Isaac Szymanczyk currently works as Senior Director, Digital Program Management at Skechers. He began his career in technology communications and copywriting, working for multiple agencies and brands. He then transitioned to communications consulting and ran the communications agency Conveyor for six years. Prior to joining Skechers, he held leadership roles in communications, change management, and program management at GCI, VF Corporation, and Nike.
In our conversation, Isaac talks about how storytelling and effective communication are essential in getting people to rally behind change. He discusses strategies for getting people on board, such as the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) concept. Isaac also shares actionable tips to make presentations more compelling, such as using humor to bond with the audience.
I got into my career because I was interested in communication. I was told I had a talent for writing and good presentation skills, so I started studying advertising and PR. In my studies, I learned about the human psychology and behavior aspects of persuasive messaging, whether you’re writing an ad for a car or building a deep public relations campaign on a complex initiative.
I was fascinated by how people think and why people think what they do. That took me into a world of marketing, corporate and internal communications, storytelling, and content. That eventually led me to organizational change management, which is essentially internal communications at its core.
I now work with people who I help understand change management. The goal is to help humans overcome their natural resistance to new things and get on board with the company’s chosen direction. It’s all about organizing. Before this, I did several years of change management consulting, which involved working with program management and program delivery teams. Today, we are all doing change management. Project and program management is always about putting something new in place, like processes or technology, and we just try to wrap the people side of change in at the same time.
I think of program management as, essentially, complex project management. It’s about knitting several projects and initiatives together in a common direction that you call a program. Because of the complexity of a system like that, it can get expensive and confusing quickly. You have multiple stakeholders, departments, partners, and agencies, so it’s critical to always tell a story that speaks to why this is important, whether that’s an elevator pitch or an hour-long presentation.
You have to always be ready to remind everyone — from executives to senior leaders to individual contributors — what you’re doing, where the team is going, and why their contribution is so important. It matters less what you can do than how you can persuade others to move in a common direction. Storytelling can make or break a project, regardless of the quality of the technology being delivered.
You need simplicity and clarity for effective storytelling. I mentioned seeing ineffective communication break projects where the work was very good and detailed, but the storytelling did not simplify and clarify the vision well enough. When people are confused, they have to think. When they have to think, they stall, and when they stall, they often lose momentum. With communication, we want to simplify what’s important so that whoever we’re talking with can have the same perspective.
I truly believe that simple communication is always a game changer, which is why I recommend books like Start With Why by Simon Sinek and Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. It’s very easy for people to get focused on the details of their job and forget the bigger picture, and these books do a job of teaching people to take a step back. It’s important to take a moment to ask holistically why we’re doing this, why the company is doing this work, why we’re in this specific role, and why we need to embark on new initiatives. Answering these questions for yourself is the best way to be able to answer them for others.
When I’m looking for people to join our team in any role, I initially screen for communication skills. I’ll usually issue a writing test as part of the interview process in the form of a business email. I give them the uncomfortable problem of having to write a “bad news” email to a hypothetical stakeholder, give them some basic detail, and then see how they craft it — everything from the salutation to the signature.
I look for people who have either been naturally gifted with good communication skills, or have worked on those skills throughout their careers. Then, through things like 1:1s and coaching, we take different approaches to make their skills even stronger.
In all my career, I’ve aimed to help people understand new ideas and take action. I see this as my “through line.” There’s a framework widely known in change management called the ADKAR model, which labels the five stages of change: awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement. It can be applied to almost anything, whether it’s a job change, a new technology to use at work, or dealing with a surprise, like learning your car was just towed! Those are all changes, and how we react to changes can often be mapped to those five stages.
As far as promoting a culture that embraces continual learning, I learned some interesting ideas about resistance from a book called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. It’s about the creative process and how we all have a force in us called “Resistance.” Resistance is a natural human behavior that keeps us safe — it’s a survival mechanism. So our first reaction to any new change is resistance. Each of us has a different appetite for change, but I try to help my team understand resistance is natural, and resistance is human. And we’re just here to find ways to help each other through it.
If we can simplify and clarify why people might want to get on board with a new idea or learn something new, I think that’s the key to building a culture that embraces change and continual learning is all about.
Everyone has their own bell curve of the ADKAR five stages. The height of the bell is our own personal resistance to an idea. A well-designed change management program usually factors through all the stages of awareness, but we do have to tailor it for each group or individual.
For example, let’s say you’re introducing a massive system change that affects a large group of employees. The finance team has a different set of needs than the human resources team, which has a different set of needs from the marketing team. You want to always make it real for them, and we do this by using the WIIFM, or What’s In It For Me, concept. As communicators and storytellers, we try to speak to the goals of our customers, even when our customers are internal employees rather than consumers buying a product.
We leverage everything that we can. For example, our organization sponsors a chapter of Toastmasters, an international public speaking group. Toastmasters lets you get together with other people who want to simply improve their public speaking and practice. Whether you’re speaking on Zoom in front of five people or standing in front of a huge room, Toastmasters is a great place to work on the little things that make us better speakers.
We also share tips on business writing. I go back to a series of resources I think are invaluable, including William Safire’s Rules for Writers and the book How To Write Short by Roy Peter Clark. They’re entertaining, and they can make you a better writer if you just remember a few things. Our company also invests in things like LinkedIn Learning and Coursera, which target specific skills or topics. Often, if somebody on the team knows of a course, we’ll share it with each other. Of course, YouTube is also a great resource as well.
I had an opportunity to present a case study to a group of people from multiple companies about portfolio management and how we built our program. People came up afterward to say how energizing it was to them to understand what we did, and that it motivated them to move forward with their own initiatives.
Thinking about what made the presentation effective, I, of course, used a few slides with screenshots and key concepts, but more importantly, I also made sure to bring human energy to the story — walking around the room and animating the story with my hands and body language. I shared our story going back three or four years and walked them through our journey. I made sure to acknowledge some of the humbling realizations with a sense of humor where it was appropriate. And I reinforced the point that no system and no company is perfect — we’re all just trying to get better and be more efficient and be more professional every day. Being honest with people earns trust.
It’s important to acknowledge problems while remaining optimistic about the vision of what we’re trying to create and how we embarked on this journey. Of course, we encountered the same annoyances and obstacles that everyone else does, but the takeaway was that we kept iterating and improving to get to where we are today.
The goal of this presentation was not to say, “Look at me, I’m so interesting! I’ve had such a wonderful journey, and I want to tell you about it.” Instead, the goal was to share something we experienced that might be interesting and helpful to other people. The combination of sharing lessons, making it human, and involving the vision of where we want to go from where we started made the story effective.
The easiest way is to add a little self-deprecating humor by poking fun at yourself. It’s a great way to bond with your audience. I saw this early in my career from a large conference speaker who had to discuss some contentious topics. There was a lot of politicization of these topics, and the first thing the guy did was get up and poke fun at himself for a mistake he had made that day. Everybody laughed, and relaxed, and you could instantly tell that it was a moment of relief, and that the audience was ready to listen to him.
Before you start speaking, the room is often stiff and tense. When you poke fun at yourself and admit the struggles you’ve had, it bonds the audience to you. It helps them relax and see that you’re human. It also makes the entire experience more enjoyable for both you and them.
We, as humans, constantly worry about failing, especially in the workplace. Stage fright is real — people get nervous that everyone’s going to laugh at them and the audience is just waiting for us to fail. But the opposite is actually true. Any audience who watches anyone get on stage in front of a room or perform wants the performer to succeed. When you stumble, most people aren’t hoping for a trainwreck — they’re hoping you’re able to recover.
Whenever I present, I try to humanize myself first and humanize the audience second. I remind everyone that we’re all people chasing a vision but then point to the idea that we want to do something even greater than the sum of us.
One of the best sayings I’ve heard is that African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” It’s so relevant in everything from speaking to change management to program management and team-building. You have to find a way to get everyone to go together, and that’s key to achieving great things.
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