541: It’s Not My Job to Be Interested. It’s Your Job to Be Interesting. Here’s How.

Warning, this may sting, but it's true. It's not your boss's job to be interested. It's your job to be interesting. Learn how today. Welcome back to Speak Up, the Friday edition, short, sharp, and possibly confrontational. This is the podcast for high performing introverts, including you social introverts who have learned that being brilliant does not automatically make you influential. If you're already respected but starting to sense that your visibility doesn't quite match your capability, you are in the right place. I am your host, Laura Kamacho, your career accelerator and executive presence strategist. And by the end of today's short episode, you will know how to instantly make your contributions more compelling in executive meetings. Discover the subtle communications shift that transforms you from competent to stratsi jekk. And how to frame your message so senior leaders lean in instead of tuning out. Now before you get all up tied and tell me, Laura, I'm not auditioning for Broadway. I did not study theatre. I am here to deliver results. Exactly. And at senior levels, the delivery is assumed. Interest is not. And here is what changes as you move up the ladder. At junior levels, your competence earns you survival. At mid-level, competence earns you stability. And at senior levels, competence is the entry ticket. It's the table stakes. So if you open your mouth in a VP meeting in the first two minutes or predict a bowl procedural or mechanical, you lose altitude, not because you're wrong, but because you're forgettable. And let me say that the bar on this in some places is pretty low. So you're not having to be Trevor Noah. Forgettable leaders do not get the stretch assignments. They do not get confidential strategy previews. And they do not get pulled into succession conversations. So let me clarify something. As I said, you don't have to be Trevor Noah. You don't have to be loud. You don't have to be theatrical. You don't even have to be extroverted. And you don't have to be on. Some of the most compelling leaders I have worked with speak softly. But when they speak, people lean forward because they lead with what's at stake. It's like they have skin in the game. And they never say these things like, well, let's walk through the process. You can say that at the end, but not at the beginning. Instead, you could say, if we get this wrong, we lose 18 months of competitive advantage. Now people are listening. Instead of saying, here are the implementation steps. It's better. This is the moment that determines whether we remain a cost center or become a strategic partner. That is more compelling. Interesting is not personality. Okay. Nobody has the chance to personality write that down. Interesting is relevance. And here's the executive reality that no one tells you. Your calendar is not neutral. Every time you speak, people are subconsciously kind of rating you. They're thinking, well, does this add value or is this person just consuming oxygen? It's not that they're cruel. Everybody is overloaded with information and things to do. And senior leaders have to protect their attention. The way CFOs protect the cash. So here's your Friday upgrade before your next meeting. Ask yourself. If I had 90 seconds, what would make this message vastly more interesting? And I've got three ways for you to think about it, right? Because I can't tell you without knowing your message how to make it more interesting on this podcast, but I can tell you how to think about it. So number one would be what emotional state do I create when I speak? I wrote this for four years ago. The feel no do. How do you want them to feel? What do you want them to know? What do you want them to do at the end of your message? So it's not about how clear you are necessarily or how smart you sound, but you need to evoke an emotional state. Do you want people to feel really clear, safe, energized, alert, tense, slightly drained, neutral, concerned, very confident, interesting leaders change emotional temperature. Voring leaders, keep it where it is. And you don't need performance skills to shift emotion, but you do need awareness. So if your presence is not altering the emotional climate of the room, even when you walk in, folks, to be quite blunt about it, you're just being informational. Senior leaders, the best ones, they're atmospheric. So that's something for you to think about. Number two, if everything you said were transcribed, but your name was not there, would people know it was you? Would people recognize your speaking pattern? Because interesting leaders are identifiable, not necessarily louder or flashier, but they have a certain signature communication style, a pattern, a bias, a lens, a way of framing. If your contribution could be long to anyone in the room, like it's that generic, it probably will. And your value also becomes generic. Interchangeable is safe. If it's what anybody would say, it's obvious that's steady, but that's really not going to get you anywhere. And number three, are you optimizing for being correct or compelling? And I know a lot of you are totally focused on getting it right, getting it absolutely correct to the tenth decimal point. This can be a quiet killer for high performers because a lot of you have spent years training and being rewarded for your accuracy, precision. And I don't want you to lose that either. There's a place for it and there's a place to be directionally accurate. So it's not about saying this properly. It's like how can you make this impossible to ignore? How can you grab their attention? That's playing a different game. And you don't have to be like super dramatic, but there has to be consequences. Like if what you're saying has no consequence for the company, then why are you speaking? Why are you even saying anything? So I want you to think about being compelling and relevant and directionally accurate rather than just transferring information. I want you to become the leader who consistently makes things more interesting. And then you're not chasing visibility. Visibility is chasing you. So if you would like to know how your executive present shows up in different scenarios, I have an assessment you can take. It's called the executive present score card. And there is a link to that in the second paragraph of these show notes. I suggest that you get it. Have a wonderful day, have a powerful day, and I will catch you on the next episode.