“Born to lead” is nonsense. Many things shaped that person in order for them to achieve credibility with others. Of course, we can become a “leader” as part of our company designated hierarchy. We sit somewhere in an organizational chart above others, with various reporting lines elevating us above the hoi polloi. We know many people with that august title of “leader”, who we would never willingly follow in a million years – pompous, tiresome, incompetent jerks!

Can we become someone who others will follow when all the paraphernalia of leadership pomp and circumstance has been stripped away? How do we become a charismatic leader, whom others willingly wish to follow?

The starting point is critical. If your desire for leadership is driven by personal aggrandisement and ego, where all good things must flow to you, this force of will factor is not attractive. Good leadership is differentiated by the followers desire to want to follow, when there is no coercion, structure or impetus to do so. We gravitate to these charismatic leaders because of how they make us feel.

Effective leaders are good with people. There are some key principles they embody, which make us like and trust them. This is not artful manipulation, where they fake these principles in a cunning way. That approach exists and will ultimately be revealed as hypocrisy. What we are talking about here is having correct kokorogamae (心構え) - true intentions.

Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves

Bossy people often love to brag. Instead, build the trust by focusing your conversation on them not you. As you stop dominating and start listening, you uncover areas of shared desires, values, interests and experiences which are magnetic in their properties and bind us more closely together.

Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view

Often we are egocentric - it always about me, me, me. Having listened, we uncover the context behind their beliefs and arrive at a greater appreciation for their views and positions. We can more easily get on each other’s wavelengths. When this happens, we become more mutually simpatico, supportive and powerfully bonded.

Ask questions instead of giving direct orders

The inclusive, humble promotion of self-discovery unleashes powerful forces that encapsulates our shared direction. We become the catalyst for their self-belief. We all want to be around people who make us feel good about our better selves and with whom we share common goals.

People will willingly follow us when we apply these principles. We must sincerely switch from a “me” focus to an “our” focus. Change our approach and we change our results. We will become a charismatic leader.

Lawyers in Japan are an elite group. I attended a legal symposium, involving these super elite Japanese lawyers and yet the communication skills on offer were incongruent with their elite educations and high social status. I can never resolve how intelligent people can manage to stand up in front of an audience and position themselves such that they fully ignore one third of their audience.

So here is a hint to ourselves. Whenever we are standing before an audience, always make sure we position our feet such that they are facing ninety degrees directly forward and just turn our necks and upper body, when we want to involve each side of the room in eye contact.

Actually there wasn’t any real eye contact underway either. Speaking to everyone and nobody at the same time, is a common lack of professionalism in many speakers in Japan. Winning the audience over to us, getting them to listen carefully to what we are saying and drawing them in to our point of view, are all aided when we use eye contact.

We seek to hold eye contact for around six seconds, before we move our gaze and make eye contact with another member of the audience. When we do this, we really engage our audience.

In typical Japanese fashion, the main speakers were allotted a table to sit behind, decorated with a microphone stand. In this seated position, out came the sheets of the speech transcript to be read to us in a monotone voice. Extremely painful and ineffective.

We must always keep in mind one key advantage we have over our audience. Only we know what we are going to say. If we forget something or if we deviate off topic slightly, well, only we know that. So whenever possible we should stand and deliver, no safety net, in full gaze of the audience without notes and use our eye contact to draw everyone into our message.

The last part of the day was devoted to panel discussions. A couple of things to keep in mind for ourselves, if ever we are engaged in a similar panel discussion. Learn how to use the microphone correctly, so we can be heard clearly. I notice, so many people don’t speak across the mesh of the microphone properly, so they are not getting completely picked up by the audio technology.

These are highly educated, super elite people in Japan and yet they make these fundamental presentation errors. So it tells us that being well educated and being in a prestigious job, does not automatically anoint us with the magic fairy dust of successful public speaking professionalism we all need.

Remember, these are our personal and professional brands we are holding out there for all to see. To bolster your brand, get the training, because today is the age of persuasion power and we must master this skill if we want to be fully successful. Connecting with our audience is one of the key business skills we need to add to our repertoire when presenting.

Tricky area in sales, showmanship. The word has a certain odor about it that reeks of fake, duplicity, con game, spruker, carnival barker, etc. Yet, like storytelling, this is an important part of the sales professional’s repertoire. Clients are card carrying members of the Great Guild Of Skeptics. They are highly doubtful about salespeople’s claims. We need to bring some powerful persuasion techniques to the fore.

This isn’t making up information to snow the buyer or doing a bait and switch, between what they think they are getting and what we actually deliver. This means using our communication skills to highlight the key points that will persuade the buyer, that what we are offering will help them and is in their best interests. What we say has to be true, but we don’t need to say it in a flat, lifeless, mundane or boring way.

Showmanship would involve using persuasive word pictures to draw out the scene.A favourite example of showmanship is the car tyre puncture repair story. This is used to illustrate to salespeople the importance of showmanship, when explaining choices of action versus no-action to clients. Having a need to buy and buying are not always well paired together in the mind of the client. The example of the gas stand is used, where the service attendant notices the front left hand tyre of the car has a slow leak and offers to fix the puncture in 10 minutes. The client refuses the offer, because they are in a hurry and drive off.

The same scenario is used again, but this time the attendant employs some word pictures and showmanship.

So the attendant says:

“Mr. Customer, I notice your front left hand tyre has a slow leak. We can repair that puncture in 10 minutes”.

The client refuses, because they are too busy to spend the ten minutes repairing the leaking tyre. At this point the attendant doesn’t simply let the buyer leave, but says instead:

“Previously, we had another customer here with the same issue – a slow leak in their tyre. Unfortunately they were also too busy to fix it. We saw a report later on the nightly news about a terrible accident.

Apparently that same car tyre blew out while they were on the highway. It caused the car to flip and roll over three times. We saw the tangled mess of what was left of the car from the television station’s helicopter video. It was total tragedy.

The television reporter said the whole family of four, including the two young kids, died in that accident. When we heard that, we all felt really bad, because we didn’t get them to fix the leak when we had the chance.

We could have prevented that accident…. It will take us ten minutes to fix your puncture, let’s do it now, so we will all feel a lot better and safer”

Notice the use of very emotive language to drive home the cost of no action. The tone is subdued but still powerful. We need to be looking for ways in which we can contrast the plus of using our solution, against the minus of doing nothing or using our competitor’s solution.

Think about what you sell and what are some ways you can illustrate to the buyer that there are opportunity costs to not buying from you and buying now. Look for powerful word pictures to draw this out for the buyer. This is showmanship and we must become masters of communicating value to the client.