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Ten MUSTS For a Successful Speech

Ten MUSTS For a Successful Speech
By Stephan Schiffman

Fear of public speaking ranks high on nearly every study of common anxieties -- higher even than the fear of death!

As someone who has delivered hundreds of speeches before groups of all kinds, and trained many people to do the same, I have some insights on this. What people really fear is not so much public speaking itself as the possibility of being unprepared for a speech.

If you prepare well, you will eliminate most of the fear. Here are the ten “MUSTS” for a successful speech. Cover all ten, and you will be well prepared for the big event.

1. You MUST use humor to establish rapport with the audience very early on in the speech -- and preferably self-deprecating humor. (Abraham Lincoln was once accused of being two-faced. Lincoln replied, “If I had two faces, do you think this is the one I’d be wearing?” )

2. You MUST know your audience and match your content to their world.

3. You MUST know your material thoroughly. In other words, you must practice delivering the major points, in the order you want to cover them, preferably in front of people such as family or friends. (Doing this ahead of time will also help you identify what should be eliminated from the speech.) Consider making an audio or video of your speech and reviewing it closely before you deliver it to a “live” group.

4. You MUST know your own strengths and weaknesses as a speaker. Make sure you are emphasizing your strengths during the speech.

5. You MUST wear appropriate attire for the occasion.

6. You MUST project comfort and confidence to the audience. Erect posture and the ability to take deep breaths is a part of this. Do not confuse “confidence” with “arrogance”—being able to admit that you do not know something, or that you made an error about something, will usually win you attention and interest.

7. You MUST use appropriate body language – hand gestures, walking, spreading your arms – to retain visual interest from the audience.

8. You MUST speak comprehensibly. If this is a problem according to other people who listen to you practice delivering your speech, make a conscious choice to slow down and enunciate. Find ways to remind yourself of this during the speech.

9. You MUST speak loudly enough to be heard by everyone. (If you don’t have a microphone, pitch your voice so that the person in the back of the room will hear what you’re saying.)

10. You MUST speak with enthusiasm and conviction. If the audience does not believe that you believe what you’re saying, they will tune out.

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STEPHAN SCHIFFMAN is the president of D.E.I., one of the largest sales training companies in the U.S. He is the author of a number of best-selling books including Cold Calling Techniques (That Really Work!)

Calculate the Cost and Benefits of Training

Calculate the Cost and Benefits of Training
A four-step process for measuring the savings that training provides and comparing it to the costs.

"Only the educated are free."
—Epictetus, Roman philosopher, slave and author of Discourses

Most organizations would like to be able to measure the costs invested in training initiatives against anticipated results. The challenge is that it is far easier to measure the costs of conducting training than it is to quantify results. A useful tool in determining costs and savings is to compare costs per participant versus savings per participant.

Comparing costs and benefits can be done in the following four simple steps:

1. Calculate the cost of training. This will include training costs such as:

• Facilitator fees
• Training design
• Course materials
• Videos and workbooks
• Facilities rental
• Equipment rentals (such as overhead projectors)
• Production downtime (including employee time off the job)
• Videoconferencing facilities
• Specialized computer equipment
• Administration (such as registration procedures or confirmation notices)

All the relevant costs, divided by the anticipated number of participants, gives the cost per participant.

2. Determine the potential savings generated. These savings might include:

• Fewer errors
• Reduced customer turnover
• Less equipment downtime
• Increased revenue collection
• Faster equipment startup time
• Reduced employee turnover, when turnover is attributable to poor supervision
• Proper implementation of new customer strategies
• Higher workplace morale through more effective management practices
• Less time lost to grievance hearings and work stoppages because of ineffective supervision
• Reduced recruitment costs (because training can create more job-ready candidates for promotions)
• Maximized productivity of new employees through efficient orientation training

3. Calculate the potential savings. To calculate potential savings, set goals for post-training achievements by identifying and quantifying the changes a training initiative will produce if all other factors are constant. The factors in the formula include the following:

• Current level of performance (for example, 200 error rates per month; six lost customer accounts per month; five days lost to work stoppages per year)
• Translate the current level of performance into a dollar figure (for example: 200 error rates x five minutes’ correction time x $15 salary per hour = $250 per month).
• Identify the change that training can produce (for example, reduce errors to 50 per month).
• Calculate the savings that the target criteria will generate (for example: 200 errors - 50 errors = decrease of 150 errors per month savings = 150 x five minutes/60 x $15 = $187.50).
• Identify a meaningful time line for realizing savings, based on your best business predictions about factors contributing to errors remaining unchanged.
• Identify the number of employees in the target training group.
• Divide the total anticipated savings by the number of participants to identify the savings per participant.

4. Compare the costs to savings.

• Multiply the cost per participant by the total number of participants.
• Multiply the savings per participant by the total number of participants.
• Compare your figures to establish your business case for training.

This exercise not only identifies actual costs and realistic savings but also ensures that your training expectations are reasonable and targeted to measurable business outcomes.

SOURCE: Excerpted from The Trainer’s Tool Kit by Cy Charney & Kathy Conway. Copyright 2005 by Cy Charney & Kathy Conway. Published by AMACOM Books, a division of American Management Association, New York, NY. Used with permission. All rights reserved www.amacombooks.org

What Great Leaders Know About Learning

What Great Leaders Know About Learning
What managers must do in a new era to keep their best people

by David Newman            

Another key employee has just quit. When asked why, she immediately responds that her manager was hard to get along with, gave conflicting priorities, and could be moody, often snapping when a staff member made a minor mistake. “I love the company” she says mournfully, “I…I just can’t work with him anymore - not one more day.”

That’s the least of your worries right now. You’re working on several big sales opportunities, and you need to be closing them. You just won several new pieces of business that require your adding head count or looking to outside contractors, as your people are now stretched too thin. You want to refinance a loan to upgrade to some much-needed equipment. You have Excedrin headache #113 and it’s tax time, so your bookkeeper and accountant need a lot of your attention these days. Welcome to business reality. Developing your managers isn’t exactly your top priority right now, is it? It a nice to have not a have to have, right?

Well you are completely and totally Wrong. (That’s with a capital W.)

According to a recent Gallup poll, people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. How much is turnover costing you? How much time and money does it cost to recruit new people, train them and get them productive? More than you think.

One of our clients in the restaurant industry (not a high-paying field, generally speaking) sat down and did the numbers on our two-page Cost of Turnover worksheet and figured out that for each of the 20 employees that left her company over the last 12 months, the hard and soft costs totaled $70,000 per employee!. That’s right – over $1.4 million total.

According to estimates by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), without doing any complicated math, it costs between 1.5 and 2 times an employees’ salary to replace them. Then multiply by the number of people that leave you each year and you can see that it would cost a lot less time, money, and effort to fine-tune the skills of your present managers.

Here are some ideas:

1. Understand the consequences of inaction. Yes, you can continue to skate by for a while. But how long have you been skating by already? Are you close to a major meltdown and don’t know it? When it comes, it will take much more time and money – and headaches -- than you imagined. The general manager of a manufacturing plant fired over a dozen people in his first year on the job. Why? Because previous inaction on his predecessor’s part was simply too expensive in lost sales, poor service, and low morale on the part of people who saw the laggards skating by. Having poor managers is like not replacing your oil filter - as the saying goes, “You can pay me now or pay me more later.”

2. Realize it will take some time and effort. It will be lots of work on your part to start an effective program and start to turn your leadership culture around. Sustainable progress is not about sending managers to one-day courses. This needs to be an ongoing process, not just an “every once in a while” event when you can fit it in. The good news: Companies that managed their culture well far outdistanced those that didn’t in John Kotter and James Heskett’s landmark study documented in their book, Corporate Culture and Performance. Specifically, the companies that consistently paid attention to their leadership culture over time enjoyed:

• Revenue increases of 682% vs. 166%
• Stock price increases of 901% vs. 74%
• Net income increases of 756% vs. 1%
• Job growth of 282% vs. 36%

So the bottom line (in case we’ve been too subtle so far) is that management development doesn’t cost you money; it makes money in translated performance.

3. Work with an internal or external professional learning consultant. They understand how long-term change happens and can design a plan that will ensure measurable results. A good mix will include a needs assessment, some seminar time, one-on-one coaching, peer support, follow-up, and performance measurement. Another critical factor is demonstrated management commitment to change (i.e. CEO buy-in, senior management attendance, involvement, and yes, maybe the long-overdue firings of some “bad apples.”)

4. Start something. To quote Mick Jagger – “Start me up!” Yes, even if the plan is not fully fleshed out. Sure, it would be great if all of the pieces of the puzzle were in place before you begin. Yet, if 80%-90% of the plan is in place, that’s good enough to launch! Use Tom Peters’ words of advice, “Ready, Fire, Aim!” After all, development is a dynamic endeavor. You’ll be tweaking and modifying it as you go, anyway. Your people will come up with ideas of what they want added and changed to make it even more effective for them. Your program needs to become their program. Involvement and engagement are the keys to buy-in and results.

After reading these four points, have you gotten turned off? Are you saying “Wait a minute - my people aren’t that bad.” (The heads of many defunct companies felt the same way.) But the real question is do they have the skills to step up to the next level of responsibility? Are they regularly growing and learning how to be better at their job? And can you really afford to be complacent about developing your future leaders? Remember your organization has to be BETTER every year to stay up with the competition nipping at your heels.

The same Gallup poll found that one of the reasons top employees leave is that they feel they are not learning and growing, or that no one took an interest in their development.

Start getting development for your people and take an interest in their growth. Just like your teeth and your customers, if you ignore your employees, they WILL go away.

Business Intelligence: Are You in Training or Talent?

Business Intelligence: Are You in Training or Talent?
From Training magazine's Inside Training newsletter
By Margery Weinstein

Changing the plays to a game you appear to be winning sounds self-defeating, but New York-based financial services company CIT Group is doing just that. The company, which boasts more than 7,200 employees, and more than $70 billion in managed assets, is giving its human resources a revamp. The effort will tie the work of the department closer to bottom-line results and foster executive ownership of employee development and retention, says Herb Harback, senior vice president, head talent and strategy, who is leading the transformation.

"The training department is a gray elephant," he says. "They focus on classes and students, and their metrics are how many people are in there, and that's it." Harback, who?s been on the job just 16 weeks, says he quickly realized the emphasis needed to change from measuring class usage to gauging the impact those classes have on the financial performance of each business unit. Rather than refer to his department and its mission as "training" or "organizational development/learning and development," Harback's team is known as the Talent & Strategy Group. "We're involved with talent, the strategy around it as well as the development," he emphasizes. "We're looking at talent as we define the business leaders, and we're looking at talent in terms of the CIT employees.

The effect of that talent nurturing on the company's business lines is what Harback says he will measure his success by. "We look at people that we have worked with, that we've coached, that we've sent through programs, and we're going to look at the business," he explains. "Did it make a difference, or didn't it make a difference in the bottom line?"

Along with changing the way end results of talent management are measured, the new approach also includes a shifting view of acquisition. When employees are promoted to new positions, they are now transitioned as though they are new hires. "In my mind, you're in a new role, therefore, we're going to move you back to the acquisition phase because we've got to make sure you're equipped properly for this new job," Harback says. "You're going to have a whole different set of relationships because of the new responsibilities. It's going to be more complex, and we've got to make sure you have the right skill sets to do that."

To make sure management keeps an active eye on budding talent—helping it grow instead of only noticing it's gone once there's already an empty chair—a senior executive from each line of business, such as sales or commercial finance, has been named a "talent and relationship manager," participating in meetings with Harback's group. An executive from sales, for instance, might be charged with learning as much as she can about talent acquisition, or an executive from commercial finance may have to get up to date on all the latest regarding talent development. In addition, within every line of business, each executive working with the talent and relationship manager has a designated responsibility, such as college relations as it relates to talent acquisition, or leader assimilation in regard to talent development.

This system allows execs not only to feel a sense of ownership in talent strategy, but feel they're getting guidance from an inside source, as opposed to an outside entity such as "HR" or "training" that considers the department its "customer."

"So, if you're the head of a business, hopefully sitting at your table now is Mary," he says, offering a hypothetical example, "who is a talent expert, and who will advise you not as a consultant, but as a member of the team."