Is Your Team Performing the Culture You Want?

Picture this: the lights dim, the audience leans in. There you are, commanding the stage with a story that electrifies the room. This isn't just a speech, this is a transformative moment captivating your audience. I'm Susan Drumm, and this is The Enlightened Executive, where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. Each week we spotlight cutting-edge strategies to help executives and entrepreneurs grow in leadership and life. And today we're gonna find out how to make this dream your reality with my guest, Mike Gannino. Mike is a storytelling expert, speaking coach, and creative director who helps professional speakers as well as authors and executives and entrepreneurs make unforgettable scenes on stage. And we're not just talking about the stage, we're talking about your town hall, your all-hands meeting, your team meeting. How are you conveying the information they need to know? Mike is the author of the new book, Make a Scene: Storytelling, Stage Presence, and the Art of Being Unforgettable in Every Spotlight. And it's a guide to showing up boldly and connecting deeply with storytelling and stage presence. He's a former TEDx executive producer, and he's trained over 5,000 speakers using his signature Mic Drop method. His work has transformed even the most stage-shy scientists into magnetic performers. Mike, I'm so excited to have you on the show. We've done some amazing work together. You've really helped me crystallize messaging and deliver a whole next level of performance. So I'm grateful for you. But welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. You know, one of the, one of the, like, joyful things that I get to do in my work is to meet a lot of people who are experts in their field, who are exploring really interesting cross-sections of what it means to be people in this world, what it means to be leaders, what it means to exist right now. And I get to go, like, live inside of their world for a little bit to help them bring that to stage and bring it. So, you know, You are definitely one of those people, and I, I got to learn so much through our time together, so I'm really thankful for that as well.

Yes. Great. Well, okay, so I know many entrepreneurs and executives who dread having to do the larger, you know, all hands company meeting or town hall. And what's the first thing you need to let these people know about how they show up?

That it really matters a lot. That, you know, for me, my whole journey into this world started with giving corporate presentations and corporate trainings. I was in the restaurant industry while also, you know, acting and doing creative things on the side. But like a lot of actors, I ended up working in the restaurant industry and I was way more successful on that side of things and eventually became a director of training, a head of HR, head of leadership, and then eventually a chief operating officer for a small restaurant chain. We had like 20 locations that we grew from nothing to 20 in a couple of years and eventually sold that to private equity. And one of the things early on in my my career on the corporate restaurant training side of things, where I was giving workshops on anything from like, you know, customer service things to how to interview people to the general managers and things like that, was that at the end of the day, the people that came to these sessions or came to these trainings, sure, they were there for information, but a lot of times it wasn't just the information they needed. They needed the container for the transformation we were asking them to make. If we were asking them to think differently about how they interview, to be more thoughtful or to you know, dig into some specific style of interviewing we were teaching them, that it wasn't just about giving them the information, because if it was, we could just give them a PDF and call it a day and give them a test. But if we wanted them to, like, change over the course of a 3-hour workshop or over the course of an hour-long all-hands meeting, we had to really think about it from their perspective. And today, like, when I work with people like you as a director for their messages and for messaging, I'm sitting in the audience's seat thinking, If I was sitting out here and, and someone got on stage or someone stepped in front of the, the entire team or hopped on Zoom to give an all-hands meeting, what is it like to be in the audience? What does that feel like? How is the pacing of the information? How is it presented? Because a lot of times as leaders, we are operating so fast and we're operating with a lot of known information that our team doesn't have. And then we wonder later, like, well, I don't know, why didn't they get the memo? Why didn't they follow the, the presentation? Why didn't they follow the notes we gave them in the all-hands? But we forget that we walked into those situations. With a whole bunch of information, a whole bunch of backstory that we didn't give them. And a lot of times that's because we forgot to tell a story at all. And whenever I'm working with— and my foray into public speaking coaching actually happened because I was a public speaker and a corporate client came and said, "Hey, our executives have to present all of the time and it's costing them credibility because they are boring. They don't get it clear. It's costing them believability where people are like, 'Eh, I don't really— I don't know if that person cared.'" And can you help 'em do what you do? And so my foray into working with people like you came because a corporate client came and said, hey, can you help us be more like that? Because we need that for our teams. And over and over, the big thing that I'm teaching there is about presence and being able to be, uh, honest and connecting with the team. And also packaging. How are you putting together the story? And for me, that also started in college. I was a broadcast journalism major in college. And PR. And those two things are really about how do you put together the story? How do you not bury the lead? And how do you make sure that the audience receives the information you want them to? And that's one of the things I, I really think more executives and more leaders can be a little more thoughtful about when we're going out there and trying to communicate, because every time we're doing that, we're trying to get the audience, our teams to think differently or to know something. So how can we give a little more thought to that.

Yeah, and I think taking people on a journey is exactly the way you need to think about these types of engagements and these types of, you know, meetings that you're leading. Yeah. It's not just I'm providing information because the, the truth is they could get it elsewhere. So if it was just about that, it, it wouldn't, it wouldn't matter. You're actually creating a shift in someone's mindset. In someone's behavior, in what they need to prioritize or pay attention to. And in order to do that, you've gotta captivate them in a certain way. So what's the secret sauce in doing that?

The secret sauce. I, I wish I could bottle it, right? I, I think there's two things that I see often when it comes to, you know, execs and leaders who are presenting, whether that's at an, a company conference, whether that's an industry event or, or even in an all hands or a, or a recorded video that we're sending out to let everyone know about a change that's coming up or a new launch. And the common things are that we don't package it in a story. So figuring out how can we tell a story that helps the team see this. So if we're talking about a change that we need to make to stay relevant in the industry, to, to keep competing, to battle whatever's going on, whether it's, you know, AI today or political changes or geopolitical changes, whatever the case might be. Those are real things going on. And so can we package that in a story? And these kinds of stories, I think sometimes when leaders hear that, they think, okay, it's just like a once upon a time, there was a little rabbit who wanted to go to work. And that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about here is giving the team the, uh, the context. Really, when I say story, what I mean is the context to understand something with lived experience. So if we're talking about changes in tariffs in AI, how it's gonna affect our workplace, how we're gonna battle some, some new competitor coming into our space or something, or regulations. Can we put that into context that helps 'em understand what we're up against? Can we just give them a little lived experience to, to see that story through versus just coming in and saying, hey, here's what we've gotta do. And they're left thinking, well, what about this? Or what about that? Because that's a big risk as a leader is that They assume there's a bunch of stuff going on that's not going on. So if we don't give them the narrative, if we don't give them the context, they usually think of a much scarier context. We're all gonna lose our jobs. The whole industry's going away. We're all gonna be replaced. Like they replace it with the most negative, scary version in the absence of you as a leader giving them the narrative to do it. So why not lead with the story? Why not lead with the way you want them to look at it? So that's number one. And then the second thing I think is that Most leaders, and this is also one of the interesting things I've learned from, from working with you and in your work around, uh, patterns and even with the playlists, is a lot of them are unaware of the way that they walk into a room. We're unaware of the way that we look at a camera if we're giving a, an, uh, an address to a lot of people or going on media. We're unaware of the amount of pacing that we do or the amount of throat clearing that we do figuratively and literally sometimes in front of our teams and All of those things make a difference. If someone's standing in front at a— I've worked with executives before where I've come in and I've said, hey, can, can you gimme some, just videotape your next all hands, and then we're gonna watch that together when I come in and work together on how we improve. And all the time what I see is people who are, have never gotten feedback on how they present, on how they physically move in front of other people. And we're watching all the time, aren't we? Like we're watching and seeing, should I believe them? Should I trust them? What's going on with the way they're— why are they, why are they holding their hands that way? Why are they crossing their arms that way? And it's, it's one of those strange things that I, I feel like you've probably seen it a lot too, is it's one of the last places I think we get feedback on at work is presentation skills and communication skills. We might get notes of, hey, don't do this in a meeting. Uh, we'll get notes on spreadsheets and how to support things and maybe even get some notes on like, how to put our slide decks together, but it is a rare person. It's a rare leader who has received and who can effectively give feedback on delivery. I think because it feels really personal to say, hey, do you know this is how you come across? Yeah. And so people don't get the feedback, but it is like the number one thing that is hurting their careers. And it's the number one thing hurting a lot of leaders is not getting that feedback. So they bring people like me in. So that I can sit and say, hey, this thing that you're doing, have you ever— Yeah, right. Let's watch the video. And then they like, everyone wants to cry. It's amazing that the thing like, you wanna watch like a very powerful executive cry. It's make them watch themselves on camera. But those are the two big things I think is storytelling and really the physical presence, the out of breathness of like, have you even thought to breathe for a moment? Those little things make a big difference on if people believe you, if people understand what you've said, and if they leave with the same version of the story you wanted them to versus the version they've cooked up because you— there was an absence of a narrative for them.

Right, right. And this is the intersection of what you do in leadership development because what, what I see is, you know, people would say it's the most terrifying thing to, to learn to speak. And I just got this far where I'm starting to feel comfortable. I can deliver the all hands meeting. But God, I don't want to see myself on video. Like, that would be like the worst thing. Like, that's gonna knock— I'm feeling I've inched up my confidence pretty well, and then it would— that would knock it back down. And, and what I mean by the intersection is if you are in a space where you're, let's say, a higher level of consciousness, it doesn't bother you so much. You're not so wrapped up. That's not that's not the totality of who you are. You can watch it with some separation versus being so hooked with identity and ego and self-image and watching this, which is why people don't even go there. Right? Right. Because they're— but, but the more inner work that you're doing around getting comfortable with your own leadership, understanding your gifts and blind spots, it's more like you could look at them like, oh yeah. I see that. I see I'm doing that. I didn't realize I was doing that. Okay. It, it doesn't have that emotional pull that I think is keeping some leaders from doing this work.

Yeah. That, that sting. And I think the other thing too that happens, and this happens even with my, my clients who are keynote speakers, when we're watching back the tape, the things, one of, it was so funny. I was doing a workshop with a, with a financial team and it was all their people who go out and do. Pretty big fundraising. And so they're often at conferences, they're on panels, or they're going into people's offices and presenting as a team. And so I was working with them on how to co-present and how to come across in media. And so we were watching tape back, of course. And what I would ask them initially was, when you're watching yourself without my feedback, I just want you to review yourself. The things that they would review were never the things I noticed. The things they would review were all those nitpicky things. Ah, I don't like the way I'm sitting and I don't like this. And oh, I look like this and my hair like that. And oh, I look angry. I look this way. And those are never the things that I'm picking out. And so I think there's also this element of we're being self-critical of things that aren't actually important to the message. So it stops us from looking at it because we're being self-critical based on all the stuff we've probably heard from someone else from our childhood. If our parents told us we were too much or we weren't enough or we were lazy or we were geeky or some high school bullies or something, a lot of people still, again, patterns in it to use your work. We still carry that with us and we aren't even aware that that's what's shaping the way we view ourselves on camera. And so I would have them, I, again, I remember this very specifically, this, this team of people, I had them go through and, and talk about their own, what they saw. And then I said, okay, cool, my turn. And I said, oh, here's some things. And it was none of the stuff that they said. 'Cause I just said like, oh, it was interesting. You started this way, which probably made the audience go thinking all these negative thoughts. And it was They got too far into the negative thoughts before you could pull 'em back. What if we reframed it? You started here, you started in a story, and we see what happens. And then little things, of course, like, hey, maybe don't, yeah. You know, put your arms up that way or this or whatever. But it was never about like, you look, you look unwell, or you look unhealthy, or you don't look tan, or your weight's a problem. And those were always the thing that we nitpick. So I think no wonder people don't wanna watch the video back because they turn into their worst bully. That they've ever had versus working with someone who can help them understand what they should be paying attention to so that if they do watch the video in the future, they're not just berating themselves over things that don't really matter, but they actually start to look for, oh, these are the things I should be considering. So now let me watch it with that lens. And I think that's one of the key things that I hope people get when they've worked with me in that way.

Yeah. And what are some of those things? Let's say someone isn't, you know, isn't able to work with you? What are the things that they would, what are you looking for when you watch somebody's speech?

There's the physical dynamics, right? So I teach these 5 stage languages, right? That, that we use, that audiences understand a story on. The first one is verbal. So how are you actually packaging your information? Is it clear? Do I, do I understand the concept clearly? Do you set it up easily? So this goes back to what we were saying before around the narrative, the context. Are you setting it up in a way that is easy to understand and that I, I immediately kind of get where you're going versus the jargon that we often use, the, um, very high-level speak that is not helping anyone understand the context, but it's just showing like you're real smart and so you know your information. Can we use metaphors? You know, that's one of the verbal tools we have. Can we use metaphors to help people understand things differently? The second stage language is vocal. So I'm listening for, does someone get stuck in one place? Because we have, we have like this, our voice is like a piano and we have all these keys on it, but we get stuck playing the same note all the time. And we don't realize that we can change our volume, change our pacing, that we can pause. So that's what I'm listening for a lot is, hey, were there other things you could do with your voice? Could you have said that and then stopped and let the audience consider it for a moment? Could you have slowed down that really important part? Mm-hmm. Because it signals to the audience, just like I did right now, ooh, something important's being said here. Do we have more of the range we can play with? That's that second language that I'm listening for. A lot of people will think sometimes they need to speak slower. You know, people have been told that you should speak slower, and so they become very aware and try to do this. And we all start sounding like Oprah, right? Like, yeah, you are the winner. You know, and the reality is people don't need you to speak slower. They need you to be more thoughtful about when you pause about what you might repeat. That's what we need, not slower words, cuz that's annoying to listen to as well. And of course it gets you stuck in your head worried about how you sound. Uh, I'm looking at physical, that's the third stage language. I'm looking at the physicality. Where are you sitting in an interview, in a panel interview? Where are you sitting closed off from the other person? So instead of if I'm here with someone this way, am I sitting open towards them or am I sitting kind of off to the side, kind of closed like this? Is my, um, are my arms being effective or do I forget that I have hands and they don't help me communicate at all? Or am I doing the same repetitive, like, movements over and over because, uh, I wasn't even aware I needed to do something differently? If they're standing on a stage, if they're standing in front of the team in an all-hands meeting, do they pace back and forth for no reason looking at the ground? This is a big one I see all the time., and now people watching this are gonna go back and watch tape and be like, oh my gosh, I did the thing that Mike said where I look at the ground. And I always think to people, are the answers on the ground? Is the, is the teleprompter on the ground that you're looking down? But people will do this thing where they're talking and then they'll turn slightly their shoulder to the audience, by the way. So like not even staying open to the audience and they'll like look down as they walk in the other direction and then stop and look at somebody and then turn around and look at the ground and walk the other way. So these physical choices are little things that I'm looking at, uh, and then visual. Are there visual things you could have brought? Is there a prop you could have used? Is there some, uh, could you have sketched something on a board for us that would've helped us conceptualize this idea easier? Are there slides? What's on the slides? Um, slides are a big one where often there's way too much on the dang slide, or there's images on the slide that make the audience have to stop and think about like, wait, how does that image relate to what they're saying? Because it's not really related. So I'm like stuck in there. So these are the things I'm looking at because That is what the audience is considering. The audience isn't worried about your hair or your outfit or whether you had too much, you know, Christmas pudding, uh, and you need to hit the trail or whatever the case is. No one's worried about that. They're worried about like, do I understand what's going on and can I believe this person? And so I look at it through those stage languages to say, where might we make different choices? Because I don't think, I don't think anybody as a communicator makes bad choices. I think in my experience, it's that people weren't aware there was another choice they could make. That's what I witness a lot.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I would say also going back to the impact of why not start with a story? Why is the story so important? This is a place where, you know, I think a lot of executives and entrepreneurs think, well, the storytelling is for the present professional speaker. I'm just here to convey information.

True. I mean, we're all just here to convey information, but ultimately, why are we communicating that information? Because we hope that it changes someone's mind to get them to do something different. Again, like you said before, otherwise just send the PDF, just send the email. But you've gathered all of these people. You've spent— one of the ways when I was selling, when I was selling public speaking support and storytelling support and presentations to, um, to leadership teams and, and not startups really, but small, small tech companies was a big niche of mine for a couple years. What I would say all the time is, so you've gathered 400 employees, what's your average wage? And you're gonna have 'em here for 2 hours at an all hands. So what's the cost of this meeting? What's the sunk cost of like, you know, not only just like the cost of the meeting, but then the cost of they're not doing something else. So now we're talking about a $30,000 meeting and you don't even wanna think about the information.

You don't want—

this is a big stakes thing. If, if someone was stealing $30,000 from your company, you do something about it. And yet we're not doing anything about the way we communicate. And so if it was just information, send a PDF and make 'em sign off on it. If it was a, a change of like, hey, from now on you gotta park in the green slots instead of the blue ones, just send a thing and have 'em sign off that they understood it, put a sign up or whatever. But if we're gathering people to help them think differently, to understand a big challenge we're up against, to understand a, a rollout or a, a new, a new launch or a new path that we're taking as a company, to introduce new leaders to the team, even executive leaders to the team. We're gathering them to dissuade their fears, to get them to understand the gravity of the situation we're in, to get them to understand the, the opportunity ahead for us. And if the information alone could do that, then you would send a PDF, but you gather them there because you know that it needs a little something extra. I like the Mary Poppins rule of why storytelling. The information or the insight is the medicine. And Mary Poppins told us that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. And so the story is the spoonful of sugar in these cases. And often if we can figure out the story to tell, if we can figure out how to package it correctly, it really gives— it gives the team two things that I've seen happen. One is that it shapes the context and the narrative. So they're not as scared, they're not as worried as they would've been otherwise. It also often gives them language they can communicate to others about it.

Mm-hmm.

So I had a, I had a, um, restaurant technology client and when we were rolling out, you know, forever they had like one type of business that was like direct to restaurants only. And they were gonna roll out like a marketplace where you could go to like a central website and look at several restaurants., but they had sold the story so effectively. I helped create it on, we are direct to restaurants only. Like we cut out the middle person and we let the restaurants, and there was like, those marketplaces were the demon for years. So we're rolling out, they were rolling out a marketplace for the first time and I was like, well, we have to really package this correctly because we've done a really good job at demonizing the marketplace. Right. So how can we shape this? And the way that we put the story together, what happened later is we started to hear the sales team tell the story the same way. Without telling them, this is what you're gonna go do. They had heard the story and said, oh, that makes sense to me. I know how to repeat it now without any additional training on how to do it.

Exactly.

And they understood how to package it because we gave them the story. We gave them the language. And we see this even with, with, uh, there's, there's a bunch of research around little kids who understand the story of their family before they were born and who understand like how they were born and what was going on and what it was like. That those kids have less anxiety. They have less fears of what's going to happen because they know, oh, this has existed before me. And I think that same thing applies for our teams as well. If we can give them the story to believe in, we have a better shot of them feeling a little less anxious when bumps come along the way.

Yeah. And the story is more memorable, ultimately. Of course. Yes, you're presenting information, but most people aren't going to retain it unless it's done in a way that is like, oh yeah, I can follow that. I mean, since the beginning of time, human beings have communicated information through the language of stories. And yet somehow in business we think we don't need to have the story even for the smallest things. Right? Um, and I agree with you, so often the context is what's missing. You have a very unique way of going through like, what's the old story, what's the new story, and helping people like start before you even get into what's the you haven't set the stage or set the table to make that message receptive. Um, and so I think that that framework is super powerful in how you, and how you work.

It's funny, I was, when I first started working with people outside of just, um, cuz initially it was a big hotel chain that I had been their keynote speaker for their general manager conference. They came along and said, hey, can you help our exec team? Because they all remembered the little stories you told and the big message, but our exec team rambled on and on. They went over time, people got bored, people stopped listening. And so that eventually trains people not to listen to them. By the way, if, if you don't know how to communicate, you train people to ignore you, which is I think a death wish for a leader. Yeah. If you're teaching people not to pay attention to what you have to say. And so with that group, one of the things that, that I was doing initially was a little bit of messaging, a little bit of like packaging the content, teaching them physicality, how to use their voice, those kinds of things. And then later when I started working with people like you, keynote speakers and professional, professional speakers, authors who were going out on speaking on their books, I started really paying attention to what are the ways that people are being taught how to package their keynote or their message, their workshop, their presentation. And it was always so awful. It was like introduction, 3 supporting points, and a close, which is just like a 5-paragraph essay. And what we're often asking, whether it's a, a, a keynote speaker like you or an executive giving a presentation to their team or even their industry, we're asking for people to look at something differently. And, and maybe we're not asking for like a revolutionary new approach to something, but we are asking them if we're communicating, we're communicating to get people to see something the way that we see it. And I just kept thinking over and over, where else does that exist? Where else do we witness people witnessing a transformation? And then in witnessing that transformation, they also are changed a little bit., and I just kept coming back to my roots, which was film, theater, storytelling, even narrative storytelling in, in fiction. And I started thinking, how could we apply this to the work that we're doing if we're asking people to change their minds? And then I started reading about persuasion and psychology and how our brains change, and I got really geeked out on it. And that's how I came up with the, the model that you're talking about, which I call the transformational narrative, which is putting together the narrative for change because if we're going to ask people to make a big change, uh, this, this company that I've long been a fan of and, and worked with and been hired by and hired them called ZingTrain out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. They started, uh, they're the training arm of a company called Zingerman's Deli, and they have a division that just does workshops and seminars and things like that. It's a fascinating business. But one of the things I learned there from my friend Maggie Bayless, who ran the training consulting company, was we need to understand people's compelling reason for change, their compelling reason for change, not ours. And I think as leaders, sometimes we get in front of them and we think, well, I know the compelling reason for change. It's cuz I need you to change. But we haven't considered their compelling reason for change and we haven't put together the premise for that change that's gonna make 'em say, yeah, let's go. And that is what I aim to do with the transformational narrative, which is this 3-act structure for delivering essentially a persuasive message, which I think all communication in this way is persuasive. And what you were recognizing is we always start with the new story. And the new story is that situation we find ourselves in that is untenable because we don't know the rules to navigate this. And think about if you were on a team and the leadership was coming in and asking you to change in some way, that we have to You know, we have to pull up by our bootstraps and we gotta do more with less and all these things that we hear all the time.

Right.

What if that started with the situation we find ourselves in, the world around us right now and where we're at and why the way that we've been playing the old story doesn't work anymore, but where we're going, the I want song is what I call it. That automatically gets people saying, oh gosh, okay. I understand why we're being asked to do this change now. I really see the picture. That is a scary world we're in. And it makes sense that this is where we wanna go. So what should we try? It's just a much better way to set up a premise for your big ask for people to do something different than their way they're doing it. And I think too, one of the things that happens so often in leadership situations is people have seen so many big changes that when you come out and you have a new rollout or a new plan, they think, okay, well, sounds good. We'll just see if this one—

Yeah, sure. Yeah.

We'll see if this one rolls it. We'll see what happens in a couple weeks.

Yeah.

This kind of communication style helps you really set up the, the one, it forces you to really think about the situation and understand it from their perspective. So like sitting in that director's seat and thinking, how is the audience gonna receive this? It forces you to look at it differently, but it also makes sure that you really put in the work so that they walk away understanding where we're at, where we're going, and what it's gonna take together to get there. And I think more leaders communicating this way would end up having much better results in their teams actually doing what we want them to do after the meeting's over.

Mm-hmm.

Instead of wasting $30,000 on an all hands that didn't do anything.

Absolutely. Well, you have so much knowledge. I have, I have one other, only time for one other piece that I wanted to layer in here, which we referenced a bit, which is AI. How do you think AI is influencing the way people need to communicate.

I think it's happening. I think there's a lot of ways. The big thing, I think, as it applies to leadership and you, the keynote that I've been working on with you, you have so many great ideas, by the way. So people listening, you should be hiring her because the ideas for how to incorporate AI into a very human situation, Susan has some really brilliant practical ideas for that. So I just want to plug that as well because when I was reviewing it a couple of weeks ago with you, I was like, oh, these are really fresh. These are really good. People, this is like another book or something people are gonna want. It's really good.

Yeah.

But I think that the place where a lot of leaders come from, and especially so many people, we get, we keep getting promoted because we're good at our job because we are subject matter experts, because we know a lot. We keep getting promoted and promoted and promoted. And with AI, there, the day of just being a subject matter expert is slowly going away because AI is gonna keep getting smarter and smarter and better at understanding concepts and, and good at doing them and good at teaching them. What we have to do, and I think where leadership is going, is we have to start to be the people who know how to communicate change so that whatever the AI subject matter expert information is actually becomes something we can do something with. But that idea of, "I've got smarts and I know things," that's not enough. You have to be able to be the person who can interpret that for people, who can dissuade their fears over Where are we going? What's going on? Because when people are in that fear mode, they do nothing and they sit and they wait.

Yeah.

And our jobs as leaders, as conscious leaders, as enlightened leaders, is to be the one who can look at it from the audience's perspective and say, how do we need to package this subject matter expert information? How do we need to put it together so that it actually drives people to change, that it actually gives them the compelling reason for doing something different, that it does calm their fears or excite their energy to move forward. And I think that in this world of AI, knowing a lot of stuff, being able to even, uh, interpret data, that is going to be a machine job.

Yeah.

The human job is gonna be able to get hearts and minds and energies aligned in the right direction. And that is a big call for leadership right now, I think.

Absolutely. You need to develop, first of all, empathy to understand how does my message potentially land. You need to really get clear on what's the emotion that people might be feeling. How am I dealing with my own emotions? Am I in touch with my own emotions? What are my emotions? Right?

I love what are emotions.

Oh, there's no room for emotions in business. Oh my God. That's gonna be the only thing you're gonna be dealing with cuz everything else is you can get from AI. But now we're in the world of the emotionally intelligent leader and that's That's the only type of leader we're gonna need to navigate this future. So, so much good stuff. Oh my gosh. Tell me, um, where can people learn more about you and your work?

I'm, I'm really easy to find once you figure out how to spell the last name. Uh, I'm Mike Gannino, G-A-N-N-I-N-O on all the places. And if you type in Mike Gannino, the good thing about having a last name like Gannino is like I win the SEO game. So if you type in Mike Gannino, you'll find me on all your favorite sites. Uh, my book is called Make a Scene: Storytelling, Stage Presence, and the Art of Being Unforgettable. There's a couple of great chapters in there for leaders as well, for presentations, for sales pitches. And you can find that all the places you like to get books. So, uh, Make a Scene by Mike Ganino. And then, uh, yeah, Mike Ganino on the internet. I'll see you there.

Well, Mike is absolutely brilliant. I can tell you firsthand from working with him. So if you are interested in upping your game, definitely reach out. He's got a ton of resources and really encourage people to do that. So thank you.

Thanks for having me.

If you like this episode, you're not gonna wanna miss my interview with Cindy Adams, an executive coach and speaker and co-founder of The Business Network, who believes that speaking up isn't always the boldest move and help us explore how courageous authenticity involves leadership and how to express it with wisdom.

Let's lead the way.

Hope you enjoyed today's episode, and I'd like to point you to the next important step. Hit the subscribe button to get notified when we release new content. I'll see you on the next episode of The Enlightened Executive.