Last Friday I looked around a room full of professionals, all there to learn how to lead people better. They had different degrees of understanding about how much their own way of showing up shapes every bit of connection and communication in their lives. What didn’t vary was their commitment. Every person in that room was a good human, meaning well, and every one of them understood that small things can be adjusted. In communication, we learn this over and over that the little things are the big deal.
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to. In some workshops, people arrive because they wanted to attend and self-selected. Other individuals aren’t yet sure the workshop will be worth their time. Sometimes, that hesitation comes from previous workshops that didn’t feel useful or relevant. And some individuals are just contrary and derail a session before it starts. I’ll admit I’ve been all of these people.
Which one are you when you walk into a room? Committed to finding the shift that helps you, and by extension helps everyone else in it? Or committed to derailing it, even a little?
The two parts of leading better
Leading people better always comes in two parts. The first is leading yourself: self-awareness, an honest read on how you’re coming across, and the humility to keep working on it. The second is how you show up for your colleagues, your team, your clients. How you communicate, which is how you land or how you are heard.
That second part is trickier than it sounds, because your intention and your landing are two different things. You can mean something with your whole heart and still have it heard completely differently than you meant it. That gap is where most of the frustration lives, and it’s rarely about bad intent. In our surveys, the same thing comes up again and again: people want to be clearer and more succinct. Not more professional. Not more polished. Clearer.
Communicating doesn’t finish when you say the thing. It finishes when the other person hears it and understands it. You can’t make someone else hear you differently. You can only shift yourself, which is both the hard part and the whole point.
Degunking, and the habit hiding in plain sight
A lot of what we do in a room together is degunking, clearing away the professional false expectations that build up over years so people can get back to their own individual, unique awesomeness. One of the sneakiest habits inside that gunk is the belief that being nice and polite is essential, professional, expected.
Nice and polite feels like good communication. It feels like not ruffling feathers, taking care of the room, being easy to work with. What it does is protect the person being nice and polite, not the relationship it’s supposedly building. It backfires too, because nice and polite rarely earns the respect people think it will. Kind and honoring is a different thing. It’s respectful, it takes real practice, and it tends to the relationship instead of managing appearances.
Most people in that room on Friday were somewhere in the middle of learning that distinction. Some had never named it before. That’s usually where real movement starts. Not a new framework. Finally seeing the specific habit that’s been quietly running the show.
I was coaching a handful of leaders who kept running into the same wall. Someone in their world was being unkind or disruptive, for reasons that weren’t always clear and didn’t need to be. What was clear was that these smart, talented, strong leaders kept backing off and choosing nice and polite instead. In that choice, they gave away their own power, the very reason they’d been picked for the role in the first place. Powerful people default to nice and polite more often than you’d think, usually to avoid upsetting anyone, which is often the opposite of what the room needs. These leaders were different from each other in demeanor, industry, job title. Every one of them felt the shift the moment they chose kind and honoring instead of polite. They were open, present, willing to say the thing that needed to be said.
Why this doesn’t scale, and why that’s the point
Individual coaching works, and it’s hard to scale. That individuality is exactly why it works, and why people keep coming back. A workshop can introduce an idea. A keynote can plant a seed. What changes how someone shows up is having their specific habit named in a way they can hear, by someone with the experience and skill to catch it.
Executive presence is a skill you learn. Presentation is a skill you hone. Leading and facilitating a room takes real finesse. Even I’m working on all of it, all the time, and I’m nowhere near finished. What baffles me is how many people never take the chance to work on their communication at all, when the return touches every meeting, every one-on-one, every presentation they’ll ever give, and every relationship, at home and at work.
It matters who’s in the room. It matters who’s leading it, what their technique is, what their attitude is, what they’ve lived before they started teaching it. It matters, too, whether you’re ready to look at your own habits honestly and decide to shift.
What are you bringing into the room?
That question goes both ways, whether you’re leading the room or sitting in it. Some people lean in. They elevate the learning, partner with whoever’s up front, and make the whole room better just by being in it. Others bring so much pushback they derail even the chance of one good moment.
So, what are you bringing? As a learner, what’s the goal? If someone has earned the chance to share their experience, do you stay present and take what you can use, or spend the group’s time challenging the moment instead?
There’s an exception, and it matters. Sometimes what’s coming from the front of the room really is off base or offensive. When that happens, the answer isn’t to shut down and become the room’s black hole. The answer is to speak up, ask questions, get clarity.
We get chances to learn every day, from an ordinary conversation to a training. What you bring to those moments is the whole game. The people who get the most out of any of it are the ones who came ready, who chose it even when someone else signed them up, and who went looking for the one thing they could use.
That counterintuitive, slightly sideways angle is our gift at ARTiculateRC. Nice and polite can kill progress just as easily as it can help, depending on what the moment calls for. We work with the individual, helping you degunk based on specifically who you are and who you’re talking to. That takes coaches with real experience, real intuition, and real practicality, working with people from every kind of background.
Formulas are great, and you still have to be trained to use one. Handing someone sheet music doesn’t make them a musician until they’ve learned to play it. Handing someone a script doesn’t bring it to life until they’re genuinely connected to who they are and how they want to deliver it. Handing someone a formula for communication, or for feedback, works the same way.
That’s why the formula was never really the point. A tool works when a trained, present person picks it up and uses it with skill and finesse.
So go back to Friday. Some people in that room will use what they learned once, feel good about it, and quietly go back to nice and polite because it’s easier. Others will practice being kind and honoring in the one meeting this week where it matters, and that’s the moment the shift becomes real.
That’s what it means to show up in the room. Not perfectly nor always politely, but kindly with intention and purpose, one room at a time.
Hilary Blair is a leadership keynote speaker based out of Denver, CO, and is the co-founder of ARTiculate: Real&Clear. She is also a highly regarded actor, improviser, facilitator, voice-over artist, and voice expert coach. Connect with us, we are dedicated to and passionate about clarifying communication. Start a conversation as we explore the multiple ways we can support your unique communication style and technique.
