“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.

In our lives, we have harvested a lot of experiences, which we can use in our presentations. If we were better organized, we might have had the forethought to keep notes, so it would be easier to refer to them when we are looking for material. Well there is a hint right there – keep notes from now on. You can just jot down in your Evernote or something similar, the key points you will want to recall later in a talk.

Storytelling is not some Hollywood script writer level requirement for speakers. It is just telling our stories from real life and the lives of people we have observed. We can also share and acknowledge incidents from authors who have captured their experiences on paper, but in our own words. We just have to be observant and be able to see a good connection between a point we are making in our presentation and an example where we can relate it as a story.

We know with planning our talk we should start with the conclusion of our talk first, boiled down to its essence. We then pick up the main points we are going to use to illustrate why our viewpoint or our conclusion is correct. We then design the opening to grab people’s attention, amidst the mad world they live in, which seems to permanently distract them.

Now when we are fleshing out the key points we want to make, in the main body of the presentation, we are searching for evidence to back up our claims. This comes in the form of data, expert authority and stories to make the point come to life. This is the time to drop into the vault of our collection of stories and find good matches between the point and the story.

This may seem hard at first, but when you reflect on why you think something, about an issue there is usually a good reason for it. Something happened which you witnessed or were aware of, which influenced your take on the matter. There will be a story in there somewhere. Usually these are either successes or failures.

We can all become careful observers of things going on in our business lives, which we can sew into the fabric of what we will be saying in our talk. There is no shortage of actors and characters out there in businessland from which we can draw. Let’s start our collection today if we don’t have one and keep adding to it, if we do. Some of this stuff you couldn’t make up by the way, which is always exciting. The point is to capture it and employ it.

Imagine my surprise, as an expert in sales training, when I meet salespeople who have not spent even one second trying to master the bridging of the gap between value and cost. Sitting in the audience at a speaker event, next to a thirtyish Japanese sale’s guy, we talked about how he does his sales.

He told me he contacts a lead, gets an appointment, shows up and explains the service and submits a quote. Really? On the blank side of meal menu, I mapped out the elements of the sales process for him. Prepare for the meeting and focus your intention on one thing – getting the re-order, not just the solitary sale. Build trust through establishing rapport. Create interest by asking extremely well designed questions to understand the client’s needs. Now tell the client whether we can help them or not and if we can, explain the how of our solution. There may be points of insufficient clarity, concerns, hesitations or downright objections to what we are proposing. We need to deal with those before we proceed to ask for the order, and then we do the follow up to deliver the service or good.

I then asked him what does he do when the buyer says, “too expensive”. His answer had me reeling. With a cherubic mien, he told me he offered to “drop the price”. Incredulous, I asked “by how much do you usually drop it?”. He quoted 20% as the number. There were four other sales people in his team and if that is how they roll over there, then that is an expensive first response to client pushback on pricing.

Here is the snapper – do you know what is happening inside your team? Are they also dropping the price immediately as their first counter to an objection on the money?

He should have said, “why do you say that” when told it was too expensive? Was the price objection genuine, a ruse, sport negotiation, time bound, or irrelevant because they haven’t seen enough value yet to understand the price point? There will be one highest priority element in the too expensive objection. It might be the actual volume of cash involved, budget allocation timings, internal competing project competition concerns, etc. Which one is it – we need to know.

The moral of this story is to take a very detailed look at what your salespeople are doing. Don’t confuse seven years of sales experience with one year of experience seven times. Also, don’t imagine that they have a process, that they know how to explain the value or to deal with objections. Based on what we see in our sales training classes and talking with clients, in Japan, the chances of that being the case are very, very, very low.

Japan loves rote learning and parents will pay cram schools to get their kids fully tuned up and on to the education escalator. Rote learning and exam technique is the standard educational approach in Japan right through to starting University classes. At University, unless you are trying for very specific careers like medicine, the elite bureaucracy or some job that requires you to pass a national exam, then the next four years are a type of Club Med for undergraduates.

In the internet and AI age, when anything you want to know can be found through a search engine, how relevant is rote learning and exam technique for the future? We all know we need more innovation and creativity in companies. Where is this going to come from? If we think about the work skills, knowledge and abilities we will demand of our employees in the next twenty years, we can be absolutely sure the current Japanese system of education won’t be producing it.

With lifetime employment, investing in training people made economic sense because you would reap the rewards. With greater job mobility on the horizon however, this social contract between staff and company will be broken. Young people, who will be in short supply due to demographic changes, will become like baseball free agents. They will rapidly discover they are able to swap teams for a better deal.

So where are we up to? The companies aren’t training their staff as comprehensively as they once did. The staff themselves will find themselves being lured by recruiters to move on to greener pastures.

I believe the educational construct in Japan basically has its ladder up against the wrong wall. What will become of this country? What will we need to do to prepare ourselves for this brave new world? Are we thinking about these prospects? If we haven’t spared a thought for this grim future of work, then now is a good time to take another look at assumptions, strategies, plans and targets. Those preparing now, will win in this coming war for talent. Game on!

Normally when we give presentations, they tend to be pretty dry affairs. We marshal the facts, relate what happened, tell stories perhaps but in a one dimensional way. We are relating what happened, but are not making any attempt to bring it alive. However, what do we seek when we are looking for entertainment or education – we are looking for dialogue. Our television dramas, movies, novels, biographies are all using dialogue to good effect.

Why not do the same thing in our talks, to make our key point stronger? Let me give an example of something that happened to me in 2010 in Miami. I was attending my first Dale Carnegie International Convention and hardly knew anyone there. In the evenings there would be various parties to attend and on this particular occasion I had the honour of meeting Dale Carnegie’s daughter Donna Dale Carnegie and she introduced me to Mike.

Now Mike stood out in that crowd of Dale Carnegie people, because he had a long ponytail and was wearing a Hawaiian shirt. It turned out that Mike was the contractor who did all the stage audio sound etc., for the Convention and had been doing it for years.

“I always finish my year with the Dale Carnegie convention because you hold it in early December”, he told me. He also got me attention when he said, “I really like your organisation”. Being new to the Dale Carnegie world I was curious, so I asked him why he said that. He whispered to me in a conspiratorial fashion, “The things that people are saying out in front of stage and what they are doing behind the stage are the same”.

I asked what he meant by that. He continued, “Well I do a lot of these same types of events and we are all hooked up on the mics, so we can hear what is going on behind stage, as well as out on stage. There are plenty of folks who say one thing to the audience, but carry on quite the opposite off stage. I found in years of dealing with Dale Carnegie people they are genuine and they live the principles they espouse and I like that”.

I could say all of the same things and relate that story, just telling the details of what happened. However, when I include the dialogue, it brings the whole thing to life. People in the audience can picture a guy in a Hawaiian shirt, with a long ponytail, whispering this information to me. I can even cup my ear, as if I was listening to him, when he told me that secret part. They can hear his voice as I relate the story, which makes it more credible.

“I would be able to sell a lot more except for all the external factors over which I have zero control”. Actually, you have never heard this line of argument before from a salesperson. This is because this statement is an honest appraisal of what they see as the problem, but they don’t express it that way. Instead they bitch about the boss, the market, industry changes, currency movements, the sales materials, the pricing and everything else but their pathetic sales ability.

Are they accessing all the good information available to become better? No. They are not bothering, because they don’t see any correlation between their lack of an internal motivation to study to become better and their non-realization of sales success.

People wind up in sales by accident. The turnover of salespeople is very high because it is a metrics based game. The numbers tell against you when you are failing and in short order you disappear. The companies invest nothing, preferring the law of the jungle to sort out who stays and who goes.

Salespeople have more than enough resources to self-educate themselves about the finer points of sales. Here is how complicated this is: learn how to ask the client questions about what they need; listen carefully to the answers; tell them you either have a relevant solution or that you don’t; if you do, provide explanations that justify the trade off between the value you bring and the price you charge; supply it and follow up.

This is what they do instead: tell the client all the details about the product or service without having any clue as to whether this is what they need or not; if they don’t have what the buyer needs, then try to force the square peg into the round hole and give them what you have any way, even if it doesn’t really fit; burn that client and move on to the next buyer.

Let’s study, apply the knowledge, keep studying, keep applying, without pause. There has never been a better time to be in sales, because there is so much rich education material available about how to become a true professional. No more excuses baby, get to it.