Lee Child is the multimillion selling author of the Jack Reacher series of novels.
When Lee was 14, his drama school teacher changed his life. “It is not about you, it is about the audience”.
In a recent episode of the High Performance Podcast, author Lee Child spoke of the impact his drama teacher had on him… and how this focus has shaped his whole life.
His greatest fear as a writer? To waste a reader’s time.
This is a lesson that I share with all participants when I teach in IESE Business School. The difference between mediocre speaking and great speaking is the shift from “what I want to say” towards “what they need to hear”. When you focus on the other, you move towards greatness as a communicator.
This video is about 4 different types of audience that you can face as a speaker and how to adjust your objectives and manner of engagement to each of these distinct audience groups.
The 4 Types of Audience
There are four types of audience, and consequent persuasive strategy that you can come upon when you are seeking to move a group to action through your speech.
Friendly. Your purpose: reinforcing their beliefs.
Apathetic. Your purpose is to first to convince them that it matters for them.
Uninformed. Your requirement is to educate before you can begin to propose a course of action.
Hostile. You purpose is to respect them and their viewpoint. The most you may be able to gain is respect to listen to your views. It is key that you can present some information that is viewed as new to the audience before asking for any change in their position. This is firstly courteous, but also gives the listener’s ego room to change without feeling demeaned (“based on this new information, I ask you to change”)
Dealing with a Hostile Audience
Specific Actions for Hostile Audiences
When providing new information it is vital that you help the listeners “assimilate”. How can you make it real for them? There are a number of techniques to bear in mind.
Use stories (ideally real stories), metaphors, hypothetical situations
Stress common ground
Present statistics/data that is clear to conclude from
Address conflicting evidence (what are the strengths and weaknesses of the conflicting evidence)
AVOID exaggeration or gross hyperbole. The use of exaggeration in a number of areas of public debate has caused extreme entrenchment of the opposing sides. eg. abortion, climate change. The persuasive speaker works hard to keep to the facts and be clear about the logic of the proposed course of action.
This is a guest post from Ecatherine Matnadze, who serves as the Vistage Spain In-house Leadership Coach - working with me and the leadership team in clarifying goals and staying disciplined in our actions.
When a change plan fails, it is more often than not due to the human dynamics inside the organisation. It doesn’t matter whether your plan is “good” or “bad”, it matters that you work to build a coalition of support amongst those that will be affected by your plan.
Most leaders can come up with a goal and with a plan. It’s the relationships that make things happen or not.
The 5 Types of People in Any Change Initiative
Committed Supporters,
Compliant Supporters,
Neutral Parties,
Antagonists, and
Active Resisters.
1. Committed Supporters
Committed supporters are people who will go out of their way to help an idea happen. A committed supporter is someone who will take personal risk to make this happen. There is an old story about a pig and a chicken going to a picnic. The chicken brings eggs; the pig brings bacon. The chicken is compliant; the pig is committed.
We want to know who the committed supporters are. Why do they support this idea? How can we leverage them? How can we get them to influence others?
There aren’t going to be a lot of committed supporters in most organisations. But if you can find them, they can be enormously helpful.
2. Compliant Supporters
These are the chickens who come to the picnic with eggs. They’re helpful. They’re supportive. Who are they? Why do they support this? How can we use their support to get things done?
Maybe we can turn them into committed supporters. Maybe we can build the relationship a little bit more so they’ll go from bringing the eggs to bringing the bacon.
3. Neutral Parties
There’s a lot of people who just sit back and watch and wait. They don’t take any risks, they’re not sure, or they’re just neutral. And again, we want to identify them – if we can get more of them on our side, we can get a lot more momentum for our idea.
Who are they? Why are they neutral? And what reasons can we use to influence them to turn them into a supporter?
4. Antagonists
Now we’re moving to the people who are negative. Antagonists are not willing to take personal risk to stop the idea, but they might feel moderately threatened by it; they might not understand it; they might not like it. Sometimes they’re very vocal against it, but they’re still not willing to do anything.
The best you can do with the antagonists is to get them to be neutral. At least get them not to speak out against the idea in meetings. Would you go and talk to them? Maybe you redeploy them somewhere where they don’t have an impact on this idea.
5. Active Resisters
These are the nemeses, the saboteurs. Active resisters feel personally threatened by the idea and will do anything to resist.
It’s very rare that they’re irrational, unless you have done something that’s caused a personal enmity. Usually they have other incentives and it’s a matter of will, of really working hard to get them on your side. Sometimes it’s a matter of changing the way they’re rewarded. Maybe someone with power can talk to them and say, listen, this is moving forward, I need you out of the way.
Sometimes the best you can do with active resisters is to isolate them – maybe they have to move to a different department, or leave the organisation.
You don’t need Everyone to Support you…
It’s said that in any major initiative at most you’re going to get about one-third on your side as committed and/or compliant supporters. Few want to change, and most people are in a state of inertia. It’s okay for people to be negative, you just don’t want so many of them that it’s going to make it impossible the initiative to succeed. You don’t need everybody to support you. The key is finding the right number of people.
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Ecatherine Matnadze is Certified Executive and Team coach, focusing on coaching top leaders and their executive teams. Having worked as a CEO herself, she understands the demands placed on high-achieving leaders, and helps them balance business results with personal well-being.
Ecatherine is based in Barcelona, Spain. She works with Spanish- and English- speaking clients, both locally and internationally. You should connect and follow her posts on LinkedIn.
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