As a Leadership Consultant and Coach, I’m privileged to often be invited to my clients’ incentive and rewards conferences. Sadly, what I’m noticing more and more is that the speakers and the content have become almost intolerably bland.
Now, I’m all for being appropriate in a meeting, especially when you are a leader addressing your audience but honestly, it’s as if there is now a recycled speech-data-bank that leaders choose their generic, boring and scrubbed-clean speeches from, or just as bad, it’s so geared to analysts versus the audience that we’re all doing our best to figure out how this applies to us.
I can tell you that Dave Odenath, President of Prudential Annuities, knocked my socks off when he presented a really complex chart on Sales, COS, ROE, ROI, etc. in a clear, understandable, and meaningful way to the spouses of his leadership and sales team. And then he thanked the spouses for supporting his team in achieving and exceeding their sales objectives, acknowledging what the spouses give up (like seeing each other on a regular basis!) to help their husbands or wives be successful in their career at Prudential Annuities. By the way, this was an impromptu audience as Dave invited the spouses to listen in on what was meant to be his presentation to his sales and executive team. He was completely real and compelling. It’s rare.
At some “rewards” conferences I’ve seen the audience get checked into each portion of the conference with a bar code scanner and if people don’t show up to the meetings, they get punished in some way. Seems like an oxymoron situation to me. Really, if you want people to show up, have something to say that no one wants to miss. Simple, but not easy.
Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, authors of The Leadership Challenge, claim that leaders typically spend only 3% of their time thinking about their vision. Their research also showed one of the top things people say they want in a leader is someone who is a futuristic thinker. Well, it’s no wonder the podium is becoming so banal – leaders aren’t spending time on what matters to them and their constituents. In essence, they are regurgitating what the company tells them they should be saying because they have become too busy doing other things.
I suppose if the entertainment industry can’t get it right (think of the Academy Awards speeches), corporate America may deserve a little forgiveness from me for its lack of creativity! But really, when you’re asking people for their time — and today there is no scarcer commodity for people in the workplace — you need to step up and give them a reason to want to listen to what you have to say! Give your people something real, not the company Kool-Aid.
