A quick survey of the five most popular topics professional business speakers talk about illuminates what businesses prioritize when it comes to improving their organizations.
Here are those five, which comprise 92 percent of paid engagements:
- Motivation & inspiration (35 percent).
- Leadership (17 percent).
- Communication (15 percent).
- Sales (14 percent).
- Change (11 percent).
- Everything else (just 8 percent).
Motivation & Inspiration
Inspiration I define as “the drive to do creative work and develop good ideas,” while motivation provides “reason to act with enthusiasm or to inspire the forces necessary to determine behavior.”
While dictionary definitions are often a bit bland to digest, these two interrelated topics are partners in pursuit of a common goal: the desire to create actionable interest.
Based on the hiring statistics, more than one-third of all speakers are hired to help organizations gain behavioral velocity.
But why?
For most business leaders, inspiration is a peripheral topic that is important but not core to their daily pursuits. Since motivation comes from within, it behooves a smart leader to learn as much as he or she can about the topic — preferably in a teachable way. This key trait — the ability to create and sustain a culture of self-motivated workers — underscores the difference between management and leadership, since leaders inspire results through others.
If leadership is part of the brand you wish to project, you need to learn how the principles of motivation and inspiration fit together in order to align heads and hearts while creating more powerful people.
Leadership
This dovetails on the point we just made: Leaders inspire results. Saying it is one thing, but knowing how to do so is what matters. This topic is behavioral-knowledge reliant. You will want to learn personality types, maps and lenses, multi-generational effectiveness, and a myriad of other things like charisma, first impressions, likeability, work styles, etc. Each is part of the jigsaw puzzle that helps smart people understand how collective organizations tick.
Communication
Most workers have mediocre communication skills, so truly effective communication is a science unto itself. I have found this to be very much an “iceberg” topic — that what people do not know is multiples greater than what they do.
I teach four elements of effective communication: sender, receiver, channel, and message.
- The sender is us. We must learn a tremendous amount about ourselves if we hope to maximize our influence.
- The receiver is the audience, which faces us as an audience of one, several, or many. Our effectiveness with the receiver(s) will be impacted by how much you know about managing multiple concerns, diverse backgrounds, personal and political agendas, motivations, and biases.
- The channel is the vehicle we choose to convey our message. Each channel has strengths and limitations. Great communicators pick the right channel or channels for specific reasons at precise times.
- The message is what you say. There are construction rules for high impact messages, just as there are “watch out” guidelines to avoid messing up or diluting the intent or power of what you want to say.
Based on these four thumbnail explanations, it’s easy to see there is much to learn about each component.
Sales
We are entering the phase of economic recovery where revenue is king. Companies are open to better ways of selling, and buyers are open to new ideas and problem-solvers. Timewise, we are entering a perfect marriage of want and need.
The watch-out here is to avoid hiring a speaker whose shtick is a replication strategy of “do this, do that.” Instead, hire a good sales coach who teaches. Rather than just tell people what to do, seek someone who takes the extra step to explain “why” each step matters. Adult salespeople learn best in context, so explaining the “why” helps get audience buy-in and maximizes post-learning application.
Change
All of our minds circle a four-step emotional wheel whenever we deal with change:
- The evolutionary need for the change to come about — culminating with the change becoming reality.
- The panic stage. People internalize change into a personal context, usually defaulting it to the worst possible scenario — that almost never happens.
- The acceptance stage. If you can’t change it, embrace it. Trade the emotion of the panic stage for the logic of the acceptance stage. Logic trumps emotion, but you cannot overlay logic atop emotion and pretend the emotion is gone. Emotion must dissipate before logic takes root.
- The flourish stage. Under the new reality, things can and will settle down and improve. This is the end vision.
In summary
All of us can relate to these five topics personally and professionally. Individually and collectively the subjects are worth investing time and energy to learn more about. The subject matter mastery will bring greater balance to your personal life and enhanced effectiveness to your business life.
These are the five topics others are most often paid to teach. Nothing says you can’t get just as smart concerning any or all as anyone your company might hire. There is no magic to external speakers. They simply have subject matter expertise in a micro specialty most of us do not.
But learning is not restricted to those who call “dibs” and get paid to talk about certain things. Learning is open to everyone who chooses to pursue.
Learn more about these five things and you will grow more powerful. All are fun to learn about and certainly worth the work.