How can you speak more impromptu and without hesitation when communicating with your boss and best clients?
This is a question that recently was asked in a leadership workshop I ran. You’re sitting in a one-on-one with your boss or in a meeting with the team and you want to confidently make a quick decision, share a thought or an opinion, off-the-cuff.
Many professionals share that instead of speaking up on the spot, they hold themselves back. They’re not sure how to effectively speak impromptu.
What I’ve experienced in my career (I’m a former IT Executive) and from those that I’ve coached over the years, is that oftentimes, when you’re speaking about a project or maybe a goal that the team wants to accomplish, the fog of indecision will settle in, when you don’t feel like you have enough business context or knowledge about that given project or goal.
Speak to the Benefits and the Risks
By that I mean being able to communicate the threats, or the risks to that project. Can you speak to the opportunities or the benefits of going in a certain direction?
I’m not saying that you need to have all of the information on the spot, you just need to have enough so that you can speak to the threats and opportunities. Speak to what happens if we go in this direction, or don’t move in that direction. Just having a pulse on these things can allow you jump in without hesitation.
Before I forget, I want to be sure you know about my leadership audio course (it’s free) that’s designed to help you own your authority in your career by applying 5 top strategies and it works. It’s based on two decades of leading in Corporate America and those professionals I coach here at In Our Shoes.
Having knowledge and context is so key and will give you confidence so that you don’t feel like you are just shooting from the hip. It also demonstrates that you are able to lead in your role and have a good understanding of the overall picture, even if you don’t know all the answers or the exact path to the ‘How’.
Avoid Drilling Into Too Much Detail or you Will Lose Your Audience
Sometimes speaking to the details, and drilling too much in, can create information overload and work against you. You risk losing your audience – your client or your manager’s attention, because you’re too far into the details instead of staying high up and rolling up information for them to easily understand.
If you look at any successful leader that has built a very strong career for him or herself, they will share that their confidence to make split-second decisions, to be decisive, to be more impromptu and, and do what needs to be done in the moment, didn’t happen overnight. Their confidence grew from years of having increased trust in themselves.
From a Gutsy Leader perspective, this is about having increased trust in your intuition – your gut instinct.
Having enough data and knowledge about the given business context, the given project, to be able to go for it and make a split second decision wasn’t something that happened overnight.
Trust your Gut to “Jump In”
With an increased trust in their intuition, those smaller steps taken over time in that regard, had actually built their confidence. They have years of experience from facing unpredictable failures and unexpected results.
And we all know that you don’t work in a vacuum, right? You’re dependent on other people for the success of your work and for the success of your projects. If someone downstream cuts into your project’s timeline, because they were delayed or all of sudden you are facing changing requirements or unforeseen circumstances, you have to pivot, that’s part of leadership.
“The more self-aware you are, the more present you are to others in the room.” – Own Your Authority
(McGraw Hill)
So it’s never going to be perfect. Fact: unless you start moving and jumping into those conversations, and not hesitating, even if you have a strong understanding but not the whole picture, then go for it, say what you need to say.
If you’re feeling an internal nudge to share an opinion or recommendation, or you want to disagree with the direction being discussed, that’s part of the conversation as well. You can say the words: “I don’t agree with the direction we’re taking.” And then back up your point.
So it does come with practice and as with everything, you have to jump in at the deep end of the pool. But give yourself permission to have just enough knowledge and context, to be able to instinctively share that thought. As women, we don’t always give ourselves permission to do that and oh yes, I’ve been in those shoes. I am my own student.
All right, I hope this has supported you. I’ll talk to you soon and hang on, more to come!
👠To your gutsy moves,
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