Speaking with Confidence

Lesson 10: Leading with your voice

Goal: see where your voice already leads, and use it on purpose: to set direction, to steady a group, and to open the door for others.

Leadership is mostly talk

Look at what leaders actually do all day: explain where the team is heading, run meetings, give feedback, deliver bad news, thank people, ask questions, persuade a committee, calm things down when something goes wrong. Almost all of it is spoken. You don’t need a title for this either. The person who runs the school fundraiser, chairs the strata meeting or gets the project unstuck is leading, and doing it with their voice.

This works the other way too. Practising speaking, and especially running meetings and giving feedback, is one of the most direct ways to practise leading. It’s why Toastmasters calls itself the place “where leaders are made”: every meeting role (chairing, keeping time, running the impromptu segment, evaluating) is a small leadership job (Lesson 16).

Speaking up gets you noticed, for better or worse

In studies of small groups working on a task with no appointed leader, the person who spoke the most was the one most likely to be seen as the leader. How much they talked predicted it better than personality or intelligence did (MacLaren and colleagues, 2020). Researchers call this the “babble hypothesis”. Some evidence.

There are two lessons here. If you stay silent, others won’t see you as a leader, however good your ideas. And the loudest person isn’t necessarily the best one to follow. Lead by speaking up with substance (Lesson 8), not by filling airtime. When you’re the facilitator, watch for the loud voice that is getting followed just for being loud (Lesson 9).

Say where you’re going

People can’t follow a direction they can’t repeat. Before a project, a season or a big change, be able to say in one or two sentences where you’re heading and why, then say it again, often, in the same words. It will feel repetitive. That’s how you know it’s landing.

“This year we’re getting the club’s finances back in the black, so we can fix the clubhouse roof next year. Everything we decide tonight should help with that.”

That’s the one-sentence message from Lesson 6, used to lead.

Calm is contagious

When something goes wrong (a system outage, an angry customer, a bad result), people watch the leader’s voice before they listen to the words. A rushed, high, loud voice spreads panic; a slower, lower, steady one tells everyone things are in hand.

• Slow down and drop your volume slightly. Breathe out first (Lesson 2).
• Say what you know, what you don’t yet know, and what happens next.
• Give people something to do.
• Say when you’ll update them, then do it.

“The payment system is down. We don’t know why yet. Leanne’s on the phone to the bank. Until it’s fixed we’ll take card numbers by hand. I’ll update everyone at 11.”

Practitioner tip, drawn from crisis communication practice.

Hard conversations

Raising a problem with a colleague, saying no to your manager, telling a committee bad news: these use every skill in this course at once, under pressure. They’re also where people decide whether to trust you.

• Prepare your first sentence. “I’d like to talk about the roster, because I’m finding the Friday shifts hard to manage.” Get to the point in the first 30 seconds.
• Slow down and lower your volume a little.
• Describe, don’t diagnose. Stick to facts and their impact, not guesses about motives.
• Listen to their side before you propose a solution (Lesson 11).
• Agree a next step, even if it’s “let’s both think about it and talk on Thursday”.

Open the door for other voices

Leading with your voice also means making room for everyone else’s. In a study of restaurant managers and staff, employees spoke up with ideas and problems much more when their manager was seen as open: willing to listen, act on suggestions and not punish bad news. The manager’s general leadership style mattered less than this openness (Detert and Burris, 2007). Some evidence.

Teams where people feel safe to speak up learn faster (Lesson 8). Ways to build that as a leader:

• Ask for input, and ask early, before you’ve decided: “What am I missing?”
• Thank people for bad news, especially the first time.
• Speak last on opinion questions, so people don’t just agree with you.
• Close the loop: “Sam raised this last week, and we’ve changed the roster because of it.”

Exercise 10

Write the one or two sentences that say where something you lead is heading: a team, a project, a committee, a household. Say them out loud at the start of your next meeting with that group. Then ask one open question (“What am I missing?”) and listen to the whole answer before responding.

Listen

Conversations from the Legendary Lectures podcast, hosted by Al Barnett on the Gold Coast. These are personal stories and practitioner views, not research.

• Legendary Lectures #30, Mastering Difficult Conversations: The Say the Hard Things Framework with Jess Kyle: a practical framework for saying the hard things at work and at home.
• Legendary Lectures #39, Your Beginning Doesn’t Define Your Future with Ron Cox: leadership, mentoring and resilience.

Sources

• MacLaren et al. (2020), Testing the babble hypothesis: speaking time predicts leader emergence in small groups, The Leadership Quarterly
• Detert and Burris (2007), Leadership behavior and employee voice: is the door really open?, Academy of Management Journal
• Edmondson (1999), Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams, Administrative Science Quarterly
• Toastmasters International, Club meeting roles