Locks and Keys

J. Douglas Jefferys asked:


The process that sets you on your way to speaking like the best speakers in the world, speakers who possess The Skills, goes like this: You find a target in your audience and you lock eyeballs. You deliver a complete thought to that one person, and then you do the hardest part, you pause. You pause before turning to the next person, and speak to the next person with your next thought.

Here’s a tip to begin the whole process correctly: Whenever you get up to speak, before you ever get out of your chair to come to the front of the room, know which person with whom you’re going to begin speaking. Have that person picked out before you get up there. Otherwise, you’re going to start off on the wrong foot: you’re going to start scanning around for those “friendly faces”. Choose the person you’re going to deliver your opening line to ahead of time, and begin your talk by looking at that one person and letting it flow.

Let’s be clear - one thing you definitely don’t want to do is to look for and speak to only a few “friendly faces”. That might be advice that works well for the few faces, but what about all the other less than friendly mugs? How do you suppose they feel when they notice that you are engaging other people but not them? Do you suppose it might get them thinking about something other than your message? Do you want a few people buying into what you’re saying, or the whole group? Your job, remember, is to look at everyone in the audience. Everyone in the room needs to leave feeling that you took the time to personally engage them as individuals.

If you’ve been to a speech or a presentation by someone with The Skills, you have no doubt noticed that they did this. In fact, have you ever been to a large event with perhaps hundreds of people and come away feeling that throughout the program the speaker kept coming back to you? That for some reason the speaker picked you out personally for special notice, and repeatedly?

This is perhaps the most powerful advantage you will have with The Skills, but it’s also the easiest to acquire, because it happens all by itself! One great thing about The Skills is that they are infinitely scalable. That is, the larger the crowd, the better they work for you, but you don’t work any harder. You engage in exactly the same behaviors with twelve people as you do with twelve hundred!

Parallax Universe

The reason is this: thanks to the ways our eyes are built, from distances as short as ten feet, a phenomenon known as parallax kicks in, and for the very same reason we see railroad tracks converge in the distance, our eyes see the other person’s eyes converging on ours even when they might be pointed a few feet away. Speakers with The Skills are always only looking directly at one person at a time. But from a short distance, and increasingly with greater distance, people sitting around the person to whom the speaker is actually looking believe the speaker is looking directly at them.

So from, say, fifteen feet away, the four people around the one person you’re looking at will feel the benefits of your engaging them as individuals. From thirty feet, twelve people around your target will swear you’ve singled them out for attention! Your circle of influence keeps getting larger and larger, but you’re just doing the exact same thing you’d do in a small conference room. In our classes we enjoy asking the women if they’ve ever been to a concert where the singer sang directly to them, and we inevitably get at least one response of, “Yes, but how did you know?”

Rock stars know how to create and keep fans, and this skill is a big tool in their box.When you lock on one person, everything else kind of fades away. You focus all of your attention on that one person and nothing else. For the moment, your entire universe is composed of the one person to whom you are directing your one thought. And when you do that, for those three to nine seconds or so, your brain isn’t making new threat calculations all the time, trying to get you cranked up, cranked up, cranked up. Everything kind of fades away.

Advantages

Just as when you work from a nice, clean desk, or as when you’re given just one task to do, and that’s all you have to do, by talking to only one person at a time, it creates a nice, strong point of focus. All of your attention can be given just to this one moment, so that nothing else that’s going on affects your brain. Focusing on one person creates an environment that helps you focus on one thought - the thought that you’re delivering to that one person.

You’re also able to pace yourself. When you learn how to pause, when you learn how to say what you have to say and then stop talking for a moment, move on to the next person and only then begin speaking to them, it helps to create a smooth pace that the audience can follow, and also one that doesn’t foul you up.

One of the problems people have when they get up to speak is that, with adrenaline in your veins, your metabolism is elevated. Consequently, your perception of time slows down. You thus tend to speak much more quickly when you’re up in front of a group, when our juices are all flowing high. And unfortunately, with your somewhat diminished cognitive ability it’s not impossible for your mouth to overrun your brain. You know, you can push the words out so fast that your brain is not be able to replenish the queue quickly enough. And so you do end up finding yourself with nothing to say.

When you find yourself with nothing to say, that can be quite an anxiety-producing situation. It starts cranking up the whole fear juice thing again. The more you get cranked up, the more time slows down. That’s one of the reasons most people don’t pause. In your slow-motion state, you feel your pauses to be much longer than the length of the pauses your audience hears. But when you’ve been speaking on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on, and then all of a sudden, you just stop, the pause then becomes very, shall we say, pregnant.

By working pauses into your speech from the very beginning, you’re able to establish a pace that seems natural to the audience, and will actually mask any moment when you might not be able to think of what to say.



EDWARD

Tom O\’Dea asked:


Introduction

 

Key Opinion Leaders are the most influential people in any group or organization.  If you’re going to lead people, especially a large number of people, you need the help of Key Opinion Leaders.  Your job is easier when they are engaged and impossible if they oppose you.

 

Other articles have addressed the important and non-trivial task of identifying key opinion leaders.  Here we will address engaging them — winning their support and letting them make you successful.

 

Engaging the Key Opinion Leader

 

If you know who your Key Opinion Leaders are, you’re ready to start working to win their hearts and minds.

 

Now if you’ve got a layer of management below you in the organization, you probably have in those jobs the people through whom you expected you would drive your leadership agenda. 

 

They’re still there of course.  But now you have another group of people, most of whom probably report to one of those managers you have reporting to you.  The success of your leadership agenda relies on these — your key opinion leaders.  What do you do now?

 

Not to worry.  You didn’t pick the Key Opinion Leaders.  You found them, but they were picked by their peers.  So they’ve really been honored by the others in your organization.

 

Your job just got a lot easier.  So did the jobs of the managers below you.

 

You see, ultimately you’ve got to win over your entire organization.  They need to understand your agenda, know why they’re being asked to change, to perhaps work harder during a transition period, whatever.  You need something extra from them, and they’re only going to give it to you if they buy in.

 

But you don’t need to win them all over.  Your job now is very straightforward.  Grab the hearts and minds of the key opinion leaders.  When they buy in, when they understand, you can get out of the way because the rest will come virally.  These are the people who others believe in, respect, and are going to follow.

 

You — and your managers — now have the ability to influence the behavior of 50, 100, 500 or more people by working very closely with maybe 5 or 10.

 

And that’s what you’re going to do.  You’re going to let these people know that they have been identified by their peers.  You’re going to give them access to you and your management team.  You’re going to share as much information with them as possible, and you’re going to carefully consider every question they ask and every objection they raise.

 

They are going to know that you have a plan, that you consider them key to the success of the plan, that you will listen to them as they question and seek to understand, and that you will be open to suggestions and honest debate.  You’re going to give them the time — your time — to absorb and make your plan, their plan.

 

You will give them answers to their questions, and you’ll incorporate their suggestions whenever you can.  It may be your agenda, but they’re going to feel like they own it.

 

Show the Key Opinion Leaders that they’ve been elevated.  You don’t need to promote them or pay them more money.  You’re giving them more respect, more of your time, listening to them more.  They will know it, others will know it, and they will appreciate it and respond to you.

 

When a Key Opinion Leader Can’t Be Won Over

 

What to do when you can’t win the heart and mind of a KOL depends on how serious the disagreement is. 

 

If you’ve made a great effort, and you simply can’t see eye to eye with one another, you may have options.  Assuming you and they have acted professionally and ultimately have agreed to disagree, you can ask that KOL a simple question — will they agree not to oppose or work against you if you move them to a new position? 

 

If the answer is yes, help them go and join a new team or a different project. Everything is handled professionally and everyone lands on their feet.

 

If in the course of identifying Key Opinion Leaders you found someone who you can’t work with, and who will actively oppose your agenda, you have a more difficult problem.  This person has to go, and your agenda is going nowhere until you take drastic action.

 

Want some good news?  It seldom comes to that.  If you’ve been a successful leader to this point, you probably don’t have any cancers within the group.  If you have a KOL with whom you ultimately end up disagreeing, they are most likely professional enough that you can work out a solution where no one gets hurt.



IGNACIO

Tom O\’Dea asked:


Introduction

 

Key Opinion Leaders are the most influential people in any group or organization.  If you’re going to lead people, especially a large number of people, you need the help of Key Opinion Leaders.

 

This article defines what and who Key Opinion Leaders are, and how to find them in your organization.

 

What is a Key Opinion Leader?

 

Never heard of a Key Opinion Leader?  Key Opinion Leaders, or KOL’s, are the people within a group who are most influential.  They are the people others are watching, and whose lead others tend to follow.

 

When a new idea is floated, when a personnel change is made, when a process is changed — the reaction of the key opinion leaders will most likely be reflected in the reaction of the group. 

 

If the key opinion leaders “get it”, if they are on board with whatever is changing, and they demonstrate their support, there’s a great chance the group will go along.  But if the KOL’s are suspicious, if they are unsure, if they are flat out resistant, your success as a leader is in jeopardy.

 

Who are Key Opinion Leaders?

 

If you think you know who your Key Opinion Leaders are, you may be in for a surprise.  You can’t pick them, and you can’t assign them.

 

Let’s start out by understanding who they (most likely) are not.

 

They probably don’t include you.  Not that you are not influential, but you have the influence that comes with title or rank.  Most key opinion leaders derive their influence from other sources such as seniority, credibility, popularity, etc.

 

They probably don’t include most of the managers who report to you, for the same reason as above.

 

Finally, they probably don’t include the people in your organization whose opinions you value most — at least not all of them. 

 

Key opinion leaders are not assigned.  They evolve and develop over time in any group or organization.  If a group has not been together very long, it is likely that the KOL’s of today will not be the same in six months or a year.

 

So — you know who are most likely NOT your key opinion leaders.  How do you find out who they are?

Finding the Key Opinion Leaders

 

It’s not that hard really.  You just have to ask!   Hang on, before you start running around the organization, let’s be a little more specific about this.

 

If you go around asking everyone who the key opinion leaders in the organization are, they’re going to look at you a little funny.  It’s not a title, and it’s not an assigned role.  The term Key Opinion Leader was coined to identify a phenomenon that occurs naturally in groups of people.

 

One of the best tactics I’ve seen for identifying KOL’s is to ask everyone in a group to write down the names of the 2 or 3 people in the organization they most respect.  That’s it — no qualifiers, no detailed explanations like respect for what.  Who are the 2 or 3 people you most respect?

 

Collect all the answers and look for the names that show up most often.  Those are your key opinion leaders. 

 

This isn’t scientific.  The definition of most often will have a lot to do with the size of your group of people.  Sometimes 1 or 2 people stand out easily.  Sometimes it’s more like 4 or 5 people who are separated from the rest.  But inevitably, there will be some number of people you will find named with some frequency.

Surprise!

 

By now you’ve figured out a fundamental truth about KOL’s.  Not only are they not hand picked or assigned by you, but they control your fate as much as or even more than you control theirs.  What if you find that one or more of the key opinion leaders is someone you simply can’t abide?

 

There is no rule that says that all the KOL’s are influential in a positive manner.  Often there are one or more who are anything but positive.  And all too often this comes as a complete surprise to the leader.  What do you do when that happens to you?

 

You’re first goal is going to be to get the key opinion leaders engaged and on board with what you’re trying to accomplish.  If you’ve got a KOL you know you’re at odds with, you have a decision to make.

 

The best possible outcome is to win him or her over to your point of view, or perhaps more precisely to work with him or her — and the other KOL’s — to find a plan of action everyone can commit to.  If you take that path and succeed, people are going to notice and your stock as a leader will skyrocket.

 

If you take that path and don’t succeed, all is not lost.  You will have to remove the reticent KOL from the team.  Hopefully there’s another project to which they can be assigned. Still, people will see that you gave it a fair shot, and for that you will have gained respect.

 

But what if you know from the start that you can’t reach common ground with this key opinion leader?  First off (and I’m going to be brutal here) the fact that someone operating in opposition to your leadership has become so influential in your organization is not a good reflection on you.  You’ve made a mistake in not dealing with it sooner, now you have no choice. 

 

You have an agenda as a leader, something you are specifically trying to accomplish.  It involves changes in people, process, and/or technology.  And you have a cancer in your organization working against you.   Maybe you didn’t know it was there, or you saw it but minimized its importance.

 

Either way, you have to cut it out. 



PABLO