Speaker of the Year Nigel Risner: A Leader Should Know How to Listen

Novinite Insider » INTERVIEW | November 14, 2003, Friday // 00:00
Speaker of the Year Nigel Risner: A Leader Should Know How to Listen Photo by Gergana Kostadinova (novinite.com)

Nigel Risner was the past president of the London Chapter of Professional Speakers Association, and has just been voted Speaker of the Year by the Academy of Chief Executives. He delivers over a hundred talks a year in his unique, energetic style to corporations and associations such as The Academy for Chief Executives, The Institute of Directors, Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC, Red Bull and many others. Prior to motivating audiences, he ran a successful finance company, being one of the youngest CEO's in London at the age of 26.

He spoke to novinite.com Editor Petya Bondokova.


Q: As you make your first visit to Bulgaria, what is it you know about the country?

A: I rang up the Bulgarian Embassy and I found out the population, I found out the temperature, the five biggest industries, and roughly the currency in income that people are earning.

It's nice being a speaker in a country like Bulgaria. I can't start with hundreds of thousands of dollars when the average income here is 117 dollars a month. You have to understand where people are coming from.

I've been excited for speaking to the Bulgarian audience, because I like speaking to audiences where I don't know the whole culture, where I have to adapt my speech instead of doing just a normal one.

Q: Do you thing that, in a global aspect, there is a tendency for people to realize the importance of communication for doing a good business?

A: No one was ever born a leader. Newspapers never say "Born a leader at November 11." There are learned skills. Very rarely at school we learn communication, very rarely we learn acknowledgement, very rarely we learn how to negotiate. But we are good at maths, or we are good at geography... If we could learn to communicate, geography wouldn't be that difficult. When we get to a new country we know where it is on the map, but we don't know how to talk to people, we don't understand their culture, we don't understand about reaching out. Communication is a worldwide problem and ninety-nine percent of the world are not good at it.

Q: What do you need to be a good speaker - a natural gift or working hard for self-improvement?

A: There are very few natural born speakers - there are lots of naturally practiced speakers. I wasn't born speaking. I was taught how to speak, and I've done a lot since I was born.

One could learn how to be a speaker provided they want to do two things - one is making mistakes (Which is what most people don't like to do, and which is why most people don't like speaking in a foreign language - they are scared about making a mistake). My opening line today will be in Bulgarian and I promise you it will not be great, but I'll have a go. And that's the difference - I'm sure it won't be perfect but I'll have a go.
In every country I go to my opening line is always in the language. But most people don't want to practice, they don't want to get better, and just do their own thing.

Q: When was the fist time you started realizing that speaking will probably be your lifetime job?

A: I left school when I was sixteen, so I didn't finish high school, and when I started working at sixteen very quickly I realized that communication wasn't that difficult. And the better I got in communicating, the more money I seemed to earn.

At eighteen, I left what I was doing and went to Israel to play tennis. Then, for two years I didn't communicate, I played tennis and I coached. But when I started coaching young kids and when I spoke to them in a different way they seemed to hit the ball better after I spoke to them. It was kind of interesting how I started to develop communication skills when I was eighteen, and that was the first time I was becoming a coach.

Q: And what job did you get when you were sixteen?

I was a finance broker - I helped people buy hotels, nursing homes, restaurants, pubs, and used to help finance them being the intermediary between them and the bank.

Q: What kinds of people usually attend your presentations?

I have three groups of people. I have children at schools - I have an education program for young school kids. With my wife I do a program in a prison, and I do a lot of work for chief executives. So I go right from, literally, birth, to the end. And the reason is that young kids need to learn some of the messages we are teaching leaders, and people in prison have made some bad decisions. And because very often they keep coming back into prison, we have to do what's called breaking the cycle. And leaders need to learn why kids and young offenders do what they do, otherwise they'll employ people like that. We need to make sure they employ the best.

When I was in prison I thought how did kids, aged sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, get there, what decision did they make to get in that position? What was worst - and I think it's the same with Bulgaria - kids keep going back into prison. There's a phrase I think is called recidivism - what do they do when they get out that made them go back in? People keep making mistakes, even when they know something is not right they keep doing it. It was an interesting dilemma for me to find out did they like the prison that much that they wanted to come back? And that's what they do - it's more comfortable being in prison because they know the system.

Why would you stay in your job even if you weren't happy? Most people stay in their jobs far too long because they're comfortable. My talk today is about how uncomfortable we could be, being comfortable.

Q: Who is better at communication - women or men?

Women aren't better at communication. What they do is that they actually communicate from a different place - women communicate from the heart and men communicate from their head.

Women also do something very interesting that is called chit-chat, social chit-chatting. Men don't do it that way. If two ladies go to the toilet they talk, if two men go to the toilet they do what they need to do and they leave. It started years and years ago from being in the caves - men went to hunt and the women were cooking, and while they did they would talk. This is thousands of years old. Especially young mothers who spend time with their children and they have to learn to communicate.

Men don't communicate very well but they can communicate if they're taught.

There's an issue for me with women in business, and the issue is that most women don't have the confidence because they think they're not as good as men. Then they do something called bullying - they prove being better than men by shouting, being louder. And I can understand why because, even if you look in Bulgaria, there are very few women in a high position. It's no different in the UK or the United States. Eight percent of directors in the UK are women. We are a hundred years advanced, and they're still only eight percent, but that's because over the last 300 years there have been no women there.

In sixty years time one woman will appoint another two women, and in about 500 years there'll be only women and one solitary man. But that also won't work because there has to be a balance.

Q: What are the basic personality traits of a good leader?

A: They need to be in the room. That means they have to be present, and very often leaders are too busy being everywhere but where they need to be. They need to listen unbelievably carefully - in English we spell the word listen L-I-S-T-E-N and the last thee letters is T-E-N, not two - ten times more listening, not two times more listening!

They need to model exactly what they want from their employees, not say one thing and do something else.

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