Speak with Confidence When You’re Put on the Spot

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To be a truly impactful leader, you need to master the art of spontaneous speaking. This means not just delivering your carefully crafted keynote, but nailing the Q&A and small talk afterward, or making memorable off-the-cuff toasts and speeches. Contrary to popular assumptions, you don’t need to be an inherently charming extrovert to communicate effectively when put on the spot. Here’s how to build the muscle.

First, avoid predictable default responses, which prevent you from connecting with others in more genuine, appropriate, creative, and productive ways. Instead, invoke analogies or shared references that can help you engage your listeners. For example, when you’re asked to make a public introduction, don’t just list the roles on the person’s résumé—tell a story about how they added value to the team. To take some pressure off yourself, remember that you don’t need to be the star of the show. Listeners are more apt to trust and approve of you when you speak like a human being rather than an actor or a robot.

And finally, don’t underestimate the power of listening. Give yourself space to process the information. Paraphrasing or asking open-ended follow-up questions can help confirm your understanding and provide extra time to think about your response.

Get More Comfortable with Failure…

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We’ve all been there: you make a New Year’s resolution and…it doesn’t stick. Why? It’s often because we don’t allow ourselves to be bad at it at first. We fail a few times and then decide to give up. But adopting any new habit is going to feel clunky at first. 

The key to taking on something new is to get more comfortable with failure. Here’s how.

Start by immunizing yourself against big letdowns by trying out experiments that allow you to fail in tiny ways. For example, if your goal is to write every day, start by committing to one short paragraph each morning. If you don’t like what you write, no big deal! It’s just a paragraph. Write another one tomorrow.

Next, make your goal known to others before your self-doubt creeps in and you chicken out. This layer of accountability will help you actually follow through on your goal — no matter how bad you are at it the first time.

And finally, keep a log of your efforts. Over time you’ll notice how far you’ve come. Rather than focusing on the small, inevitable failures, you can appreciate your overall progress.

Don’t Lose Sight of These Critical Leadership Behaviors

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Consider this paradox: As you grow in your career, your brain develops in ways that undermine your ability to excel as a leader. Here are three essential leadership behaviors you need to commit to and protect as you develop professionally.

  • Being future-focused. The higher up the ladder you climb, the farther out you need to think. Resist the urge to value the immediate and short-term future over the long term. Rather than just ensuring the quality of today’s work, you must constantly scan for what’s next—and ensure your team is prepared.
  • Being good with people. As you accrue responsibility, it’s easy to give too much attention to high-level strategy and not enough to your relationships. Becoming a truly transcendent leader means finding a balance between technical and social skills and between goals and people.
  • Being able to drive realistic results. More power tends to make leaders more optimistic about what’s achievable. Make an effort to stay grounded: Pay attention to the data, details, and your employees’ perspectives and set sensible targets accordingly.

Make Time for Little Tasks That Have to Get Done

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Everyone has those small but necessary tasks — clearing out the overflowing inbox, making the introductions you promised to, or filing the stack of paperwork. If you can’t delegate or jettison these types of tasks, here are two ways to take care of them efficiently:

  • Batch your less important tasks. Do them all at once, creating a sense of momentum. You can park yourself at a local café and vow not to go home until you get through them. Or, meet up with some colleagues to work through your lists of boring tasks together.
  • Employ a “small drip strategy.” Identify small blocks of time in your schedule, like 15-minute windows between phone calls, and use them to do low-value tasks. You can find these scheduling holes serendipitously, or deliberately schedule in a half hour of grunt work every day, perhaps at the end of the workday, when you have less energy for important tasks.

The best teams use these six tactics…

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The best teams use these six tactics to separate substantive issues from personalities and resolve conflicts.

  • Focus on the facts – Arm yourselves with a wealth of data about your business and your competitors. This encourages you to debate critical issues, not argue out of ignorance.
    • Example – Star Fisheries’s top team “measured everything”: bookings, backlogs, margins, engineering milestones, cash, scrap, and work-in-process. They also tracked competitors’ moves, including product introductions, price changes, and ad campaigns.
  • Multiply the alternatives – In weighing decisions, consider four or five options at once — even some you don’t support. This diffuses conflict, preventing teams from polarizing around just two possibilities.
    • Example – To improve Triumph Computer’s lackluster performance, managers gathered facts and then brainstormed a range of alternatives, including radically redirecting strategy with entry into a new market, and even selling the company. The team combined elements of several options to arrive at a creative, robust solution.
  • Create common goals. Unite a team with common goals. This rallies everyone to work on decisions as collaborations, making it in everyone’s interest to achieve the best solution
    • Example – Start Electronic’s rallying cry was the goal of creating “the computer firm of the decade”. Premier Technologies’ was to “build the best damn machine on the market.”
  • Use humor. Humor – even if it seems contrived at times — relieves tension and promotes a collaborative spirit within a team. Practical jokes, Halloween and April Fool’s Day celebrations, and “desert pig-outs” relax everyone – increasing tactfulness, effective listening, and creativity.
  • Balance the power structure. The CEO is more powerful than other executives, but the others wield substantial power as well — especially in their own areas of responsibility. This lets the whole team participate in strategic decisions, establishing fairness and equity.
  • Seek consensus with qualification. If the team can’t reach a consensus, the most relevant senior manager makes the decision, guided by input from the others. Like balancing the power structure, this tactic also builds fairness and equity.

Don’t tell them show them…

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Telling is different from showing, when you show it’s visual whereas telling is dull.

Telling – Ravi went to fetch water from the well.

Showing – Ravi, picked up his old socks and shoes, with a stained red mark from the previous night’s adventure, wore them, and then took a bucket. While marching on the muddy road to fetch water from the nearby well.

When you are storytelling you are visualizing things and it’s important that your audience also visualize it, because even a trivial visualization gives the audience the connection and liveliness as if they are living through that memory.

And that’s the difference between a great communicator and a mediocre one. So next time whenever you are communicating either through presentation, email, or talking to a group, try to do it visually with words rather than just telling.

Keep Growing When Your Career Feels Stalled

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Short-term issues can require us to temporarily change course: If you’ve lost your job, you urgently need income. If in-person schooling isn’t available, someone has to stay home and supervise virtual learning. If you’re the primary caregiver to a family member, you need to secure flexibility for responsibilities at home. Prioritizing these short-term concerns over long-term goals, while painful, may be necessary right now. But a temporary detour from your professional path doesn’t mean you have to put aside your ambitions. You can regain control over your career arc with these strategies:

  1. Reframe the situation. Even if you’re not advancing toward your professional aspirations right now, you’re still making a difference and providing value in other areas of your life.
  2. Push back against standard options. The WFH boom has led many organizations to provide more flexible work arrangements. Express what you want; most offers can be negotiated.
  3. Allocate small amounts of time toward your goals. It may not seem significant to spend three minutes sending a networking email or reading a few articles on a topic you’re interested in. But these little investments add up.

Get the Feedback You Need from Your Customers

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Your business can’t improve operations without honest and substantive feedback from your customers. But customers can often be reluctant to provide it. Here are three ways to get the input you need.

  • Reframe customer feedback requests. When following up with customers after they’ve interacted with your company, make it clear that the organization is seeking to improve—not to be told it’s doing well. Instead of asking “How did I do?” ask “What’s one thing I could do to have served you better today?” Ask good second and third questions to encourage customers to generate ideas.
  • Focus on customer actions, not their words. Instead of tracking “sentiment,” which can be misleading, track and observe customer behavior. How often are customers repeating purchases? How frequently do they come to your store or site? What do they do when they’re there?
  • Make it habitual, not occasional. Switch up that bi-annual or quarterly survey in favor of mechanisms that are continual and can be integrated into your culture. Whenever you make a change to your operations—even if it’s small—observe how customers respond and seek honest input. Feedback from customers is not only a gift but an imperative.

Boost Morale with a Thank You

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As your organization faces the twin challenges of strained budgets and burned-out workforces, what can you do to keep your employees engaged? While it may not be as impactful as a promotion or a raise, don’t underestimate the power of symbolic awards, such as private thank-you notes or public displays of recognition. These simple interventions can significantly improve employee motivation, according to research.

To maximize their effect, it’s essential to customize these rewards to each unique context. Specifically, ask yourself: Are you the best messenger, or would this expression of gratitude be more impactful coming from someone else? When is the best time to offer the message? And should it be communicated privately or publicly? Whatever you decide, your message can be short and sweet — as long as it’s thoughtful. When employees feel that it’s sincere, a symbolic gesture of recognition can go a long way.

Stop Overthinking Big Decisions

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Thoughtful deliberation is an essential leadership quality that can help you make better decisions and produce better outcomes. However, it can also devolve into overthinking, which can be paralyzing. Here are three ways to avoid a thought spiral that can slow you down:

  1. Curb your perfectionism. Perfectionism is one of the biggest blockers to swift decision-making because it operates on faulty all-or-nothing thinking. To curb this tendency, ask yourself questions like: What’s one thing I could do today to bring me closer to my goal? Or what’s the next step based on the information I have right now?
  2. Pay attention to your intuition. When it comes to difficult decisions, your gut reaction is often a critical data point, particularly when time is short or you don’t have all the information you need. Research shows that pairing intuition with analytical thinking helps you make better, faster, and more accurate decisions and gives you more confidence in your choices than relying on intellect alone.
  3. Construct creative constraints. Determine a date or time by which you’ll make a choice. Put it in your calendar, set a reminder on your phone, or even contact the person who’s waiting for your decision and let them know when they can expect to hear from you.