“I just found out I’m going to have over 40,000 in my live audience, maybe over 50,000.”

When I first started coaching Alistair, he had come from another company and taken over for an executive in a major corporation, replacing a very charismatic leader who was tremendously loved by everyone. After seeing Alistair’s first presentation, they were utterly disappointed. And they told him so in their anonymous, and not always polite, evaluations after each of his “All-Hands” presentations to the 800 people now reporting to him.

Alistair came to me for coaching because these evaluations were filled with words like “Dry”, “Dull”, and “Not inspiring”. They thought Alistair was a smart technical geek with no leadership ability. The “Loyalty” scores in his division hit the bottom.

It was very quickly clear to me that Alistair had tremendous leadership ability and was an exceptional strategist. He was tripping up on his ability to communicate, and so the outside world never saw it.

When you trip up on communication, you will trip up on leadership. They go hand in hand.

I coached Alistair on many skills. The continuing monthly evaluations from his All-Hands told us whether he was winning.

The first real positive was when 33% of the evaluations said Alistair was “Informative”, the first nice comment he broadly received. This was a huge improvement from all the criticism. Then the comments started to say he was “Informative AND Inspiring”. Big win. The number of “Inspiring’s” became a huge majority, better than 75% of the responses. Then all the negative comments disappeared (except for the 1-3 that always show up). The “Loyalty” scores shot up to a new high. Alistair was now being understood, respected, and gradually they came to really like him ALOT.

Alistair liked them back and the interchange of warmth and rapport that grew during the All-Hands meetings became extraordinary. It was like he was talking to friends who were very happy to listen.

The organization started putting Alistair front and center in major corporate presentations, including ones to key customers. They were flying Alistair around the world to talk to heads of countries whose governments were purchasing their products countrywide.

Around this time, Alistair was beginning to be asked to present at conferences. His conference audiences grew bigger and bigger. And more and more important.

Now Alistair was getting ready to talk to over 40,000.

Alistair was ready. He was enthusiastic, not at all nervous. What he had learned early on in the coaching helped prepare him for each growing audience. And what he’d learned early on applied to small audiences as well large ones. He was ready for the big ones.

When you think about talking to 40,000 people, it makes you think you need to talk to “everyone”, which leads to looking at the audience like a mass of people. The feeling that you have to “talk to everyone at the same time” can put a tremendous amount of unnecessary strain on you.

It can even trigger the feeling that you need to “perform”. And that you are going to be “judged”.

What Alistair had learned was that you CAN’T talk to a “mass of people”, you can’t even talk to a group. When you try to talk to everyone you are talking to no one.

There is no “everyone” out in your audience. There are ever only individuals.

Alistair learned that you have to talk to an individual, and you have to talk to them individually as you’re speaking in front of a group. You direct your communication to one person, and keep it moving from individual to individual in the group and speak to each one in turn. You DON’T “scan the audience” while you’re talking. You pick ONE person and you talk to them, and then you talk to the next one, covering the whole audience this way.

How do you do it with 40,000 that you can’t see all the way in the back, especially with the lights off back there?

You have to have mastered this skill sufficiently to KNOW with confidence that there’s a PERSON back there and you talk to them.

As you speak to one individual after another, you draw the whole group in. And everyone in the audience feels, “You are talking to me.”

Everything about you changes – in a really GOOD way – when you are talking to a person and not trying to talk “to everyone”.

This is true whether you are low in the chain of command or in the C-Suite, whether your audience is 5 or 50,000.

Once Alistair mastered this skill of being able to speak EFFECTIVELY to ONE person, it didn’t matter how big the group grew. This principle remained the same, it was a stable truth. And Alistair saw it work time and again.

If you want your audience to listen, stop talking to the group and start talking to one person at a time. Mastering this ability is how you show the world you have what it takes to lead.

Be the cause!