Page 103 - Great Communication Secrets of Great Leaders

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CHAPTER 6
STRUCTURING THE STAND-UP LEADERSHIP PRESENTATION
Warrant: Our diversity will enable us to continue to develop products

that customers want to buy.
Warrants are the “general principle that enables you to move from reason
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to specific claim.” They are the syntheses of your arguments, the statements
that will enable people to latch onto your leadership ideas.
The leader needs to imbue his or her arguments with a mixture of fact and
personality. A dry recitation of arguments will not sway anyone. When the
arguments are invested with the leader’s character, along with well-turned
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phrases, analogies, and stories, the presentation will take flight. Winston
Churchill and Martin Luther King were masters of the craft of augmenting
their arguments with rhetorical flourishes that carried the listener on a kind of
symphony of sound and reason.
THE PERSUASIVE MESSAGE
One of the chief responsibilities of a leader-communicator is to persuade fol-
lowers to adopt her or his point of view. In fact, Drucker argues that persua-
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sion lies at the core of all communications. Except in times of extreme crisis,
such as a battlefield or a pilot taking command during a thunderstorm, where
time is of the essence, leaders must do more than say, “Follow me.” They need
to give reasons why people should follow them. And, during those crisis
moments when the leader does not have the luxury of time, he or she must call
upon the reservoir of credibility that he or she has established through consis-
tent and repeated leadership messages. Robert Cialdini, a noted authority on
the topic of persuasion, lists six key characteristics that persuaders use. Each
is rooted in fundamental human behavior. 6
Reciprocation refers to the sense of obligation to “repay in kind” that

we feel when we receive something that we perceive to be of value. 7
None of us likes feeling that we owe something to someone else, so
we are inclined to pay it back as a matter of course in order to free our-
selves from the obligation. When the leader describes what the organi-
zation has done for the individual or the team and then asks for
something in return, she or he is using a form of reciprocation. For
example, if a leader talks about how the organization has given individ-
uals opportunities for growth and success, and how those opportunities
have been fulfilled, employees will typically fall in line and do what-
ever the leader asks them to do. We are likely to reciprocate because we
feel a sense of obligation.
Commitment and consistency involves sticking with an individual or a
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principle because it is in line with what we have done previously. A call
to action is an example of commitment and consistency because it asks
followers to do something as a consequence of the commitment they