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How Peter Handal and Dale Carnegie & Associates train leaders to communicate better
Smart Business Northern California | April 2010
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Once you know who you’re talking to, then how do you tailor
your message so that they understand it?
If you listen, and I’m not taking sides politically on the
health care issue one way or another, but listen to the president when he talks
about health care — I’ll give you two examples. One would be when he’s talking
to a Democratic audience, when he’s trying to fire up the base and the other
audience base is the general American public. It’s pretty interesting because
he does know the audience and he does tailor his approach to that audience.
When he’s talking to a more liberal base, the Democratic
activists, he’s much more enthusiastic, much more, ‘If not us, who; if not now,
when.’ And he’s’ calling from their perspective what they want to do as
Democrats and make history and they want to pass landmark legislations that
will have an effect for decades to come. He appeals to that desire they have
and he’s talking in their interests.
Still in the same topic but if his audience is the general
American public, he doesn’t talk about how it’s going to be a legacy for the
Democratic party — the we have to do this now because that’s what we were
elected for — but when he’s talking to the general populous, he’ll talk about
the insurance companies and how they’ve done all these bad things. He appeals
to people in terms of, ‘You don’t want to have pre-existing conditions
eliminated and you want to be able to get coverage when you need it.’ Same
thing — ‘I’m for this health care legislation,’ but he tailors it very
effectively to the different audiences he’s speaking with.
I’m not taking positions though — Dale Carnegie doesn’t have
a position on health care, but it’s a good example.
How can someone craft those various messages when he or she
doesn’t necessarily have speechwriters working for himself or herself?
First of all, it’s knowing your audience. So you start with
that because once you know who the audience is, you put yourself in their
place. If I were in their place, what would I be interested in? If I’m a small
business owner and I’m talking to a group of my managers, maybe what my
managers would be interested in is are they going to lose their job, what’s the
future, so I would be thinking about what they are interested in and try to
address that in my conversation. If I’m talking to my customers and they’re
interested in the quality of what we do and are we going to do it on time and
are we going to keep the price we gave them and what do other companies that
have used my company’s services think, and so in that kind of communication,
which could be a sales call, then you would be addressing those kinds of
issues. If you know the audience and then you say, ‘If I’m in their seat, what
is it that I want to be interested in?’ then you address that.
After you’ve communicated, how do you check to make sure
your message was understood?
So often people think they have said what they thought they
said, and in fact, people have heard something totally different. That does
happen.
One way that I think is very effective is to have questions
and answers. I personally feel very strongly that when I give presentations, I
like to have them interactive, and I like to have the audience asking questions
about different things at the end, so if I’m allotted 45 minutes for a talk,
I’ll allot 20 minutes for question and answers and only talk for 25 minutes. In
that kind of environment, you then get the idea of what they heard. I think
that’s a very important technique to use.
Another way — and if it’s a smaller group, you can do it
much better — is just making the conversation interactive. If you’re on a sales
call and you’re a small business owner and trying to represent your company,
trying to convince this XYZ company to buy your services, instead of getting up
and going through your notes, you might say, ‘Does that make sense? Is that the
kind of issues you face?’ Try to draw them out as opposed to lecturing at
people and just talking at them and it makes it much safer and you’ll be
communicating what you think you are because people will be interacting with
you.
And how do you make sure your message stays consistent across
different constituencies?
That’s a real challenge for any company. Dale Carnegie is in
86 countries, and we have 233 offices all around the world, and we train in 30
languages, and it really is hard to get the message out, and here it is, we’re
experts in communication, and it’s hard to get a consistent message out that
everyone hears.
Part of it is using different methods. It’s not enough to
send out an e-mail to everybody and say, ‘This is what we’re thinking or this
is the issue of the day.’ There’s nothing wrong with e-mails — it’s an
essential way of communicating, but if that’s the only way you communicate,
that’s not going to reach all the audience. Some people absorb information in
writing. Some people are the kind of people that absorb information face to
face. We all have our own ways of learning. Some people like audio books
instead of actually reading hard copies. My wife much prefers the Kindle.
Everybody has different ways of learning, so I think it’s important that, in
order to get a consistent message out and have everyone hearing it, to use a
whole variety of media. It’s a little more work because you have to repeat the
message in different ways, whether it’s a DVD or Skype or conference calls or
whatever, but I think that kind of approach is one way of doing things.
The second is to repeat the message over and over and over
again. There was a friend of mine that was the CEO of Wal-Mart Stores. I think
Wal-Mart has like a million U.S. employees, and I asked how he communicates to
a million employees. He says to me, ‘Peter, the first 10 times, nobody hears
me, and the second 10 times, they begin to hear some noise in the corner, and
the third 10 times, they begin to hear something about what the message is, and
the fourth 10 times, they’re beginning to really hear what the message is.’
His point is to repeat the message over and over and over
again so that people will hear it. That’s just the way we are as human beings.
There’s a lot of noise out there. Whether it’s on our smart phones or e-mails
or voice mails, there’s so many things going on, even though we all think we’re
great at multitasking, you don’t absorb information and concentrate just on
that one thing that’s going on at that one point of time. You have to
concentrate. Use a variety of media and keep on repeating and repeating and
repeating.
How to reach: Dale Carnegie & Associates Inc., (212) 836-0741 or
www.dalecarnegie.com
