Before You Say a Word: A School Leader's Guide to Clear and Compelling Communication

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Eric Palmer. Eric is a professional speaker and educational consultant from Denver, Colorado, whose passion for speaking has been part of every one of his multiple careers. After several years in the business world, he became a teacher, spending 21 years in the classroom, primarily as an English teacher, but also as a teacher of math, science, and civics. The author of several books, Eric presents frequently at conferences and has given keynotes and led in-service training in school districts across the United States. and around the world. He focuses on giving teachers practical, engaging ways to teach oral communication skills and showing education leaders how to be more effective communicators.

[00:52]

He is the author of seven books, including Before You Say a Word, A School Leader's Guide to Clear and Compelling Communication, which we're here to talk about today.

[01:02] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[01:04] SPEAKER_00:

Eric, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[01:06] SPEAKER_01:

Thanks very much for having me here.

[01:08] SPEAKER_00:

We were talking before we hit record about how not a lot is said these days about oral communication. We've had a lot of attention paid to writing. We've paid a lot of attention to how AI is disrupting the whole world of writing. But one thing that has remained the same for a very long time and probably will for the foreseeable future is that oral communication is a big part of our job as school leaders. So what did you see as a need in the field that prompted you to write this book?

[01:36] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I started teaching elementary school way back when, and I was on a fifth, sixth grade team. And we would send Tom to represent the fifth, sixth grade team. And he would meet with the three, four person and the one, two person and the electives person. And he would meet with these people. I guess we called them specials, not electives back then. And he would come back and he would give us some kind of message.

[01:57]

And we almost always hated the message. You know, he would say, well, parents are dropping their kids off early. We need to get somebody out there to supervise the playground. And we said, well, it's outside of our contract hours. We need to prepare for the day. We would get miffed about things like this.

[02:14]

And Tom would always say, hey, hey, don't blame me. I'm just the messenger. And certainly that was true a lot. We were blaming the messenger. But the longer I was in education, the more it struck me that we need to blame the messenger. And ASCD asked me to do a talk on that.

[02:32]

And I said, well, here's what I noticed. I noticed a lot of educational leaders. And I'm not just talking principals. I'm talking about people who do staff development, people who may be a teacher on special assignment. Lots of educational leaders are ruining their message because they present it so poorly. And I've seen good ideas that were dead on arrival because it was presented so poorly.

[02:54]

I've seen really nice people who I thought, you know, you're a great guy, but somehow the staff hates you. How does that happen? because the message was presented so poorly. So I came up with the idea that sometimes we need to blame the messenger. And it occurred to me that, and I checked it out, you can go to any principal education program, you can get any doctorate in education, you will never have a class in any of that that talks about how to present well. And yet that is what administrators, that is what teacher leaders do more than anything else.

[03:28]

I don't have a number, but I would be guessing that 90% of an administrator's day is talking. And it's an enormous variety of situations in which they're talking. And yet none of them have had specific instruction about how to present well. And it's not the case that all of them know how to present well. And so after speaking at the conference, someone said, this would make a good book. ASCD thought Blame the Messenger was a little harsh.

[03:55]

So it became Before You Say a Word.

[03:58] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and I would have to concur that there really is no training of this type for school administrators. It's not part of the standard coursework. It's not part of the certification programs. It's not typically something that districts offer. I've seen maybe a little bit on crisis communications, but that's kind of a subset. And certainly, for just about any purpose, we need to be able to communicate Now, you said sometimes we do need to blame the messenger.

[04:26]

I wonder if we could start with some of the big mistakes that people make when communicating, because certainly we have a reaction when we see it, like we know it when we hear it, that somebody is communicating in an ineffective way, but we often don't recognize that in ourselves. What are some of the big mistakes that people make in oral communication?

[04:47] SPEAKER_01:

Well, let me give you a framework, and I first developed the framework for teaching students how to speak well, but it applies to adults. And most adults never got instruction in school either. All speaking has two distinct parts. What you do before you open your mouth and what you do as you are speaking. And these are very separate skill sets. Some people are really good at creating a talk, not so good at performing it.

[05:10]

There are other people who are natural performers, but have little value to say. And so sometimes administrators make a mistake because they've created to talk poorly. We've been in this position before where you've said something that, oh boy, I shouldn't have said that. You didn't think before you spoke about what you were going to say. And we've also been in a position where the other was true. You said, well, I think I didn't say that well.

[05:37]

I mean, I knew what I was trying to say. It was a good message, but I didn't say it well. And so administrators can trip up in both cases. Let me give you an example of something you mess up before you say a word. Often we misjudge the audience. In fact, that's probably the number one mistake in creating a talk.

[05:58]

Educational leaders misjudge the audience. And a principal will say something that teachers, if you just thought about it, you know they're not going to like it. We tend to think, well, I have something I need to say. It never starts that way. What can the audience hear? What mood are they in?

[06:17]

What do they need to know? What do they want to know? We don't analyze the audience enough. And this is costly. I had in the book, I mentioned an example of an elementary principal of my school that I talked about. It was so big we had to have two assemblies, one for K-1-2 and one for 3-4-5-6.

[06:36]

And she introduced the assembly to the little kids and said, hello, boys and girls. Today we have a special assembly. It's called Ballet Folklorico. Do you know what ballet is? Which is appropriate for an audience of K-1-2. And then my kids come in, fifth and sixth graders, Hello, boys and girls.

[07:00]

Today we have a special... My kids are looking at it like, what? And you think it's trivial, but she lost the respect of about half of the students. Or I had the head of a very prestigious prep school.

[07:14]

They hired a brand new head of school. No one had met this person. The first day in August, the teachers came back. There was a half an hour meeting for breakfast and time for teachers to talk. And at eight o'clock, the meeting was supposed to start. And remember, this is the head of school.

[07:30]

We've never met her before. We don't know this person. Some people came straggling in late. You might expect this. They haven't seen each other all summer. They had breakfast.

[07:41]

They straggled in late. The first words out of the mouth, we've never seen this person before. In my building, if a meeting is at 8 o'clock, 7.55 is on time, 8 o'clock is late, and anything beyond that is unacceptable. Okay, I believe that is a legitimate thing that you want to put in your school culture, but not now. Analyze the audience.

[08:06]

This is the first day back. They've never met you. How about, hello, welcome. This is who I am. I'm excited to be here. I'll give you the whole thing about being on time later.

[08:17]

but analyze your audience. You lost the new staff instantly because of a horrible mistake, and you should have thought about that before you opened your mouth. The other side of that, and this is a long answer, often we deliver a message poorly. You've got good content, but we've all been to staff development, professional development, where we just thought, oh, this is so boring. This is the most dull speaker I ever heard. There's no life in the voice.

[08:48]

They're not changing speed. They're not doing things that good speakers do as they speak. So those are probably the two most significant ways it breaks down. Before you open your mouth, analyze that audience. And as you are speaking, you've got to have some life. You've got to sell this.

[09:05]

You need to let us know that you care.

[09:08] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, very well said. And you've got the book broken into the planning and the delivering phases. When it comes to the planning phase, I wonder if a lot of leaders think about audience or think about tone or think about how they want to be perceived as some sort of pulling their punches or some sort of betrayal of saying what needs to be said. Is that a mindset that leaders come to this with that if I put any thought into that at all, that I'm not really being honest or I'm not being authentic. Where does this come from, this desire to not be thoughtful at all about how the audience will receive the message?

[09:47] SPEAKER_01:

I can never not be thoughtful about how the audience will receive the message. The message is designed for the audience. That has to be number one on my mind. And so, yeah, sometimes I'm going to have to pull punches. Sometimes I'm going to have to adjust the message I want to give. If I'm doing a conference, one of the situations leaders are in, you may do a conference with Jeremy and you may do a conference with Sarah.

[10:12]

They're different people. And so you have to speak to them differently. You build the talk for Jeremy different than you do for Sarah. So a large part of what educational leaders do is pull punches and you need to really analyze the audience to understand. I know what I want. This is really important and I need to say this.

[10:31]

No, it never starts with what you need to say. It starts with what the audience can receive.

[10:37] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I think in terms of the broad concept of leadership capital, that we don't have an infinite amount of leadership capital to burn. We have to pick our battles as the saying goes. And if we do want to be heard, if we do want to accomplish something through our communication, yeah, we've got to do that math. We've got to weigh the situation and figure out, you know, what does this person need to hear from me at this time, knowing that it's probably not, you know, a lecture on tardiness the first five seconds that someone meets me.

[11:07] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Exactly. Well, and your point is good, especially if you're in a larger school. When I was finishing my career, I was in a large middle school. You don't interact with the leader very often. You may see the leader in the hall occasionally.

[11:20]

Maybe someone will come into your room once or twice a year when they're doing an observation. You'll see the person at faculty meetings. You don't really get to know that person. And so the few interactions that I have with that educational leader have to be pretty good. And people will say sometimes, well, if you got to know her, she's really a good person. Yeah, but a lot of the staff don't get to know her like that.

[11:47] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so we don't get the benefit of the doubt as a result. We don't have that relationship drawn the way we would if it was somebody we spent more time with and communicated more frequently with. Yeah. So within the planning section of the book, you have a chapter on what you shouldn't say. And that seems like a chapter that could be infinitely long. There are lots of things that we shouldn't say.

[12:10]

What are some of the highlights or some of the common themes in what we need to be mindful of what we should not say?

[12:19] SPEAKER_01:

Well, let's go back again. It all starts with audience analysis. what are they going to be receptive to? And certainly in education now, there are so many hot topics. And you know right away that there are people that are gonna be super hot on, should we remove this book from the library? Should we have a LGBTQ club at the school?

[12:41]

You know that this is gonna happen. So you have to prepare yourself for understanding if I say this, who's going to get really triggered? Who's going to get upset? How can I frame it in a way that will make it clear that we're here to converse, that we're here to build a culture together, not that I am trying to force my ideas on you. And so anything that seems directive, anything that seems my way or the highway, Those have to be avoided. And yet I see a large number of school leaders that say, I've got a vision for the school and this is how it's going to be.

[13:17]

No, avoid that. Take that out of your content. Put in things that are more, that indicate a spirit of collaboration.

[13:26] SPEAKER_00:

Well, and back to the perhaps imperfect metaphor of picking your battles, part of the purpose of picking our battles is to make sure that we win them, right? That we actually have, say, the support to move forward with something. If it's in our vision, we don't want to share our vision and then have it fall flat and have everybody fight us and not actually make any progress on it. We want to find things where we actually have some potential to make progress. Is that along the lines of what you're saying?

[13:52] SPEAKER_01:

I think so. And I think there's also the need for some humility in here because I have a vision. But often, I think in the maybe 15 years I was in the middle school, we had five different principals. And I don't know how many different assistant principals. So there's some amount of humility that's needed when a new leader comes in saying, I have a vision. Maybe.

[14:13]

But what if your vision's not right? What if your vision doesn't fit this school? What if it doesn't fit this staff? And so we need to temper our vision with humility and understand that our ideas may not be the best ideas. We need to be open to thinking about other ways of doing things.

[14:32] SPEAKER_00:

Well said. Now, Eric, in the second part of the book, you talk about delivering the message, the actual delivery of the message. Once we've figured out what we're going to say and what we're not going to say, and we've chosen our message, we've thought about our audience, what are some of the skills and aspects of delivery that we need to think about?

[14:51] SPEAKER_01:

But what I tried to do in the book, and it comes from, of course, what I did with students, let's simplify what it takes. What do great speakers do? And when I ask people that, I say, what do great speakers do? I usually get a huge variety of answers because no one exactly knows. And someone will say, well, I think good speakers speak loudly, clearly, and slowly. No, they don't.

[15:14]

If you heard someone speaking loudly and slowly, you would hate that. So they say, well, they have enthusiasm. Well, I don't think so, because it would be inappropriate to say, we had 14 serious bullying incidents last month. It doesn't call for enthusiasm. So I said, what does it take as you are speaking? And I broke it down into six pretty specific skills.

[15:41]

And what any leader could do is they could apply the framework to themselves. They could apply it to people who they are working with. They could apply it to teachers presenting it back to school night. How are you doing as a presenter? And it starts with poise. Because all of us can think of some speaker we heard, some staff development person, some professional development person that had an annoying habit.

[16:02]

And we spent all our time paying attention to that annoying habit. 28, 29, 30. That's the 31st time she moved the hair out of her eyes. The principal at my son's high school plays with the microphone height adjustment ring. He never raises and lowers the microphone. He just unscrews it and screws it and unscrews it.

[16:23]

And we notice these things. So one thing speakers have to do is make sure that they avoid that one thing they do. And almost everybody has just one thing they do. Maybe the hair out of your eyes or playing with your glasses or adjusting the microphone height adjustment ring. It starts with that. You've lost us.

[16:41]

You've got this great content, but you've lost us if you're not poised. A second thing we worry about is voice. Can you hear every word? That's all. It doesn't have to be loud. I just need to hear every word.

[16:53]

My father was very effective when he would say, Eric, come here. You don't have to speak loudly. biggest thing I worry about, and this is the number one growth area for all educational leaders, I think all speakers, life. You've got to have some life in your voice. If you're telling me this is the new initiative this year and it's better than all the initiatives we've had in all the other years, you better be able to sell that to me. And yes, I mean sell.

[17:23]

Well, I'm not that kind of person. Maybe, but you need to be. You need to develop to become that kind of person because you got to have some life in your voice. I need to hear that you're concerned when someone comes to you and says, I'm having this problem in my classroom. I got it. I hear that.

[17:40]

And I need to hear that you're excited when I give you some news about my classroom. This is great. And I need to hear at the faculty meeting that you care about these comments. And number one growth area, life. So those are the, I say the three. Now, I talk about also gestures that need to be effective and using speed well, speed up, slow down for emphasis.

[18:02]

That's the frosting on the cake. I'd be happy if you didn't distract us, if we could hear every word, and if you had a lot of life in your voice so I know that there's a human being that cares.

[18:14] SPEAKER_00:

Now, what would you say to leaders who say, well, I'm not going to be fake, right? This is who I am. This is my normal speaking voice. And if you want me to be different from that, that's going to be fake. Yeah, I think that's a great question.

[18:26] SPEAKER_01:

I'm not asking you to not be who you are. I'm asking you to add elements to who you are. As an example, I play Little League for Old Guys. I'm not making that up. There's a baseball league for old guys. We don't like softball.

[18:40]

We used to play baseball seriously. And there's an over 30 division, over 40, over 50. It's not important what division I'm in. That's not the point. But I am different in the dugout with my teammates than I am when I'm in a classroom. And any educational leader is probably a little different with presenting at the Board of Education than they are presenting at the pep assembly at the school than they are reading aloud to third graders when they're sitting on the floor of the reading area.

[19:11]

You have versions of yourself, and we all do. And so what I'm asking people to do is have more versions of themselves. The version that you use when you're talking to Jeremy, the version that you use when you're talking to Sarah because they're different teachers with different needs, the version that you use... And so, yeah, as I said before, people will say, well, I'm not that kind of person.

[19:33]

I get that. But who you are is not who you need to be. And so we're going to have to broaden our skills somewhat to become livelier than maybe is comfortable for us.

[19:45] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And that's often my feedback to people who are practicing for interviews. You know, if you walk into an interview and put everybody to sleep, they're not going to really get a sense of who you are as a candidate. And that's going to cut off opportunities. That doesn't mean being fake, but it means communicating who you are, communicating some enthusiasm. And it's a skill like any other that can be And in terms of nonverbals, Eric, you mentioned that everybody has a thing that they do that they could probably stop doing that's distracting, whether it's fiddling with something or some sort of distracting mannerism.

[20:19]

What are some nonverbals that we need to think about either on the avoid side or on the do side?

[20:26] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I think we've all been in situations where someone said something to us and we thought, no, they didn't mean it. What clues did they give you? I used to have a principal that I worked with and I would say, can I ask you a question? And she had a way of saying yes, but with gestures that indicated no. And she would kind of roll her eyes, kind of shrug her shoulders, almost turn away. And so what body language messages are you giving that maybe you don't intend to give?

[21:01]

For me, when I started teaching, I had a big career in debate. I was a collegiate debater. And I would say something at a faculty meeting that I thought was, I disagree with that. How everybody heard it was, how could you be so stupid, Justin, as to make a comment like that? My body language, my inflection indicated that obviously I was so superior to you. And it's easier for people to visualize it.

[21:31]

If I just say, think of things people have done from, well, we can all imagine the kid rolling the eyes when you say something. You've seen it. And be aware when you see it, oh my God, she totally just said with her body, I have no interest in you. Or he totally just said with his body, my idea is the winning idea. We can visualize these things. And so I just want people to be aware of the nonverbal messages they give.

[21:59]

Often we're not aware. I don't know that the principal was aware that when I said, can I ask a question? I don't know if she was aware of how powerfully she said no with her body while saying yes with her mouth.

[22:13] SPEAKER_00:

can we become more self-aware about these things? Because certainly we can work on things if we're aware of them, but like, should we be videoing ourselves? Should we ask other people for feedback? What's the best way to become aware of those things that are not on our radar right now?

[22:27] SPEAKER_01:

Both of those. Yes. Video yourself, ask a trusted person. And of course, when you're an educational leader, people are going to maybe pull punches as we talked about earlier. How was it? Oh, no, you were good.

[22:38]

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There was nothing I noticed. Uh, Something about the way you said that makes me think there was. Understand this.

[22:47]

You know, I talk in the book about what you do before you say a word. Those things are really easy to fix. I hate the way we design PowerPoint slides. And you make those before you say a word. And I think educators are dreadful at making PowerPoint slides. That can be fixed instantly.

[23:05]

You can read that section of the book. You can go home and fix your slides instantly. What we're talking about in the performance is stuff that can't be fixed instantly. You've got decades of some kind of habit. I had decades of a tone of voice of superiority. The principal has decades of fidgeting with the microphone.

[23:25]

These things you work on incrementally. Now that you know what to look for, now what you need to look for in the people you supervise, you can say, well, let me see that video. Oh my gosh, I didn't know that I did that with my hand all the time. or I didn't know that my face had that expression. There's a meme that runs around, did my face say that out loud? Because you may have something in your face indicated that you didn't know your face was indicating.

[23:53]

So yes, video yourself, ask trusted friends, but understand that when you see this, it will take time. You don't get rid of these habits overnight. It's incremental progress, but you're on the right track. You know what to look for. You've got video evidence. You've got people telling you you'll make progress.

[24:13]

I want to stress that we're talking about the number one thing that educational leaders do, oral communication, and it just absolutely dumbfounds me that we don't focus more on it. And I think that If you spend more time thinking about the messages you create and how you perform them, you will be so much more effective. A school's culture is created verbally. It's not created by that slogan on the wall or by the mission statement that you have printed in the office that some teachers may or may not know. It's all the little oral communication activities that happen as you pass people in the hallway. It's all the little communications that happen when you have one-on-one conferences with the teachers, the communication with the PTCO.

[25:00]

All of those are what build a school culture. And if you're not spending a large amount of time developing the oral communication skills that support that, you're going to have difficulties.

[25:13] SPEAKER_00:

So there's a lot of leverage here in attending to these issues. A lot of upside.

[25:19] SPEAKER_01:

Exactly.

[25:20] SPEAKER_00:

So the book is Before You Say a Word, A School Leader's Guide to Clear and Compelling Communication. Eric Palmer, if people want to learn more about your work, maybe check out your books on developing these skills in students, where's the best place for them to go?

[25:35] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I've got a website designed for teachers who want to work with students, and you'll only understand it when you go to the website. It's pvlegs.com, and I'll let people go there and discover what that means. Or ericpalmer.net. Both of those places will put you in contact with me and tell you what I do.

[25:56] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Eric, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[25:59] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you, Justin. Absolute pleasure here as well.

[26:02] Announcer:

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