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Everyone would agree that communication skills are most important in business, and being able to communicate clearly and powerfully makes or breaks a leader.

Interestingly enough, presentations and speeches are the least effective means of leadership communication.

If you want to find a much more powerful and effective way in which to communicate, you’ll have to familiarize yourself with the so called – “Leadership Talk.”

To help you understand what leadership talk is all about let’s look at the purpose of a leadership talk, what is a cause leader and how to develop and deliver a Leadership Talk.

1. The purpose of the Leadership Talk

There is one, and only one purpose of the Leadership Talk and that’s to motivate people to be your “cause leaders” in meeting the challenges you face.

Leadership talks must communicate with the receiving end in mind.  There are two golden leadership premises that drive The Leadership Talk.

a. Leaders, in order to be called effective, must bring about the desired outcomes and results.

b. Aside from getting the right results, a good leader must also get it done fast.

Leadership talks are powerful tools that get results by helping business owners reach out to their employees, identifying ‘cause leaders’ and sustaining fast results generation.

Great leaders all start and end with messages from the heart; that is what leadership talk is all about. Applying leadership to a task changes the expectations of the task.

Results will always be more dramatic if you ask people to not just do things but take the lead while doing it.

2. What is a ‘cause leader’?

Cause leaders do more than accomplish their jobs; they actually take leadership of those jobs and by doing so bring a special motivation, vision, and initiative to the jobs.

Clearly, you can order them to accomplish the task; and if you’re in a position of authority, they will most likely carry out the order.

But they might not do it with full commitment. Worst is they may even dislike being ordered around.

Or they may be inclined to do nothing unless ordered, and so after accomplishing the task, they do little else but wait for the next order.

However, their commitment to take on leadership, involves you having to establish a special relationship with them.

You can always have them perform their jobs well but never insist on them to take the lead; it’s a choice that’s also a privilege of any employee to accept or decline.

3. How to develop and deliver great Leadership Talks

The secrets to proper delivery of a Leadership Talk are: audience needs, strong belief and action.

Audience needs: The first step in putting together a Leadership Talk is to understand the needs of your audience.

You can never enforce cause leadership into someone because that will always be the choice of the worker.

The cause leaders need to find it worthy of their time to solve their own problems and needs.

All needs are problems and all problems are crying out for solutions. Handing out active solutions to their needs will still be a long shot towards actually motivating them to make the right choice.

Asking them the following questions will help you and them clarify their needs:

(1) What is changing for them?
(2) Who would they rather have leading them besides you?
(3) What action do they want to take?
(4) What do they feel?
(5) What do they fear?
(6) What’s their major problem?
(7) What makes them angry?
(8) What do they dream?

Strong belief: Knowing your audience’s needs is important, but it’s only the first step in developing a Leadership Talk. The next step involves strong belief, and it’s not about just your own belief but that of your employees as well.

The key question is, can you transfer your belief to them so that they believe in it as strongly as you do?

In order for this to happen, they want to know two things: who you are and why you are there.

As to who you are: It generally revolves around your knowledge and skills, which is highly related to how you’d face the challenges that will come along the way.

As to you why you are there: There’s an exclusive answer in this inquiry and that’s whether or not you can satisfy their needs by providing solutions.

Action: After you have completed the first and second stage, the most important phase is the actual actions that the staff will commit to after your talk.

As the main goal of any leadership talk is to get great results on a continuing basis, you may want them to start small then go upscale in time. Test the cause leaders by asking them to prepare a checklist containing real PHYSICAL ACTIONS that they can implement straight away.

Having people move from simply saying they will do things to actually taking the physical action to perform it will dramatically increase the effectiveness of your talk.

September 2013 Issue