~ A "Letters from Silicon Valley" Series ~
Early in my career, I attended graduate school to get a Master’s in Organization Development. In one of my classes, I was assigned to give a presentation on how to influence employees to embrace change. It turned out, the subject of the presentation didn’t matter as much as how we gave it. The real assignment was for classmates to give and receive feedback on our presentation styles.
I was nervous because I hadn’t done much public speaking at that point in my life, and most of my classmates were more advanced professionally than I was. I had already been in Silicon Valley for a few years, so I incorporated into my presentation language from the engineers I had worked with in the past. I felt it helped me relate to and connect with technical workers at my company - Hewlett-Packard, at the time. I used popular engineering terms of the time like “necessary and sufficient,” “failure analysis,” and “efficiency.” When I was given feedback, one of my classmates, a Director of Human Resources at her company, mentioned that it really struck her that I used the language of tech so well. While listening to me, she realized that she should learn to speak more like the engineers that ran and worked at her company, in order to have more of an impact.
After some time had passed, that classmate shared with me that her new way of communicating had helped her get a promotion and led to her landing an interview at a much larger company. She eventually got the job and shortly thereafter offered me a position on her team. I was humbled to think that language I believed to be of minimal importance and fairly well known had actually made a big impact on someone so experienced and in a leadership position.
As you communicate with those around you, may you use the language of your industry to connect with and influence people and, maybe, advance your job prospects.
Go Ducks!
~ Humberto
Contact:
humberto@chacon.us