The Master of Ceremony (MC) goes to the microphone to get the programme underway but the audience are simply oblivious, caught up in their own riveting conversations. The situation is much worse at receptions where alcohol is already flowing and the people down the back are generating a roar, a positive din, that drowns out the speakers. Apart from bona fide members of Imperial Families, everyone is fair game in the “let’s ignore the speaker” stakes. Cabinet Ministers, eminent speakers, famous personalities all struggle to get the attention of the crowd. When it is our turn, what can we humble beings do about this?
Here are some ideas that will shut down the noisy rabble and provide a proper platform for the speaker to be heard.
Make sure to turn off the background music well before you are ready to start. Surprisingly, this is often forgotten by the organisers. Speakers should not try to compete with irritating white noise in the background, so check this will be done before you are due to launch forth.
Preferably always have someone else introduce you. Their job is to quiet the room in preparation for your presentation. This doesn't always go to plan though, because it can be a lucky draw on who introduces you. Usually, they are not skilled speakers themselves and so they may do a lame job at best.
If you are in the MC role yourself, about to introduce the programme speaker, avoid the charisma by-pass problem of no presence in the room. I recently saw a giant of a man, fulsomely mustachioed, boasting a hulking frame, draw up to the microphone and in a tiny faint voice try and call the assembled masses to order. He had absolutely no success, so even an imposing physical presence is no guarantee to cut through the clatter.
On the other hand, if you worry about speaking behind high podiums and appearing to your audience as a stylish coiffure just peaking above the water line, always arrive early and have the event staff provide a small raised dais behind the podium for you. We always want the audience to easily see our face. Even better, dismiss the podium altogether, because now we can use our body language to maximum effect. If you are using a laptop on the podium, turn it to the side, so that you can see the screen and stand facing the audience, so there are no barriers between you. The technology should be at our command and not commanding us.
As noted, voice projection is key for cutting through crowd noise. Today’s microphone technology is very good, so you don’t need to have a stentorian voice to be heard. However, placing the microphone too close to your mouth creates dissonance, making it harder to hear you. Mysteriously, some speakers have the opposite problem and hold the microphone so low that there is almost no sound being heard. These errors are easily avoided if you just hold the microphone about a hand’s spread in front of your mouth and speak across the top of the microphone mesh.
When you face a challenging noisy crowd, make sure to hit the first few words very hard. To get things going, start with a strong “Ladies and Gentleman” with power invested into the first word and remember to draw that first word out slightly (Ladieeeeees). Elongate it for effect but don’t overdo it . Now include a small pause before a strong finish to the phrase. This will generally shut the room down and gather everyone’s focus on the speaker. If it doesn’t produce that “hear a pin drop” silence, then go again with strong voicing of the next phrase, “May I have your attention please”. Again, add a pause and let peer pressure quiet your audience. If it is still noisy, repeat this phrase once more and do not start until you have total silence.
I have seen speakers using assorted cutlery to bang on a glass, to create a chime that signals it is time to “shut up everyone and listen”. It works, however, one word of warning - don’t speak while pounding. Let the chime effect work for you and when the room pressure builds to a point where you have achieved silence, put the glass down, pause and then start. Why pause? This builds anticipation and curiosity, both of which work in our favour when trying to get attention to what we are saying. Using pauses during your talk is also powerful for focusing everyone on the message you are delivering
Similarly, you can also use powerful music to drown out the crowd’s babble and make them listen to what is coming next. Just a short piece will do, as it signals action is about to commence and people will switch their gaze to you at the front of the room. After the music ends, again use a slight pause and then start.
We can’t be effective communicators if people are not listening, so our first task is to quiet the room. Using these techniques will produce the right break in the chaos for your message to be heard. Some final advice, don’t practice on your audience. Spend time rehearsing your talk, so that you are confident and comfortable that you can command the room from the very start.
Action steps
Best intentions, higher callings, righteousness – all good stuff but without good communication, our efforts fail. Instinctively, we all know storytelling is a great communication tool, but the word itself is a problem. We associate it with bedtime stories and therefore the idea sounds a bit childish. In the modern era, Hollywood talks about the arc of the story or in politics, the media punishes the lack of narrative. Actually, this is storytelling just dressed up in more formal attire.
The other problem with storytelling is that we are not very good at it. It seems too simple, so we gravitate to more complex solutions – frameworks, theories, models, four box quadrants, pyramids, Venn diagrams – anything to appear more convoluted and pseudo-intelligent. If we present something complex, we must be smart. On the other hand, anyone can tell a story. Ah…but can they?
How many really good business stories have you heard lately? Have you been captured by the speaker, as they have taken you into a story that has you emotionally and logically involved? In my observation, businesspeople are usually poor communicators. To ensure they never improve, they are invariably uninterested in “childish solutions” like becoming a great business storyteller. They totally miss the point. We can tell stories that are credible, relevant and absorbing. We do this by adding in colour, action, personalities, locations, situations – all manner of rich fabric to the story. We paint a powerful word picture that the listener can visualise in their mind’s eye.
No matter what industry we are in, we have four main business communication objectives. It might be to increase credibility for our organisation or to inform an audience of some pertinent information. It might be to move people or it might just be for entertainment purposes. The Business Five Step Storytelling process focuses on moving people to action. We might tell this story from the point of view of our own experience in the first person or we may refer to the insights of someone else, told in the third person.
We begin by clarifying the “Why” it matters. The story draws out the immediacy and relevance for the audience of the problem or issue. This is a critical step, because everyone is surfing through hundreds of emails, Facebook and Twitter posts, LinkedIn updates, Instagram messages, etc. They are dealing with family, work, financial and health issues. There is a tremendous competition for the mind space of our audience. If we don’t have a powerful “Why” to grab attention, game over right there. This is where storytelling is so powerful. We move straight into the world of the story, to highlight the gap, the failing, the challenge. Replacing the usual bromide beginnings of talks (Thank you for inviting me; It is a pleasure to speak to you today; etc.), we move straight into emotion and action: “The Marunouchi Board Room mood was dark and grim. As Jim stood up, looking at the faces around the table, he knew this was an all or nothing moment….” If you hear a talk with a start like that, you definitely want to hear what is going to happen next.
We now move straight on to the “What” – the information they need to know. This is knowledge they don’t already have or have not sufficiently focused on as yet. This will bring forth data or perspectives, which are pertinent, immediate and grip our audience. Imparting key points, each linked with firm evidence, is essential today because we are all card carrying skeptics. There is so much false information floating around, we are permanently on guard against feeling cheated or foolish.
We must communicate to the audience what they need to do. This might be our own recommendation or we may relay that of the third person in the story. For example, “Bill told me the whole marketing team, Nakamura, Adam, Tanaka and Ohira had spent weeks working back late, almost missing the last train becoming a regular occurrence. Constantly refining the database, each time with a much sharper angle for the buyer’s perspective, they were getting closer and closer to the key insight. Ohira mentioned to me the reems of paper generated were piling up on every flat surface in the office, they could hardly move but finally the answer became clear. Over a twelve month period, constant split testing and independent validation upon validation registered the same pattern. To produce the follow up communication sequence that will consistently produce the best results we need to….”
Having isolated out the issue, imparted some evidence to provide more compelling reasons to take this issue seriously, we now tell the “How” to move forward. This will explain in some detail what needs to be done, so that the listener can take immediate action: “The vendor’s programmers needed to be involved with the marketing team, as they scope out the action steps. By the way, the flow chart map in our largest meeting room in the Otemachi office spanned across every wall, even the glass door, in some places three layers deep. It was complex but visually easy to follow. Mitsuo walked me through the paper covering the walls, tracking each iteration and step, emphasing the colour paths created by the red, green and blue marker pens. Step One was….”
To deal with any potential doubts or concerns, we head them off by exploring the “What Ifs”. We join the listener in the conversation going on in their mind concerning the fears they might have, about what is being suggested. We address these in the story, so that there are no or few residual barriers to taking action: “There were doubts among the London Board members – plenty of them. What if the data was too old now, given the speed of change we were facing. In fact, we found that the constant split testing allowed us to keep updating our hypothesis, so we were always close to the buyer viewpoint”.
Finally, we repeat the “Action Steps” we recommend, succinctly and clearly, so that these stay fresh in the mind. “After the wrap-up meeting was held over pizzas and beer back at the Toranomon Hill’s office, we isolated out the Five Steps we found which worked best. In this specific order: Step One….” Compressing the steps into numbers like three, five or seven work best, as they tend to be easily recalled. Few people can hold elaborate data points in their head. Keep it short, keep it memorable.
Embed the key messages in a series of stories that we can follow along with you. Unfold the point of the talk with plenty of real people and real situations stitched into the telling. The richer the detail and the more real the story, the easier it will be to take our audience with us. Being dull and boring like everyone else is an option, just not a very good one. With a simple storyline embedded into the explanation, we will be so much more memorable and persuasive.
Action Steps
Public speaking throws up many fears and challenges for all of us. As part of High Impact Presentations, one of our public speaking courses, we have been surveying the various participants for the last four years about the types of things they most want to improve. The most common request, from both Japanese and English speakers, is to “be clear when presenting”. What do they mean by clear? The speakers want their message to get across to the audience, to be easy to follow, to have some impact from their efforts to get up in front of others and speak.
This is not easy, mainly because we keep snatching defeat from the jaws of victory! There are some errors we make which kill our ability to communicate with the audience. Here are some critical factors to make sure that situation never occurs.
Firstly, we should decide what is the purpose of our talk? Is it to Entertain people, so they leave feeling warm and fuzzy about us and our organization? Is it to Convince them or to Impress them that our organization is reliable and trustworthy? Is it to Persuade or Inspire them to take some action that we are recommending? Is it to just Inform them of some recent data or information that is relevant to their industry? We need to be crystal clear about what we are trying to do with our talk, before we even worry about the design, production and delivery.
Secondly, we need to thoroughly investigate beforehand just who will we be talking to? What is the generational mix, the age demographic, the male/female split? Are they experts, amateurs, dilettantes, critics, supporters, potential clients, etc.? We need to pitch our talk at the right level for the audience – no dumbing down to the exceedingly well informed, insulting them at every turn. We don’t want to be an acronym heaven dweller or a specialist jargon snob, baffling the punters completely. We need to gauge our listener’s level of comprehension and make sure we are talking to them at their level of expertise.
Thirdly, we should rehearse our talk before we give it. Sounds straight forward doesn’t it, except that hardly anyone does this! In sales we always advise, “Never practice on the client”. Presenters should heed the same sage like advice. If we prepare the talk in writing, we may find the cadence is different when we say the words out loud, compared to when we read it on a page. We also may find we have misjudged the time completely and be too long or too short. We need to start singling out key words we want to hit harder than others for emphasis. Speaking in a boring monotone is one of the most common errors of non-professional, non-competent speakers.
Some Japanese speakers have complained to me that they are at a permanent disadvantage with public speaking, because the Japanese language is a monotone, non-tonal language. True, it lacks the tonal variety of English but there are two simple changes we can make when speaking Japanese to break out of the monotony. Apply pace to speed up or slooow right down. Another variation is to add more power to a word or phrase or to speak in an audible whisper, removing the power altogether. Both of these techniques will help monotone speakers vary their presentation and maintain the interest of their audience.
Fourthly, get the mechanics of delivery right. The message cannot stand by itself; the quality of the content is not enough; the supreme value of the data is insufficient - if people can’t hear you. Yes, physically they can hear you are speaking, but when the content and the delivery are not in harmony, only 7% of the message is actually getting through to the audience. That is a shockingly low number.
The research on this is quite well established and it makes sense. When the message content is not congruent with the way you deliver the message, we get distracted by how you are dressed, by your body language, by the tone of your voice. As an example, if I said , “I am really excited about the prospects for this new technology” in a totally flat, no energy, barely audible monotone voice, with a bored, unhappy expression on my face and delivered it while looking down at the lectern and not at my audience, only 7% of people would get the message. Many speakers make it hard for themselves because they talk to precisely no one. They look at their notes or the screen or the floor or the ceiling; anywhere, but at that sea of expectant faces carefully scrutinising them.
Engage your audience by using eye contact and keep each person’s gaze for around 6 seconds to make the eye contact meaningful, without it becoming intrusive. Japanese friends tell me “In japan, we are taught not to make eye contact”. That may be the case for normal conversation but once you have an audience, you are now in a different role. We need to step it up if we want to have the audience buy what we are saying or to keep interest in our message.
This is where making eye contact for 6 seconds works so well. The members of the audience feel we are speaking directly to them and they gravitate to us as a result, because we have engaged them. Also, get you face involved! If it is good news, then smile; if you suggest doubt, have a quizzical expression on your face; if the information is surprising, have an expression of wonder; if it is bad news look unhappy or concerned. A wooden face, totally devoid of expression is a tremendous waste, when we have so much potential to add power to our words with our facial expression. Japanese speakers can gain a lot here because often they fail to take advantage of the face as a medium of their message.
A well placed pause is a brilliant way to get the audience focused on what we have just said. Often when we are nervous we speed up and start running the ideas together. This makes it hard for the audience to digest the key points, because the points are rapidly overwhelming and replacing each other. A pause also gives us time to regroup our thoughts and calm down a bit, if we found we were getting a bit too fast in the delivery.
Throw in some gestures to add power to the words, but don’t maintain the same gesture for longer than 15 seconds. Utilise your palms, so that they can be seen by the audience. Don’t hide them behind your back, or lock them up protecting your groin or keep them hidden away in your pockets. This is the classic refuge of my fellow Aussie executives. They don’t know what to do with their hands so one slip into the pocket. The really confused CEOs from “downunder” put both hands in their pockets for a stereo effect. A gesture made too low may not be able to be seen by parts of the audience, so make the gesture zone between chest height and head. The gestures should be natural and not Shakespearian or thespian. Leave acting to the experts, be natural, be your “professional” self.
When we know why and who we are speaking to; when we get voice, face and hands working in unison to add strength to what we are saying, we get 100% of the audience to clearly absorb our message. It is quite clear what we have to do isn’t it!
Action Steps
It is a big crowd, yet the conversation suddenly dies and a hushed silence now sweeps through the room. All eyes are fixed forward, as the MC tears at the envelope and announces this year’s award winner. Polite applause fills the air as the proud selectee stands up, glances around smiling, shakes hands and navigates between the maze of tables and chairs up to the podium. Receiving the prize, obediently posing for the photographer, our winner turns and begins to move gingerly towards the microphone. Facing the assembled crowd of industry peers, personal and organisational brands now begin to disintegrate.
They have that deer-in-the-headlights glazed look in the eye, as they contemplate a packed room full of searching, quizzical faces. Their throat suddenly seems Sahara parched, words struggle to get out, both legs feel weak, and the mind is a total whiteout.
What finally does come out of their mouths are strings of pathetic Ums and Ahs. There are particularly strained and embarrassing silences as they obviously struggle, thinking what they want to say. Their speech is incoherent, nervous, unconvincing and clearly killing them. In one minute they have gone from hero to zero in front of their industry peers. Some cowards even run from the microphone, declaring they will not take the opportunity to make any comment. Their general demeanor screams FEAR and their face looks particularly taut!
We are talking about a one minute acceptance speech here. An opportunity to promote your organization, promote yourself, thank the troops, etc. Why are so many people so poorly prepared to represent their organization in a public setting, where there is no excuse and every likelihood that you will have to get up and speak?
One speaker though, addressed the podium radiating confidence, stood up straight, and spoke with energy and clarity. It was short – maybe two minutes maximum, but it sounded so professional and competent. So it can be done – what is the difference?
The most telling point was the majority of speakers had obviously done zero preparation and this speaker had worked out what needed to be said. The majority had not considered what they might say, until they swung their torso around towards the microphone. That is not a lot of preparation time!
Actually, a short one or two minute speech is probably the most difficult talk we will ever give. It is so brief, we have to really plan it well. We also need to rehearse what we are going to say beforehand. Don’t ramble on and please, let’s not practice on our audience!
There are only a few points we can make when forced to be so brief, so we have to select the most powerful messages and dump the rest - there is no time for dross. As we say it has to be “all killer, no filler”. We need to be projecting massive confidence, even if we are dying from nerves on the inside. By the way, only we know that is the case. Definitely choose and commit not to show it to the crowd, keep that vital information to yourself.
It is a good practice to hit the first word we speak hard, to eliminate any hesitancy. With that good energy level established , we should maintain our voice power, to project confidence to everyone in the room that we deserve to be up here, getting this award. Remember we all critics and we judge your entire organisation on you. If you rock, we think your whole organisation is great. If you are a dud, we assume everyone down at your shop is a numbskull.
When speaking to the audience, our eyes should be singling out specific individuals at each table to speak to directly, as if we were having a friendly chat over the backyard fence. We are only speaking to them for about six seconds though. More than that becomes intrusive and less doesn’t allow for any meaningful engagement with that person. We then switch our gaze to another table across the room, repeat the process and start engaging someone sitting there. In a one minute speech we can engage ten tables in a room, which with around 8-10 guests at a table is pretty good coverage.
We also won’t waste our chance in the limelight by applying a vice-like grip on the lectern. Instead we are going to free up our hands for gestures. We will accentuate particular thoughts and points, with the use of our hands. We will definitely slip in a pause after a key point, to really let it sink in. We will add extra voice strength to selected words, to give them added emphasis. We will use animation in our face to drive the key message hard.
If there is even the remotest chance you will have to get up and speak, be prepared, be “A Game” ready, be organised and be great. Rehearse what you will say many times, until it flows smoothly and convincingly. You may not win but if you do, you will be ready. Don’t snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on the awards dais. Make it a personal and professional triumph instead.