In Part 4 of Persuasion Atrophy, I talked in-depth about securing credibility. Securing credibility is job one when it comes to your persuasiveness. Credibility must be earned and reinforced; it’s rarely just granted. The final installment of this series uses the last of The 4 C’s of Compelling Presentations pillars: being concise.

An organization I belong to holds an annual convention, which includes bringing in several subject matter experts as speakers. I was especially interested in hearing one particular speaker. His credentials were impressive, having written several books on his area of expertise. I got to his session early to ensure I had a seat as I expected the room to be full. His session was right before a break for lunch, so there wasn’t another speaker people needed to run off to.

He took to the stage on time and started his presentation.

His content was a meandering mess. He repeated himself. He didn’t talk about the topics on his slide. He was difficult to follow. And he went way over his allotted time, acknowledging that the only thing people would be missing out on was lunch.

I expected to be inspired. Instead, I was bummed.

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So let's cut to the chase...

You may be a great consultant, one who effectively applies his or her wisdom and experience to help his or her client solve some tough business problem.   That's all fine and well.  When it comes to facilitation, though, it's a different ballgame and a very different approach to problem solving.  I like to think of the difference as follows:

In Part 3 of Persuasion Atrophy, I delved into the importance of connecting with your audience. Professionals now and in the future need to be intentional about how they build and exercise the persuasion muscle. This will ensure the skill doesn’t give way to equating persuasion to shaming—and thinking critical copy/pasting is in and of itself persuasive.

To continue with my case, I’ll use The Four C’s of Compelling Presentations as the roadmap for exercising the persuasion muscle and avoid persuasion atrophy. This installment focuses on securing credibility.

Some years back, one of my assignments was to research potential business process offshoring (BPO) partners we could potentially use for some finance and administration functions. A vendor caught wind of the initiative and asked to meet with me to discuss his company’s BPO capabilities.

The vendor came to my office, pulled out a presentation, and started reading the slides to me. I was genuinely interested in learning more about their capabilities and asked a number of questions. With each question, he responded, “I need to get back to you on that.”

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

Several years back a colleague of mine (I'll call the colleague "Nellie") was managing a very high-visibility project. This project was high on the radar of key executives all the way up to the CEO of the company and any major mis-steps would send fireworks up the chain faster than lightning.  This was one of those "thrill-seeker" projects; definitely high risk but also of high reward if the project was successful.  Nellie was up to the challenge and willingly accepted the assignment.