Page 28 - The New Articulate Executive_ Look, Act and Sound Like a Leader

FIRST, UNDERSTAND YOUR AUDIENCE 19

He was supposed to talk about the company’s fi nancial health,
PowerPoint and all. But instead he told a story about how his little
boy had found him unable to sleep, sitting downstairs in the dark,

worrying about having to fire so many people from both companies

in the weeks ahead. It was the first time his son had ever seen him
so vulnerable, he said. The son, confused and worried, put his arm
over his father’s shoulder and said, “It’s all right, Dad. It’s got to be
all right—because I know if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t do it.”
Then the boy told his father why he, too, had been unable to
sleep. Just that very day his best friend in fifth grade had been killed

after falling out of a third-fl oor window. The boy talked quietly
about his friend and his sense of shock and loss, not yet fully able to
comprehend that his friend was gone forever. The father listened. In
the end, the boy said, “He never had a life—at least the people in
your company have a life. . . .”
“At that moment,” the father told his audience, “I knew I had a
message. I didn’t feel good about what had to be done, but I was
able—at least, emotionally—to put it into proper perspective.
“The message is that we all have a future, those who are with us
today—and those who are not. For those of us who stay, the future
has never been brighter. For those who have left us, we hope we have
been a stepping-stone on their journies to even greater opportunity.”
And so it went. The story touched everybody in the audience for
several reasons: It reached down into their emotions to wake up the
Instinct Man, gave them all a sense of solidarity and a kind of kin-
ship, and served as a life experience that they could all identify with
and share together. Most important, it said the man doing the talk-
ing was a real human being, and it helped defuse some of the linger-
ing anxieties in the wake of the leveraged buyout.