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Leadership Communications Coaching with Granville Toogood

Command, inspire, and enroll any audience, large or small

Based on the twin theories that three minutes with the right audience can be worth more than a year at your desk, and that mere talent and competency by themselves are no longer sufficient to lead successfully, Granville coaches his clients to command any room and compel any audience. His results lead to vastly improved leadership skills, which drive performance, productivity and profit throughout the organization.

Learn to speak like a seasoned pro in every important business opportunity

  • Design the Perfect Presentation™
  • Speak like a pro from notes, outline or extemporaneously
  • Execute crispness and focus on demand
  • Craft a compelling personal leadership style
  • Articulate a vision and follow through for real results
  • Steer the meeting and negotiate the deal
  • Command the stage and audience

The Seven Principles of CVA

Granville has developed a proven methodology called Communications Value Added (CVA). Based on the belief that what you say and how you say it can determine the success of your business, the seven principles of CVA will dramatically enhance your daily performance and make you a stronger, more capable leader.

  1. Always be interesting – never bore
    2. This would seem like an obvious admonition. But it is amazing how many people ignore this fundamental guideline and it is even more remarkable how few people in business view it as necessary. If you fail to elicit interest from your audience, all your preparations and efforts are doomed.
  2. Always provide something extra, something of value, something memorable to every audience
    3. This may mean taking a position even though you may not have realized you had a point of view buried in all that data. Or it could mean teaching the audience something they could not have known until they heard you speak.
  3. Always be master of your presentation – never allow your presentation to master you
    4. Three important rules are adjuncts to this principle.
    • Always begin and end your presentation with just you talking.
    • Use only graphics, schematics, tables, illustrations, or photographs – try hard to avoid using word slides.
    • Introduce your next slide while the old slide is still on the screen.
  4. Speak only about what you know
    5. Too often people accept invitations to speak, and then discover they have agreed to talk on a subject they are not competent to discuss. If you expect people to listen, talk only about what you know.
  5. Always to be sensitive to the needs of your audience
    6. Nothing makes businesspeople more impatient than the creeping suspicion that the time they are giving to the speaker is not time well spent. Never make an audience of busy people sit and wait for you to get your point. Always try to anticipate exactly what your audience wants to hear.
  6. Speak in pictures
    7. Use anecdotes, analogies, illustrations, and hard facts. Vague notions, general ideas, and abstractions, no matter how worthy or noble, just can’t cut it.
  7. Prepare
    8. A minimum amount of preparation can yield maximum results, especially if the planning and design of your speech or presentation adhere to five simple components: strong start, one theme, vivid examples, conversational language, and strong ending. Preparation usually means tighter, crisper and briefer, all of which are good. Preparation also means clearer message, higher interest factor, greater depth, longer retention, more fun for speaker and listener alike, and overall a much higher level of quality.