How to Lead the Culture Your Team Actually Performs

Your Culture Is a Show, Whether You Script It or Not

“You can either write the story or become an actor in someone else’s.”

That’s what culture strategist Mike Ganino said during our recent conversation on The Enlightened Executive. And it’s a truth more leaders need to hear.

Mike’s background in hospitality, theater, and executive coaching brings a fresh perspective to a topic that often feels vague or overused. His message?

Culture is not what’s printed on your office wall. It’s what your team performs every day.

And as a leader, you are always modeling that performance. Whether you mean to or not.

Why This Matters for Leaders

Culture is shaped through observation, not just instruction. People don’t follow the values on the website. They follow you.

Which means your tone, energy, consistency, and decisions all become cues that teach your team what is truly expected.

Leadership presence is not about charisma. It’s about alignment.

Do your actions match your stated values?
Do your team members know what “great” looks like by watching you in action?

If not, someone else is writing the script for your culture. Probably without your input.

Storytelling is Your Secret Weapon

Mike shared that storytelling is the most underutilized leadership skill when it comes to building culture. And the neuroscience backs it up.

Our brains are wired to absorb meaning through story.

When leaders use narrative intentionally, highlighting real team wins, framing decisions in context, or naming what matters, culture sticks.

But when you leave the story unsaid, people create their own. Often based on fear or assumption.

The question isn’t whether your team is telling a story. It’s whether you’re guiding the right one.

Four Leadership Moves to Shape Culture Now

Here’s how to start shaping your culture on purpose, not by accident:

1. Lead with Awareness

After every meeting or interaction, ask yourself:
“What emotional tone did I leave behind?”
Presence is a performance your team learns from.

2. Make the Next Episode Clear

If your culture were a Netflix show, does your team know what’s coming next?
Create clarity around what matters now and where the team is headed.

3. Name the Pattern

Culture is a series of repeated behaviors.
Where are you seeing healthy repetition, and where are the scripts misaligned?
Speak it out loud so your team knows what to keep and what to change.

4. Rehearse What Great Looks Like

Instead of just setting expectations, practice them.
Run through high-stakes moments—presentations, pitches, conflict—with your team so they know how to deliver.

Final Takeaway

You don’t have to be a natural performer to lead culture. You just need to be intentional.

Your team is always watching. They’re learning how to “do” your company by watching how you lead.

So the real question is: What story are you telling through your actions, and is it the one you want repeated?

For more insights on leading culture through presence and self-awareness, subscribe to The Enlightened Executive or explore the Enneagram Applied program to uncover your leadership patterns.

Episode Transcript

Susan Drumm: Picture this. The lights dim. The audience leans in. There you are, commanding the stage with a story that electrifies the room. And 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 going to find out how to make this dream your reality with my guest, Mike Ganino. Mike is a storytelling expert, speaking coach, and creative director who helps professional speakers, as well as authors, 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. 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.

Mike Ganino: Thanks for having me. You know, one of the joyful things that I get to do in my work is 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 live inside of their world for a little bit to help them bring that to the stage.

So you are definitely one of those people, and I got to learn so much through our time together. So I’m really thankful for that as well.

Susan Drumm: 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 a town hall. What’s the first thing you need to let these people know about how they show up?

Mike Ganino: That it really matters a lot. 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. I eventually became a director of training, a head of HR, a 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.

One of the things early on in my career on the corporate restaurant training side of things — where I was giving workshops on anything from customer service to how to interview people, to the general managers and things like that — was that at the end of the day, the people who came to these sessions, 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 dig into some specific style of interviewing, we were teaching them — 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 change over the course of a three-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, 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 someone got on stage, or someone stepped in front of 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’re 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, why didn’t they get the memo? Why didn’t they follow 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.

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’re boring — they don’t get it clear. It’s costing them believability. People are like, I don’t really know if that person cared. Can you help them do what you do?” And so my foray into working with people like you came because a corporate client 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 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?

That’s one of the things I really think more executives and more leaders can be a little more thoughtful about when we’re going out there 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?

Susan Drumm: 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 meetings that you’re leading. It’s not just, “I’m providing information,” because the truth is they could get it elsewhere. If it was just about that, 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 got to captivate them in a certain way. So what’s the secret sauce in doing that?

Mike Ganino: The secret sauce, I wish I could bottle it, right? I think there’s two things that I see often when it comes to execs and leaders who are presenting — whether that’s at a company conference, an industry event, or even in an all-hands, or a recorded video that we’re sending out to let everyone know about a change that’s coming up or a new launch.

The common thing is that we don’t package it in a story. So figuring out how can we tell a story that helps the team see this. If we’re talking about a change that we need to make to stay relevant in the industry, to keep competing, to battle whatever’s going on — whether it’s AI today, or political changes, or geopolitical changes, whatever the case might be, those are real things going on — 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 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 going to affect our workplace, how we’re going to battle some new competitor coming into our space, or regulations — can we put that into context that helps them understand what we’re up against? Can we give them a little lived experience to see that story through, versus just coming in and saying, “Hey, here’s what we’ve got to do,” and they’re left thinking, “Well, what about this or what about that?”

Because that’s a big risk as a leader — 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 going to lose our jobs, the whole industry is going away, we’re all going to be replaced. They replace it with the most negative, scary version in the absence of you, as a leader, giving them the narrative. 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 — and this is also one of the interesting things I’ve learned from working with you, and in your work around patterns and even with the playlists — 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 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 — I’ve worked with executives before where I’ve come in and said, “Hey, can you videotape your next all-hands, and then we’re going to watch that together when I come in, and work together on how we improve.” And all the time, what I see is people who 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? We’re watching and seeing: should I believe them? Should I trust them? What’s going on with the way they — why are they holding their hands that way? Why are they crossing their arms that way? And it’s one of those strange things — I feel like you’ve probably seen it a lot too — it’s one of the last places I think we get feedback on at work: presentation skills and communication skills.

We might get notes of, “Hey, don’t do this in a meeting.” We’ll get notes on spreadsheets and how to support things, and maybe even get some notes on how to put our slide decks together. But it is a rare person, 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?”

And so people don’t get the feedback, but it is the number-one thing that is hurting their careers. It’s the number-one thing hurting a lot of leaders — 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 everyone wants to cry. It’s amazing — the thing of like, you want to watch a very powerful executive cry? Make them watch themselves on camera.

But those are the two big things I think: storytelling, and really the physical presence — the out-of-breathness, like, have you even thought to breathe for a moment? Those little things make a big difference in whether people believe you, whether people understand what you’ve said, and whether they leave with the same version of the story you wanted them to — versus the version they’ve cooked up, because there was an absence of a narrative for them.

Susan Drumm: Right, right. And this is the intersection of what you do with leadership development, because what I see is people would say it’s the most terrifying thing — to learn to see. 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. That would be the worst thing. That’s going to knock — I’m feeling I’ve inched up my confidence pretty well, and then that would knock it back down.

And what I mean by the intersection is: if you’re in a space where you’re at a higher level of consciousness, it doesn’t bother you so much. You’re not so wrapped up — 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. That’s why people don’t even go there, right? But the more inner work you’re doing around getting comfortable with your own leadership, understanding your gifts and blind spots, it’s more like you could look at it and go, “Oh yeah, I see that. I see I’m doing that. I didn’t realize I was doing that. Okay.” It doesn’t have that emotional pull that I think is keeping some leaders from doing this work.

Mike Ganino: Yeah, that sting. And I think the other thing too that happens — this happens even with my clients who are keynote speakers, when we’re watching back the tape. I was doing a workshop with a financial team, and it was all their people who go out and do pretty big fundraising, so they’re often at conferences, they’re on panels, or they’re going into people’s offices and presenting as a team. 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: “I don’t like the way I’m sitting,” “I don’t like this,” “Oh, I look like this,” “my hair looks like that,” “oh, I look angry, I look this way.” And those are never the things that I’m picking out.

So I think there’s also this element of being self-critical of things that aren’t actually important to the message. 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 said something — a lot of people still carry that with them, patterns, to use your work — and we aren’t even aware that that’s what’s shaping the way we view ourselves on camera.

I remember this very specifically with this team of people — I had them go through and talk about what they saw, and then I said, “Okay, cool, my turn.” And it was none of the stuff that they said. I said, “Oh, it was interesting — you started this way, which probably made the audience think all these negative thoughts, and they got too far into the negative thoughts before you could pull them 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 put your arms up that way,” or whatever. But it was never about, “You look unwell,” or “you look unhealthy,” or “you don’t look tan,” or “your weight’s a problem.” And those were always the things we nitpick.

So I think no wonder people don’t want to watch the video back — because they turn into their worst bully. 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 I hope people get when they’ve worked with me in that way.

Susan Drumm: Yeah. And what are some of those things? Let’s say someone isn’t able to work with you — what are the things you’re looking for when you watch somebody’s speech?

Mike Ganino: There’s the physical dynamics, right? So I teach these five stage languages that audiences understand a story through. The first one is verbal — how are you actually packaging your information? Is it clear? Do I understand the concept clearly? Do you set it up easily? 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? Or is it the jargon that we often use, the very high-level speak that isn’t helping anyone understand the context, but is just showing that you’re real smart and know your information? Can we use metaphors? 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. I’m listening for: does someone get stuck in one place? Because our voice is like a piano — 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: 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? Because it signals to the audience — just like I did right now — something important is being said here. Do we have more of the range we can play with? That’s that second language I’m listening for.

A lot of people will sometimes think they need to speak slower. People have been told that you should speak slower, and so they become very aware and try to do this, and they start sounding like Oprah — “like 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, because that’s annoying to listen to as well. And of course, it gets you stuck in your head, worried about how you sound.

I’m looking at physical — that’s the third stage language. I’m looking at the physicality. Were you sitting in an interview, in a panel interview, 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? 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 movements over and over because 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 going to 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: are the answers on the ground? Is the teleprompter on the ground that you’re looking down at? But people will do this thing where they’re talking, and then they’ll turn their shoulder slightly away from the audience — not even staying open to the audience — and they’ll 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.

And then visual — are there visual things you could have brought? Is there a prop you could have used? Could you have sketched something on a board for us that would have helped us conceptualize this idea more easily? Are there slides? What’s on the slides? Slides are a big one — often there’s way too much on the dang slide, or there are images on the slide that make the audience have to stop and think, “Wait, how does that image relate to what they’re saying?” because it’s not really related. So I’m 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 Christmas pudding and need to hit the trail, or whatever the case is. No one’s worried about that. They’re worried about: 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 anybody, as a communicator, makes bad choices. I think, in my experience, people just weren’t aware there was another choice they could make. That’s what I witness a lot.

Susan Drumm: Yeah. And I would say, going back to the impact — why not start with a story? Why is the story so important? This is a place where I think a lot of executives and entrepreneurs think, well, storytelling is for the professional speaker — I’m just here to convey information.

Mike Ganino: 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.

One of the ways — when I was selling public speaking support and storytelling support and presentations to leadership teams, and not startups really, but small tech companies was a big niche of mine for a couple of years — what I would say all the time is: so you’ve gathered 400 employees, what’s your average wage, and you’re going to have them here for two hours at an all-hands. So what’s the cost of this meeting? What’s the sunk cost — not only the cost of the meeting, but the cost of them not doing something else? So now we’re talking about a $30,000 meeting, and you don’t even want to think about the information. This is a big-stakes thing. If someone was stealing $30,000 from your company, you’d 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 them sign off on it. If it was a change, like, “Hey, from now on you’ve got to park in the green slots instead of the blue ones,” just send a memo and have them sign off that they understood it, put up a sign, whatever. But if we’re gathering people to help them think differently, to understand a big challenge we’re up against, to understand a rollout, or a new launch, or a new path we’re taking as a company, to introduce new leaders to the team — even executive leaders to the team — we’re gathering them to assuage their fears, to get them to understand the gravity of the situation we’re in, to get them to understand the opportunity ahead of us.

And if the information alone could do that, then you would send a PDF. But you gather them there because you know it needs a little something extra. I like the Mary Poppins rule of why storytelling — the information, the insight, is the medicine. And Mary Poppins told us that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. 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 gives the team two things I’ve seen happen. One is that it shapes the context and the narrative, so they’re not as scared, not as worried as they would have been otherwise. It also often gives them language they can communicate to others about it.

I had a restaurant technology client, and when we were rolling out — forever they had one type of business, direct to restaurants only — and they were going to roll out a marketplace, where you could go to 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, we cut out the middleman,” and those marketplaces were the demon for years. So they were rolling out a marketplace for the first time, and I was like, we have to really package this correctly, because we’ve done a really good job demonizing the marketplace. 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 us telling them, “This is what you’re going to 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.”

Susan Drumm: Exactly.

Mike Ganino: And they understood how to package it because we gave them the story. We gave them the language. And we see this even with — there’s a bunch of research around little kids who understand the story of their family before they were born, and who understand how they were born and what was going on. Those kids have less anxiety, less fear 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.

Susan Drumm: Yeah. And the story is more memorable, ultimately. Like, yes, you’re presenting information, but most people aren’t going to retain it unless it’s done in a way that—

Mike Ganino: —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? And I agree with you, so often the context is what’s missing.

Susan Drumm: You have a very unique way of going through, like, what’s the old story, what’s the new story, and helping people start before you even get into what’s the thing. You haven’t set the stage or set the table to make that message receptive. And so I think that framework is super powerful, and how you work.

Mike Ganino: It’s funny. When I first started working with people outside of just — because initially it was a big hotel chain that I had been their keynote speaker for, 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 you don’t know how to communicate, you train people to ignore you, which I think is a death wish for a leader — if you’re teaching people not to pay attention to what you have to say.

And so with that group, one of the things I was doing initially was a little bit of messaging, a little bit of 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 speakers, authors who were going out speaking on their books — I started really paying attention to the ways 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, three supporting points, and a close — which is just like a five-paragraph essay.

And what we’re often asking — whether it’s a keynote speaker like you, or an executive giving a presentation to their team or even their industry — we’re asking people to look at something differently. And maybe we’re not asking for 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 fiction. And I started thinking, how could we apply this to the work 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 model that you’re talking about, which I call the Transformational Narrative — putting together the narrative for change.

Because if we’re going to ask people to make a big change — this company that I’ve long been a fan of, and worked with, and been hired by, called ZingTrain, out of Ann Arbor, Michigan — 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 and 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 because 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 going to make them say, “Yeah, let’s go.” And that is what I aim to do with the Transformational Narrative, which is this three-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. Think about if you were on a team, and the leadership was coming in and asking you to change in some way — we have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, we’ve got to do more with less, all these things we hear all the time — what if that started with the situation we find ourselves in, the world around us right now, where we’re at and why the way 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 want to 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 the 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 with a new rollout or a new plan, they think, “Okay, well, sounds good, we’ll just see if this one rolls.”

Susan Drumm: Sure.

Mike Ganino: We’ll see what happens in a couple weeks. This kind of communication style helps you really set up — it forces you to really think about the situation and understand it from their perspective. So, sitting in that director’s seat and thinking, how is the audience going to 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 going to 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 — instead of wasting $30,000 on an all-hands that didn’t do anything.

Susan Drumm: Absolutely. Well, you have so much knowledge. I only have 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?

Mike Ganino: I think it’s happening. I think there’s a lot of ways. The big thing, I think, as it applies to leadership — and 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 are going to want this — it’s like another book or something. It’s really good.

But I think that the place where a lot of leaders come from — and especially, so many of us keep getting promoted because we’re good at our job, because we’re subject matter experts, because we know a lot — we keep getting promoted, and promoted, and promoted. And with AI, the day of just being a subject matter expert is slowly going away, because AI is going to keep getting smarter and smarter, and better at understanding concepts, and good at doing them, and good at teaching them.

What we have to do — and I think this is 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, it 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 assuage their fears over where we’re going, what’s going on. Because when people are in that fear mode, they do nothing — they sit and they wait.

Susan Drumm: Yeah.

Mike Ganino: 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? So that it actually gives them the compelling reason for doing something different, that it calms their fears, or excites their energy to move forward. And I think that in this world of AI, knowing a lot of stuff, being able to even interpret data — that is going to be a machine job.

Susan Drumm: Yeah.

Mike Ganino: The human job is going to be getting hearts and minds and energies aligned in the right direction. And that is a big call for leadership right now, I think.

Susan Drumm: Absolutely. You need to develop, first of all, empathy — to understand how my message potentially lands. 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—

Mike Ganino: What are emotions?

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

Mike Ganino: I’m really easy to find, once you figure out how to spell the last name. I’m Mike Ganino — G-A-N-I-N-O — on all the places. And the good thing about having a last name like Ganino is I win the SEO game. So if you type in Mike Ganino, you’ll find me on all your favorite sites. 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. You can find that everywhere you like to get books. So, Make a Scene, by Mike Ganino, and then, yeah, Mike Ganino on the internet — I’ll see you there.

Susan Drumm: 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 I really encourage people to do that. So thank you.

Mike Ganino: Thanks for having me.

Susan Drumm: If you like this episode, you’re not going to want to 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 helps 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 and the bell to get notified when we release new content. I’ll see you on the next episode of The Enlightened Executive.