Do you work with a reluctant CEO? One who is in long-term denial about their lack of media interview or public speaking skills? The one you know needs coaching, but the challenge is persuading them to take it?
Here are four tactics I've seen clients use to get the executive to recognize the need and seek help:
- Peer example. Identify a senior figure the chief admires outside of your organization, who has had media or presentations coaching...and is public about it. (We've come a long way from my early coaching days when many politicians and executives where as loath to talk openly about getting media and speech coaching as they were talking about being in psychiatric therapy!) If the peer is openly enthusiastic about the results, the more likely your CEO will be interested.
- Direct-report guinea pig. If the CEO is not responsive to your coaching suggestions, find one of your boss's direct reports who is. When the CFO or COO returns from training, extolling its value and clearly a better communicator for it, the CEO may be persuaded to follow suit.
- Trickery. Create a media or speaking event that involves a format the CEO has never experienced. On several occasions I've worked with executives who were going to be delivering a speech using a teleprompter. The situation was new, so the resistance to coaching was reduced. Indeed, the opportunity to become comfortable with the new format, made the training welcome. In the process, of course, I was able to coach them on needed skills that applied to their speaking regardless of whether they were using a prompter.
- Shock therapy. It will be a good thing if you have steered them in the right coaching direction before this happens. And I'm not suggesting you be the one creating the shock. But reality does have a way of intruding at inconvenient times.
Over-confident CEOs with an inflated sense of their speaking ability will ultimately collide with reality, and come out bruised or broken. I don't wish this on anyone, but public or professional humiliation can be therapeutic!
It's too late, of course, for the current crisis, but if it encourages the chief to seek formal training, all will not have been lost.
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