Not one, but two of my clients are in trouble because they each have a super-abundance of charm.
Accomplished, handsome raconteurs, they hold forth in meetings with panache, tossing off confetti clouds of words that flit, rise and fall on the warm winds supporting their sonorous voices.
Yet both of them fail to be clear and succinct, assuming, I suppose, that air time is more important than incisive thinking and plain expression.
Interesting, in these cases, that charm does not go hand in hand with brevity and good sense. In fact, it may preclude a more disciplined approach to speaking because The Charmer wins approval, not by what he says, but by how he makes others feel.
In fact, all his life, The Charmer has learned to win friends and influence others not by the rigor of his thinking, but by his twinkling temperament.
And now My Two Charmers are in executive positions, and some around them detect intellectual laziness in their approach to discussions and presentations. And certain gray-beards have asked The Charmers to beef up on substantive muscle and lose some of the glitter and panache.
It’s an interesting problem to have: because of their personalities, they can be seen as all hat, no cattle—which is a Texan phrase denoting someone who talks a big game but can’t back it up.
In my experience, most people in executive positions are hard-wired the other way: all cattle, no hat.
And here we go again, the world is looking for a kind of hybrid executive, one whose quantitative skills can reduce uncertainty to a fixed, small number, and whose charm can pull Benjamins out of wallets and cause armies to march.
My two guys are working on the analytical stuff.
Sims Wyeth & Co. provides public speaking courses, executive speech coaching, presentation skills training, voice and speech training, speech writing, and courses that address stage fright, body language, presentation strategy, and effective use of PowerPoint, all of which contribute to greater executive presence and personal impact.