your point
It's like here's what I think, here's why, here's an example and then let me just remind you again the point I'm making.”
“The structure I really like is a three question structure:
What
So what
Now what
If you're giving an update in a standup: here's what I'm working on, here's why it's important, here's what I'm doing next. By packaging the information up and what so what now what it becomes much more digestible much more memorable.”
“…a whole series of these tools in your toolkit can really make a difference.”
Employ the "ADD" framework (answer, detailed example, describe relevance) when answering questions
"You answer the question cleanly and concisely. You then give an example to reinforce the answer and then you explain the relevance or significance of the answer so people know it.”
Use visualization to reduce anxiety and desensitize yourself before speaking
"Visualization is a really useful technique. You see yourself not just in the moment of speaking but getting up to the stage, seeing it going well, thinking about how you step off the stage. We see athletes do this kind of thing all the time and there's good research to say that this desensitizes people."
Reframe anxiety as excitement to reduce nervousness
"When we feel those symptoms of anxiety rather than seeing it as negative say ‘this is exciting! I get to share my point of view! I get to demonstrate my value! By seeing it as more positive it causes to relax. Research fascinatingly found that people actually were perceived as communicating better and again that's because that pressure was taken off of them."
Tactics to Build Great Company Culture
Why Read:
Learn key insights on building and maintaining a strong company culture from HubSpot's CTO and Chief People Officer.
Authors:
Jason M. Lemkin, SaaS Founder, Enthusiast & VC interviews Dharmesh Shah, Founder and CTO at HubSpot, Katie Burke, Chief People Officer at HubSpot
Link:
Key Concepts and Tactics:
Codify and publicize your company culture early on
"…the Hubspot Culture Code, people think of it as a code of conduct kind of thing… but I'm my mind at the time the deck was being crafted, I thought of it as actual code. So, it was an engineering perspective, it was like, 'Okay, if I were to write an algorithm or an operating system to pick people, or to figure out how to make decisions, what would that look like essentially?' That was the original kind of genesis of it."
Treat culture as a product and continuously iterate on it based on employee feedback
"From an engineering perspective, as I think about culture, this is probably the most important insight I've had personally… I think we should think about culture as a product, and the team, the people, the employees, as the customers of that product. And so all the things that apply in building a product, you would never build a product without talking to customers. Unheard of. You would never try to craft a culture without getting the team's input. Product is never done, culture is never done."
Conduct anonymous employee surveys and transparently share all results and feedback with the entire company
"We do an anonymous quarterly survey of all our employees. We never assume that our culture is working. We always assume that we can do better… we get a whole lot of feedback, and then the hard work begins. We share every single data point, every open ended response, every piece of feedback that people say. 'Dharmesh did a terrible job.' 'I hated Katie at that company meeting, it was awful.' 'Our benefits are terrible.' That all goes to our entire company on the Wiki, so you can download that file, you can read it yourself, you can look through it, you can actually raise on our company Wiki a disagreement about it. You can raise concerns or questions, you can ask us."
Address toxic employee behavior promptly through coaching or exit
"If it's blatant disregard, if it's harassment, if it's a pattern of behavior against a particular group or individual, that behavior is incredibly hard to fix. And I'm sick and tired of companies making excuses for not fixing and addressing it. It's unacceptable, those people have to go."
Take active, intentional steps to improve diversity and inclusion, starting with one dimension first
"There's part of us that wants to focus on one thing… we sort of know we have higher odds of making an impact on gender diversity. Its much more straight-forward than other things that you can try… and so we started there. Okay, we want to build some momentum, we're new to this thing, we want to get some wins behind us, and it's still goodness, so let's try to get that better."
Define your values in a way that distinguishes you and informs hiring/growth decisions, not just generic platitudes
"So the exercise I always say to people is, 'Get in a room and decide on the values. Then cover up your company name and show it to someone and say, 'Would you get excited about our company? Would you understand the type of person that would excel here?'' And if you can't do that, or if you think it could be for the yoga studio down the street, or a restaurant, or one of your competitors, which often it can. That's a problem. You cannot cover that up and say, 'Okay, you could go down the street to our competitors and get the same thing.' Your values should uniquely position you in the same way that your value proposition for your customers distinguishes you from your competitors. Your culture has to do the same thing."
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