Human Relations For Career and Personal Success 9th Edition by Andrew Dubrin

Exercise 16

Applying Human Relations Exercise
The Thirty-Second Elevator Speech
A longstanding tip in career development and impressing higher-ups is to make a thirty-second impromptu presentation when you have a chance encounter with a key person in your organization. If you work in an office tower, the chance encounter is likely to take place on an elevator-and it is generally frowned on to have long conversations in an elevator. So the term elevator speech developed, describing a brief opportunity to impress a key person. Imagine that you have a chance encounter with a high-ranking executive in your area on the elevator or escalator, in the parking lot, during a company picnic, or at some other location. You then give that person a thirty-second pitch geared to make a positive impression. Because you must boil your pitch down to thirty seconds, you will need to prepare for a long time. (Credit President Abraham Lincoln for that insight.) About six different pairs (impresser and person to be impressed) will carry out this role-play in front of the class. The evaluators will put themselves in the role of the target key person of the thirty-second evaluation. Consider using the following scale and answering the two questions:
___________ Wow, I was impressed. (5 points)
___________ I was kind of impressed with the person I ran into. (4 points)
___________ He or she left me with at least an average impression. (3 points)
___________ I found the person to be somewhat annoying. (2 points)
___________ That person I met left with a terrible impression. (1 point)
What I liked about person's thirty-second pitch:
Find a mechanism to feed back some of your observations to the role-players. Volunteer to present the findings in class, give the person your comments on notepaper, or send him or her an e-mail.