Whether your audience is one or 1,000, there is more to successful communication than checking to see if your audience is listening. Expert communicators find ways to connect with the person or people to whom they are speaking. Connecting with an audience involves finding common ground, building a bridge to understanding and, most of all, putting the focus on everyone but the speaker. Leadership expert and best-selling author John C. Maxwell has spent decades honing the skills needed to connect with an audience. In this interview, he discusses his new book, “Everyone Communicates, Few Connect: What the Most Effective People Do Differently,” and how leaders can make much-needed connections.
The idea that connecting is really all about others sounds simple enough. Why is it such a difficult point for people to understand?
First of all, we’re selfish. I’m selfish! The natural tendency is for all of us to say, ‘What’s in it for me?’ That’s just who we are as people. That’s why I think connecting has to be intentional, because connecting is not about me. It’s about others. As a young communicator in my middle 20s, it dawned on me that, for a period of time as a young leader, I was trying to get people to connect with me and catch my vision.
One day I realized, I’ve got to turn this around. I’ve got to get in their world. I’ve got to think about them and what they’re thinking about and what they need and how to help them. Every morning I ask myself two questions: Who can I add value to today, and how can I do it? And every evening I ask myself: Did I add value to someone today, and how did I do it?
The reason most people do not connect is they do not understand the focus and the intentionality that is required to connect with others. I’ve watched other people that connect well, regardless of profession, and I can tell you that this is 100 percent fact: It’s not a principle that usually works. It does work. Everybody I know that connects with people, they do so because they’re thinking of others first.
You mention that control is a barrier to finding common ground. What advice can you give leaders about relaxing the need for control?
They need to ask themselves a very simple question: Do I want to have my way, or do I want to have the best way? If I want to have my way, I need to power up and use control. What I’ve known about those types of leaders is the fact that the only reason people follow them is because they have no choice. Now, that’s not leadership and that’s not connecting. Compliance is certainly not leadership and it’s certainly not connecting. The best leaders, the best connectors, what they seek immediately is common ground.
If I were sitting down with you today and you and I were wanting to connect, I would find out as much about you as I could. I’d ask questions about you and I’d find out something that you and I have in common. What I teach in the book is very simple: If you want to take people to higher ground, you have to first find common ground with them.
When you and I have something with which we agree or that we both love or that’s important to us, I can build off of that. I can now begin to connect with you. But I’ve got to find common ground first. Many, many people make the mistake of finding their own ground and being comfortable with it. They’re not willing to go beyond their fence and they’re always trying to bring people into their yard and go find a yard in between the two of them.
Everyone Communicates, Few Connect: What the Most Effective People Do Differently
By John C. Maxwell
Thomas Nelson ©2010, 288 pages, $25.99
