We have been asked to speak or we have punted a chance to speak to an audience. We will have a message in mind for the talk and we begin the process of constructing the talk. Unfortunately we are now in the era of short attention spans, “fake news”, massive cynicism and intolerance. Contending philosophies and diverse experience has been tossed out the window in favour of tribal agreement and solidarity of interpretation. Cancel culture started on US varsity campuses as students began aggressively confronting Professors during lectures, if the students didn’t agree with the content or view. As American politics has collapsed into a bi-modal equation of “us” versus “them”, bi-partisanship has been quietly taken out the back and garrotted.
“A hundred flowers blooming and a thousand schools contending” isn’t fashionable anymore, as foxholes are dug deeper and the sniping has become continuous. Where does this leave us as speakers? It is difficult enough to be a speaker today, without another layer of complexity. Every time we get on our feet to speak, we are putting ourselves up as targets and are exposing our personal and professional brands.
Business topics generally are pretty boring, so the degree of angst being generated isn’t usually substantial. Nevertheless, there are land mine fields a plenty for us to stray into. Diversity, equity and inclusion generates attention around the configurations of the upper echelons of companies. Plastic waste entering the food chain demands changes in the amount of plastic being used and how it is disposed of. Floods alternating with droughts around the world and the disappearance of ice sheets at the poles, has attention focused on what companies are doing to battle climate change. Online hacking and broadcast of personal information and internet security in general, are urgent issues without solutions in sight. I could go on, but let me stop here to make the point that while most of what we say, we may think is harmless, we may be overly optimistic.
Captains of industry and the sub-captains are being scrutinised to an extent not seen before. Audiences are sensitised to their preferred expectations and requirements about how they think the world should be and how companies should conduct themselves. Next thing we pop up to give our talk and walk into any number of potential maelstroms. Are we skill set ready? Are we mentally prepared?
When presenting in business, unlike at some Universities, it is unlikely the audience will try to shout us down and deny us the opportunity to speak and be heard. Generally, hostilities and gun play are reserved for the Q&A. Once we open up for questions, we are now in a street fight, the defining aspect of which is that there are no rules. Audience members can say whatever they like, however unrelated or off-topic to what we were speaking about. They can be rude, arrogant, bullying, condescending and aggressive and there isn’t anything we speakers can do about that.
If we are smart, we will have set the frame of the questions by delineating the time period for the Q&A. This is a critical move because if you ever have to get out of Dodge in a hurry, you can always say, “we have reached the end of our allotted time for today’s talk and let me make some concluding remarks”. We insert this little time control timebomb at the start to enable us to have a dignified exit if we are being bombarded with nasty questions and swept up in oceans of invective.
We can disarm a heat seeking missile thinly disguised as a question by paraphrasing what was asked. With any question time, it is a good practice to repeat the question so that those down the back can hear it. Well that is except for the attack question and we definitely do not want to repeat it. Instead, we paraphrase it to take the heat out of it. For example, if someone asked, “Isn’t it true that you are going to fire 30% of the workforce in the next few weeks?”, we can paraphrase this as “the question was about staffing”. We still have to answer the question though, but we have successfully reduced some of the tension in the room and we come across as cool, calm and collected in the face of incoming hot rounds of fire.
The best plan is to give our answer and smoothly and swiftly move on to the next question by saying, “Who has the next questions?”. Do not ask the hostile interlocutor if they are satisfied with your answer by saying, “does that satisfy your question?”, because if it doesn't the brawl continues. If your antagonist won’t be brushed off so easily and interjects during a follow-up question, denouncing you as a fraud and a charlatan for not properly answering their question the way they wanted it, we need to be careful what we say next.
We need to remember that we cannot win in a street fight with no rules, so we are better to break off hostilities with that person and just move on. We should say, “I appreciate you have strong views on this subject, so rather than occupy everyone’s time right now, let’s you and I get together after the talk and continue our debate”. At which point we again say, “Who has the next question?” and keep moving forward.
If things don’t get this fraught, but we still have a sizeable gap in views on a subject with one of our audience, we need to just acknowledge that and not try to “win the argument” because that is just not possible when we deal with zealots who are locked into their world view on a subject. We can say, “thank you for sharing your thoughts on this subject and I see we are a fair way apart on this topic, so let’s just agree to disagree. Who has the next question?”.
We cannot win in a public verbal brawl, so we are better to avoid it at all costs. The audience expects us to be professional all of the time and many of them will view the antagonist’s activities as ridiculous. We cannot bring ourselves down to that level and so we must stay above the mud and the blood they want to embroil us in.
The date has been set for our presentation. Naturally, we are pretty busy with work, so we borrow that Toyota production line mantra of “Just In Time:” and leave it all to the last moment to cobble together our presentation. We rifle through our previous presentations, looking for slides we can repurpose for this topic, which of course is an excellent time saver. We just manage to get the deck together in time and off we go to the venue. Here we give the only rendition of this talk to our live audience. This is such a high risk high wire act, threatening both personal and professional brands, you shake your head as to why on earth someone would choose to do it this way.
Toyota makes great cars and they have pioneered many innovations in car production, but they are not the model we need for giving presentations. We need Aesop’s fable here about the hare and the tortoise. The hare is so much faster than the tortoise, but in this fable the hare loses the race, because although the tortoise was slower they were more consistent and steady in making progress.
“We don’t plan to fail, but we fail to plan” is an old saw we have all heard before and which we ignore at our peril in any aspect of life. Regarding presentations, restrain your hand for from firing up the laptop to start searching for slide decks and instead spend some time tortoising. Who is my audience going to be? What level of expertise will they have on this subject? What are their seniority, age and gender splits? What are they most interested in? Can I get enough information from the organisers to enable me to start the planning? Slide deck amalgamation is like firing blindly into the dark, because we don’t know what our target is for this talk.
Once we have decided who we are going to be targeting for this talk, what is the purpose of the exercise? There are generally four purposes from which we can choose: persuade, motivate, inform or entertain. Most public business talks are usually focused on the first three. The entertain one is the classic “filler” role for the speaker. You are the light variety show before or after the main event. It might be the luncheon or dinner spot at the convention or conference. I hate this one. You need serious, real talent to be entertaining, which is why, in a business context, we should leave this to the professionals. If you are a great raconteur, bully for you, but for most of us, this is a step way too far.
Once we know what our purpose is, we can fix on some key messages. These will depend to a great extent on how much time we have been allotted. There are only so many things we can cover in-depth in a thirty or forty minute talk. Having our central thesis determined is fine, but so what? We need to think about the evidence we will marshal to make our point stick and for us to be convincing for the audience. This might include data, statistics, expert testimonials, evidence, examples, storytelling, etc. If we find ourselves making a bold statement, then we need to pause and say the words “fake news” out aloud to ourselves, because that is exactly what the audience will be thinking, unless we can prove what we are saying.
We need a blockbuster opening to break through all the mental clutter immobilising our audience and blocking our messaging from getting through. We need to design two closes, one for at the end of the talk and a second one for after the Q&A. Recency is a powerful thing with human beings, so we have to go with that flow and make sure the last thing they hear is what we want them to hear. Now we are ready to consider what visuals we need to help the audience and ourselves with the navigation of this talk. There will be a burning temptation to load the slide deck to the gunwales with content both on each screen and with too many screens. Go totally Zen here. Be minimalist, stripped down to the bare essentials. We don’t want the slides to upstage us – we must remain the main act and the slides are our servant, not the other way around.
Once we are ready, we start the hard work and that is the practice, the rehearsal of the talk. Doing a full thirty minute talk at full power, over and over again in rehearsal is seriously exhausting, but necessary. We need to know the content, the cadence and whether we can fit it into the time constraints we are facing. By the time we get in front of our audience we are a very polished presenter on this topic, fully tooled up to impress everyone with our professionalism.
In Part One, we explored the mental barriers around linguistic perfection which are holding Japanese businesspeople back and denying them the chance to have “executive presence”. Once we have cleared that hurdle, then we can start to work on the other key elements for achieving “executive presence”. Appearing confident is not a plus in Japan. Here, being unsure, timid, shy, unprepossessing, modest, bashful are all signs of good citizenship, by fitting in with the majority and avoiding standing out. Having “executive presence” is the exact opposite of this cultural preference, so it takes quite a lot of work to convince Japanese executives they have to stand out and be heard.
The obvious differentiators are eye contact, voice amplification, gesture usage and posture. Looking someone straight in the eye is a western concept emphasising credibility and trust. In Japan, it is rude, so everyone is taught to look at the forehead or the throat instead. When coaching these executives, I have to make the point that their role is different when presenting, to other aspects of their work. They are not having a chat with their mates now. They are on stage presenting or in the meeting room commenting. Six seconds of eye contact is about the right length to engage someone in the room without it becoming too intrusive. We have some proprietary “secret” techniques for helping with this eye contact fear and we change the dynamic for these executives and they realise they can do it. They could always do it in fact, but mentally they were not ready to do it and that is where we apply the magic.
Engaging the audience, especially an international audience, makes a huge difference to the credibility of the Japanese executive. They come across as supremely confidence and sure of what they are saying. Let’s face it, we are all suckers for buying the confidence of others and by extension, what they are saying. The voice has to back it up though. A tiny little voice gets lost very quickly and audience attention drifts away. Speaking with a loud voice is not polite in Japan, so we run into another cultural barrier.
We use a lot of video in our coaching and while the Japanese executive may feel they are screaming out their words, under our coaching direction for them to go louder, when they see the replay, they realise it just looked extremely confident. “Seeing is believing” is definitely a necessity here to overcome the mindset that loud is bad. Amplifying the message really makes such a difference to be taken seriously and for people to dwell upon what you are saying. Again, it is adding that patina of confidence to the message and our own credibility standing behind the message. It sounds simple – when appropriate, speak louder. However these executives are not even close to the loudness required, so they need a lot of support to help them through this barrier. We also have to keep pushing them to go bigger with their voice modulation, to have more vocal range, to project more power.
Holding their hands behind their back is a favourite of Japanese executives when speaking, usually because they are not sure what to do with their hands. They feel this anchors them and provides stability when they speak. That may be true, but it negates a lot of the power available to us as speakers, especially when we can employ our gestures to really emphasise a point we want to make. Combining eye contact and voice modulation with our gestures is a dynamite combination. It creates so much power and credibility for the message. Hiding our hands behind our back or locking our hands together in front of our body are denying us access to this tremendous tool.
Gestures have a very short use by date though. Holding the same gesture beyond around fifteen seconds just sees the power of that tool evaporate and the residue is just an annoying distraction. We have to turn the gestures on and off. Gestures also have to be congruent with what we are saying. We can show something large by extending the width between our hands or we can use one hand as a measure and show something tall or short. The words have to match up with what we are indicating or it looks strange and is an unnecessary distraction from our message.
Posture is another indicator of confidence. Slouching, leaning on something, shifting our weight continuously, wandering around the stage, walking too briskly to and fro, only engaging half of the audience are all competition with what is coming out of our mouth. We want to appear professional and that means standing straight and tall like a professional. It means commanding the whole room with our body language. There is a Japanese word “ki” (気), which is describing our vital life force and we want to employ that when speaking. We want to be projecting our energy into the audience and across the room, we want to fill up the entire space with our energy.
Using correct eye contact, voice modulation, gestures and posture together creates an impression of solidity and gravitas. This adds up to creating a sense of “executive presence” when we are speaking. For Japanese executives, the hardest parts for them are straying from the cultural confines of their upbringing, to become a force in public. Naturally, we teach them how to secure all of the attributes needed to have executive presence, but the key is how we teach them the necessary mindset shift, to bring it all together.
As a training company we are often asked to assist with helping Japanese executives to have “executive presence”. This term is a broad descriptor, but essentially we all understand what they are talking about. They want their Japanese executives to be seen as professionals and to have them listened to and taken seriously. Japan is the third largest economy in the world, but its star is fading. In my observation, on the world stage of conventions and conferences, APAC executives from China, India and Korea are having greater impact. One of the issues is linguistic expertise imbalance, with Japan usually at the back of the bus. This is a self-induced limitation though, which doesn’t have to be such a negative factor.
The Japanese mindset is one about perfection. There should be no defects, no mistakes and having set the bar so high, they have made it extremely difficult for themselves to deliver when speaking in English. Chinese speakers have an advantage because the grammar is similar to English with a subject-verb-object configuration. International Indian executives are educated in English and the main barrier for them is the degree to which their strong accent plays a role in making communication difficult, combined with the rapid speed with which they speak. When we get to the Koreans though, the comparisons become a bit harsher, because Korean language has the same grammatical structure as Japanese – subject-object-verb. So, why are the Japanese not doing a better job speaking the international language of business – English?
Actually they can do it, but they have talked themselves out of it and as a consequence they hesitate to speak up in English, which of course means yielding zero “executive presence” in the global arena. This is one of the reasons they love to use slides when presenting and pack those slides with massive amounts of text, which they then insist on reading to us. Given we can all read, this is very boring and we switch off and escape from their talk. They are also allowing the screen to dominate the proceedings and their potential executive presence has now been surrendered to the slideshow. Remember, we want all of the attention on us and we want to dominate the slides, not the other way around.
When we are coaching Japanese executives to have more presence, we have to deal with this linguistic issue head on. They have made a fundamental assumption that linguistic perfection is needed to be effective in communication. Therefore, they fear failure and embarrassing themselves by speaking less than perfect English. The best way not to fail is not to speak at all or to speak as little as possible.
This fear of failure runs through the society. Karl Hahne, who runs Hafael here in Japan, was a recent guest of mine on my Japan’s Top Business Interviews podcast. He made an interesting observation, which hadn’t occurred to me about failure and how it permeates itself in Japan. He noted that in ancient times, if a samurai failed his lord, he was expected to commit seppuku or ritual suicide. In the modern business world, we sometimes see executives committing suicide to take responsibility for mistakes. In some cases, they even kill themselves to take responsibility for their superior’s mistakes. The aversion to making mistakes runs deep in Japanese society and as coaches, we have to work with that fact in mind.
We work on switching their mindset to encompass the idea that you can still have effective communication, even if there are errors or imperfections. I demonstrate this by mangling the Japanese language, using an English grammatical structure with Japanese vocabulary. I say, “watashi Tokyo eki ikimasu” and then ask them what I said? They tell me, “you said you were going to Tokyo Station”. I get a bit melodramatic about this stage and feign shock and ask them how they could have possibly understood what I said, when it was imperfect Japanese. The point I make to them is that just as they adjusted what I said into correct Japanese in their mind, we do the same thing. They don’t need to limit themselves by fearing mistakes, because this hesitancy in speaking up is guaranteed to erode their presence in a meeting or when making a presentation.
To get attention we need to be confident when we speak. All of us buy the confidence generated by others and we receive the message they bear as a result. If we fear mistakes, then we just don’t speak up and even if we do, it usually isn’t convincing, so it is ineffective. Getting over this mental barrier is hard for Japanese executives and this is where they need a lot of coaching. In my own experience, they certainly have enough grammatical knowledge and enough vocabulary, so that is not the real barrier. Their perfectionism has to be replaced with confidence that their message is getting through, even if there are mistakes.
In Part Two, we will look at some of the tools available to these executives, to have greater executive presence.
As Covid slowly declines here in Japan, things are slowly getting back to a semblance of normality. Imagine my surprise, to be asked to apply for a spot in a Chamber of Commerce pitch contest, with actual people in the room. Actually, I was a ring-in, because originally they told me I would have to join the pitch contest later in the year because this one was already full of contenders. Covid took care of that little glitch and eliminated some of the pitch contestants who became infected, so I was shuffled into the pack at the last minute.
I asked the organisers where in the batting order I would get my chance. I was in the middle, which isn’t a great spot. I prefer and recommend you go first or last. If first, the idea is to blitz it so that the first impression is owned by you. Also all the other contestants are being measured against you and they are not going to measure up at all. The end spot is the most preferred because this is the final impression and the one that lingers longest in the mind before the voting process starts.
Ten minutes is long enough if you know what you are doing. The other contestants who went for a slide show made some basic errors. You only have ten minutes, so the point is to build a strong impression for your company. If you choose to use slides, then make them super interesting. The other contestants didn’t go for that idea and decided to just boor everyone with lines of text and more text and some more text, for good measure. In the case of one of them, their profession was a people business, but there were no people in the slides. If it had been me, I would have had tons of photos of customers enjoying their service, lots of shots of happy families, some shots of the behind the scenes preparation for delivering the service. Something visual so we could identify with the service they provided. Text means your brain has to think whereas images tell you all the information you need to know immediately.
In my case, I decided to take a leaf out of the content marketing handbook. Content marketing means you provide some examples of your service to show your credibility. It might be white papers, testimonials, videos, podcasts, books – all manner of things which underline you are a legitimate expert in your field. We have produced a handy little card to fit into your wallet called 6 Impact Points For Persuasive Power. Before the talk, I distributed these to everyone in the room.
When it was my turn to talk, I explained that persuasion power is needed by everyone in business, be they leaders, salespeople, colleagues and anyone who would like others to cooperate with them. Now I have cast a wide net, to make the topic relevant to all gathered to hear this pitch. I didn’t say much about Dale Carnegie, except that we will celebrate 60 years in Japan next year. That is sufficient credibility by itself. I mentioned the five core areas we cover, to give people some idea of the scope of the business and that was about the sum of the propaganda. It is supposed to be a pitch contest, but actually waxing lyrical over the virtues of your company is pretty dull for everyone else, so it doesn’t really get very far.
I went through the six points explaining how they work and how anyone can incorporate these into their presenting skill set. The audience feels they are getting some value for their time rather than being forced to listen to irrelevant details about another company they have zero interest in. People are primarily interested in themselves, so by focusing on how these 6 persuasion points can help them, they feel some benefit from attending and listening to me. The other key thing with this choice of content was that I have to be able to walk the talk. If I am going to run around telling others how to present, then I have to be able to be the role model myself. This is a chance to add credibility, when you can do what you recommend to others. The speakers before me felt the gap in presenting expertise and it was also obvious to the audience. The speaker after me publicly said that I would be hard to follow and she was right, because her presentation unfortunately was not benefiting from the points I had just been making.
The pitch contest was no contest, because I planned it that way. No powerpoint in sight so that all the focus was on me. I also chose a subject of universal applicability and interest. I demonstrated what I was talking about, so that people could leave the affair thinking they learnt something from an expert and that card is for sure safely ensconced in their wallets. One of the earlier speakers mentioned he had spare copies of the powerpoint, if people wished to have them and naturally no one was interested in the slightest. Their carry home item was A4 size, not attractive and also not particularly useful in information terms. A robust business card sized summary of the 6 points on the other hand was kept. That was no accident.
So when we are presenting with other speakers, lets always assume we are competing with the other presenters and lets approach it like a contest, making sure we emerge the winner.