Linda speaks with Davina Stanley, author and consultant, on how to effectively communicate organizational decisions, strategies and results. Davina draws on more than 25 years of experience helping leaders and teams to clarify their thinking so they can communicate complex ideas.
Linda Fanaras:
Welcome to the B2B Brand 180 Strategy Podcast. Hi, I’m Linda Fanaras, CEO of Millennium Agency, and I’m excited to bring a communication expert in to share insights, knowledge, and key tips. If you want to transform your B2B marketing into a powerhouse brand, then you may want to listen in. Learn how to position your brand from the competition and uncover that “white space” in the market. I’m happy to introduce today’s guest, Davina Stanley, who turns mid-career experts into great communicators. A veteran communication specialist, Davina launched Clarity First Program, and “The So What Strategy” book, which we will learn about today. So, let’s get into it. Hi Davina. Thanks for joining me today.
Davina Stanley:
Absolute pleasure. Lovely talking with you.
Linda Fanaras:
We are very excited. So, do you mind sharing a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Davina Stanley:
Sure. I live in Sydney, Australia, and I help executives across the board to communicate a whole lot better. My background is, is a little unusual, I suppose. I started out as a kindergarten teacher, originally teaching four year old boys and decided that as much as I adored them, I didn’t want to spend my days in the classroom with 25 of them all at once. And I moved through a series of steps into corporate communication, and I’ve been really lucky. You know, I married a fellow who wanted an international career. So, I’ve lived in many places. I’ve lived in Hong Kong and New York, and Tokyo, Melbourne and Sydney. In fact, I’ve lived in Hong Kong twice. So, you know, I’m, I’m really fortunate. I’ve had quite an adventurous life, I think.
Linda Fanaras:
Fantastic. Thank you for sharing that. So, I learned and read a little bit about your Clarity First Program, and I think it would be great to educate the listeners on how does it really help executives? Because I think often executives feel like, you know, they are good communicators in most cases, but how do you feel like it actually helps executives?
Davina Stanley:
Yeah, I think it focuses on the inputs even more than the outputs, if you like. When we think of communication, we think of, you know, what we see, what we hear. But what we do is go right back to the source and say, okay, well what’s the messaging? What is your, what is your idea that you need to convey? And we dig quite deeply to help people really work out what that messaging is, and very often people can, if they’re charismatic, can engage an audience with their personality and, and really, you know, bring people along the journey, which is a fabulous skill. But what we do is we add to that by helping people to clarify their messaging, clarify their thinking. So we use thinking tools that come out of management consulting to crystallize that message and make sure that when they are delivering it, whether they’re really confident in their presentation or not, and some people that I work with are not, they’re, you know, they’re very good thinkers, but they’re not necessarily the charismatic sorts of people. They can really engage an audience because what they’re saying is really valuable and they can get it across really, really quickly.
Linda Fanaras:
So are you thinking more along the lines as, as an executive communicates that they really have to identify exactly what they’re going to say and how they’re going to say it?
Davina Stanley:
Absolutely, and I think in many organizations this work’s done collaboratively too. So, an individual, whether they are an analyst, at the more junior levels, a mid-level manager really has to engage people above them, below them and beside them. They’ve got to be really good in all directions, but they need to get a bit of a consensus around what a message might be before they actually get a decision, let’s say. And so, we have a technique where people organize their messaging in a really tight way onto a single page so that they can have some really easy conversations. Well, easy as in it’s easy to have the conversation, the conversation itself might not be easy if the ideas are controversial, but it’s really an easy way to facilitate a conversation around the thinking so you don’t get lost in, you know, loads of detail. For example, a lot of people use Google Docs or Word, and they’ll use track changes, or they’ll live edit a document. We’ve got, you know, lots of PowerPoint slides or lots of, you know, pages of prose, and all they end up doing is looking at the minutiae. They, they lose the big idea, the big thing that they’re trying to get across. And it takes a lot of time. So we help them do it much more quickly and focus on the big idea, the “so what,” as we call it, rather than, you know, spinning wheels around, you know, “Oh, not this word or that. That’s a little d- no, I don’t like that word.” Or, “Oh, I think maybe this belongs here, not there.” Rather than actually guys, you’ve missed the point, you know? You’ve missed the point.
Linda Fanaras:
Well, it’s interesting what you’re saying because there are a multitude of different leadership styles, and I think sometimes people feel like they should be a certain leadership style, but that’s not their natural tendency or their actual personality. Yeah, so as a leader, it’s important to identify what leadership style works for me, and then how do I identify what to say and how to say it. That works for me because trying to obviously be someone else, let’s say I have no problem speaking my mind where somebody else might be very non-confrontational. I think identifying exactly what needs to be said in a clear, concise manner can really make all the difference in the world.
Davina Stanley:
Absolutely. And having a bit of a sense too, of what your audience is looking for in terms of their style, you know? If you have a really hard message, I worked with two clients yesterday and they both had really hard messages and they were about both about budgeting and, in both cases, they had a real problem with the money. They needed to do something for maybe half what they’d been given, and they needed to deal with that. And so, thinking about, well, what’s the best way to engage that other person? And you know, do they like to have some time to think before the conversation? Is that really important to them or does that not matter? Are they really happy to have the conversation on the fly? Having a good sense of those kinds of things can be really helpful too.
Linda Fanaras:
Mm-hmm. And bringing up budget is a good example because I think that’s one of those things where, uh, leaders might have difficulty speaking about, or let’s say you had to ask for a larger budget numbers or it’s an expense issue, and trying to explain why something was done. Having a set of key talking points and messaging points will be instrumental in making sure that that comes across in a very positive way.
Davina Stanley:
Absolutely. And elevating them so that they’re in a hierarchy. So, the most important thing gets delivered really quickly and really easily, and you know, if you only get, if you know you get squeezed, you go and you’ve got half an hour booked with your manager to go and have the conversation and suddenly you’ve got five minutes, what do you do? And that happens quite a lot. So, if you know what those top line messages are, you don’t forget because you get caught away on, on a narrative, you know, building towards the tension point if you like. It’s like, no, hang on, we’ve only got five minutes. No worries. Here’s, here are the key things that I wanted to discuss with you. At a really high level. And you know, we hear people all the time saying they get caught like that and they end up only needing five minutes. They didn’t need half an hour after all, you know?
Linda Fanaras:
Right, right. So, it looks like you have a couple different programs available for leaders. You have a basic program and an express program. Are you able to explain what the difference is between them?
Davina Stanley:
Mm-hmm. Absolutely. So these, the basic and express are self-paced learning courses and basic is just three modules with some simple tools to give you an overview of our approach. So, for somebody who wants just a sense of it, who doesn’t want to go too deep, but just to have the general idea, if you like. The express course goes deeper onto all the elements that we talk about. It gives you those three basic modules, as well as a series of ideas on how to structure your thinking, how to organize your ideas. And so, they’re our two self-paced courses, and I also have a cohort program, which we call the Clarity First Program, and that’s where people come on board, they come for six workshops, and they have opportunities to work in small groups for coaching as well around real life pieces of communication. That’s where people get to interact and really explore the ideas and engage with them, because conceptually it’s not that hard, but as soon as you start trying to do things, you know, it becomes much more difficult. There’s always a big gap, isn’t there, between, “Oh, that’s a good idea. Yeah. I get that,” and actually being able to do it. Yeah, yeah.
Linda Fanaras:
It sounds good until I have to actually do it right. Exactly. So can you, I know that the book actually covers – the book that you have – covers seven, I would say commonly used communication patterns that people use in business. Can you, can you talk about what a few of those are and speak a little bit about that?
Davina Stanley:
Perhaps, first of all, I might talk a little bit about where they came from because it might be like an unusual idea that there are, common patterns, if you like, for core communication, you know, corporate communication is, is quite difficult. Whether you’re in a small business doing B2B messaging or whether you are convincing an executive of something, there’s a lot to sort of tie together. But what we found was, my colleague and I have been using these techniques since both of us were at McKinsey, the management consulting firm, and we realized that we were using very similar stories. You know, we’d work with a client, and they’d start telling us about the message we needed to convey, and we’d sit there and say, okay, alright. And we have a picture in our heads. We say, okay, well maybe you could do it like this or like this or like this. Maybe you could talk about the criteria that you need to meet or maybe you could tell them about the problem and how you can fix the problem, make that the primary anchor for the story. Or maybe you need to talk about it via some options. You know, there’d be three ways. Let’s say you could do this, and Jared and I were talking, and we said we wonder if we’ve just got biases. We wonder if we’ve got our own preference as to how you tell stories and whether we are just pushing our clients in a particular direction based on our own preference. So, we sat down and talked about it and realized that we were using very similar stories. There were some differences, but ultimately there were some really common threads. And so, we have a number, I’m thinking which one to tell you about. Let’s, let’s use “Houston, we have a problem,” because it’s got a great name – we gave them all names to try and make them more memorable. And Houston starts off with “Houston, we have a problem,” and then it’s got three steps to it. So firstly, “Houston, we have a problem.” It uses what we call a deductive structure. People have heard of the technique, Minto Pyramid Principle, they will have heard of that before. “Houston, we have a problem,” however, the best way to fix it is this, therefore, fix it, you know, use, implement the fix, and you get to your action plan at the end. So that’s one way of doing it. Another way of doing it would be to flip it to be more positive, because Houston can be quite confronting. You don’t want to use Houston if you’re speaking with, let’s say the- let’s say you’re talking about improving a system because it’s just out of date. You just need to upgrade it. And the person who created the system is the person who’s going to have to approve, because they’ve been promoted since they created the system, is going to approve the change. You might not want to go in and say, “Hey, this, this program, it just doesn’t work anymore. It’s terrible.” You might not want to start like that. So, you might turn it in a different way and use a positive version of that, which is “Opportunity Knocks,” which is, “Hey, we have an opportunity to capture a whole lot more value by doing all of these things. However, we’ll need to upgrade the system to, you know, achieve that.” “Oh, okay. Yes, I can see that.” “So, okay, here’s how we think we should upgrade the system.” So, you’ve got basically the same story, you could tell it those two different ways.
Linda Fanaras:
Mm-hmm. So, you create a different pathway, yep.
Davina Stanley: 12:11
Yeah, exactly. Or you might say, well, there are a number of ways for us to improve our performance around this particular issue. However, improving the system is going to be the best way to do that. Here’s why. So, let’s do it. So there, you know, three different ways, perhaps, you could tell that one story. There are many more, but you, you very quickly get the handle of the patterns, and then you can look at them and think, oh, you know, we’ve got a little tent. They’re in the book. Of course, we’ve got a little thing that we give people that put them on a page. And so, you can just have a look and think, “Well, I’ll just have a go with that one. I’ll just have a go with ‘close the gap,’ see if that works, and just really loosely sketch it out,” and you think, “Oh, that’s not quite right. Okay, I’ll have a go at ‘watch out,’ I’ll try that.” You know, and just try them very quickly, and that helps you finesse your messaging and helps you sort of click as to what it should look like. And then you can just go forward and say, “Right now I’ve got it. Now I can color it in,” if you like, “I can fill it in because I know what the general flow should look like.” And it’s fun, it just helps. It’s a shortcut. So, we want people to understand the principles, the thinking principles, so they can really critically assess the quality of their messaging and their thinking. But then, at the same time, we want to help them get started quickly, you know, to balance those two things out.
Linda Fanaras:
That’s interesting. And I was just thinking as you were talking because there are so many different types of leaders and there are so many different types of styles. So, for example, an up-and-coming leader might be a little defensive if they’re trying to get a point across, or another leader may be shy and non-confrontational and need to get their message across. So, when you’re dealing with people like that, that have very specific personalities, how do you try to get these people to embrace your concept, to really change their personality and their behavior to address these needs that we’re talking about today?
Davina Stanley:
So, I think I don’t ever get anyone to change their personality. So, I help them understand their style, their working style, you know, whether they’re a driver or amiable, expressive or analytical, and what drives them. And I help them think about their audience. So that’s all about the delivery too. So, whether you have, let’s pick the story that I was playing with before. You know, you’ve got a system that needs upgrading and you need to invest some money to do that. That circumstance, that recommendation doesn’t shift. And you believe because you’ve done the analysis that that’s the idea that you need to convey. And so, mapping the thinking out so that you’ve got a really tight case that demonstrates why this is a good idea to invest, you know, $10, won’t be $10, but in a new system, let’s say. Then you sit there and you say, okay, how are you going to deliver that? How do you actually work with that person to get it across? If you think your stakeholder is going to be really resistant to your idea, then what you might do is say, okay, well perhaps I’ll talk to some other people first, you know, who might influence them on my behalf. Or perhaps I’ll have a one-on-one conversation with them because I’m a bit, you know, I really don’t like presenting in front of groups, I’m really not confident. So what I want to do is make sure that before I get in the room, everybody knows the key ideas because I’ve worked with them one-on-one, and so I’m walking into a really open door. I’m walking through an open door. I’ve done the work before I get into the room. So I think a lot of that is not so much about whether you have your message early and then have some supporting points that you can deliver really quickly, but rather how you engage them, how you stakeholder manage. And you know, whether you lead with questions to open up the conversation, whether you like to dive straight in, whether you want to have a bit of a warmup chat before, all of those things can be managed. But the essence of the message and delivering the message to people who are time poor and who want a really quality idea that’s really well thought through, I think that’s pretty universal. It’s pretty universal.
Linda Fanaras:
Yeah, I like what you said. I mean, I think what you’re saying is depending on the style, you know, it might be easier for somebody that’s non-confrontational to start with a question to get the ball rolling, or it might be a style for somebody else to tell a story to get the ball rolling or start with a positive statement to get the ball rolling. So, there’s all kinds of little tactics to get there, but what do you think some of the biggest communication mistakes are that leaders make? There’s probably a lot. We all learn as we go.
Davina Stanley:
Oh, we do! We do. I continue to learn, you know? Absolutely, I love it. The biggest ones. Well, firstly, I think, well we talked about one already, which is to work in documents to create a paper. You know, you’re thinking about senior leadership decision making, papers or board papers, let’s say, or even marketing communication. To work on it in Word, in Google Docs and try and edit it together without a structure, a thinking structure, I think is, is a really big mistake because it just takes an awfully long time, and the message gets really muddied. So, I think that’s one. I think another is to assume that as a senior person you can’t improve. And when I say can’t improve, I don’t mean get a little bit better, but materially shift. And so, I think that’s, that’s- sometimes I work with people who say, oh, you know, “I shouldn’t need this now. You know, I’m, I’m a vice president or a president, or maybe even in the C-suite, I shouldn’t need this now.” Right? But actually, they’ve just never been taught. They assume they can leverage the people around them and just pick up a few tips and tricks rather than go to the real heart of the matter, which can be quite difficult, yeah? That’s two. I’m thinking I should give you three, shouldn’t I? I’m just thinking what’s, what’s a good third? I’ve got many in my mind. What’s a good third? Okay, here’s the third one. That it’s all about the documents themselves. Right? That actually we shouldn’t be focusing on- or not so much that we shouldn’t, I think people haven’t thought that they can really speed up their process for working so that they as a leader, don’t need to rework their team’s communication for them, often at nights and at weekends. You know, I talk with leaders in big organizations who routinely take hundreds of pages home every weekend, you know, their Sunday afternoon is spent rewriting, let’s say, 500 pages of other people’s stuff. And they just assume that they have to because their people can’t, can’t write. But if they have a collaborative process, they can actually shift that and get most of it done during, you know, during sensible working hours, let’s call it that. I think that’s something that people just, it doesn’t occur to them that that’s possible.
Linda Fanaras:
Right. So, some traps I think that people fall into, I think we had spoken about before, maybe topics and structure as an example, or the reality of biology. Do you want to speak about some of that a little bit?
Davina Stanley:
I think biology is a really good one. We all know what it’s like when we open up an email or a paper, a document, and you take one look at it and you think, oh my gosh, this is going to be hard. You know, you just look at it and it’s almost visceral. You feel this “Oh, Gosh,” and very quickly we make a decision within fractions of a second almost as to whether we are going to read something or not. And I think people don’t realize that, you know, it’s just an email. I’ll just build something out and send it off, or it’s, oh, we always do it this way, we’ll just, you know, pull it together quickly and send it off because it’s efficient for me to do. You know, and what they’re doing is protecting their own biology by not pushing through and, and thinking, and when I talk about biology there, what I mean is this: our brain is about 2% of our body weight, but it uses about 20% of our calories. So that instant response is quite primal. Where we look at something in our bodies looking at it, well, I guess our eyes are looking, our body’s responding and saying, “That’s too hard. This thing isn’t worth all that effort. Save your calories for something that really matters. This is not a clear and present danger or something that’s really worth investing in.” So, you’ve really got to push through quite consciously to, to read something. So, if this awful email, let’s say, doesn’t come from the CEO or somebody really important to you, then you, “Ugh, I’ll look at it later.” And you very rarely do, you know? How often have we got inboxes that are full of emails that we just don’t look at because they’re just too hard?
Linda Fanaras:
Right, right. Yeah. If we have- it takes too much time. Yeah. It’s like I can’t get to that right now. I don’t have enough time.
Davina Stanley:
Exactly. Exactly.
Linda Fanaras:
Yeah, no, I see there’s a lot of that. So many executives are, I think they are great leaders, but maybe they don’t have very good communication skills. So, employees may look up to them, but their communication skills or effectiveness is really not that great. Is there anything else that you could add to that?
Davina Stanley:
Look, I think, you know, clarifying that you really do have a problem and then working out how to shift that productivity dial is really key. I like to talk about improving the clarity of the message so it jumps off the page, the quality of the message so that when it jumps off the page, it’s a really valuable message. And velocity, which talks about the speed, the speed of the operations around that message, creating it, delivering it, and then acting on it. So just focusing on those three things.
Linda Fanaras:
Yeah, that’s fantastic. And I think, if I was to summarize what we’re saying today, it’s really for leaders who are looking to improve their communication skills and identifying who they are as leaders and how to develop a strategy that gives them the tools they need to communicate more effectively. So, taking their style or their personality and coming up with some clear and concise messaging that actually works within their personality style. And start to execute that in a way, so whether it requires having to talk to maybe a difficult employee and having talking points around that.
Davina Stanley:
Exactly.
Linda Fanaras:
So, whatever, yeah, whatever the case may be, but really being in preparation for whatever that conversation is. That’s fantastic. Excellent. Let me thank Davina Stanley who turns mid-career experts into great communicators. Check out Clarity First Program and “The So What Strategy” book at clarityfirstprogram.com or Google ‘Davina Stanley.’ Thank you again for listening to the B2B Brand 180 Strategy podcast. And if you like what you heard, press like, share, or subscribe.
