As the executive owner of change look at your communications with the view of a stakeholder and take guidance from a trusted advisor to ensure you are genuine and match your personal style. The participants in your change effort will be looking closely for this. Keep in mind trust is often a direct line to motivation and participation. Develop your Coffee Persona.
This is the ‘you’ that your friends and close business associates see. This is where your perspective is clear, your values are supported and motivations are apparent. Your coffee persona emphasizes with gestures, clarifies with tone, connects through eye contact and responds with empathy and conviction. It can sometimes irritate your cafe listener. It can sometimes enlighten. It is always dialogic and respectful.
Coffee conversations are often exploratory with new information and perspectives as the goal. They are sometimes task based in that they look for definitive answers to confusing questions. Support can be the goal when a decision has already been made.
As the coffee speaker we get to choose our listeners. When speaking to a group, choosing your listeners is rarely an option. How do we pick up our coffee persona and drop it in front of listeners in a group (meeting, presentation, speaking engagement, facilitation)? The answer is that we develop our skills backwards. We look at the ‘me’ that exists over coffee, grab skills that are effective and develop them further for a group environment. For example:
- We take gestures with us (yes you can use your hands if you do it effectively to describe and emphasize)
- We keep eye contact for full sentences and only look away in silence.
- We paraphrase the listener rather than parrot
- We use props and special tools to show relationships.
- We make sure our own individual perspective and connection the information is articulated.
- And it works in reverse, many of our conversations could stand to have some formal presentation components.