As businesspeople, we don’t get that many chances to face a public audience and give an actual talk. The majority of the time, we are giving internal weekly reports on projects or revenues. We feel constrained to deliver in the same way everyone else is delivering – monotone, lifeless, dull accounting of the progress or non-progress of our section. We fear if we start ramping up we will be disparaged as an idiot, so we keep the lid on what we are doing. Going full Hamlet on the project update will certainly draw some negative criticism from our bosses, who will quickly tell us to stop clowning around and get back to the usual methodology. Are we doomed to stay in first gear as presenters for eternity?
Probably. Work reporting has a certain format and level of expectation which is it should be hum drum and ordinary, not melodramatic or dynamic. What can we do though within that frame to work on our skills? Firstly, we need to re-set our habits. We need to develop a work rhythm presentation which won’t get us called in to the boss’s office for a dressing down, but which also allows us to work on some of the basic skills.
Planning the report needs a makeover. Usually the planning component is pretty marginal. Instead let’s think about what is the key insight from the numbers or the project progress or lack thereof. What is the message we want to convey? Once we determine that, then we start to build the framework for the delivery. Usually we are one of a number of people presenting and the rest of the troops will be doing a sterling job to put everyone to sleep with their efforts. That means we need to plan our opening of our report in a way which will grab attention but without being too over the top. If we start with the equivalent of “the sky is falling” that will get flagged immediately by the boss as negativity, seeding panic and will warrant a powerful scolding about our negative impact on the team spirit.
So we are looking for a start which is less powerful, but powerful enough. For example, we could say, “We had some surprises this week”. Those surprises could be positive or negative, but that simple statement will get everyone wondering, “Oh, yeah – what surprises?” and we will have achieved our aim to grab everyone’s attention. We are basically practicing the dark art of creating newspaper headlines. The start should be short, sharp and attention grabbing. We are trying to work a pattern interrupt into our headline, to break though the mental barriers in the room.
When we get into the main report it is a good idea to frame the key points. We could say, “We had some surprises this week. Let me go through the three things which were unexpected”. Now we have set up a simple navigation process to allow our audience to follow our report. We could have said, “We had some surprises this week. I will go through the macro and micro factors behind these”. Now we have framed two chapters of the report, making it easy to follow. Another approach could be using time. “We had some surprises this week. Let me go through the lead up, where we are now and what we can expect next”. We can now cover the past, the present and the future in three chapters and this is simple to follow.
Our final message needs to be clear. It may just be a simple summary of the key points, a call to action, a recommendation, a warning, or a rallying call for support from other teams. Our report may be only five to ten minutes long, but it gives enough scope to apply these frames to the talk and mimics exactly what we do in a forty minute public speech. We get to apply the formula we need, even if only on a smaller scale. We need to be using our voice to highlight key words and phrases, our gestures to accent data or insights and our eye power to connect with everyone in the room. There is no reason why we shouldn’t be doing this every time because this is what makes for effective communication.
If we do draw some negative comments take a long hard look at the perpetrator. Are they skilled in communication and presenting? If they aren’t, then just ignore them. What if it is the boss? We should always keep a professional tone, no going over the top, but keep going, because often the boss cannot present to save their own life and are no model for us. Just tell them you are taking these weekly reporting opportunities to develop your communication abilities. If you are not leeching into thespian antics, then there should no basis to be reining you in.
Another area where we can excel is in using our slide information. I say this because everyone else will be making all the usual mistakes of cramming everything on to one slide, having too many fonts and too much data which simply cannot be read. If we are using spreadsheets, then distributing copies to everyone beforehand is a better idea than putting up columns of numbers no one can understand. If we are paperless, we can still show the spreadsheet. Usually there are only a few numbers to highlight, so we should concentrate on those. The spreadsheet becomes wallpaper and we use animated popups to highlight a specific number in very large font. We can then talk to that number. We keep repeating this process for the specific numbers we need to talk about and there usually aren’t too many of those in a short report.
Graphs are a good way to show numbers. We need to recall the golden rule of a slide has to be fully understood within two seconds of it going up. The key is to avoid having more than one graph per slide if possible or a maximum of two slides, if a comparison is required. Line graphs are good to show trends and pie charts are great to show proportions. Try to keep the animation to a minimum, because it just distracts from the key message.
Our thinking changes to “I am giving a five minute or ten minute segment of a forty minute speech and I will prepare accordingly”. This way our frame of reference is always the full professional presentation rather than the sad excuse which most people deliver. In this way, we are able to practice our skills within the realm of weekly reporting reality.
There are some fundamental mechanics of the presentation delivery. I would call these hygiene factors for presenting. Eye contact, facial expression, voice modulation, gesture usage, pause insertion and posture are the basics. Unfortunately, in my observation, most business presenters have not mastered these core skills. This despite all of the training available, all of the free information being plastered all over the internet. “Content Marketing” experts are establishing their credibility by providing phenomenal information for free. What an age we live in, yet we still have presentation train wrecks.
Let’s presume some have mastered the basics, so what comes next? Here are three elements we need to be working on.
When we ask our presentation class participants what are some of the attributes they want to achieve when speaking in public, “being clear” is always prominent. However, what is required to be clear? The audience has to be able to navigate the talk and follow the direction the speaker is taking everyone. I attended a talk by the President of a huge global organisation here in Tokyo and he “wandered like a cloud” all over the place. It was a navigation nightmare. Let’s not make our audience work hard to keep up.
The chapters of the talk should be clear, the flow logical and the points quite apparent. The delivery needs the right pacing, with sufficient pauses to allow the messages to sink in. We need a pattern interrupt every five minutes of the talk, to keep the interest of the listeners. We will ensure there are highs and lows in the delivery, so that it is not all delivered at the same pace. This is a very common mistake amongst business speakers – they have only one speed setting from start to finish. We need to mimic classical music with its ebbs and highs, it lulls and crescendos. Certain critical key words are culled from the herd and given special attention and treatment to make the message clearer. We might hit them with a stentorian outburst of raw energy or we might drop it all down to a cupped hand, conspiratorial whisper, for which the audience has to mentally lean in to hear.
If your core message is mundane, boring and unremarkable, it will be hard to excite the assembled masses about what you are saying. Storytelling in business is one of the dark arts. It is rarely mastered, poorly understood and infrequent in its application. Presenting statistics for example, can be boring, but wrapping them up in the drama of the story can be gripping. Reveal who were the heroes who forensically excavated these numbers and their herculean efforts to dig into the data to find the gems.
Delve into what are the ramifications of their findings. Extrapolate into the future to paint a picture of hope or despair with these numbers presented as early warning indicators. Capture which careers are about to be shredded or heralded? When storytelling, we need to take the listener to a place, in a season, at a time of the day, with people they know and all of this located in their mind’s eye. We take the audience with us to the precise moment it all happened and draw out the hard lessons we have won as a consequence.
Talking in a monotone, matched with a wooden face devoid of expression, quickly becomes a funereal distraction for the audience. Removing all the physical energy from the talk sets it adrift from the listeners. They feel no connection and no interest, because the speaker themselves doesn’t seem interested in what they are saying.
Enthusiasm is contagious and we hunger for a speaker with fire in the belly. Instead we usually get the legions of the walking dead of business speakers – those armies of the grey, gaunt, forgettable and dull. We are not simply advocating high energy, almost crazed hysteria here, but considered belief and real commitment to the message, one which the audience will definitely buy.
Your energy sets up a vibration. it transports your passion and commitment to what you are saying directly to us and infects and envelops the whole room. When we speak, we employ our “ki” (気), our intrinsic energy and we push that energy out all the way to the back wall, as a conscious effort to fill the room with our presence. I am sure you have had the experience of when someone enters a room, they literally fill it with their presence. That is precisely what we want to achieve as presenters – to dominate that meeting room space with our power and “ki”. The first step is to have that mindset to want to do that and then direct our energy outward, rather than bottling it up, restraining it.
We specifically want to engage that entire audience and connect with them all. We use our eye contact power to make that connection. We should focus our gaze on a single point, so select one of the eyes of each audience member. We look so deeply into their eye we feel we can delve into their soul. Well delve for only about six seconds however, because with that intensity, it soon becomes intrusive. The impact of that one-on-one engagement is enormous. They feel they are the only one in the room and we are talking directly to them. That connection triggers tremendous continued support for our personal and professional brands
The basics platform allows us to take our presentations to the highest levels. We must work hard on amplifying the connection between our message and the audience. Therefore, we are the rare ones who can break through all the communication dissonance. Others simply fall by the white noise wayside. Being a presenter has never been tougher or more demanding. In our Age of Distraction and this Era of Cynicism, we have to stand tall as highly capable, skilled communicators, showing everyone the way forward.
There are some levels of presenter and so where do you fit in? The scaredy-cat like I used to be, avoiding all opportunities to present. The novice presenter trying to work it out by yourself through trial and error? The student of presenting who has worked out the connection between persuasive ability and career and business success. The semi-pro who holds down a full time job which does provide a number of chances a year to keep working on advancing your presentation skills? I don’t include the professional presenter because that has become their livelihood and is out of scope for 99.99% of people in business.
For those in denial, I know, I get it. I was so terrified of embarrassing myself I decided the best course of action was to escape all chances to present. As we advance in our careers though, the room to hide starts to disappear and we have to face the reality – if you can’t present you cannot advance in your career or business. Here is some clear advice – don’t struggle along. Become proactive and go and get the training. Find a class where there is a psychologically safe space where you can learn with positive encouragement. Our ego is already fragile about presenting and the last thing we need is someone criticising us. Look for trainers who follow the good/better school of feedback. That means they tell you what you are doing well and encourage you to keep doing that and explain how you can make it even better.
If your colleagues are not paid up members of this school of feedback and all you get from them is critique, just be polite and thank them and move on. They are clueless about developing people so just blank them out and keep up your training and study. As you advance you will actually become a problem for other presenters. Some of them will try to pull you back down to their level, because they are aware they are hopeless and prefer everyone to be the same, so that they don’t stand out. A cutting comment from a work colleague is seared into my mind, “Greg is all style and no substance” after my presentation to the whole company. Ouch! Fortunately, I knew why he made this stupid comment and just ignored it. If you bump into these people, just ignore them and keep working on your skills.
For those who have started on the path, the trick is to keep going. I remember reading one of Tony Robbins’s books where he realised most business speakers only get a few chances a year to talk in public and that he could get the equivalent of years of experience in a few months, if he got enough chances to speak in public. I followed that same idea myself and looked for every opportunity to speak and I still hold to that strategy. Event organisers are always looking for free industry speakers. I am sure Tony Robbins had to give a lot of unpaid talks before he become good enough to get paid. Anyway, we are not in it for the money, we are trying to get a professional capability and we need an audience to work with. As you build up a resume of speeches given, more chances will flow to you. It has been a long drought of opportunities thanks to Covid, but in 2023 we should start to see the reappearance of in person events and the chances to speak at them.
This will be good for the semi-pro who may have gotten a bit rusty having had no spots for the last three years to keep advancing their art. It would be a very good idea to go back to the basics to make sure we have not forgotten any of the professionalism we had previously developed. It might also be an idea to proactively reach out to organisations who are slowly emerging for the shadows and starting to host in-person events again and let them know you would be happy to give your talk. The audience size may be considerably smaller and some of them will probably be watching you online, which is not as good as having them all in the room, but better than nothing.
Review how you went and analyse what needs to change to make your presentation better. Simple things you did before may have evaporated and will need to be re-introduced into the mix. Eye contact will definitely be one of them for a lot of people. We don’t just look at our audience en masse. We single out people and use our eye contact to engage them during our talk. Too much is too much though, so around six seconds each is the formula we need.
I have only seen a couple of speakers live in the last few months and they were pretty rusty I thought. My guess is they just carried on from where they left off, except they are not at that previous level anymore and need to rebuild their skills. When we get back to basics, we plug any holes which have appeared or we make sure everything that should be happening is in fact working for us. This won’t happen by itself, so we need to work at it. The beauty is if we do this and everyone else just carries on as if there hasn’t been a three year break, then we will instantly stand out as an excellent presenter.
Our personal and professional brands are invaluable and we have to invest in them and presenting is the one time when all is revealed publicly. We have to make those chances winners and build our reputation and take it even higher.