Developing Speakers for Thought Leadership | Elizabeth Bachman

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Building up speakers within organizations to deliver thought leadership.

An interview with Elizabeth Bachman about helping speakers find their voice and vision.

Today’s guest is Elizabeth Bachman, Presentation Skills Trainer at Strategic Speaking for Results, host of Speakers Who Get Results podcast, and former founder and artistic director of the Tyrolean Opera Program.

Elizabeth shares how she helps professionals find their voice, get on the stage and elevate their profile within their organization. We discuss building credibility, overcoming stage fright, and ways to find opportunities to get on the stage.

Elizabeth discusses how her incredible talents as an opera director have allowed her to shape the way an audience takes in what speakers are sending out.  Also, she explains how you can tailor your message to the different audiences without having to change the meaning of your content.

We wrap up the conversation talking about Elizabeth’s passion for working with women to break the gender stereotypes that exist.  In addition, she shares valuable advice for women looking to break into the speaking scene and why allies could be the difference-maker.

The advice in this episode can take young speakers out from behind their computer to the stage and beyond!

Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:

• If you want to be recognized for your thought leadership, you have to stand up and be noticed.
• Having a poor speaking engagement isn’t the end of your thought leadership. It is simply a moment to learn, go back to the basics, and continue to practice.
• Thought leaders should seek allies who believe in you to keep you going when you doubt yourself.

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And if you need help scaling organizational thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage!

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Transcript

Peter Winick Hello and welcome. You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m your host, Bill Sherman. And today we’re talking about one of my personal passions, organizational thought leadership. In many cases, the people who speak on behalf of an organization have one common characteristic. They’re the people who in the past have been asked to speak. And this circular logic leads to a set of usual suspects on the speaking podium. Well, what if you want to expand your pool of speakers inside the organization? I asked Elizabeth Bachman to join me and help us explore these questions. She began her career as one of the first cohort of women who directed major opera productions over her career. She directed more than 60 operas on four continents, including at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and Tokyo. Later, she founded her own opera company, and now she runs Strategic Speaking for Results, a consultancy that helps professionals find their voice, get on the speaking stage, and most importantly, elevate the speaker’s profile within their organization. I’m eager to talk with Elizabeth about polishing a person’s technical brilliance into a compelling experience. Whether that’s Luciano Pavarotti or an SVP of Engineering. I want to talk with her about bringing more voices onto the speaking stage, and we’ll explore how to say yes to speaking opportunities and overcome that initial stage fright. Let’s begin. So, Elizabeth, welcome to the show.

Elizabeth Bachman Thanks so much, Bill. I’m just so excited to be on this podcast. I love this podcast.

Peter Winick Thank you. Thank you. So you and I had a fantastic conversation a few weeks ago, and we were talking about individuals within an organization who are trying to build their credibility within the organization by going outside and through speaking and other opportunities. I’d like you to talk a little bit about that, and let’s start there in the conversation. Why does that happen? What does it look like?

Elizabeth Bachman Well, to start off with, you know, as you’ve probably mentioned, I’m I started out as a presentation skills trainer. And it’s winding up much more into leadership. And how do you step forward. So building your credibility in the organization, there’s a lot that you can do around that, especially if you feel like you’re invisible and you’re not being paid attention to. But one of the best ways of doing it is to get outside the organization and present yourself as a thought leader, if you will. Position yourself as someone who’s got something to say. If you are speaking on behalf of the organization, you always have to check in and make sure you’re saying something. But you say this is one of the great things we do at Company X at another time. This is where it makes sense. And then turn around and tell the company that you’re doing it. Tell everybody that you’re out there speaking. One of the things I know from 30 years in presentation is when you’re the person who is up there talking or performing or you’re the person that people are listening to, that’s automatic credibility. People will say, okay, this is, you know, looks like looks like she’s got something to say. Very interesting. But I have to say, I’ve heard it over and over from clients who’ve gone out. They finally go out and they’re out there speaking or they speak on a panel or something and they come back and other people on the team say, Wow, I didn’t know you knew all of that. I didn’t know you were you were a speaker. It’s the sort of thing that we might know about ourselves. But unless you tell people that, they won’t know. So you just have to you have to publicize that you’re out there doing it.

Peter Winick So one of the things that comes to my mind is in a large organization. Speaking is not an activity that’s reserved for the top of the House or senior leadership. There are many opportunities throughout an organization, and so from a thought leadership perspective, ahead of thought, leadership should be looking at who are the people who should be going out today and speaking on topics, and then look at the next layer below. Who are those folks who could also speak on that hot topic and give them an opportunity to do so? And you touched on something that I think is incredibly important. If you don’t raise your hand, if you’re not out there making an attempt, you don’t get visibility within your organization for your expertise.

Elizabeth Bachman Yeah. Yeah. And too many people sit behind their computers and they do a great job and they think if I do a good job, I will be recognized. I don’t know. I don’t know about you, but I wasted years waiting to be recognized for the good job I was doing because my mother said, Good, good girls don’t brag. And there is there’s a fine line to walk between talking about what you’re doing and bragging. And so you want to be you’ve got to be careful about that. That’s also another big part of what I what I train people on is how do you walk that line? But to claim your voice for your speech and then the more you’re out there, the more you’re one of the ones who’s presenting, the more people noticed. And then they’ll say, Bill Sherman knows he’s a smart guy. He knows what he’s talking about. Let’s ask him to do this project, things like that. So it’s a matter of it’s all about visibility. It’s all about visibility, the right kind of visibility and making sure that then and then being strategic about it. That’s the other part is you can get out there and speak about all sorts of things. Being strategic about where is it going to take you is a huge part of the work that I do with leaders.

Peter Winick So say a little bit more about that in terms of helping someone find their voice and then also get out and find those initial speaking opportunities. Give us a sense of, you know, how that process goes.

Elizabeth Bachman Well, you’ve got to be comfortable with presenting in the first place. So if you’ve never been the one who’s part of the presentation within your company, then ask to present a piece of it. Ask to be part of it. The more you practice, the better. Really, people. Stage fright is always worse the first time. The first time is probably going to be your worst presentation. And then it’s done. So you get past it. This is the sort of thing that the more you do it, the easier it gets. The more you do it, the easier it gets. If you don’t have opportunities, Toastmasters is a really great way to get that basic fundamental comfort with presenting on stage. What I do is the next step or 2 or 3 steps beyond Toastmasters, which is to help people then say, I have an opportunity to speak. What do I want to say? How do I want to position myself? I want to be known as the person who X-y-z. So, for instance, my client, Greg was he’s a lawyer. He’s a lawyer. He’s an expert in employment law. And he was terrified of speaking. But one of the things he had to do was he had to explain the changes in employment law to the firm’s clients. And it was boring and it was, you know, boring. He knew they were going to be tuning out, but they needed to know it. And so he worked with he and I worked together on making his speeches interesting and compelling and funny. The first after he’d done the first few, it was such a success that his boss said, Yeah, well, we’re going to present this to all the clients. And then they said, You know, you’re a really good speaker. I think we’re going to send you out on some of the prospecting calls. And he called me up and he said, my God, I have to speak outside the company. How do I do this? But because we’d worked out what he was going to say, all we really needed to do was tweak it a little bit. So that it then became a sales presentation. And within six months, he was promoted and he was bringing in he was bringing in 50% more business. So that’s the sort of thing that just coming from nowhere, from someone who really, really hid behind his computer monitor out to be a confident speaker. It’s just practice and knowing where you want to go. One of the things my business is called strategic speaking for results because I’m always after if you’re going to give a speech, what result do you want? What action do you want them to take? Even if the action is to think, wow, I didn’t know she knew that. Interesting.

Peter Winick So let me jump in here for a moment. And you’ve talked a little bit about overcoming stage fright. And the technical brilliance alone doesn’t get you onstage. It doesn’t get you the opportunity. And from the language alone, there’s echoes of part of a previous career that you’ve had in terms of doing work in opera and directing productions with Luciano Pavarotti, for example. And so if we think about it from a musical perspective, musical skill as a singer alone doesn’t get you to the Met. Right. And so I think there’s a seam there. Draw a little bit of the connective tissue between your earlier work in opera and theater and what you do now in terms of evoking the best performance like a director, right?

Elizabeth Bachman Yes, I’m a director. So I was I was never an opera singer. I started as an actor when I was five years old. And, you know, my mom said I was the best goddamn bunny rabbit to ever grace the stage of the hillside school. And I was hooked. I said, okay, I’m going to be a famous actress on Broadway. But it turned out I was actually a better director than I was an actor. I’m an oldest child, so I tend to be a little bit bossy. And so I discovered that directing and shaping the way the audience appreciated and took in what the performer was sending them with what the performer was doing. That was what got me really interested. And that’s the same thing with speaking is who are you speaking to? What do they care about? And how can you phrase what you are saying in a way that they can take it in? And it’s about rule number one, is it’s all about the listener. So it doesn’t mean that you’re changing your point or that you’re changing what you’re going to say more at as much as changing the way you say it. So that so that, for instance, if you’re talking to a group of heart based female entrepreneurs, you’re going to talk about the mission and the heart based part of your business. If you’re talking to a group of CFOs, you’re going to talk about the ROI and the numbers. It’s more might be more or less the same speech or the same ideas, but you’ll be tailoring what you’re going to say to the listeners. So that’s part of the strategy. That’s part of what are the results that you want to get. When it comes to making a name for yourself outside the by speaking outside the company, one of the things is to figure out what is it that you’re really good at and what is that? What is it that you’re really good at that maybe people don’t know? People don’t understand. Sometimes it’s about explaining something that people ought to know. Like Greg, the employee employment lawyer. What is it that you really want to say that’s not being said? Or where your perspective is important. And one of the things that you can do and actually one of the things you can do if you don’t know, you don’t know what your themes are, is I give my clients permission to complain briefly. Just get together with a friend. Uncork a bottle of wine and sit around and. And talk about what are you annoyed about? What are your pet peeves in your company, in your industry? And then what could we do with them? What should we do instead? And use that as the sand that will create the pearl. That becomes your topic.

Peter Winick If you are enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about the podcast, please leave a five-star review and share it with your friends. We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all major platforms as well as at LeveragingThoughtLeadership.com.

Peter Winick So to jump in for a moment, one of the things that I think about from a directing perspective and it’s a passion you and I have both shared, is that it’s about shaping the moment and the experience. And you talked about a number of times the importance of practice, that things don’t happen with deliberate cleanness that first time that you do them. And it’s a going through process. You experiment, you look and you draw out. You talk about the irritant that builds the pearl. You have to get out there again and again, whether it’s speaking, whether it’s writing, posting on LinkedIn, However, you’re getting your message out. It’s testing experimentation and then having someone give you feedback. And that’s what I look at is that directing process. Sometimes you have to be your own director and look back and say, What worked? And sometimes you’re lucky enough to have an external person say, Here’s what’s shown and avoid that. That’s not working. Yeah.

Elizabeth Bachman Well, and having somebody else with fresh eyes. Yes. And you and give you feedback, informed feedback, I will say because you want someone who really knows what they’re doing. Often somebody might go do a speech somewhere and people come up and they say, That was great, that was great. And what they’re really saying is that was great. I would never have the nerve to get up there. You know, they’re talking from their own stage, Right, if you will. Whereas someone who actually knows their business will give you the feedback to say, This was great, let’s just polish this other bit a little bit. We all have ones where we do a terrible job. That’s, you know, those will come along for some from time to time. And that’s a reminder, You know, that’s human. That’s human. Yeah. It’s like it’s like the time that you find yourself going a little too fast and maybe you get a speeding ticket. You know that. I figured that those are the warnings that make us go, Okay, stop, start over and be careful. Pay attention. That that sort of thing that the universe sends us little reminders. But most of the time I always feel that speaking presenting is an art form and it’s absolutely form. Yeah. So that the more you do it, the more it evolves. And sometimes one of my most popular speeches and my most popular presentations is called Three Big Presenting Mistakes that Cost You Sales. And that has evolved over the years. The core of it’s pretty much the same, but the audience has evolved. I’m speaking to different people now. I’m having different points polishing it, so I consider it a living, a living creation. I just it’s kind of like a garden and make it a little bit better every time, hopefully.

Peter Winick Absolutely. I want to go back to something that you mentioned and explore it a little bit further. You made a comment earlier saying that good girls don’t break. Right. And I think there’s a hesitancy among many people in that sort of self-consciousness. And I think you pointed it out as being tied to gender in some ways. And I think that’s an important thing. So I want to ask you, in terms of your perspective in working with clients and especially what do you see with women? What are the hurdles? And I know this is an area that’s a passion for you. So let’s dive into it.

Elizabeth Bachman Good. Well, thank you. And I have actually quoted you said that the other day when I said, you know, why is it that so many of the speakers are men? I mean, just them worldwide women are five, ten, 20% of people up there speaking. And one of the reasons is that. Women don’t raise their hands to say, hey, I’d like to do this. Go ahead and do this. And because women are not raising their hands and putting themselves forward as speakers, we take it for granted that it will be mostly men with just a few women. I think about the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. May she rest in peace. And somebody asked her what’s. How many women would be appropriate for the Supreme Court. And she said, well, we had nine men for 200 years. Nine would be good. And, you know, you take it for granted that it’s mostly men, and then you have a few women in there. We’re a long way from getting from gender parity. But the more women are out there speaking, the more they raise their hands, the more they’re showing that it’s possible, the more they’re getting. People used to the idea that it should be more or less 5050. And this goes for minorities as well. You know, if you are and I work with minorities, I do a lot of work with the minority supplier diversity counsels. There are certain things that are gender based and certain challenges that seem to be gender based and certain challenges that seem to be based on racial stereotypes and whatever. Most of what I do are the gender based challenges, just because that’s what I lived and I was a woman in a man’s business when I was coming up first as an opera director. I was one of the first 3 or 4. I wasn’t the first have to knock down that wall, but I was part of the wave that followed the first ones where it was still unusual to have a female director, and the local paper would say, So what’s it like as a woman doing this? And it would be different.

Peter Winick So, please.

Elizabeth Bachman Get me out there. And I had to get past the good girls Don’t brag to put myself out there. Sometimes it was putting on an act.

Peter Winick So. Let’s pause for a moment and imagine you’re having a conversation with someone who has that voice inside her head that says Good girls don’t brag or whatever advice she got from her mother. What advice would you offer on how to overcome that, to find your voice and get into speaking? Maybe a tip or two.

Elizabeth Bachman Okay. One of the tips is find allies. Find people who can help you reflect your glory back to what you do have. No one should ever have to write their own story because we’re too close. As the old saying goes, you can’t see the label when you’re inside the bottle. If you’re writing your story. Get somebody else to say. Yeah, but you created an opera company. That’s huge. You should mention that. And we are women. Young women. Girls particularly, are trained to be nice. They’re trained to please. It probably comes from animal instinct, where the smaller and weaker person had to please the larger, stronger person. We don’t necessarily need those instincts. We should recognize those instincts. And then figure out how to lead in a feminine way. Feminine leadership. There’s a lot written about it. Or if anybody who’s listening would know, you can always just ask. Call me up and ask. The thing is to try. And to try. If you don’t succeed the first time, it’s not the end of the world. Does it mean that you’re a bad person? And part of the social training for girls and young women is you have to do it perfectly every time because if you fail, it’s a problem for everybody. But actually, if you don’t, if you don’t get accepted the first time, you apply to speak. Apply to the next one and the next one. The barriers for not raising your hand are mostly internal. So get yourself a group of allies. Get yourself friends, living mirrors, if you will. Someone who could be a living mirror to you and say you are amazing, go for it and then push you until you do.

Peter Winick If I extrapolate from that and build on it, I think having allies and seeking allies is a good thing. The piece that I would layer on is if you’re in a role of leadership, whether you’re ahead of thought leadership for your organization, it is your responsibility to find in Elevate voices, find those who do know things that are smart, have something to say, and be that ally. Encourage them to take that first step and be ready to support. If the first step, if there’s a stumble in a skinny along the way, you have to be willing to say it’s important that your voice be heard. And I think what we see is if you ask a man more often than not, hey, will you do this speaking event or a podcast guest? It’s very easy. And to get a man to raise their hand and say, Sure, sure, I’ll do it. With women be willing to ask a couple of times and show that you are serious rather than just being courteous. If you want them to step up. Be persistent.

Elizabeth Bachman It’s actually part of the social training is to, you know, even if as a as a young woman, if you’d like to. It’s kind of expected that you say, no, it’s okay, someone else can do that better, you know, and is to say no the first couple of times, you know, it’s part of what girls get taught. So it’s all programing. Being a mentor as a leader, if you can be a mentor and a shield for someone as especially as a young woman, is finding her feet and helping her, helping her figure out where she’s supposed to go once she’s done it a couple of times, then, okay, I can do that. Not a problem. I can. But it’s the first hurdle of the first couple of ones. That is always the tricky part.

Peter Winick So one of the examples that I know from this is senior exec who taps someone on her team and said, hey, there is a speaking event coming up. I’m not going to be able to do it. I need you to do it right. And so the woman who was asked sort of got a little tension in the throat and said, okay, you’re trusting me to do this? Absolutely. Go do it. Well, what if I do it wrong? Well, then we clean it up if we need to. But that trust and say I’m sending you in my place and I think is a powerful tool. And I would encourage folks who do get speaking opportunities to think about which ones can you hand off to others within your organization.

Elizabeth Bachman Absolutely. Yeah. One of the reasons why there aren’t all that many women in high level positions is. Because the pipeline hasn’t been worked on. There’s that’s a huge conversation about how do you cultivate the younger ones, The younger the minority hires the people who are minorities or women. How can you make sure that they are sponsored and taught and offered the opportunities to learn things? And being out there speaking is one of the things people need to learn and. Absolutely.

Peter Winick And celebrated for doing so.

Elizabeth Bachman Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Is a crucial tool in business.

Peter Winick As we come to the end of this conversation, Elizabeth. I want to close by asking you a question. You’ve worked with a number of people who have that inner critic inside of their head. And we’ve talked a little bit about that on the call. You’ve also directed world class opera performers. How do you balance that critic inside of you challenging yourself to get better and at the same time not let it paralyze you? So how do you ride that line between growth and paralysis?

Elizabeth Bachman That’s the big question. Get help and allies. Make sure you got people behind you who can say, yes, you can do this. Yes, we do this. So when you have the moments of thinking, my God, it’s all wrong, I did it all wrong. Have the people who could say, no, this was right. You’re okay. You’re going to be fine. Just go do it. And actually, there’s an exercise that somebody taught me years ago and I have used very often is if you think of. The inner critic. So a picture of it. Mine kind of looks like a combination, like Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street. And sometimes he looks like my second grade teacher. But the inner. The inner.

Peter Winick That’s a scary mash up.

Elizabeth Bachman I know. It’s a very scary matchup. But if you put if you put a picture, picture that person in your hands. Help them in your hands, shrink them down so they fit into your hands. And then imagine them surrounded by a ball of lights like Glenda’s Bubble in The Wizard of Oz and just bless them. Thank you. I know you’re there to keep me safe when I was little, but I don’t need you now. And then take a deep breath and. Below and let them go. Take a breath and let them go. Let the bubble go and just watch it waft off into the disappear into the sky. And it’s a way of blessing letting it go. It also gets you to breathe, which helps. And. And sometimes the bubbles will keep coming back. And then you just take a deep breath and blow them away and move ahead with what you thought you said you were going to do.

Peter Winick Fantastic. Thank you very much for joining the conversation, Elizabeth. If someone wants to follow up with you, how can they reach you?

Elizabeth Bachman The best way is to find. You can find me on Facebook linked in and my website, which is Elizabeth bachman.com. And I could say listen to my podcast which is called Speakers who get Results. You’ll be hearing Bill Sherman in in a few weeks and that will give you an idea of the various things that we can talk about. So Elizabeth, at ElizabethPark.com is the easiest way.

Peter Winick Wonderful. Thank you, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Bachman Thanks so much, Bill.

Peter Winick If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please join our LinkedIn group. Organizational Thought Leadership. It’s a professional community where thought leadership practitioners talk shop about our field. So if you’re someone who creates curates or deploys thought leadership for your organization, then please join the conversation in the organizational thought Leadership LinkedIn.