What causes your ears to perk up?

The Dilbert cartoon has a cult-like following based on the experiences of real-world people, living down stream of corporate nonsense.  Dilbert makes me chuckle.  Occasionally I giggle out loud.  Recently, I held back a belly laugh as I sat in conference room listening to the Dilbert drone of  a real-world Corporate robot.  I found myself living on the funny pages!

As God is my witness, I heard ‘it’ say these phrases in a summary statement to a 30-minute speech: “one trick pony,” ‘in it for the long haul,” “at the end of the day,” “deeper dive to find the low hanging fruit,” “no matter what we bring to the table, we need to make sure our customers want to take it“…and my personal favorite: “if we do this right…we will get hockey stick growth.”

We’ve all been there before — fighting back the primal yawn instinct, making our grocery list, checking our Blackberrys and iPhones under the table and dreaming about what we would do with PowerBall money.  The question is…what causes your ears to perk up?

In my opinion, if you are going to host a meeting these days, you better have a compelling reason for us to meet!  We’re all distracted by our own ‘noise.’  We can be motivated to show up, pay attention and really listen if we believe we are a part of something important.  And if we think the leader can stay on point.  And, if  we know we will get straight talk.

This applies to PTA fundraisers, Board rooms, Sales Meetings and especially Staff Meetings.  We’ve all heard ‘low hanging fruit’ and ‘at the end of the day’ one too many times.

Now I’m all ears…will you please share your opinion of what good leaders do to make your ears perk up?  Please reply with anything you wish to share, and I just might pass it on along.