A senior leadership group within Airbnb often communicates high-stakes presentations to senior leaders, foreign stakeholders, and to their CEO, who is known to limit talks to 5 minutes. In addition to the CEO having little time and patience for subpar presentations, the company also enforced a hard limit of two-hour training windows.
Future business growth depended on these leaders nailing their communication skills and presentations. Miscommunication was costing them valuable time, executive buy-in on innovative projects and initiatives, and a loss of new international business.
Industry
Services
The big challenge
Multiple leaders needed to uplevel their presentation and communication skills. Some needed to frequently present, and appease, a high-standards CEO. Others needed to frequently work with foreign governments due to regulations in their industry, but were hitting communication roadblocks due to different cultures, nationalities, and other nuances.
Recognizing a strong skills gap for better communication, the L&D leader pushed hard for Duarte training, because she knew the ROI was worth it. They needed a communication learning journey to teach their leaders how to make audience-centric presentations, whether for a CEO or for someone from another part of the world.
Duarte started by conducting their own pre-workshop audience analysis of their CEO and his communication style. We referenced multiple interviews to understand his ability to influence and which Duarte workshop methodology would work best. From there, we mapped out a strategy to ensure communication success.
We initiated several alignment meetings, one with the point of contact to set expectations, then a second involving leadership and key stakeholders to ensure we understood their strategic goals and metrics.
For presentations, we learned they needed to balance detail with simplicity, how to design content that meets the needs of multiple audiences, and how to develop hooks to keep people interested. For communicating, we discovered they needed to learn how to adapt their message for different audiences, how to still be effective when communicating to different cultures and nationalities, how to choose whether to go deep in a topic, or to stay high level, while being prepared for either if an audience asks for it, and finally, to be audience-first in their core messaging. What a speaker may value may not be what is important to an audience.
We walked through audience analysis exercises and taught the team about who the “hero” is for their presentations. This was a big unlock for the team! The story structure section was a big win for this team, and it generated lots of insightful questions and comments.
We also instituted small group peer feedback coaching sessions: They offered feedback on content and visuals during the first round especially when some folks shared their text-heavy slides. They started to recognize the relationship of “what is and what could be,” and ensured timely transitions from their “Act 1 to Act 2” in their presentations.
The results
This is a fast-paced learning culture, and they cap all trainings to no more than 90 minutes! It was their first time working with an outside partner, but their leaders expressed it was worth it! Some leaders started this learning journey by proclaiming themselves as master storytellers, with 15 years of communication experience. But by the end of their time training with Duarte, they shared they learned new communication skills.
Our time-tested workshops made a significant impact on Airbnb’s senior leadership, and they walked away from Duarte trainings transformed with better communication skills that helped their daily work find more success, and by default, more business growth.
“The most senior person in the room told everyone he could do better and elevate his storytelling game. He went from, ‘I’m an excellent speaker and I know who to craft a story,’ to ‘there’s a lot for me to learn and I could do a better job when delivering a message, so it’s well received and understood by my audience’.”
