There is a cringeworthy moment in every brainstorming session where someone says the word ‘No’. The energy fizzles out and almost simultaneously the ideas start falling flat. In a brainstorm, there is no room for the word ‘No’. But there is room for the words ‘What if?….’

A good challenge is not a criticism – it is the exploration of an idea. It is fleshing it out. If an idea has the merit required to survive a few rounds of hypothetical questioning, then the idea is going to be a good one, and effective leaders realise this.

Craig Lauchlan – General Manager, Portfolio Consulting Services, Commonwealth Bank Australia – shares his thoughts on the topic of leadership with Preetha Shekar from Red Giraffe Training.

According to Lauchlan, the IT sector is an environment where there are constraints and risks and it is important to understand all parts (whether it is finance, risk, technology, dependencies etc) to have a chance of success. Peer challenge and review helps to foresee and overcome potential obstacles and simultaneously achieve group buy-in. After all, you will always need the group buy in to move forward with an idea – you can’t achieve great results on your own, it is a collective team effort.

Lauchlan himself fosters an open working environment – colleagues are encouraged to share ideas and put those ideas to the test. He believes that without exception a good idea will always feed into the overarching business vision or strategy for the business unit.

We’ve heard it all before. “There’s no ‘I’ in ‘Team”, we’re told. Better yet, “Team work makes the dream work”. There are inherent truths underpinning these cliches, and ultimately it is a leader’s responsibility to ensure that his or her team works efficiently together as a unit. So how is this achieved?

Craig Lauchlan – General Manager, Portfolio Consulting Services, Commonwealth Bank Australia – shares his thoughts on the topic of leadership with Preetha Shekar from Red Giraffe Training. Believing resolutely in the interrelatedness of each function within an organisation, Craig advocates that a leader must always recognise that it is the team as a unit – not the individual – that will add the most value.

According to Lauchlan, leaders must search for and advocate each individual’s strengths. It is these strengths that will take people forward, and focusing on negatives can turn into self-fulfilling prophecies. Strong leaders are those who want to see their teams succeed, and will invest energy into helping them achieve this. Lauchlan himself draws great pride from watching his team members thrive and enjoy success.

Whilst you may actively preach against advertising and flick the channel at every commercial break, even the heartiest of opponents must recognise the strength of a good advertisement.  Many of us know the tune to a jingle better than the second verse of our national anthem. Other TV ads will trigger emotions in us that lead us to reach for the tissue box. 

So while we might oppose the blatant capitalism that underpins the ads, there are few of us who can ignore the good ones. So what is it about commercials that is so powerful? And what can it teach those of us in even the highest positions on the leadership chain about effective presentation skills and the art of selling?

1. Keep it simple

What you see here is a succinct message. Mac computers are easier to set up than PCs. The delivery of the message is uncluttered, and so too should be your speeches and presentations. Why lose the impact of your message by fluffing it up around the edges?

2. Leave your audience feeling something….anything

John Lewis, the humble British department store selling a variety of homeware and clothing goods. How have they managed to capture the hearts of their audience? Through the clever use of emotion, expression, and humanity, that’s how. When speaking and presenting, the stronger your connection with your audience the more your content will be.   

3. Inspire behavioural change

We’ve all watched a commercial at some point in our lives that has been so powerful it has literally changed our behaviour and caused us to act. From watching World Vision and deciding to sponsor a child, to switching to a lower temperature on our washing machines, we’ve all done something positive as a result of our engagement with an advertisement at some point or another.  And this is the exact result you should be looking to achieve when speaking and presenting in a business context. Leadership requires action, and this is something that the leading brands realise when they produce their commercial spots.

Leadership skills do not have a gender bias, and yet data still tells us that women are outnumbered in leadership roles in every field. This accounts for Politics, Law, IT, and Finance sectors, as well as professions that are traditionally be perceived as being heavily skewed in favour of women, such as Not-For-Profit and Nursing.

Society has made significant leaps forward in terms of the training, education, and recognition of women in the workforce and yet the number of women in leadership roles has been in decline since the early 2000’s. How do we rationalise this decline to ourselves? And how do we explain it to our daughters?

In this presentation video, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg theorises that the declining statistics of women in leadership roles reflects the higher instances of career drop-outs amongst women in the workforce. Sandberg proposes three rules that women can live by to keep them in the workforce for longer.  

(1) Sit at the table – the numbers don’t lie. Women consistently undersell themselves both professionally and personally, and lack the self-belief required to negotiate hard for their worth. Well educated and highly trained professionals, women are not pushing hard enough for themselves. 
(2) Make your partner a real partner – in the same way that leadership is not the sole right of men, childrearing and housework is not the sole responsibility of women. Equality is as important in the home as it is in the office and statistics inform us that equal-pay and equal-responsibility households have less marital breakdowns. Mutual respect and support for both partners’ jobs and responsibilities has the potential to halt the drop-out rate for women in the workforce.
(3) Don’t leave before you leave – Sandberg argues that women who make the decision to have children are displaying a tendency in the workforce to shy away from taking on further responsibility and promotion, as they subconsciously worry that they will be able to manage such a workload when a child comes along. This decision can be made months or even years before the time comes to have children, and their careers start to slow down as a direct result. Sandberg pleads for women to keep their foot on the gas pedal in terms of their career, because a job that is challenging will be the only job worth returning to when you face the difficult decision of going back to work or being a homemaker.

The potential for women to succeed in leadership positions has never been greater. There is no longer a question of capability, rather a challenge directly to women themselves to act as their own champions for professional success.

Women in positions of leadership, Sheryl Sandberg

When was the last time someone told you a good story? Hopefully it wasn’t so long ago that you were still being tucked in at night in your Wiley Coyote Pyjamas with a glass of warm milk at your bedside.

Whether the last good story you heard was Jack and the Beanstalk or an anecdote from a friend on the sideline of the football field as you watched your child scurry about after the ball, you will know from first-hand experience that storytelling is an art.

Effective storytelling is an immensely powerful tool that you can use in business presentations to quickly engage an audience. It can illustrate your point, or help your audience to remember your presentation.  When did you last weave a story into what you believed to be a high visibility, high stake presentation?

Share a story that you have told or heard that moved you or another to take action; look forward to hearing.

SLOW DOWN that PRESENTATION. No one rushes through desert.

Sitting through a speed-talker’s presentation is like being put through a human spin cycle. Dizzying. Information is thrown at you left, right and centre at such a chaotic pace, it is unlikely that any of it will sink in. You would be lucky to remember a point or two.

Consider the experienced presenter for a moment. He has mastery over silence. He will use it to give a key point emphasis. He will use it to convey confidence.  He will use to engage with his audience, and for dramatic effect.  His silence is like a silk scarf, gently luring his audience into his line of thinking.

Many nervous presenters – particularly in fields like IT and Banking – admit to a certain fear of silence. The dreaded suspension of words as they are thrown out into the abyss can seem paralysing. Great content is often babbled and blundered through at its own expense, to the point that it loses its meaning and resonance with the audience.

To be memorable, you need to hit the audience between the eyes and give them a chance to process what you have been telling them. It’s a technique that’s been used forever by politicians, actors and orators a technique so simple that you can incorporate into any professional presentation to leave a lasting impression.   No one rushes through dessert!

Scott Smith, pioneer and strategic leader within the Information Technology sector, speaks with Preetha Shekar from Red Giraffe Training about the evolution of the IT sector, and why communicating the value of IT solutions are critical towards achieving success.

Scott Smith reflects that the IT sector has undergone significant change in its time. What started off as providing a base function for voice communication solutions swiftly evolved into video-conferencing.  As technologies continued to develop so too did the role of the IT professional, who became fundamental in understanding and managing how these different technologies fit together and what growth this could offer a business.

The advent of e-commerce witnessed businesses move away from traditional bricks-and-mortar retail and the IT professional was now expected to provide the necessary infrastructure to realise the revenue ambitions of the business. As a result, effectively selling the vision and value of these products and solutions has become an essential part of modern IT leadership.

Is influencing, speaking and presentation skills a choice for the modern IT executive or manager?

Scott Smith discusses the difficulty that IT leaders face when they move away from being an individual contributor to being a team manager.  He reflects that as professionals move up the organisational ladder, their challenge as a manager is to successfully motivate and focus their team on team targets that they as managers are accountable for.

The same principle applies; command attention, give goose bumps, sell your vision.

It would seem that Jerry “King of the Living Room” Maguire could have done with some training in speaking and presentation skills. Maybe he wouldn’t have spent so long rambling when he had his audience at hello.

Jerry would have done well to seek advice from some of the most persuasive and influential speech makers in cinematic history. From Braveheart to Good Will Hunting, from Shawshank Redemption to Gladiator, it appears that there has been one common thread that commands attention.

The secret ingredient of these memorable monologues…. Good old-fashioned silence.

Whether you’re on Broadway or in the Boardroom, the same principle applies. Silence can be used to really drive your message home. To give goose bumps. To sell your vision.

If Hollywood has taught us anything it is that the best leaders are those who are able to motivate others to join them in their crusade – whatever their cause may be.

Silence provides your audience with the opportunity to pause and process the information you are delivering. Silence allows your audience to appreciate good content.

Scott Smith, pioneer and strategic leader within the Information Technology sector shares his thoughts on the integral qualities of Leadership in IT with Preetha Shekar from Red Giraffe Training.

Leaders in IT are uniquely challenged to not only motivate individuals who each have a different focus within their specific function, but to inspire them as a collective team, working together towards achieving the broader business goals.  IT leaders may be managing network engineers, security engineers or e-commerce people directly, but the group collectively has an impact on the business.

Scott Smith asserts that in the IT industry in particular, it is important that leaders are able to engage with their team to enable them to sell their value across the many different layers of a business.  Strong leaders add clarity to what is being achieved, while knowing where they want the team to go next .