Usually for most businesspeople we don’t really know what we are doing when it comes to presentations. We grow up in business concentrating on our tasks and getting the work done. As we rise through the ranks, we start to give updates on the results or project progress reports. As we rise a bit further we may start reporting what our Section or Division has been doing, or introducing the business strategy to senior leaders. In some cases, we may be presenting to shareholders, the media, chambers of commerce or industry groups.
Along this continuum we just bumble our way along, copying what our bosses are doing. They actually had the same presentation education we have been getting – none. So we have the blind leading the blind, generation after generation. Nobody inside the company thinks that people moving into leadership positions need to become powerful persuaders and influencers through their communication skillS. These are attributes that somehow those rising through the ranks have to pick up for themselves. If the company said, “You need to get presentation training and you will have to pay for it yourself, because we are not going to”, that would be one thing. Unfortunately, that conversation about need is never breached and there is no guidance whatsoever.
In the absence of any hints from senior leadership, on what we need to be doing around getting better at presenting, here are some starters:
We should be an expert in the area we are talking about. That means we have gained experience, have read the relevant materials and have been active in this field. Whenever we present we should feel we have reserve power, to be able to add additional information, respond to questions during Q&A and demonstrate that we know our topic in great depth. We are limited by how much time we have to speak but we should always over prepare. There is nothing more embarrassing than being shown you don’t know much about your talk topic. You will see your credibility fall off the podium and shatter into a thousand shards before your very eyes.
You may have experienced this at School or University, where some Teachers and Professors are just going through the materials in a very perfunctory, detached way. Others however were on fire with real passion for their subject. Naturally we all gravitate toward those with massive passion for their topic.
The audience won’t remember all of the detail of our talk, but they will remember our passion for the subject and therefore they will remember us. That is what we want in business isn’t it – to be differentiated, memorable, admired.
If you have to present on a topic which doesn’t particularly excite you then try and find some elements which are interesting and bring your passion to those parts. It is not great but better to have flashes of passion than a continual, consistent, humdrum, boring delivery.
If we don’t sound convinced about our message, then there is zero chance anyone listening will be convinced. In sales we say, “selling is the transfer of enthusiasm from the seller to the buyer”. Presenting is where we sell our information or our ideas.
We have done the hard work to master our subject area. We have worked on our delivery skills as a presenter. We have every right to be talking on the subject. We should also be excited by the topic and enthusiastic to share all of this wonderful knowledge and information with our audience.
Our listeners can feel whether we are positive about our content or not. They can tell if we are just going through the motions or not. We have all seen speakers like this. They have been told to give the talk and they have no interest in doing it and are just following orders. It is painful to be in that type of audience. We are trying to bring value to the audience and we have this uppermost in our mind.
If you become important in business then you will need to become an excellent presenter. You can become important in business and be a crap speaker, but you will always be eclipsed by those who have invested the time to gain the fundamental skills.
The idea of having enthusiasm would seem to be pretty obvious for someone presenting. In some cases, though we are just presenting information and getting massively enthusiastic about a bunch of not particularly illuminating numbers would be difficult. Often internal meetings are like this. We have to give our report on the revenue and client numbers or the trend with visitors to our stores or whatever. These are factual reports and if we were to suddenly start gushing with breathless enthusiasm, our bosses and colleagues may regard us with deep suspicion that we had lost our marbles. If we want our listeners to agree with our suggestions or to take action, then we definitely need enthusiasm. If we are in the persuasion business, then enthusiasm has to be a staple of our presentations.
Last week’s episode was all about the dark failings of Prime Minister Suga as a communicator. I had the unfortunate bad luck to be watching his media conference announcing the extension of the state of emergency. It was seriously painful to watch. I was reminded of how important enthusiasm was, by sitting through his long press conference, where there wasn’t a trace of enthusiasm in his presentation. In the end, I couldn’t take any more and turned the television off.
I am not being facetious, when I talk about pain in this case. Whether it is Suga or anyone else, if their job is to influence us or persuade us and they attempt that without marshalling any enthusiasm, it is physically painful to sit there and be exposed to that. So let's flip it around and think about when it is our turn to be the influencer, the persuader. How are we approaching this task? Are we just buffeting our audience with a data dump, with an extended avalanche of statistics?
Numbers are dead, by the way. They only have life injected into them by having context applied. When we do that, the relativities become clearer. Explaining the background helps explain their relevance. How often though have we been served up spreadsheets on screen or a bunch of line graphs, crowded together on screen? This is very common speaker behaviour and a big pain receptor.
We need to find poignant stories about those numbers that make them really come alive. We need to place them in context with the current business situation and commercial trends. What do they portend for the organisation? We need to contrast them with other figures, so we have some sense of perspective.
Instead, what do we get? “I know you can’t see this but….”, as the speaker drones on throwing up a spreadsheet in tiny fonts, overwhelming us with a blizzard of numbers. Why do they do that? Obviously no clue and no training would be the answer. Rather, they could use animation and show a pop up a balloon, with a single number displayed in very large font, so we can read it easily. They can then enthusiastically tell us the story of that number and what it represents. That will be memorable and impactful.
When speakers talk with zero or very low energy like Suga, they mystically suck all of the energy out of the room and suddenly you feel worse than before they started. In the opposite case, that transfer of speaker energy to the audience has an uplifting effect and the world looks better immediately. Their enthusiasm becomes contagious and suddenly the world looks a lot better to us. Which variety of speaker would you like to be known as – the uplifter or the energy thief?
Having passion for your subject is required. Even if the topic itself is rather humdrum and mundane, let’s try and find something in there that will be of interest to an audience. When we tell the stories we have selected, let’s do so with verve. We don’t need to be at max power all of the time, but at certain key junctures, we need to rev up the engine and go hard.
Watching Suga, you felt like this guy never gets out of first gear and the engine is barely ticking over. Until we can find the techniques for bringing energy to our talks, we should refrain from giving them, because the world doesn’t need another energy assassin roaming free.
We should get coaching, get the training, work hard and put a lot of emphasis on rehearsal. No one is born as a great presenter. It is a learnt skill and one we can achieve, if we give it the priority it deserves. Never forget, once we get up to speak, our personal and professional brands are in jeopardy. Suga will leave the Prime Ministership a total nobody and will soon be forgotten, except perhaps as an abject lesson in what not to do. We don’t want to join that crowd do we?
Let’s bring our enthusiasm to our subject and inject it into our audience, thereby adding to our reputation and making the whole exercise a personal branding triumph.
The news cycle is awash with Prime Minister Suga’s shock announcement that he will not continue as Japan’s leader. His predecessor Shinzo Abe quit on health concerns and handed over the Covid crisis to Suga. Here we are twelve months later and Suga is gone. His inability to communicate as a leader has been seized upon as one of the key reasons for his failure. In Episode #233, I focused on Suga’s challenges with communication. Here we are five months later and he has joined that large community of entirely forgetable Japanese leaders. From his own admission, he has reflected that he wasn’t able to communicate his thoughts in an authentic way. That would be a case of delusional thinking.
He was entirely authentic. He was boring, showed no passion, had a single facial expression regardless of the content, had no variation in the speed or strength of his delivery and never smiled. Apart from that, he was totally forgettable, especially regarding his message. His supporters, fellow politicians, have lamented that he should have spoken more from his heart. More delusion. He read all of his speeches, because he couldn’t string two words together by himself and so had to read it to us. Those speeches were no doubt prepared by bureaucrats in the relevant Ministries depending on the subject or by his staff. Every time he tried to speak to reporters without notes, he was obviously struggling and he kept those occasions as short as possible. If there was any opportunity to use teleprompters, he grabbed at it like a drowning man going down for the third time. No heart at play in any of these speeches.
He is a abject lesson for everyone about the importance of having a skilled capacity as a public speaker. This might be one of those urban myths, but apparently some parents wouldn’t let their kids listen to him, in case he created a negative influence on their communication skills. Even if it isn’t true it is still not a bad idea, because he can only instruct through negative example.
Basically, he has been a so called “retail politician” his whole career. Someone without privileges or an array of silver spoons like Abe and Previous Prime Minister and current Finance Minister Taro Aso, who through his own dint of hard work and cunning managed to climb to the highest post in the land. This is a classic tale of patronage, backroom deals and obligations running out of gas. What was also needed was a personal strength in persuasion power through public speaking. In the end, his colleagues, fully concentrated on saving their own necks, forced him out because they were concerned about an electoral backlash of voter unhappiness.
As we rise through the ranks in our careers we will be called on to become more persuasive. That will involve public speaking. Shinzo Abe version Mark 2, when he came back into the Prime Ministership, had obviously had public speaking training. He was much better than the earlier Mark 1 version. So what happened with Suga? If he in fact did receive coaching on speaking, then let’s find out who was his coach and make sure we never use them. Watching him speak in public from his time as Chief Cabinet Secretary since 2012, until he became Prime Minister in 2020, he hasn’t changed at all. It is more likely he has never sought any professional coaching on how to become more persuasive.
Why would that be? My guess would be he didn’t see the need until it was too late. By too late, I mean having to announce he was quitting. When he became the leader, he inherited the Covid crisis from Abe. During Suga’s watch it has gone on to the fifth wave, with epic numbers of people becoming infected. Let’s also toss in the Olympics, just to really turn the heat up. Probably not a lot of spare time for coaching on how to be more persuasive and get his message across to the Japanese voters.
This is the point. Don’t wait until it is too late like Suga. Get the training now and keep getting it right throughout your career. If you want to be persuasive, if you want to get your message across, then it takes work and requires concentrated time. When you get to the top like Suga, it is too late because you don’t have time. We all need to be working on this speaking facility before we get to the top. In fact, this same facility will become an engine to power us to get to the top. Get trained and keep polishing your communication skills as a lifelong learning commitment. In a few months time, Suga will have been replaced and forgotten. It could have been totally different if he had learnt how to be persuasive. He could have delivered his message, authentically and professionally, expressing clearly and succinctly what was in his heart. Sayonara Suga san.
Have you heard of XiaoIce? According to the media it is a “cutting edge artificial intelligence system designed to create emotional bonds with its six hundred and sixty million users worldwide”. It already accounts for sixty percent of all global human-AI interactions, making it the largest. Here is the terrifying punchline, “It was designed to hook users through life-like, empathetic conversations, satisfying emotional needs where real-life communications too often fall short”. It is claimed that the AI is better than humans at listening attentively. What?
Are our modern communication skills so atrophied, that we have to switch to a chatbot? Is this a function of growth, off the back of the pandemic? We are working from home, so many people feel isolated and as if there is no solid foundation in their human relations anymore. This is ironic really, because today we are in the most “wired” ecosystem in history. We have online calls, hand held mobile phones and multiple text chat options. How could we be suffering from a lack of connectivity?
The problem then is not the hardware. Generationally, we can observe that the current younger generation prefers to text than speak. Texting is less complex than trying to phrase what you want to say on the fly. Text is also less complex when trying to parse what the other party is actually saying. We don’t have to interpret the voice tone or the cadence of the message. Text is flat in tone and very fortunately editable before we send it.
The point about listening though is a good one – we have become very poor listeners. The wonderful technology we have access to today is a double edged sword, because we are now chained to our devices and the days are twenty four hours long, with no respite. We have our phones by the bedside, so we can connect to the internet immediately and we do.
What can we do to improve our communication skills? Here are a few timeless Principles of successful communications.
This sounds pretty easy, but we don’t do it. We are so focused on ourselves, we stop listening to what the other person is saying. We are churning the words around in our own mind, prepping for what we will say in the conversation, such that the concentration is on ourselves and not on the person speaking.
We don’t encourage the other person to speak either, because we want to do all the talking. We think what we have to say is the higher priority and they are there just to hear us out. We need to suspend our desire to do all the talking and instead just relax and let the other person do most of the talking. People are so starved of being listened to, they will be so grateful that we allowed them to talk and they will regard us very highly.
Sadly we are very selfish and are primarily interested in ourselves and what is going on in our lives. It is all “me, me, me”. The young people falling in love with the XiaoIce virtual chatbox are fooling themselves into believing that their emotions can be reciprocated by a machine. They are seeking attention, someone to listen to them, someone to be empathetic with their situation. It is counterintuitive, but the best way to build relationships is to become “genuinely” interested in other people. The key word there is “genuinely”. If we do this, we will become part of their world and our world will improve as well.
The key word here is “sincerely”, otherwise it is just manipulation. Our sense of self-worth is closely linked to how important others make us feel. People with low self-esteem and low self-worth are now talking to chatbots, in a desperate attempt to feel better about themselves.
All they need is for us to communicate they are important to us. Often we don’t do this because we presume “they already know that”. Actually they probably need to hear it a lot more than we imagine. So look for areas where we can recognise their contribution or their worth and most importantly communicate we appreciate them.
Chatbots are not a substitute for real human relations. If our society degrades to the point where chatbots are the main source of human relationships then the end of civilisation is nye. We cannot allow that to happen. So let's start using these simple Principles and build real relationships with each other, before it is too late.