TJ Walker argues that speaking skills matter more than most executives realize for reaching the C-suite. He points to Disney's choice of Thomas Staggs as COO, citing a New York Times quote that he was "a little more polished, a little more charismatic" than rivals. Walker says executives should spend more time practicing presentations and less time editing slides.
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The Disney Company has announced its new Chief Operating Officer and that for all intents and purposes, will be the next CEO. Why is this surprising? So here's the background, ladies and gentlemen. There's often huge, huge intrigue in the CEO positions of major, major media companies. Sumner Redstone in his 90s, is still heading Viacom. There's typically a messy transition in these handoffs. People just don't want to let go of all that power and all that fun. And it often gets messy. It's been messy at the Disney Corporation before. Now it looks like things are a little different. So Robert Iger has been the highly respected and successful CEO of Disney for quite some time. He's planning on stepping down in 2018, planning an orderly transition. So the battle for the last five years has been between Thomas Staggs and James Rosulio. Both men are considered highly competent, well respected executives in the Disney Corporation. Well, this week Disney announced Thomas Staggs will be the Chief Operating officer, the sole chief operating officer. And that's a signal that he's won the battle. Huge, huge story about this in the New York Times today. Here's what caught my eye. Because we're not typically concerned with corporate appointments here at Media Training Worldwide, but here's what caught my eye. A long term observer of both men was quoted in the New York Times saying this, saying Bob had an embarrassment of riches, implying the current CEO had a lot of good executives to choose from. But Bob may have felt that Tom is a little more polished, a little more charismatic. He has great presentation skills and is a little more Disney like than Jay. That's the part that jumped out at me. Now folks, there's this huge misunderstanding a lot of people have about presentation skills. It's seen as sort of fluff and extra. Oh, that's for the salesman. No folks, it's for the CEOs. And a lot of very capable CEOs never reach their full potential because they fail to work on this one skill. Now I'm not here to tell you, just be a good public speaker. Just take my class for a day and you'll be CEO of Disney or any other Fortune 500 company. No, I'm not suggesting that. What I am suggesting is once you get to a certain level of success in any huge corporation, everyone you're competing with for the next rung or the highest rung is already smart. They're already hard working, they're already talented, they already have some political skills and have developed alliances. What's going to be the difference? And the difference quite often is your speaking skills, your ability to speak on behalf of the entire corporation to all hundred thousand employees, to the whole world, to the media, to all investors. It is this speaking skill. It's not an extra. It's not fluff. It's certainly not a soft skill for any business executive looking at the bottom line. There is nothing more bottom line than getting that final job as a CEO. Because the difference between retiring as a senior vice president or a president of an operating division versus versus CEO of an entire publicly traded company that's a big company is the difference between retiring life as a very comfortable millionaire versus retiring life as a billionaire if that sort of thing is of interest to you. So please keep that in mind the next time you have a decision of what skills to work on and whether or not you're going to spend another two hours redoing the words and the bullet points on your slide versus actually practicing and polishing your presentation skills. I'm TJ Walker.
