Keep Leading!® Podcast Episode 018 | Mastering Your Leadership Voice | Dr. Laura Sicola

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Keep Leading Podcast, the podcast dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host Eddie Turner, the Leadership Excelerator. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact.Have you ever made seemingly simple pointing in a conversation only to have it escalate into a mind boggling maze of misinterpretations, clarifications, ruffled feathers, debate, embarrassments, circular arguments, or even worse or have you made a great point only to have it fall on deaf ears or to have it glossed over as if you’ve never said it in first place or worse, act as if you weren’t even in the room? If that is the case, you are not making the impact you want to make as a leader. And so you’re going to really want to pay attention to today’s episode because my guest, Dr. Laura Sicola, is going to teach us how to speak with influence and make an impact as leaders. She’ll do that right after this message.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Keep Leading Podcast, the podcast dedicated to leadership development and leadership insights. I’m your host Eddie Turner, the Leadership Excelerator. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact.Have you ever made seemingly simple pointing in a conversation only to have it escalate into a maze of misinterpretations, clarifications, ruffled feathers, a debate, embarrassing arguments or even worse or have you made a great point only to have it fall on deaf ears or to have it glossed over or it was as if you’ve never said it at all. If this is the case, you are not making the impact you want to make as a leader.

Those questions from the opening book written by my guest today. She is a leadership communication and influence expert and holds a doctorate in linguistics. She will explain how you can speak to influence by mastering your leadership voice. My guest today is Dr. Laura Sicola.

Dr. Sicola, thank you for being a guest on the Keep Leading Podcast. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Eddie. It’s a pleasure to be here and I think we’re going to have a great time today but you have to call me Laura.

All right, Laura, you got it.

Terrific.

Now you and I met a couple years ago in New York City and I learned so much about you and then later went and watched your TED Talk and it was a fascinating TED Talk and you’ve got all six million views on that now, so that’s pretty impressive, and I’d encourage my listeners to watch that when they have time, I’m going to drop that in the show notes for them, so I know a little bit about you but can you tell the listeners a little bit about you and your background.

First and foremost, I’m a teacher. I’ve been teacher for 20 something years, started out doing public school and then teaching university. And I joke that I need to keep teaching older students so that I keep looking younger. Otherwise, if I stayed teaching with children … but I’ve been doing coaching with executives and business owners for about a decade now and it’s been terrific.

Wonderful. And I imagine you have a lot of success stories that you could tell us about. Some of them appear in your book that we’ll talk about momentarily. And so, thank you for being on the show to be able to share some of that. We’re excited to have you.Now, you’re the author of a new book and that’s the one I mentioned a moment ago here, Speaking To Influence: Mastering Your Leadership Voice. You sent me a copy in advance. I got a chance to read it and I absolutely love it. Congratulations on a job well done.

Thank you so much. It was definitely a Labor of love.

Can you tell us what made you write this book?

Just the opportunity to share with more people. Every time I attend events, every time I am meeting with client groups, everyone is expressing the same challenges, feeling like they’re not heard the way they want to be heard, they’re not getting the results that they want to get, they’re not getting the opportunities that they want because they’re not being viewed as a leader or they’d been given even a role that have a leadership component to it but they just don’t feel effective in that role. And when we talk about what’s causing it, it all boils down to communication skills. People just don’t feel like they have what it takes to get the results that they want. And so I thought “Well, let’s make it available for the world.”

Very nice. So individuals may feel that “Hey, listen, I’m an expert in my field. People know that if you want the authoritative answer, come to me but I don’t have to worry about the packaging of my words.” What would you say someone that may feel that way as a leader?

Get the book.

Nice and simple.

Nice and simple. The whole point is that that kind of technical expertise simply isn’t enough. If you want to rise to about the midpoint in your career, basically plateau there, then okay you can be just the best engineer or the best marketer or accountant but if you want to transcend to a higher level of leadership and opportunity, you need to be effective across multiple spectrums of people. So if you’re an engineer, you have to be able to talk to people not just in IT but in Marketing and in Finance and clients and do educational work in whether it’s a video or a seminar or you name it. Same thing if you’re in Finance. You have to be able to talk to Marketing. If you’re a “creative person”, I hear a lot of people in advertising and those worlds, they want to be creative, that’s great but if you’re talking to someone who is a scientist, you need to have a number in their somewhere, it can’t be all pictures. So learning how to translate your expertise so that people who don’t share it can grasp it, then they can see you as an expert but you have to be able to speak their language and you have to be able to do it in a way that still feels authentic to you. And when you can master that balance, that’s where the start of influence is going to be.

Now, some people may say that that’s a good thing “That you just said, Dr. Laura,” and they agree with you but “Listen, how do you do it? It seems like it’s a hard step to make.”

Well, it’s certainly more than a step. I mean, the first step is recognizing that “I’m good at this but I’m not so good at that. I am great at my field. My technical expertise is solid but I realized that talking to others, whether it’s in front of larger group, whether it’s a leading a conference call, whether it’s pitching an idea to senior management, senior leadership,” wherever you realize you’re not being effective, you have to take that for step by getting your ego out of the way, being ready to step out of your comfort zone, and do what it takes to identify why you’re not being affective with this particular audience and then start learning how to close that gap. So the first step is the most important one.

So get the ego out of the way, realize that it’s a career-limiting attitude to not want to improve and take those steps.

Absolutely.

All right. Well, can you give an example of when a person has worked on the communication style and made improvement and it’s changed their career or conversely where you met someone in your business who did not make it and what their consequence was?

Sure. So I worked with somebody who was a director at a Fortune 50 company and she was very highly skilled, had lots of experience working in her industry and even in the company, but she’d been vying for the better part of several years for an Executive Vice President role and she just wasn’t able to convince people that she was ready for it. It was always the but – “She’s great but …” And it was all about projecting that leadership, confidence, authority, trustworthiness, not that she wasn’t trustworthy as a person but can she hack it at the top, does she have what it takes. And what we realized was that when she was talking to her team, she was fine but when it came to speaking to the bigger influencers, the senior executive teams, we realized that she was coming across almost in a panic that whether she was on the phone or whether she was in person with them, there was this frenetic nature of trying to make sure that there was enough information, that she told them every detail, that she got in as much information as possible in the 30 minutes or however much time she had and in the interest of backing up all of her statements to ensure that they could believe where her ideas came from, what was happening is that she wasn’t being strategic and she was going for quantity of information rather than the quality of information. She was approaching it defensively trying to make sure that there were no questions, that there were no problems, that they had no reasonable doubt her rather than authoritatively saying “Here’s what you need to know and here’s why. My assertion.” And because of the amount she was trying to smash into that time limit, she had to talk so fast to get it all through that she sounded like she was running a mile a minute and came across as frantic, not poised, not in control, not confident. So all of this together, and her intention was not sitting right with them, they weren’t receiving her the way she needed to be received both to have them except what she was telling them and to have them except her as someone who belonged at the next level. So once we identified that, we started to work on how to have her shift gears, how to change the pacing, how to be more strategic in what the messaging was, the order of information, the quality of the information, the details, the assertions and then how to project that whether it was in person, through webinars, on conference calls or anywhere else. And once we figured out how to do that, it took about four months and then she was VP. That’s all it took.

Four months. That’s quite a dramatic turnaround in a short time.

Because that’s what we realized she was missing. It had nothing to do with her technical expertise. The tech was there. It was about the projection, a leadership, and what the behaviors were that were triggering the impression that she was leaving with others. And once she got that under control, the biggest hurdle is really identifying what the triggers are and then figuring out how to adapt it from there. Once you get it, it’s all smooth sailing.

So I could be a leader but I’m not projecting my leadership the way that I want to for effectiveness if I don’t have the right voice. You used the phrase there that she was coming across as defensive instead of coming across as authoritative. Tell us the difference, please.

Well, it’s funny. This is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek analogy here but what’s the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography. Do you know?

Yes. Actually I use that in my speeches as opener.

So what is it?

So, the famous 1964 court case on obscenity, Justice Potter Stewart said “Well, I won’t try to describe it because if I did, I’d do so unintelligibly” but then he said those famous landmark works “I know it when I see it.”

Yes, you know it when you see it. And in the same way you can hear authority, you can hear frantic, you can hear confidence, you can hear defensiveness. You know it when you hear it even if you can’t, and most people frankly can’t define why they hear it or what makes them in their gut have that sense that this person sounds all of those things or either or both but you know it when you hear it. My job is to figure out what they’re hearing and why it’s triggering that impulse or that response and then help you to sort of reverse engineer how you’re communicating and why so that you can redirect and ensure that instead you’re making the right impression. So that’s the most important thing – you know it when you hear it, good or bad. So what are you letting other people hear.

Okay. So you talk about tonality in your book. Would tonality affect my level of authority?

Sure, sure absolutely. So tonality is about pitch, intonation, the highs and the lows in your voice where you put them. So I’m telling you about my work and I tell you that I’m Laura Sicola and my company is Vocal Impact Productions, my new book is Speaking To Influence: Mastering Your Leadership Voice. All of a sudden like the energy just gets sucked out of the room, gets sucked out of the conversation. When I talk like that, what impression do I leave on you? How do I sound?

Well, you didn’t sound like somebody I’d love to have the show.

Why not?

There’s no energy. We have to have energy? There has to be animation. There has to be a variance.

Why is the lack of energy important for the show aside from the fact that it just sounds better? Why? What kind of impression do I leave as far as what kind of person I am?

Whether or not you are a leader.

Sure. Tonality that energy, the highs and the lows or the lack thereof, that just has almost that Buehler analogy for anybody who’s seen Ferris Buehler. That analogy unfortunately is getting more and more outdated but I hope there’s enough listener who are familiar with their ‘80s … Nevertheless, when there is that lack of inflection in the voice and it’s just more monotonous sounding, the impression it tends to make is you don’t care, you’re going through the motions, you’re just doing it because you have to, you’re not really mentally present, you’re not engaged. It’s like if I don’t sound like I care about what I’m saying, why on Earth would anybody else? It doesn’t sound like I have any conviction or there’s any passion behind it. And it doesn’t have to be passion like “Let’s go charge and storm the barricade.” It’s just “But do I care? Should you care? How can you tell?” People are going to infer how they should feel about something that you say based on, first and foremost, how it seems like you feel about it before they even hear what the words are and process their meaning. So if you’re feeding them a preliminary signal that says “I don’t care. We don’t really need to care either,” then, okay, they’re about to pick up their smartphone and check for email until you finish … Tonality is critical.

So if I’m a leader listening to you discuss this and explain this right now, the question probably going through my mind would be “How can I build better vocal habits?” Do you have a technique or two that I can use?

The easiest thing to do, when in doubt, record yourself because most people are sadly oblivious to the reality of how they sound when they come across to others. It’s what I call the blind spot which is the gap between how you want to come across, how you think you come across, and how you actually come across when you speak. And most people will say “Well, I may not be perfect but I’m good enough.” That’s the kiss of death – “Good enough” – because good enough isn’t good enough. Good enough is like a C+. If your surgeon, attorney, accountant got a C+ as their GPA in college, would you feel like that was good enough? No, of course not. You’d never hire them. So why are we settling for good enough as our own standard for communication and performance. You really have to be able to transcend that. And if you want to know how to grade yourself as far as what you’re projecting, even when you’re on the telephone, just that the recording doesn’t pick up the other person, if you want to maintain confidentiality, turn on your smartphone, hit the voice memo button while you’re on your landline and just record a minute or two of you talking. Then play it back later. What did you hear? Like you’re presenting someplace. Video record yourself or just audio record. It’s the quickest and by quickest I mean like instantaneous method you can use to identify the reality of how you come across. And you will know immediately if you were somebody sitting in that audience how you’d have felt about listening to that person. And once you come to that revelation, you will instantly realize something needs to change and you’ll have a good sense about what it is.

Thank you, Laura. We appreciate that.So we’re talking Laura Sicola and she is explaining to us her book Speaking To Influence: Mastering Your Leadership Voice. We’re going to continue the conversation but for now we’re going to pause and listen to a word from our sponsors.

So we’re with Dr. Laura Sicola today and she he is a leadership, communication and influence expert. She holds a doctorate in Linguistics and she’s the author of Speaking To Influence: Mastering Your Leadership Voice.So before the break you were telling us a lot of good information about how important this really is to leaders and how it can derail great careers that could otherwise transcend new heights. In your book there’s something else that you said that really resonated with me. You have a point of view on leadership and influence. And this is something that since my studies at Harvard has really my thinking has changed on. So can you share your point of view and why it matters to leaders?

The key to leadership, and this is something that everybody needs to recognize regardless of what your position is, is that leadership is an image. It does not matter what your role, title, or position on the org chart is. You can be an intern in the mail room and be seen as a leader and you can be in the C-suite and not be perceived as a leader. And the difference is that when you are perceived as a leader, people inherently listen to you differently. They’re more apt to getting on board with your ideas, your vision, helping you make it a reality because they see your vision, they appreciate where you’re coming from. If you’re just outranking them, you’re just a boss and they’re only doing as you say to the extent that they are willing to because they sort of have to, that’s the nature of the job and the hierarchy, but if they see you as leader, that’s when they give you their heart and their soul as opposed to just punching a clock and cashing … So the ability to communicate you your ideas and listen to theirs to engage in that back and forth dialogue in a way that projects leadership is going to be the make or break component in your success.

That’s an excellent analogy, Dr. Laura. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. I have long felt that way and that was my experience going through leadership at different levels and being exposed to leadership for different organizations but I could not have said that as eloquently as you did. So for leaders to be able to understand that that is a critical realization for them to come to, and you kind of go through in great detail there, it’s just nice to have you articulate it that way.Now what makes speech influential?

The single factor that’s at the root of influence in speech is credibility. When you speak you’re going to communicate your message, whatever it is that you want to convey. And people have to register what you’re saying and who is saying it together in one credible package. And what creates that impression of credibility is that there are three channels through which you’re going to communicate that message. First is the verbal channel which is the actual words that you choose – the order, the details, the jargon, the stories or lack thereof. The second channel is the vocal channel which is the sound of those words as they come out. And the third channel is the visual channel and that’s your body language, your physical communication, what do people see as you’re talking. And you can think of them as the 3Vs – the Verbal, Vocal and Visual. And when they all work together, then there’s only one three-dimensional message that the audience is focusing in on and that unison is what creates the foundation of credibility. And credibility polity is the foundation of leadership. When they are not connected like that demonstration I did before where if I just tell you that my company Vocal Impact Productions and I wrote a book on leadership and influence, you’re going “What? Wait, I hear the words but I’m not buying it,” literally or figuratively for that matter. So you’re just thinking to yourself “It doesn’t gel” and your brain gets really distracted by the pieces that don’t match. And when the speaker’s words, voice and/or body language are sending mixed signals, the listener doesn’t know what to pay attention to and they immediately withdraw and that just destroys that foundation of credibility because they don’t know which message to believe. So the key is always being in alignment, making sure that your words, your voice, and your body language are all articulating the same message at the same time. That’s where authenticity and influence begin.

So I heard you say 3Vs and I caught visual and vocal. Can you give us that third one again?

Sure, verbal.

Verbal.

It’s Verbal, Vocal, Visual. The verbal is the what, the Vocal is the sound, and the Visual is the context, the wrapping.

Very nice, very nice. So that’s a very nice tool for us to keep in mind as leaders that people are looking at these three different things and measuring us and this has a direct connection on our level of influence, our level of being able to be persuasive and have an impact.Now we’re talking about day-to-day conversations as a leader, how we’re interacting with people, how we’re using our voice but what about those times where we are a little bit more formal in the form of public speaking ? Would you say something different about public speaking versus our normal day-to-day speaking?

Yes and no. On the one hand the principles that I’m discussing in the look and that I teach in general are relevant to all contexts. It’s the same reason that your coworker may be pushing back or that your boss may not quite be ready to give you the go-ahead for whatever it is you’re pitching are the same reasons that your significant other or your kids are not necessarily responding the way you want to. So whether you’re on stage, on camera, on the telephone or just having a one-on-one conversation with somebody, these principles are still going to be the primary reason that you do or don’t get the response that you want.So that being said, the way that you would prepare for each of those different contexts might be a little bit different. If you’re doing a more formal official presentation of some sort, you’d better be a whole lot more rehearsed. You’d better be ready to answer a lot of questions on the fly. You need to be ready right out of the gate to make a good first impression. So many people, for example, get very nervous when speaking in public. And what I typically hear people say is “Well, you know, once I get into my groove, I’m okay but the first few minutes I’m a wreck and I feel like I’m fumbling and stumbling all over the place but after a few minutes, then I’m into it and then I’m fine.” So if you know that’s the case, you need to make sure that your first couple of minutes are rehearsed, are planned, are practiced, are ready to go because who wants to listen to somebody stumble and fumble around for the first few minutes. They’re going to assume that that’s going to be what the rest of your presentation. It’s like you’ve already made a really negative first impression that has undermined your credibility like we just discussed and it’s going to take a lot for you to undo do that impression and get them to reevaluate you as the leader that you want them to see you to be because that’s not the first impression that you made. So you can’t afford that messy beginning to the conversation, especially in a formal presentation situation.

Excellent. Thank you. And the other reason I wanted to highlight that is because oftentimes, to what you said the toward the end, people may feel like “Okay, I’ll get it right once I’m on stage when I have to give a formal presentation” but really the practice starts in our daily conversations. So starting to clean up, starting the practice good healthy exemplary speech habits now daily so that when we’re on stage, is not artificial, it is authentic, it is who we are because we’re showing up at our best because it’s what we’ve practice daily.

I love the distinction that you just made which is that people will say “Well, when I have to turn it on, so to speak, then I can be a clear communicator, then I can do this and I can do that” but here’s the thing. Your reputation is what happens in the moments when you’re not trying. The more you communicate on that daily basis in just regular meetings, in regular one-on-ones, on regular phone calls, regular chats at the coffee pod, those are what create the impression as far as who people know you to be. They may know that you can turn it on when you have to but more often than not when they make decisions about who’s going to get what opportunity later or who they want to work with, they’re not just judging you on what you can do in those few moments. They’re going to have to work with the other guy, the other part of you every other day, all the rest of the days. So who do you want to have on that team every day? That’s the person they want to bring on. So you can’t afford to have that Jekyll and Hyde reputation.

Thank you. Now can you tell us one of your top suggestions you give leaders when you’re coaching them about mastering their vocal leadership?

Sure. So I referenced a moment ago the idea of getting that first couple of minutes, the on-ramp, smoothed out when you’re doing a presentation. I have a rule. It’s called the 60-to-60 Rule and what I mean by that is that in the first I 60 seconds of speaking you will create the impression in the listener’s mind with regard to the value that you’re going to be bring to that conversation over the next 60 minutes of time you spend together. So if your first minute or two is that stumbly bumbly piece, then they’ve already tuned out because that’s now the expectation they have for your value of contribution. So even if you don’t have time to rehearse the whole presentation start to finish, rehearse that first minute or two. Record yourself and watch it and do it several times until you feel like “Okay, this is fluid. This sounds clean. This looks confident. This projects that I know it when I see it/I know it when I hear it impression.” And get those first couple of minutes right. It’ll make a huge difference to the way the rest of the presentation runs. 60-to-60 Rule.

The 60-to-60 Rule. Thank you. So essentially what we’re saying today is that it’s important as a leader to broaden your communication range in order to have greater influence on more people and it’s possible to do that while being 100% authentically you.

Yes and that authenticity component in absolutely essential. It’s not just about talking the way that someone else want you to talk in a way that’s fake. I’m not an actor. I’m a linguist. I couldn’t teach you to act if my life depended on it but you do want to be able to shift ears and speak in a slightly different way when talking with the accountants versus the creatives versus the executives versus the clients as necessary. And learning how to do it in a way that is still you is going to be the lynchpin that holds it all together. When you think about it, you have your work mode communication and you have your ‘hanging out with friends on a Friday night at happy hour’ mode of communication and you have your ‘at home talking to your kids especially when they’re little’ mode of communication. It’s all you, right? You just shift based on how you feel is natural for that audience, what’s going to get them to see the right part of you. So being able to do that professionally with a little bit more deliberate nuanced shift is really where it’s going to come together.

All right. Well, this is the Keep Leading Podcast. What advice would you give to our leaders so they can keep leading?

Remember that your reputation is what happens in the moments that you’re not trying. So being careful about the way that you communicate with people on a regular basis is what’s going to project your image of someone who is a consistent, trustworthy credible leader. It’s not just something you do when you have to. It needs to be your new nature. Something my father said to me 20 something years ago when I first started teaching because he was a public schoolteacher, middle school, god love him, for 40 years and I asked him how to get the students to respect me when I first started teaching and he said to me something that has stuck forever, which is that “Laura, you can’t just demand respect. You have to command it with your presence.” And didn’t truly understand it at the time but now I realize the wisdom that’s in it. You have to command respect and it all starts with the way that you communicate.

Well, that’s some really good advice for our leaders, Laura. Thank you so much coach. And I appreciate you taking time to be on the Keep Leading Podcast today. Where can my listeners learn more about you and your work?

You can go right to my website at VocalImpactProductions.com.

Thank you again. Again, thank you for being on the show.And thank you for listening. That concludes this episode, everyone. I’s Eddie Turner, the Leadership Excelerator, reminding you that leadership is not about our title or our position. Leadership is an activity. Leadership is action. It’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment we put on and take off. We must be a leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all we do. So, whatever you’re doing, always keep leading.