Have you ever walked into a meeting with really important information to share, but people don’t seem to care?
You give a speech, make a call to action, and you get… crickets.
You deliver a training that people specifically signed up for… but you just can’t seem to get your words to resonate.
So what’s the deal? Here’s a secret….maybe the issue isn’t what you are saying? Maybe it’s how you’re saying it.
In my job as a leader of nonprofit leaders, I have hosted a number of workshops that teach critical nonprofit leadership lessons such as:
- How to create a reliable and predictable individual donor system
- How to recruit the right people to join your board
- How to build a high-impact nonprofit website
To say this information is valuable would be an understatement, and if you know anything about the Nonprofit Leadership Lab, you know that the experts we select to present to our members are top-notch.
Even so, one truth that these workshops reminded me of is that HOW you say things is at least as important as WHAT you say because context matters.
Now don’t get me wrong…these workshops were awesome. But the most successful moments happened when the leaders intentionally did the following things:
They accurately read the room.
They properly set the table.
And they showed up authentically as themselves.
It was less about the information or resources they had to offer and more about what some people might call the “soft skills” of interaction.
So, let’s dive into this. What do I mean?
READ THE ROOM
If you want to read the room really well, you must consider the audience beforehand and gather information about the audience in real time.
For example, we know most nonprofit leaders feel overwhelmed, so making sure you don’t provide too much information or try to cram too much in is important. Even the pace and tone of how you deliver the information can amp people up or calm them depending on the goal at that moment.
Am I only talking about an actual room or does a Zoom room count? You bet it does!
At a recent Zoom event, the leader asked attendees of a session to share how they were doing in the chat, as an opening exercise. I can tell you from personal experience that some people hate icebreakers and opening questions. They believe it is a waste of time, but it’s clear that it gives valuable information about where people were at. In this particular case, the options were:
- Green: “I’m present and ready to start this training.”
- Yellow: I’m a bit distracted with something else or I’m just okay right now”
- Red: “I’m not doing well and it’s hard for me to be present in this training.”
If there were a fair number of “reds,” it could have indicated something happening in people’s worlds that needed to be named to move past it and allow people to be truly present for the training.
In this case, attendees self-identified as mostly green. In fact, attendees put their “status” in the chat for all five days of the training, even though they were not asked to. It seemed to serve as a signal that folks were ready to cut the chit-chat and begin that day’s training.
SET THE TABLE
Perhaps by now, you have caught on that when I say, “set the table,” I’m not talking about an actual table. I’m talking about the setup for the conversation, speech, or in this case, training.
You need to think about how well the audience knows you and how well you want them to know you. Is this the first time they are meeting you? First time in this setting? What do they need to know about you that could help give credibility and resonance to your words? How will you deliver that information?
For most speaking opportunities, you will likely have a written bio but your audience may not have read it.
I encourage you to be creative. Different people learn differently. For one of the training sessions I co-led, my partner and I decided we would introduce each other.
We did this, not by reading the other person’s bio, but by sharing a more personal introduction that included facts and attributes that we admired and appreciated about each other. It lands differently when someone who knows you calls you an expert versus when you call yourself one.
In these trainings, we made sure to be clear about what we were aiming to deliver by saying: “By the end of the week, you should have a completed SWOT analysis of your organization, an elevator pitch to deliver to a funder, and a complete website assessment.”
We set the table to clarify what we wanted them to achieve from day one.
SHOW UP AUTHENTICALLY
Finally, try to be yourself. Authenticity for the win! Sometimes when we give a presentation or training, we are tempted to project a persona of who we think we should be.
I still get a little nervous when I share my screen on Zoom, and I’ve been known to have a distracting wandering mouse during those moments as well. I was tempted to try and hide this, but first, especially in the beginning, I couldn’t.
Second, I want people to know me, and I am not perfect. I don’t even try to pretend that I am. Authentically showing up as I am doesn’t diminish my expertise in the nonprofit sector, leadership, or anything else.
HOW DID YOU MAKE THEM FEEL?
When you are connecting with someone as a leader to persuade them to support you, build a relationship or rapport, teach them something, or offer advice, please take a moment to read the room, set the table, and be authentic.
Do yourself a favor and calm your nervous system, see yourself as others might, and spend at least as much time thinking about how you want someone to feel after you speak to them.
As the wise, wise Maya Angelou says, “People will forget what you said, they will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”
Want to be a more effective, persuasive leader? Remember that quote.
