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TEDx Talks
Published: 2014-06-05
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02EJ1IdC6tE
uhhuh uhhuh one of the hottest topics in courses and books nowadays with regard to leadership communication is the concept of executive presence what does it mean how do you define it I cannot be taught or learned the center for tele innovation identified three main pillars of executive presence appearance medication skills and gravitas got a toss means things like do your words have teeth are you able
to make the tough decisions and stick with them one of the missing pieces when you think about what's integrated really between the lines of broad concepts like medication skills and gravitas is vocal executive presence as I call it it's the missing link how do you sound when you're making those tough decisions that's your delivery reinforce your message and establish the image that you want or does
it undermine what happens if I'm trying to defuse a tense situation and I say okay everybody just calm down now we need to reevaluate the situation worst I'm just adding fuel to the fire and at best you maybe later on gently suggested I switch to it's about how we connect I end up working a lot with people who are preparing for presentations and for press conferences
and they make statements like we're very passionate about helping children and improving the quality of our schools and I think to myself really because you could have fooled me there's a claim of passion but there's no evidence there up the problem is a disconnect between the choice of words and their execution their delivery and this creates a problem of credibility now there's a historic and seminal
study that looked at feelings and attitudes as well as a result of the consistency or inconsistency in verbal and nonverbal messaging queues and what they found was that when they ask people to evaluate speakers as far as whether or not they thought the speaker sounded sincere but thirty eight percent of that evaluation was based on the tonality of the speaker's voice finality being things like up
the ups and the downs in your intonation patterns in contrast only seven percent of those bad decisions were based on the speaker's words it shows and the remaining fifty five percent we're looking at nonverbal cues based on nonverbal cues like your posture your eye contact etcetera now this is a study we have to be careful because lots of people love to misquoted and you'll hear people
make grounds statements like well you know fifty five percent of all communication is non verbal that's not remotely accurate and it's not what the study was talking about but what we can take from this study and a lot of subsequent research in the area is the importance of something credible now I'd like you to think about this in the context of how you personally prepare for
some sort of presentation do you spend thirty eight percent of your time working on the delivery if you're like most people you probably spend the vast majority if not all of your time working on the content your outline scripts your power point slides making sure you've got cool graphics and some snazzy animations crunching your data to put into your spreadsheets but then after all that work
we sort of winning the delivery hoping it'll be good enough and in the end apparently week and it can undermines both your immediate goals and objectives as well as your long term image and reputation the fact is if you want to be seen as a leader you have to sound like one you have to demonstrate vocal executive presence now but part of vocal executive presence is
the ability to read an audience and identify the kind of person from whom they would beat most open to receiving your message and then figure out what that kind of person would sound like not to the extent we're all born with the voice that we have but we do have a lot of control over how we use it Margaret Thatcher is a great example there've she
was the first woman in British parliament and she was overtly mocked by a lot of her opponents with phrases like me thinks the lady dot screech too much because when she was passionate in arguing certain points her voice would go higher and become rather shrill so when she decided to run for prime minister she worked with a tutor from the National Theatre who helped her to
lower her pitch in order to sound more authoritative and this is really important because the voice has both cognitive and emotional effects on the listener start with the cognitive we talked about tonality that thirty eight percent the highest in the lows in your voice and if we use the strategically we can actually help the listener to focus on the most important words in parts of the
message which makes for later processing load and helps them understand and potentially remember what we're saying and this can have a persuasive influence when we listen to speech we process it in what are called tone units were chunks and we start first by fixating on the on the intonation patterns and anchoring what we listen to tune where those highest peaks are and then if necessary we
allow our imaginations to sort of fill in whatever is in those lower sound valleys an example of this isn't somewhere ex now we all have the situation where we've been singing along to a favorite song and suddenly we realize that or perhaps somebody else not so gently points out that we've been singing the words rock never been there lot of nodding there's a classic song what
a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong everybody knows this one and it there's a line that talks about the bright blessed day and the dark sacred night but when I was a kid I thought the line was the bright blessed day and the dogs say goodnight now does this make any sense whatsoever no but I accepted it in part because first and foremost it matches those intonation
patterns and it also matches at those pitch peaks the vowels look the syllables that are up at the top and then in the parts that were less aliens that were less emphasized in those she valleys I let myself make up the rest this also reflects why effective speakers when they're speaking will emphasize the most important words with higher pitch now tonality if we use it strategically
can have a good influence on our very first impressions in attempting to establish ourselves as leaders from the moment we meet somebody it's really important of course to us make a good strong memorable first impression but this is difficult when a lot of people feel like they're not even good at remembering people's names I feel like that well I'm going to absolve you of about half
of that blame that's because when most people introduce themselves to you they pronounce their own names wrong okay well technically maybe not wrong but they pronounce them in a way that uses a rhythm and intonation patterns that does make it more difficult for you to understand what they're saying and by the way I absolve you of only half of that responsibility because the other half of
the time you're the one introducing yourself to somebody else so if I want to know that I'm introducing myself and helping the listener to really understand winning by understanding than they can hopefully remember it and thereby remember me I want to start by letting my voice go up built up like this on your first name as if to say I'm not finished yet and then at
the top we'll have a little break that little paws that will allow for a sound break to indicate a word boundary and then on our last name we want to go down the pitch fall as if to say and now I'm done what you're putting a little vocal period at the end so instead of blurring your way through your introduction like hi my name is Larissa
Cola and blah blah blah I want to focus and help my listener to understand and so I'll do my best to say to them hi my name is Laura so Cola and you'll be amazed at the difference the strategic tonality can make even in something the small now of course if we're haphazard in our use of intonation and putting it in the wrong place we can
have the exact opposite effect we can distract the listener's attention from what's most important and make it harder for them to process what we're saying and one of the most common and in my opinion annoying examples of this that's becoming more and more prevalent in society nowadays is a phenomenon called of speak otherwise known as up talk or more technically highrise terminal and that's that pattern
where people are talking and they keep adding these question like tones at the ends of all of their phrases and sentences you know like they're implying a bunch of little okay's and rates one after another like there's some sort of deep seated insecurity and pathological need for constant allegations you know the problem with talking like that is that what ends up becoming emphasized is just whatever
randomly falls at the end of the phrase it doesn't help anyone to process what you're saying and that monotonous lilting upswing time and again can be rather hypnotic and so after awhile we don't really know if the audience is listening to anything were saying much less what at by the way I should also point out that this is not just a valley girl kind of phenomenon
like a lot of people seem to attribute it more and more nowadays this vocal crime against humanity is being perpetrated by men and women old and young highly educated and lesser educated so congratulations guys you've close the gender gap we delete so from there one of the other issues is that when people of course here up speak they tend to have a very negative and even
visceral response it's not only the antithesis of local authority it's almost like the vocal equivalent of hair twirling you know so when people have that visceral response this will bring us to now talk about the emotional effects voice let's start by thinking about some people who have really distinct voices start with James Earl Jones perhaps best known as the iconic voice of Darth Vader now in
my opinion with that deep rich bass voice that he has he can read the ingredients off the back of a bottle of shampoo and it would sound like poetry but he probably would not have been as successful if he had tried to play the role of Elmo on Sesame Street right you what about someone like Fran Drescher with that completely unmistakable whiney nasal voice right out
of queens New York she was great on TV is the nanny but she probably would have been more successful as Darth Vader can you imagine her standing over Luke Skywalker saying look all I am your father it's just so doesn't work now that's of great voice for comic relief but it's not necessarily the voice that she one encounter when you're looking for a funeral director it's
all about context in the funeral context you're looking for someone who sounds sympathetic %HESITATION sounds compassionate sounds like you can trust them to take care of you and your family during their time of greatest emotional need the problem is that when we find someone who has a voice that we find unpleasant or somehow that seems to lack the characteristics of the kind of person we're looking
for doesn't sound like that kind of person we can tune them out we can sort of shut down and we don't even want to hear the rest of the message no matter how important the information it sub consciously we really want the messengers voice to fit the message now does that mean that vocal executive presence is about acting no on the contrary it's the exact opposite
you have to be authentic you have to be yourself but the key is to recognize which parts of your personality need to shine through in a particular moment and how to transmit that through your voice and speech style now you're listening to me here today in part because the way that I'm presenting to you makes sense to you and we'll match your expectations for what a
Ted talk speaker should sound like but I can't use the same speech style when I'm talking to my three year old nephew he wonder what happened to it Laura because I don't so much fun anymore any probably stop playing with me but at the same time I can't come here today and talk to you in the same way that I talk to him can you imagine
if I started by saying everybody but not a great idea let's talk about vocal executive presence if you like are you kidding me who is this not what could she possibly know about leadership or executive anything and for that matter who invited her and by the way it was them so I call it working your prismatic voice in the end I'm not acting it's just a
matter of recognizing and being aware of the two audiences difference needs and expectations and then identifying which parts of my personality I wanna let come through and how in order to assure your openness to my message and with regard to that notion deep metaphor the prismatic voice in many ways in the same way that white light will pass through a prism and break ins all the
colors of the rainbow that makeup that white light when the white light of your personality passes through the prism of some situational context you need to look at all of the colors that are available all the different parts of your personality and decide which one you we need to highlight in the moment and how in order to be most effective and appropriate for that moment and
