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Communicating to Transform: Help Your Audience Adopt Your Perspective with Nancy Duarte, CEO, Duarte Design and Author, Illuminate: Ignite Change Through Speeches, Stories, Ceremonies, and Symbols
The biggest mistake people make when they’re going to be building a presentation or delivering one is they’re so obsessed about what they want and need to say, and the information they need to convey, that they forget to take a moment and think about who’s receiving the information. So taking a walk in the shoes of your audience, even if just for a moment, to think about what you’re asking them to do, how you’re asking them to behave – because change isn’t easy for anybody. And when you are communicating a presentation, you’re presenting something so that they change. They adopt your idea, maybe you want them to adopt your perspective, and you have to think about that for awhile so that you create the words and the stories to support it so that they’re willing to adopt your perspective.
Tackle hardship head on
The thing about a great story is it’s usually a three-act structure, where there’s this likeable person who goes through a really tough time, encounters roadblocks and hardships, and then emerges changed in some way. Yet in business when we go through that, we forget that we’re actually sometimes stuck in the middle of our story, where it’s just hard sometimes. So by creating a model where storytelling is almost like a coping mechanism, where you can actually see and back up and say, “Oh, it’s hard today because we’re in the middle of our story,” and using storytelling as a method for driving transformation and change, is powerful because that’s what a story’s about. A story is about this person who has changed because they went through something tough. And encouraging your travelers through the story, through the journey, along the way, is the most important role that a leader can take on.
Practice empathy
Sometimes leaders are so focused on the future and where we need to go and how we need to get there so our organizations can thrive, we don’t spend as much time in the present really listening, and hearing, and learning what it is that the body of people that we’re charged with leading longs for. Empathy is important and not a lot of leaders have it as a practice of being able to consider what it’s like to be on the receiving end of communication – on the receiving end of change. And using speeches, stories, ceremonies, and symbols as communication devices will help your travelers want to go into the future that you’re trying to create. There’s a lot of great leaders that have had to drive enormous change who spent a lot of time listening. You look at someone like Lou Gerstner. For about nine months when he rejoined IBM, all he did was listen. He traveled the world, did Q&As, listened to his team. Listened and listened and listened before he built a strategy. It’s really important that we understand our situation before we just jump and make declarations about where we need to go, before you understand the people. It’s very important to do that.
I think people that aren’t naturally empathetic need to have some sort of moment, like Paul on the road to Damascus, where their scales fall off their eyes and they realize, “I need to be different.” I’ve had my own moments like that. I actually was raised by a narcissistic mother, and a narcissist is missing the empathy gene; they just don’t have it. And once I realized it was kind of actually a mental illness – and not that she didn’t notice that I existed – that’s when I realized why I’m kind of low on the empathy meter, is because I had never had empathy modeled for me. I never had anyone show me and express to me what it’s like to be really, genuinely, and uniquely, empathetic. And it actually wasn’t until I wrote this next book with my co-author Patti – and she’s an empath. I would say, like, if you look up ‘empath’, that’s someone with a supernatural ability to be empathetic and that’s what she was. And I feel like just the journey of writing this book and walking beside someone who’s empathetic radically changed me. And in some ways that’s what leaders need – especially ones that aren’t as empathetic, they need to be partnered with someone who is so they can whisper in their ears things like, “But this is how the people feel. But this is what the people are thinking.” Because I can’t see it naturally; I actually needed the whispers of an empath in my own organization to help me see and feel what the people see and feel.
So it’s funny, as kind of the visionary I’ll just put an idea out there and be totally enthused about it. And then Patti will come along and say, “Oh do you realize how you’re framing that? If you just change it to sound more like this, it’s more digestible.” So, it’s almost like what’ll happen is, she’ll put the sugar coating on a bitter pill that I need to deliver, right, but she just has a way to frame it – and an empathetic person frames it in a way – that makes it palatable to the people that are on the receiving end of some of these messages.