Are we clear enough about our message? There are some common problems around getting the messaging right. We have no clear message and the audience don’t quite know what to make of the talk. Or we have so many messages, the audience are confused and cannot attach to any of the messages. This is an exaggeration, but we should be able to write our one key message on a grain of rice. The point is to make the message clear and get it down to the minimum number of words to describe it. This is really tough. Rambling and waffling on are easy, whereas being precise is hard work. This explains why most talks haven’t boiled everything down to one clear message and the presentation fails or misses the mark.
If we are thinking of a topic to speak on or if we are asked to speak on a certain topic, the first major effort will be to find the key message. This sounds straightforward, but there are so many angles from which to approach a topic, we need to select the best one and then clarify it. The best one will be determined by our audience analysis. Who are we going to be speaking to and what message will resonate the most strongly with them? If we don’t know who our audience is we need to find out. In episode number 260 we went into more detail on just how to do that, so please go back and listen to that episode.
Getting the key message clear is also important when it comes to promoting the talk. Our title will get sent out to the prospective audience and if we have done our audience analysis well, then there will be a high degree of resonance with our target group. Getting the title right makes such a difference and we all know that. We respond to certain titles more than others. If we can hone in on the key interest, then our audience numbers will fill up and we will set the stage to deliver our message. I was attending a talk recently and there were only about 30 people online. Given the speaker and the quality of the content, it should have been 100 people at least. The title let the talk down and didn’t grab attention, because the message and the audience analysis hadn’t been given enough attention.
Once we have crafted our one key message, we need to look for content which supports that key message. These are like chapters in a thesis. When you write your thesis, you have your central proposition, your key finding from the research and the rest of the document is set about backing up what you are pontificating about. We need evidence – hard evidence rather than broad statements about what we think. Nobody cares what we think. In this Era of Cynicism built on a fear of falling for fake news, evidence has become even more vital than in the past. A speech is a similar situation. We have a number of chapters in the speech which are crammed to the gunwales with evidence proving what we are saying is true. Inside these chapters there may be some sub-messages, again providing hard evidence, which when added together validate our one big key message.
The usual problem with messaging though is too many messages. We teach public speaking and we have a tool called the Magic Formula where we provide the context, background, data, proof, evidence, then the call to action and the benefit of that call to action. I notice that our participants are always adding and adding points to bolster the benefit, rather than grabbing the most powerful benefit. The effect is the key message about the benefit is being diluted by what follows. This is the Age of Distraction and when we pile on the detail our audience gets lost and loses interest. We need to make sure the sub-messages are supporting and proving the main message and not competing with it.
This is where pruning a speech becomes very important. We need to ask if we can reduce the content by 10% to see if the message becomes clearer. This is a lot harder than it sounds and I am as guilty as anyone in this regard. What we normally do is keep adding to the speech. We find a great slide and we add that. Then we find another and add that. We keep adding more slides or more messages and we create confusion for our audience. Being forced to chop out 10% is a good discipline to force us to be as clear as possible. This is painful, but it will improve the whole presentation by adding more clarity to what we want people to absorb.
So have one central message and look for a number of ways to get that one message across. If we can do that, then the audience will absorb what we are saying and we can count the talk as a success. Go for quality rather than quantity of messages when presenting.
Before we tackle the purpose of our presentation we need to understand who is our audience. We covered this in Episode #260, so please go back and review that episode if you haven’t already heard it. Basically, don’t put pen to paper or start assembling a slide deck, until you are crystal clear on who is going to be in the audience. Once we know what level to frame the content, we can get started on the next step and that is being very clear on the purpose of the talk.
Perhaps it is an internal presentation. An All Hands Meeting, a Town Hall, a regular weekly report on your division or section’s numbers, the update on the marketing spend results, etc. It could be for an external audience drawn from your industry, a speech for the Chamber of Commerce, a benkyokai or study group, a public gathering, etc.
There are four things to consider regarding the type of talk we can give.
These types of public talks will often have titles such as, “The Top Five Things Regarding X”, “The Latest Research Results on Y”, etc. There will be detailed case studies from the front line that cast light on what is and isn’t working. The question is which data and how much data. We have to be careful, because we can quickly become data dump junkies. We are always tending to cram too much information into the talk and this can dilute the impact of the messages. Choosing what to keep and what not to use can be very difficult, but we must be disciplined. Always go for the gold and leave the silver and bronze to question time as reserve power.
We are musing that if this is who they put forward to the wider public, they must all be stupid and so how can you trust a company like that? Remember every time we stand up to speak, we are also selling ourselves and by extension our section, division or company.
We must believe that what we are sharing is important and we want our audience to think that too. Sadly, audiences today are living in the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism, so as presenters we have to work super hard to overcome both. We need to be excellent presenters, really professional presenters. Plus, we also have to prove what we are saying is true. We have to show the value and we have to emphasise the importance of our message.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill was the keynote speaker to Harrow, his old College, in October 1941, as Britain alone faced the Nazis domination of all of Europe. He said slowly, “Never, ever ever ever ever give up”. Those seven words were electrifying. Now that is persuasion, that is inspiration. We are all facing Covid’s war on our companies, on our businesses, on our livelihoods. Are we rising to the occasion with our persuasive, take action presentations to our troops?
Know who is in our audience, craft the talk to match that audience and decide what is the purpose of our talk. Once you have that sorted, then get to work on the detailed design of close #1, close #2, the main body with tons of evidence and finally the opening and design it in that order.
Before we do anything, we need to ask just who is going to be in our audience? If we don’t know that information, then we are thrashing around in the dark, trying to find the light switch. It may be an internal group we are speaking to, so we will have a pretty clear idea who will be in the room. It might be an industry association talk, so we can expect there will be people similar to us in the audience. It might be a public talk, sponsored by a chamber of commerce and so there could be people from many different industries gathered to hear us speak.
The key point is to try and find out who will be in the audience, by asking the organisers, if you are not sure who is coming. If for privacy reasons, you cannot get a list of attendees, then at least ask for as much detail as possible around age, rank and gender. A benefit of going to the venue early is usually all the name badges of the audience are lined up outside the room, so you can spend a bit of time seeing who is coming. The name badge will give you the company name but it won’t give you the rank or the status of the individuals. There is a simple solution for this issue.
Position yourself at the door and then try to greet as many people as possible. Japan is great, because handing over all your key private information is acceptable, because we exchange our meishi or business cards. You can see the position they hold and looking at their face, you can guess the age bracket. As you engage them you can ascertain why they have given up their time to attend, so you can gauge their motivations and interests. We can make adjustments on the fly in terms of our angle of delivery with these insights.
I heard a talk on Personal Branding, which completely missed the mark. The speaker was talking about how she elevated her personal brand in one of the biggest companies on the planet. Her audience were not in that company size bracket, so there was little to relate to. If she had spent time talking to people beforehand she would have realised she needed to make made some changes in order to accommodate her audience. Sadly that didn’t happen and the dry chicken for lunch was the only reward for attending.
Here are some ideas for preparing the talk, taking into consideration the likely composition of your audience:
As always, the key is to plan the talk in detail and not just spend all the time on assembling the slide deck. Rehearse, record, review. Listening to yourself, is what you are saying valuable or is it pap? Is it corporate propaganda or is it beneficial, practical, applicable? Plan with the audience reaction in your mind and things will go much better.
They are usually a bunch of strangers attending out talk. We may know one or two people in the audience, but generally we have no clue about most of them. The feeling is likewise. They may have perfunctorily glanced at our introduction in the blurb advertising the event but who are we as a person? How smart are we, how useful is this time allocation going to be, can we speak well, are we adding any value to them? Here are twelve ideas to build rapport with the audience.
Try these twelve ideas when you are preparing for and delivering your next presentation and you will do a much better job of connecting with your audience.
We all stumble into public speaking in business. We don’t start our first job with a grand plan for our future public speaking career. We just work as hard as we can. If we knew at the start how important this facility was, we would definitely plot out the path forward, corresponding to each stage in our careers. However, we are left to our own devices and we have no guidelines for presenting. Let’s fill in that gap in our business education and take a look at some useful guidelines on the basis it is never too late to start becoming a better presenter.
Here are nine guidelines to adopt.
1. Make brief notes in the order you want to mention them.
This is your navigation and could be on notes sitting on the podium or you might place a big sheet of paper on the backwall, behind the audience and use code words that only you understand. There is nothing wrong with quickly consulting your notes if you need to. Audience members will not jump to their feet and start denouncing us as frauds just because we took a peek at our notes. No one cares that much.
2. Unless absolutely necessary for legal reasons etc., do not read your speech. I have had the experience of representing my boss and reading his speech word for word. So painful. Yes, preparing the whole speech as a document is fine to help you practice. Just don’t read it to us. You can send it by email instead and we won’t need you or your presentation.
3. Never memorise a speech word for word.
This is no fun doing it this way because of the enormous mental strain it places on us. A thirty minute speech fully recalled from memory is pointless. We should enjoy giving talks so let’s not burden ourselves with that massive memory expectation. Just have the key points you want to cover and talk to them.
4. Use evidence to substantiate your points
We have to be very careful with general sweeping statements we may make. We will attract skepticism from our audience and we may find ourselves under attack during the Q&A. Always back up what is being said with evidence, proof, statistics, expert testimony, etc.
5. Know far more about your subject than you can use.
We don’t know what we will be asked in the Q&A, so we have to make sure we can answer any reasonable question, otherwise our personal and professional brands can be damaged. If we can’t answer a relevant question on our topic, then people will immediately doubt our credibility as a business professional.
6. Rehearse your presentation in front of your professional associates.
However, never, ever ask them “what do you think?”. All you will hear will be annoying negative comments that will ruin your day and your confidence. Instead, ask them “what was good” and “how can I make it better?”.
7. Use visual aids where appropriate.
We don’t automatically need slides. If they add value then absolutely use them. Visual aids are helpful because a picture is worth a thousand words, as we say. Pictures with people in them are the best. Also the visuals provide our navigation through the content of the speech, so we don’t have to remember all of the detail. We only have to talk to the information or the point on the slide and this is much easier.
8. Control “butterflies” in the tummy by taking in deep, slow, lower diaphragm breaths. This will help lower our pulse rate, reduce body heat and calm us down. We can also do some strenuous walking around, out of sight, to burn off excess nervous energy. For other people, they may need to lift up their energy levels, by giving themselves a pep talk.
9. Don’t imitate others: be yourself
It is tempting to copy other speakers, but we don’t need to do that. Life is short, so why try and become a facsimile of someone else? Be you every time and be the best version of you possible. If we work hard on the design, rehearsal and delivery of our talk we will develop our own natural style.
These guidelines are not exhaustive by any means, but they encompass some basics we should apply to our talks. I ran away from public speaking for my first thirty years. Why? Because I didn’t know what to do. I had no guidelines, no training and no clue. Even worse, I didn’t understand that I should go and get the training. I got there eventually, but I wasted so much time and opportunity by being in denial. Don’t be like me – don’t wait, go and get trained.
We all stumble into public speaking in business. We don’t start our first job with a grand plan for our future public speaking career. We just work as hard as we can. If we knew at the start how important this facility was, we would definitely plot out the path forward, corresponding to each stage in our careers. However, we are left to our own devices and we have no guidelines for presenting. Let’s fill in that gap in our business education and take a look at some useful guidelines on the basis it is never too late to start becoming a better presenter.
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.
When I am running half day or full day training sessions there is no rehearsal. There is a lot of participant interaction in our sessions, so you need to have the participants for that bit, if you were going to do a rehearsal. Instead, I plan the training down to the last second. I have a roadmap of the training, which nominates precisely what will need to be happening at every minute during the training and I follow that religiously. If the timing speeds up or slows down I know where I am relative to the plan, so I can make the necessary adjustments. I need to do that because we must not go over the time allotted for the training. It is the same with speaking and presenting. The organisers have a programme to get through and they absolutely don’t want the speaker to go beyond their allotted time. Are you planning your talks down to the last minute?
What do we see? Speakers who go too long on their subject or who go crazy and try to cram fifteen minutes of content into two minutes. They start whipping through their slide deck like deranged people. Sitting in the audience, your head starts spinning because you cannot keep up. Their point of departure is always, “I will need to move through this next section quickly”. Why is that? They knew from the start how much time they had and they knew that when they started the talk.
The “I will need to move through this next section quickly” statement is notification that this person is not professional. Consequently, their personal and organisation brands suffer. If they cannot figure out how to give a forty minute talk in forty minutes, do you really want them in charge of some work for you? We also extrapolate their lack of professionalism to the rest of the people who work down there. Without really thinking about it, we tar them all with the same brush, so this is a major unforced error we have here.
The quality of your presentation also suffers because often you had some really killer content, but you cannot really utilise it fully, because you are moving so fast. All of this self-inflicted reputational damage could easily be avoided if you spent time to rehearse the content. When you allocate the time for the first rehearsal, you quickly realise that you have too much material for the length of time to present it or the other way around. In my experience though, it is usually too much information and not a lack of information, which is the problem. We have this great slide we want to use and oh, yeah, there is that other great slide too. Before you know it, you have a perfect presentation for an hour, the problem is they have only given you forty minutes.
So instead of embarrassing yourself in front of others, you can make the adjustments beforehand. The subsequent rehearsals can now focus on the delivery component. There is always plenty to work on in this regard and it requires dedicated time. What do busy leaders lack? Time. The tendency is to short change the preparation for the talk and spend that time on something else. This is a mixing up of priorities. Most of that other stuff won’t be you in public exposing yourself to the world as a professional. It will be internal projects, meetings and reporting, which are hidden to judgmental outsiders.
We need to get the content right, the timing within the limit and then we need to really impress the audience with our delivery. Senior company representatives having to read their talks is unthinkable, but you still see it. How shameful that you don’t know your business well enough to talk to key points and instead you read the whole thing to us. Just send us an email with the text, and we can all stay at home and read it for ourselves. You need to practice before you get in front of any audience. What they should see is the polished you, the confident you, the persuasive you, not the frantic, disorganised you.
When rehearsing, video review yourself and have others give you “good/better” feedback. Polish the performance, because that is what it is, a performance. When you understand that then your approach changes. We remain business like though and don’t attempt to transform ourselves into amateur thespians. We present as professionals, in our particular field of expertise. If you can organise it, video yourself presenting live to the audience and then study that later for areas where you can improve. Professionals rehearse, review, improve and above all else keep to the time allotted. Are you a professional?
Many Japanese companies have expanded their operations outside of Japan to enlarge their business, as the population decline guarantees to keep shrinking the domestic market. Many multi-national companies have established a strong presence on the ground here, because they like the rule of law and freedom to conduct their business, without having to hand over their IP to domestic partners. One of the things which keeps popping up as a request from Japanese and multi-national companies here is the challenge of how to ensure their Japanese leaders have more “executive presence” on the international stage.
What do they mean by “executive presence”? Usually, they are asking their leaders to be better presenters by getting to the key points concisely, clearly and convincingly. They want persuasion power. A big barrier for Japan has always been speaking in English, the international business lingua franca. Yet, this is not the major barrier to having “executive presence” when dealing internationally in business.
Mindset Inhibitors For Japanese Presenters
There are two mindset aspects which make it extremely difficult for Japanese executives to operate at the international professional presentation level. One is perfectionism. Japan is a country with no defects allowed, no mistakes tolerated and no errors entertained. It is a product and service heaven for consumers here and totally aspirational for the rest of the world. The idea that “we will make more money, if we allow for a defect rate of 5%”, doesn’t exist here and no CFO will ever be able to push this idea through the organisation. This “no error culture” extends to presenting in a foreign language.
I had the same difficulty when I first started learning Japanese. I would be forming the perfect Japanese sentence in my mind, all ready to go forth and launch it into the conversation, only to see the topic suddenly switched to something else. I learnt to launch forth perfect or otherwise, if I ever wanted to be able to speak the language in public. Japanese executives have trouble making that leap into imperfection and so are often very, very quiet in international meetings. They often avoid giving presentations if it is possible and if they have to, then they love to read the whole thing, either off a script or off the slides. Perfect English, but pretty boring and guaranteed to produce zero “executive presence”.
No “Braveheart Speeches” For Japan
The other mindset issue is that presentation skills are not as highly valued. In the West, we still hearken back to Athens and Rome, to the great orators and their stirring speeches. Hollywood has had a field day with this trope. In Japan, there were no Mel Gibson Braveheart style speeches being given by the warlords. Battle commanders would sit in a guarded, cordoned off area and receive reports and give orders from there, as the hostilities raged forth. There were no modern movie style stirring entreaties, while riding up and down in front of the troops, urging them on to fight and win. The samurai leadership class didn’t make mass public speeches. If the local authorities needed you to know something, they would post it on a notice board.
Yukichi Fukuzawa, one of Japan’s most famous Westernisers, opened the Enzetsukan or Speech Hall on May 1st, 1875 on the campus of his new Keio University. It is still there and you can visit it when travel resumes. We could call this the foundation of Western style speech making in Japan. That was only 150 years ago, so compared to Athens and Rome, public speaking is quite a recent phenomenon here in Japan.
Standing in front of people and speaking has an element of assumed superior status, which usually requires the Japanese speaker to apologise at the start for standing above others, while everyone else is seated. Often, when I was asked to give one of the 200 plus speeches I have given so far in Japanese, a table, chair and a microphone stand were automatically prepared. The idea of standing and speaking was thought to be tiring for the speaker and it also got us all seated at the same height. Quite clever because no awkward “status” faux pas were possible. Being confident and outspoken isn’t valued in Japanese culture. Here we should be humble, shy, modest and self-effacing.
Is There A Japanese Way Of Public Speaking?
Reading your speech, word for word, to achieve linguistic purity and carefully displaying no great confidence as a speaker is the accepted formula. Not a great platform for achieving “executive presence” in an international environment. Can Japanese become great public speakers? Yes, but they have to overcome a few mindset issues first. We teach public speaking here and sometimes will get pushback about the “Japanese way” of public speaking being different to that in the West. This is a false flag. It is a wily justification for a lack of competence by poor speakers. We are producing plenty of professional competent speakers in our classes, so we know it can be done and that Japanese executives can become excellent presenters. There are common basics for effective presentations that will transcend national borders.
One of our arrogant faults in the mono-lingual, Anglo Saxon West is we presume people who are not articulate, especially in English and who cannot present well, are not up to snuff. Big mistake. Skill absorption is the key. With proper training, I believe every Japanese leader can achieve “executive presence”. Some may take longer than others to throw off their mindset issues. Gaining proficiency means we will all improve international mutual trust and enjoy clearer communication. This is really one of the last global frontiers for Japan.
Many internationally oriented Japanese executives here, will eventually catch up in English communication skills. Korean, Chinese and numerous other Asian nation’s executives, for whom the international language of English is not their mother tongue, have managed it. International conferences are where you realise the gap between Japan and the rest of Asia is vast. Japanese executives can certainly manage it as well. It might be right or it may be wrong, it may be fair or unfair, but it is a reality. Being capable of giving professional presentations in English is how to garner “executive presence”.
I was confirmed into the Anglican Church when I was twelve years of age. I remember it was the first time I ever wore a tie in my life. Prior to that, every week I had to ride my bicycle to the church after school and do bible studies with other kids with the Minister in order to pass the test to be able to confirmed. My parents were not religious at all, but I guess because Christianity is such a central component to our belief systems and literature, that they wanted me to get the basics.
Years later I discovered Zig Ziglar, one of the most famous modern day sales trainers. He was raised in the Deep South of America where bible studies is very big. I have read his books and watched his videos. I am fan. I noticed he was an incredible communicator. I also noticed that a lot of his sales stories where like the parables he would have read in his “red letter” bible, that is where the words attributed to Jesus are written in red. Australians are not particularly religious like Americans are, but I did recognise the power of these parables in communication. I don’t mean the actual quotation of the parables themselves, but the storytelling structure.
The parable structure always has a learning component wrapped up in the story being told. Often in business, we want to achieve the same thing for our audience. We might be giving a “persuade” speech rather than simple “inform” speech” or we may be calling for the audience to “take action” rather than just “entertain” them.
The parables are always from real life, rather than being a confection created for effect. This makes it easy for us to identify with the story. When I mentioned going through the confirmation process as a child, I am sure many readers went through a similar experience, including those who are from Muslim or Buddhist religious belief systems. Our real life stories make it easy to connect with our audience, because they can understand or emphasise with what we are saying.
The parables are also very easy to understand. The message is crystal clear. Do this and things will be good. Do that and things will be bad. This simplicity is what makes the storytelling so effective. Zig Ziglar was a master of telling his stories which each had a lesson there for us in sales to absorb. They were from his experience or the experience of others from the real world, not from the “how it should be world”.
This is the danger when we become speakers. We pontificate from on high, from way above the clouds, as if we were superhumans who never made a mistake or had a failure. The ego has to be strong to tell a story against yourself. We have grown up supersensitive to being criticised and so it is like kryptonite, we avoid it completely. Criticising yourself sounds crazy, so we only talk about what a legend we are.
Zig understood that audiences love a good redemption tale. Of course we like to hear how to do things so that they go well, that parable is always in fashion. Interestingly though, we often feel distant from this model story of bravery, perseverance against the odds, intelligence, strength and wisdom. We naturally aspire to those things, but they can feel like they are a million miles away from where we are at this moment. Now failure, disaster, train wrecks all feel much closer to our reality and of course we want to avoid those. Parable stories on what no to do are much more popular than the ones on what we should be doing.
When things go pear shaped, don’t miss the chance to take a note on that for a future talk. The events may feel radioactive at the time, but get it down on the record, so that you can retell it when the pain has subsided. Particularly include the characters involved, the extent of the damage and the depth of the heroics or stupidity involved. Don’t be limited to your own disasters. Comb through the media and books for other people’s disasters, which can then be trotted out as a parable for doom and gloom.
Storytelling master Zig Ziglar copied the parables, probably without even giving it a second thought, because it was so much a part of his cultural upbringings in Yazoo City, Mississippi. As presenters we can find our own blue ribbon stories of triumph and catastrophe. We can wrap these up in simple, true renditions of reality that our audience can identify with and easily recall. The parables are well remembered for a reason – they work as a storytelling structure and we can adopt it for our own talks too. In ten minutes, I bet you can come up with at least two or three good incidents that have parable like qualities, which can then be fleshed out into mini-stories of business good and evil for an audience. Give it a try!
Whenever I hear that Jesper Koll, CEO of WisdomTree Investments Japan,
is going to give a talk here in Tokyo, I want to attend. I have heard him speak before and he is very good, so my anticipation level of another great presentation is high. I am not alone in thinking like this and his talks are always packed. This underlines why being able to present at a professional level builds your personal brand. The basis for a professional presentation is receiving high level training and then getting a lot of practice to hone the craft. You might be thinking, “well I don’t get that many opportunities to give talks, so the frequency index is a bit low for me”. Fair enough, but you can get the training and that is the starting point to get the speaking spots. All professional business speakers did a lot of speaking for free, before they ever got paid. In business, we will have to give excellent talks from the very start and then at every opportunity, to build our reputation. This is why the training needs to come first and the frequency becomes a consequence of the training results.
For those who are not in the “established reputation” group, which obviously is the majority, there are things we can do very easily to join them. While we are working in our companies, there will be chances to give updates, reports, represent the section, etc., and this is where we need to start building our reputation. Fortunately, there is rarely a queue formed on the right to give these talks. Most people hate speaking in public, because they have no clue what they are doing. They just bumble along, shuffling forward like the army of the dead reluctant presenters. Good, keep bumbling. That means we can get the opportunity to volunteer our services instead.
When the top bosses see you give your report and your slides are crystal clear, well presented and your delivery is really excellent, you will be noted as someone who can represent the firm. It may not happen quickly, but don’t worry, those very same abilities as a competent presenter are also the requirements for leading others. You are likely to be promoted in your firm because you are seen as a skilled communicator, someone with persuasion power.
Rising through the ranks opens up more possibilities for giving presentations. Often the big bosses themselves hate presenting too and will be very happy to throw you the speaking spot. Grab it every time. Once you get into the public arena, other will start to notice you. More invitations will come. I have never asked Jesper about this, but I will bet he wasn’t an overnight success as a speaker. I am sure he took years to polish his delivery. As you wise up to how the system works, you will start creating your own chances. You will be nominating yourself to give pertinent talks, on some worthy subjects for the local burghers. Don’t let “imposter syndrome” hold you back. Remember that 99% of people giving business presentations range in skill from average to rubbish. You have every right to be out there and because you have received the training, you are automatically in the top 5% straight away.
Picking topics which are hot is a no-brainer. This is where your copy writing skills are called upon to draft the gripping blurb advertising your talk. Don’t rely on the hosts to do this for you. This is your brand we are talking about here and you must have total control over how you are represented to an audience. This is what the people will see and on that basis they will attend, until such time as you are well regarded speaker and people will turn up to hear whatever you have to say regardless, because they are fans.
This is what happens for me when Jesper’s name is bandied about as a speaker. I just go straight to the signup page and register, without reading the finer details, because I know it will be good. The other dimension is that not everyone will be able to attend your talk but many, many more will see the notification. They will start to associate your name with a particular topic. In Jesper’s case it will be Japan’s economy, because he is an expert economist and that is what he talks about. Your name in lights as an expert on a topic is part of building an audience and personal brand for the future.
When we get to the delivery stage, we can also build anticipation. You are introduced by the MC, who is absolutely quoting from the brilliant introduction of yourself, which you prepared in advance. I say “absolutely” because you need to nobble the MC beforehand and give firm instructions they follow the script and don’t go off piste. It should be brimming to overflow with credibility and this starts to build a positive anticipation in those who don’t know anything about you as yet.
When the MC introduction is finished and you are on stage, don't start immediately. Just hold the proceedings for a few seconds, which by the way can seem like an eternity and then start. If you want to see an anticipation build of stupendous proportions, then watch the video of Michael Jackson, when he performed at the Super Bowl in 1993. He didn’t move a muscle for one minute and thirteen seconds. At that point, all he did was change his head direction to the left. He then held that new pose until the one minute thirty two mark and then he began his performance. It takes a huge amount of guts to hold an audience for that long. Well folks we are not Michael Jackson, so we can only hold our audience for a short time, but we should still hold them in order to build that anticipation.
Keep close the idea of creating anticipation in the mind of your audience and develop your presentations accordingly. If you start this way, you can anticipate a lot of success for your personal and professional brands.
We normally think of omnichannel in relation to the medium being used to contact buyers. We can also use this idea when thinking about planning our talk. We automatically revert to the brain when we start this exercise. Our logical, rational, analytical mode is needed but that is not enough for audiences. We need heart, value and sex appeal for our messages to resonate. We tend however to get stuck on the first rung of the planning ladder, the intellectual angle. We all know though that we are emotional creatures, running around justifying our emotional choices with a veneer of logic. Our talk need to access all of our human instincts.
We need our brain to be working well. Logic is required to make the argument make sense to our audience. It means we need to be piling on the evidence, proof, data, statistics and testimonials etc. The navigation of the talk should be logical, so that it flows like a good novel, making it easy for the audience to follow where we are going with this content. I have mentioned before a talk I attended, where the visiting VIP just rambled through this maze and mist of an esoteric discussion, peppered with his vague musings, which was totally impenetrable. It lacked structure, logical flow and clear, concise communication. It was totally self-indulgent. To this day, I still have no idea what he was on about, but his personal reputation and his organisation’s reputation were both shredded that day.
Some members in the audience will be analytical types who love the logic, the detail, the nitty gritty, the evidence and they will be happy to see it. They will be calibrating everything we say and running it through their mind looking for inconsistencies, gaps, flaws and mistakes of fact. We will win this group over if we are well organised, however they are not the only personality type in the audience. We have to go omnichannel to appeal to other personality types.
Some will be more swayed by their hearts. We need to get them in touch with their emotions and feelings during our talk. Novels and movies are emotional engagement masterpieces in many cases. We are drawn into the characters in the story and what happens to them. I am a pretty logical guy, but I remember being captured by the heroine in the Japanese television drama Oshin. Her rise from crushing poverty to running a massive retail empire was a true story, which appealed to my logical brain, but her travails were all pulling at the heartstrings.
We do not have multiple weeks like a television show or three hours like a movie or hundreds of pages in a novel to emotionally engage our audience. We can have some elements of the human drama of what we are talking about. Because we are in business there is absolutely no shortage of drama which we can relate. There are the full spectrum of characters to draw upon as well, from amongst our colleagues, subordinates, superiors, suppliers and clients. Everyone loves a gory tale of corporate value destruction, factional bloodletting spitting out winners and losers and the dirty deeds done dirt cheap by business nasties.
Another instinct is the gut and this is where we are appealing to value for money. Is what we are talking about bringing concrete value to the audience. Have we proffered some information or insight, which was previously unknown to them? Are we making their business or personal life substantially better? Are we tuning into the conversation going on in in the minds of the audience and suggesting questions which they want answers to and then magically unveiling the solutions? The “what is in it for me” question is always the uppermost thought in an audience’s mind, when they sit there listening to us pontificate about a subject. I attended a talk by a big shot executive from one of the largest companies in the world. She was talking about personal branding, so she pulled a good crowd. However, it instantly became apparent that she was talking about how to brand yourself within a mega monster of a company like hers, when the audience was full of punters from small to medium sized enterprises. There were zero take-aways and zero value on offer that day.
The last omnichannel is sex appeal. Is your topic sexy, will it fill the seats? The title is always a key. A lot of thought needs to go into the best shorthand description which will grab attention. Sometimes we need a provocative title to break through the daily detritus filling the minds of our potential audience members. “How to” titles also work because we are flagging you will learn something if you attend. The delivery is another aspect of sex appeal. We have to be excellent in giving the talk, looking for every opportunity to engage with our audience. We want them thinking, writing down our stuff and often we have to branch into edutainment. I am not good at snappy repartee, quick wit, zinger one liners or being a skilled raconteur. I can tell stories though, which are interesting and insightful, which seems to get me by.
When we sit down to design the talk, we need to be asking ourselves, “have I got all of the omnichannel touchpoints covered for this talk?”. We know people are quite various in how they absorb information and in their interests. We have to do our best to appeal to as many people as we can in the one sitting. In the end, it is the planning starting point which matters most. If we plan to incorporate these four omnichannel elements of brain, heart, gut and sex appeal, then we will be more successful.
Usually when we have an opportunity to make a presentation, we get busy thinking about what we will talk about. The organisers may have set some rails by specifying the theme of the event or they may have asked us to speak on a particular topic. We are busy and often we start with creating new slides and scanning previous presentations for slides we can recycle. This is a poor strategy. What do we bang on about to our staff – plan the event or the project before you get started on the nitty gritty details. However, we neglect our own sage advice when it comes to presenting.
Part of the planning process should involve boiling the key message down to a nub that cleverly, succinctly and concisely summarises the whole point of the talk. Before we go there though we would be wise to consult others for ideas. It is a bit odd isn’t it, because we are always recommending collaboration and crowd sourcing of ideas for projects. How we seek those ideas though is a bit tricky.
Bounding up to someone for your presentation and suddenly saying , “do you have any ideas for this talk I am going to give” may not work all that well. Teamwork featuring excellent levels of collaboration is a concept, a sacred concept in most firms, but rather undefined. What is the environment for collaboration? Are people’s ideas welcomed in your workplace? Are we able to go outside the workplace and source broader networks for ideas? Do we have trustworthy networks in the first place?
I had to give a keynote speech to a relocation industry conference in Osaka. I called my contacts working in that industry and asked them about their issues, headaches and challenges. I have never worked in that industry and neither had anyone in my company, so I needed that broader network to help me. The irony was that after all the work I had put into crafting that piece de resistance , Covid put the whole event to the sword. I never did give that talk. It would have been brilliant of course!
Jokes aside, the idea of involving others is a good one, because we only know what we know. “Two brains are better than one” is ancient wisdom, but how often do we avail ourselves of outside input. I was getting my book “Japan Sales Mastery” translated and was struggling for the best title in Japanese. My friend Tak Adachi and I were having lunch and I mentioned my problem. He said why don’t you just call it “Za Eigyo” or “The Sale”. My son, later said to me why don’t I drop the katakana for “Za” from the title and just use “The” from English, to become “The Eigyo”.
This was a smart idea because I am an Australian writing in Japanese about selling in Japan, so the title combines both languages, to differentiate the book as a how foreigner would look at the world of sales in Japan. I would never have come up with those ideas on my own, so it demonstrated the value of collaboration.
The problem is we all recognise this in theory and we should be applying it to our presentation preparations, but we turn the whole thing into a solitary affair. We emerge from our cave, brandishing our slide deck and away we go. Getting more input is a better road to take, but there are some caveats. People we consult on the spot, will give us the very shallowest of ideas. We need to set this up, explain the theme and then fix a date a few days later, to allow them to digest the theme and work on some ideas. We are looking for diversity of views here and are not going to make any snap judgments. We should listen quietly – no interrupting, jumping in over the top of them or ending their sentences. We then thank them and privately reject, modify or incorporate their ideas.
If we ask them to give some feedback on our ideas, always frame the response. We want them to tell us what they like about it first and then tell us how we could make it even better. Confidence is a key aspect when presenting and that includes the preparation phase as well. This whole effort doesn’t have to take a lot of time, so we are not going to be caught in a time crunch and have to rush things, to be in time for the talk. More ancient wisdom says we don’t plan to fail, but we often fail to plan. We can incorporate more ideas into the preparation phase, if we simply plan for it.
The end is near. The end of Covid that is, as we see vaccinations increase and get us all closer to herd immunity. When will it end? There probably will never be an exact end, but it will diminish and our lives will get back to something approaching normality. That means we will be back in the meeting rooms and speaking venues to give our talks to live audiences. We have gotten used to online talks, which are the supreme example of impersonal presentations. The audience are a series of tiny boxes on the screen, some without their cameras on and there is no particular sense of interaction. We are talking to a camera mounted 10 centimeters or more above where the faces are positioned, so we have little read on the audience reaction to our talk.
Using body language on screen is difficult. In fact, it is so difficult that almost 99% of speakers don’t use any when they speak online. They sit there talking and talking, but not involving their hands for gestures or using any facial expression. Fake backgrounds have taught everyone that if you start waving your hands around they will disappear. The secret here though is to use gestures, but just don’t wave them around like a pirate captain. When you do move your hands, move them slowly and keep the gestures in the upper shoulder to around ear height range, in order to be easy to see.
When we are live in person, we can rediscover all the benefits of using our full body to emphasise our messages. When I see speakers standing behind a podium, so that they can operate their laptop or read from their notes, I always think what a waste. A waste of energy, which could have been distributed to the audience through our full body. We should move away from the podium and face the audience, so that we can draw on the power of our total body speaking techniques.
This includes using the three distances technique with the audience. When we want to make a macro point, we can move slightly back from the audience, lift our chin up slightly and employ very large gestures. When we want a neutral power position, we can be mid-stage and hold our chin level, while employing normal gestures. If we want to make a micro point, we can move as close as possible to the audience, drop our chin down ever so slightly and use rather smaller gestures.
If it is a big venue, we can cover the left and right sides of the stage too. When we move though, we should try to avoid speaking while moving. Walking is a distraction, so we want to minimise this as much as possible and have the audience completely concentrated on our words alone. We should walk naturally to the very stage apron on the left or right side, so that we are as physically close to that part of the audience as possible. This physical positioning gives a greater sense of speaker and audience connection. This is because we are showing we want to move to be with them, rather than remaining a distant, remote speaker on stage, clearly separated from the attendees.
Being in the room, we can now really use our eye power. Online, we have to train ourselves to look at the camera, but it is a weird experience. The way it works with the technology is such that we cannot see the reactions on the faces below, because we are looking up at the camera lens. Our talk may as well be delivered by phone, because we are not getting any feedback on the content of what we are saying. In a live venue, we can see the faces of the audience and can make contact with their eyes. We should be seeking to hold each person’s gaze, one by one, for six seconds. This is enough time to make a connection, make the talk feel more personal, yet without the eye contact feeling too intrusive.
Keeping the lights up, if we are using slides is key, because we want to see their reactions and we want them to see us too. If any “helpful” individual decides to turn the house lights down while you are speaking, then stop speaking. Pause to build some tension in the room and then release the tension, by asking for the lights to be brought back up again.
We don’t have a chat function live, but you can ask your audience to raise their hands if they agree or disagree with some point you want feedback on. It sounds funny, but when I have taught classes live, I miss that chat function. It gives you instant feedback from a large number of people and you can comment on their contributions and recognise them, as the chat input pops up onscreen. Constantly asking the live audience to raise their hands or to all speak up is going to be a shambles. Of course, we have the live Q&A to deal with enquiries and further clarifications, so all is not lost.
At some point soon we will back live. I found there is a transition from the computer screen to the big stage and it takes a bit of adjustment to get back in the saddle. We need to dust off our basic techniques for speaking and be ready to boost our personal and professional brands. Show time folks!
246: How to be a Star in Business Interviews
Being interviewed by the media can be a high risk affair, depending on the publication, the journalist and the business zeitgeist of the moment. These types of interviews come up relatively rarely in business. More common are panel discussions at business events hosted by Chambers of Commerce and more recently interviews on podcasts. I have been on both sides of the microphone, so let me share some observations which may help you prepare for your interview.
Chamber panels and podcasts are usually not “gotcha” interviews, as we will encounter with some journalists doing media interviews. Generally, we are going to be treated well and it would be rare that the interviewer really went after you. Having said that though, we have to expect the interviewer to want to dig down deeper into something you have said. This can be of two basic varieties.
One is a high level statement you made where the context and detail is obvious to the speaker. This may not be obvious to the audience though, so the interviewer will seek more detail and clarification. In this case, that is not a problem, because we have the depth of mastery of the subject. The other variety is a statement that may be accepted wisdom or it might be something we have said without giving too much thought to it. This is when we will get into trouble, because as soon as the interviewer starts to dig in, it becomes plainly obvious we don’t know all that much about it and out pours fluff instead of substance.
The answer here is to talk about things you have experienced, read about in detail, have researched deeply or where you have listened to experts. This sounds obvious, however we don’t know where we will go with the questions and we can be drawn to stray into areas where our intellectual coverage is pretty thin. There is nothing wrong with honesty. Just say, “I don’t have much to say on that subject because I am not an expert in that area. However something I do feel passionate about is…”. Don’t just end it with telling the audience you don’t know much, because we are starting to damage our personal brand. Avoid leaving the conversation hanging in the air with us having admitted we are babbling on about stuff we don’t know too much about. Immediately segue into an area where we are knowledgeable and talk about that.
Always seek the questions in advance. With media people they will do that, but often they have a couple of silent assassins ready which they will hit you with unexpectedly, to throw you off balance, to gain their “scoop”. Business panels and podcasts are usually not like that. Generally, for panels, they will let you know, in general terms, what is the broad discussion they are looking for. In the case of a panel, it is unpredictable where the conversation will move, but at least there are broad rails bounding the subject matter. Again, it always better to say you don’t know, than trying to snow the organisers or the audience. Instead make a comment about some aspect you do know well and preserve your expert status.
For podcasts, you should expect they will have a set list of questions and you should get those in advance. If the interviewer says something like “I let the muse guide me”, then I wouldn’t recommend joining that podcast, unless you are massively confident about the subject matter. Generally, there will be prior episodes, so you can get a sense of whether you are in the presence of real genius or a total nutter. Often there will be a pre-meeting, to go through the episode theme and for them to get a sense of what sort of a guest you will be. You can also get a sense of who they are too.
Prepare for the questions, but understand you won’t be able to read from notes. The pace will move too fast for that. You can glance at your notes, so it is better to have them arranged for easy reference, if you indeed need to do that. Just having mentally calibrated the questions is usually enough. Remember you are there because you know about the subject, so it will be easy for you to speak about it.
That is often the real problem. We do know a lot about the subject and we talk for too long and say too much. Media interviews are an area where the more concise you are the safer it is. Panel discussion hosts don’t like guests who want to hog the limelight, so they will unceremoniously cut you off, effectively signalling to the audience that you lack self-awareness. Podcast hosts may just edit the hell out of you. There is a balance, but being concise comes across a lot better than rambling. If what you say is a bit too circumspect, the interviewer will draw you out further. If you hear yourself talking too much, then you probably are, so you need to conclude your remarks on that point and stop.
Rehearse your remarks based on the questions. Remember these are public occasions and just as you would rehearse for a public speech, you need to do the same for the interview. This will help you to trim the fluff from your answers and polish them into succinct, clever responses which will shine a positive light on you. This is just as much your personal brand as giving a keynote speech. Your fellow panelists or rivals on other podcasts, won’t take this step. Think of these occasions in this way and you will definitely come across as a star.
One consistent issue which often pops up within companies requesting our training is achieving persuasion power with colleagues, bosses and subordinates. Being unable to convince others to follow your requests, ideas and suggestions is highly frustrating. Often the issue is how the topic is approached. In this “time is money”, no patience, miniscule concentration span, twenty four/seven scramble, people drive you to get to your point. If you are giving a presentation the big boss might bark out “Story, get to the point”. We are taught at business school to start with the punchline and get that into the Executive Summary, right at the front of the document. That is fine except it is ineffectual when presenting in person.
The punchline may be an excellent idea – “let’s increase the marketing budget by $1 million to fund campaigns to coincide with the end of Covid”. The problem though is that the punchline is naked and has no protection attached. As soon as we offer a statement, we suddenly transform our neutral audience into a raving band of doubters, sceptics, naysayers and critics. Fair enough too, because we didn’t land the punchline properly. Comedians don’t start with the punchline. They set it up, they build the mental pictures for us so we can see the scene in our mind’s eye. They plug in plenty of context, add interesting characters, nominate a location and secure the build up in a temporal frame for us.
When the punchline is unveiled it is congruent with the set up, makes a lot of sense and we laugh. Why on earth serious, well educated business people would imagine they can just throw the punchline out there, with no context, background, proof, evidence, data and statistics is a bit of a mystery. But they do just that and then get cut to ribbons by the baying crowd of non-believers.
Our communication skills have to be good enough that briefly, we can build the basis for the punchline. If we do a good job, the members of the audience are all sitting there thinking “we should fund a campaign to coincide with the end of Covid”, before we say anything about it. The lead up has been so well constructed that given the background, the best way forward occurs to everyone as the most obvious thing needed.
We have to keep it brief though. Storytelling is a big part of this, but these are “short stories”, not War and Peace tome like equivalents. If we labour the point or go too long with the background, some grumpy attendees are bound to tell us “get to the point”. So we need to have enough context, supported with tons of evidence, which draws out the needed next step. When we explain what comes next, everyone feels they already thought of that answer by themselves. This is guaranteed to get agreement to the proposal.
The way we get to the structure of the talk is to start with the action we want everyone to agree to. Having isolated out the action we investigate why do we think this? What have we read, heard, seen, experienced something, which tells us this is the best solution. There must be a reason for what we are recommending. All we need to do is capture that information and add in the people they know, a place they can see in their mind, put it all in a time frame and definitely add in data, evidence and proof to back up what we are saying.
We start with the background and then we reveal the punchline but we don’t stop there. Recency is powerful, so we want to control what is the last thing our audience hears. We top it all off with stating the benefit of the action. The action/ benefit component must be very short. There needs to be one clear action, so that everyone can understand what we need to do. Also, while there may be many benefits, we only want to mention the most powerful one. If we keep piling on the benefits we begin to dilute their power with too much detail. Clarity must be the driving ambition here. If we put it into mathematical terms then 90% of the time we speak should be devoted to providing the richest context possible and 5% each for the action and benefit.
If we are doing a good job then by the time we blurt out the punchline the audience will be thinking “that is old hat, I knew that, that is obvious”. If we can engender that reaction then we have done our job well. Brief but powerful, clear and convincing - these should be our objectives.
Clients have some common problems with their Japanese leaders. I know this because the same requests keep coming up. This is across industries and companies and it is consistent. Usually Japanese presenters are excellent at assembling lots of data and information. They can really pack a lot into a few slides. When they present it is like a waterfall of wonderous content, just flowing forth, without much structure or clarity. Somehow the bosses have to work out the key points for themselves, because the staff’s job focuses on accumulating hoards of data and then putting it all up on screen. The presenter is almost invisible, has low energy, speaks in a quiet voice you can struggle to hear and blends well into the wall paper. This doesn’t work so well in international meetings and Japan looks weak and ineffectual to the rest of the far flung company world.
We are battling two giants here. One is the educational system and the other is Japanese culture. I earned my Masters Degree here in Tokyo, so I have seen up close and personal what a high school education prepares you for and what universities do with that raw clay. An argument could have been made, prior to the advent of the internet, that the ability to memorise vast quantities of information and regurgitate it on command was a serious capability. We can find any thing very quickly today thanks to search engines, so having to memorise gobs of stuff isn’t as important as it once may have been.
I see it in my son’s education when he was at international High School here. They were required to have laptops and everything was done online. His generations’ issue is there is too much information. How do you find the best and correct data, how do you sort the wheat from the chaff? Young people are digital natives, but they are all drinking from the firehose of all data every recorded, sitting just a few clicks away.
We teach our students to start at the end. Define in as short a sentence as possible, the most important key message you want to impart. This is not as easy as it sounds. You have to be brutal with yourself. You have to eliminate all the nice to have, all the interesting to have and refine it down to the must have. Just throwing up a lot of data on screen doesn’t require as much thinking, as refining the data into the gold nuggets for the audience. Discerning the key message then allows us to build the structure for the argument and to align the necessary evidence in order to be convincing to our audience.
The first words coming out of our mouth have a powerful role. Everyone seems easily distracted today, have miniscule concentration spans and are quickly bored. So we need to say something that really breaks through that wall of indifference and grab their attention. There is no point launching that blockbuster opening in a squeaky, unsure, timid little voice. People will be flying for their phones to escape you. No, we need a strong voice, standing or sitting tall if online, when we kick things off. We have to be oozing confidence.
“But Story san, my English is so poor, I have no confidence”. This is another trope we often hear. Here we have Japanese perfectionism, no defect, no errors and no mistake culture colliding with the Education Department’s failed efforts to teach the population English. Don’t accept that excuse. No one cares about linguistic perfection in business meetings, except the Japanese staff when they have to speak in English. Give them the “no grammar needed” escape jail card for the meetings, to give them permission to speak without fear and let the rest of us work out what it is they want to say. We are used to this and are all pretty good at it.
Just being able to isolate the key take away and deliver that in a confident manner will be a revolution to business meetings where Japanese have to present. Not having to wade through all the dross to understand the key point will be a relief. Having one idea per slide will be a life saver for everyone – make this the iron rule for Japanese presenters. This forces the selection of only the most important information to be shown. The result will be a much clearer messaging effort and greater clarity around what exactly is that message. Confidence sells the message, so the delivery has to be sold in that manner.
Rehearsal is critical for Japanese speakers and so is coaching. This applies to whatever language they are presenting in, because you can guarantee the issues will be present in both languages to a great extent. When giving feedback to anyone, only look at two elements and tell them what they are doing well and then tell them how they can do it even better. This will build confidence and create a momentum that will maximise capability. What does all of this cost? Nothing, so let’s get to it.
Once upon a time, we taught public speaking and presentation skills in a class room, with tons of people all seated together, right next to each other. We moved to teaching everything LIVE On Line since February 2020, so what has been the difference? Surprisingly, not as much as we expected. The one big difference is the lack of opportunity to employ full body emphasis when presenting, because everyone is mainly sitting in front of a screen. You can use a standing desk, but even so, the camera will cut you off at the thigh level, so we are not getting the full body power. There are a few tricky things about gestures when using fake backgrounds, which by the way seems to be standard now. What are the things that stand out most in the online presenting environment?
Smiling is definitely one which has disappeared, when people are on screen. I don’t know why that is the case. Perhaps we are more self conscious in front of a camera? Or is this now such a serious business world that smiling is out of fashion? Think of any online meeting you have attended recently and ask yourself was anyone smiling when they made their comments or gave their reports? I was teaching a class on presenting skills online recently and what a difference it made when people would smile during their talks. Not every subject lends itself to smiling of course but there are bound to be good news in there somewhere and that is the time to trot out that big smile of yours. It is congruent with the content of the talk, so it works. It is also such a connector with the audience, it really drives up the engagement factor with an audience.
We have all been doing these online meetings for 18 months now, yet most people still haven’t mastered the medium. I know it is difficult, because the camera lens is 10 centimetres above the faces on the screen. However, take a look at the eye line of the participants in the next meeting. How many are framed in the screen so that there is a half body showing and their head is at about two thirds height on camera? Many will still have their heads cut off and they are arranged at the very bottom of the screen, like they have been decapitated. Or they will have the camera lens angle shooting straight up their nostrils – not an attractive look that one.
When we get the camera lens at eye line and we speak while looking at the camera, we are now using the medium as it was designed. The camera can bring us into the world of the viewer and we can be speaking directly to them through the lens. When we are looking down at the faces on screen we have broken off eye contact and we seem like we are looking down on everyone. It is the equivalent of giving a face to face speech without ever looking at your audience, in fact you are speaking to the floor, the whole time. Now I have seen speakers actually do that, but it is totally ineffective. The same with the online world – talk to the people through the lens and you will get your message across much more impressively.
We mainly use our voices when presenting online. Yet what about gestures? Gestures can support what we are saying by bringing more physical energy to the point. If you have framed yourself properly then you can use your hands on screen. There are a few best practices though. Firstly, don’t wave your hands around, because the fake backgrounds will disappear them at certain points. So, hold your hands at between shoulder and head height, so that they can be easily seen and hold the gesture rather than trying to move it too much. Also, if you want to show some item on screen, use your own body as the shield and show it in front of you. The fake background won’t be able to disappear it on you when you do it this way.
Most people I see online, are using the same speaking voice range they use all the time in the in-person world. When we are presenting we are no longer a part of the audience – we are on stage, be it in a venue or online. That means we need to bring a lot more energy to what we are saying, in order to attract the audience to our message. When we are online, we also need to compensate for the fact that the camera will sap 20% of our power and we will come across as having less energy that usual. You may have noticed that most people speaking online sound like they are on “downers”. We need to get that voice energy up and start directing at it a key words we want to emphasise in our sentences. Not every word in a sentence has the same value, so we need to pick out key words and phrases and make them hot, by hitting them harder.
Most online presenters have a long way to go with this medium. The experience gained over the last year or so, hasn’t improved them, actually. They are still making fundamental mistakes. These can be easily corrected and it just takes greater awareness and some practice to get it right. So let’s think again about what we are doing here and how we are doing it. Apply these ideas and you will immediately be in the top 1% of online presenters, simply because everyone else is clueless, hopeless and way underpowered.
“Naomi Osaka would have earned at least $200,000 dollars if she made the Top 16 in the French Tennis Open and would have had a $1.7million payday, if she won the tournament. Speaking to the media after each round, is why she gets paid the big bucks, so she should harden up and get to work”. Some other commentators have focused on her “bravery to talk about her mental depression and her decision to forego the money, to take care of her mental health”. I don’t fit neatly into either category really, because I get the “part of the job” responsibility in her chosen profession and I also salute her for talking about her mental health struggles, as a 23 year old young woman, facing a cynical, mercenary sports press. For me, although she may be a sportswoman, her issues also apply to the businessperson who faces the very same dilemmas. You are getting paid to represent the firm in the public arena, even if it is killing you.
I am not an expert on Naomi Osaka, but I do recall reading her comments about a year ago about her disinterest in becoming a skilled public speaker. At the time, I thought that was a curious idea for someone in her line of work. It is typical though isn’t it. We start working in our chosen career and then as we rise through the ranks, we are given greater responsibilities and that includes speaking in front of others. Did we sit down at a young age and survey our future career path and conclude that at some point in time, if we do well, we will have to give internal presentations, deal with the press, handle shareholders or represent the company by giving public business speeches. No! We just went to work every day and then one fateful day, the bell rang or the alarm went off and we had to make that first talk.
I doubt whether leading tennis academies allocate any time to instructing their future stars on how to deal with the press, sponsors or the public. It is the same in companies. No one ever thinks about investing in your future, by training you on how to handle speaking in public. In the same way that this inability or choice to not deal with the requirements to speak in public could be a career ending outcome for Naomi, it can also mean we are passed over at work, in favour of those silky smooth, confident, more professional speakers inside the firm.
Recently she wrote about withdrawing from the French Tennis Open, “I am not a natural public speaker and get waves of anxiety before I speak to the world’s media”. I read in the press that she is worth $77 million, from sponsorships etc. She has the money to get media training, presentation training and every other form of training needed to enable her to become a master of her environment and be able to deal with the gutter sports press. Are businesspeople investing in themselves to become masters of their environment? No. Like Naomi they are just suffering.
No one is born a natural public speaker. I know this to be true. For the first 30 years of my life, I was terrified of public speaking. Like a whipped dog, I hid in the shadows, praying I would not be called upon to speak in public. As I rose through the ranks in my career, there came that point, that day, when the bell rang and I had to get up and speak to an audience. Did I go and get training? No! It was some number of years before I took the plunge and got the training. When I had the training, what did I think about it? I immediately realised I was an idiot and I should have done this when I was much, much younger and at the start of my career. Now, over 500 public speeches later, I enjoy it.
What was different between the old me and the new me? My mindset changed and I stopped embracing my fears and inadequacies. I stopped running away from the inevitable. The training gave me skills and the coaching brought out my confidence. Repetition did the rest. But your mindset has to be right to be able to get the training and to access the repetition. Naomi Osaka is seven years younger than I was when I did my first talk. I hope someone looking after her gets her a good coach and she can slay this public speaking demon limiting her career. If you are in business and that same demon is confronting you, get the training and slay your career limiters too.
Video is tricky. However, it looks so simple. You just stand in front of the camera and give your talk. I don’t know why video saps twenty percent of our energy when it is actually broadcast, but that seems to be the accepted wisdom. That means that just speaking normally into camera will now look a lot less energetic. Getting the delivery to be fluent is also a challenge. Either we do it free style or we use a teleprompter. Both have their challenges. What do we do with our hands? This is an interesting one, because the camera lens seems to have some magic power to reduce our gesture self awareness to zero, until that is, when we see it played back in all its gory glory.
I broadcast three TV shows on YouTube every week, so I am doing a lot of video work. My first weekly TV show was kicked off nearly four years, so I have gained a few insights over that time. I am not from the media world or have any background in television. I am a typical businessman who got into this by accident and so it is all pretty much self taught through exposure, practice and repetition. Yes, I have the advantage of being a High Impact Presentations instructor for Dale Carnegie, but presenting to a live audience and doing it on video is totally different. Everyone has discovered this fact since we all moved home, to spend a lot of our time in Zoom meetings or their equivalent.
I also teach people how to present to the camera and I have noticed a few things. Invariably their energy is too low. They are transferring their usual speaking volume to this medium and it doesn’t work. They appear lifeless and boring. No problem, speak louder, right? That is what I thought too, but I noticed a lot of people find that daunting. For them speaking with 50% more energy feels like they are screaming. Remember we are subtracting 20% immediately to counter the camera lens energy deficit, but on top of that they need to bring even more energy to the talk. If I ask for 50% more energy, invariably I will get about a 10% increase. This is why having an instructor or coach is handy, because you can’t easily work this out by yourself.
Gestures seem to be another area of mystery. What do I do with my hands? The most common choice is to do nothing with them. This is a big missed opportunity to bring physical power to support your verbal message. I have found there is a 15 second window to hold the same gesture. More than that and it become weaker and weaker and more and more annoying. The gestures need to be coordinated with what we are saying, so that they are congruent. If what we are saying and the way we are saying it don’t align properly, then our audience gets distracted. Once upon a time, the distracted audience would be by focusing on our voice or our apparel. Now it is on their phone. For half body video composition, we need the gestures to be held between rib height and the head height, so that they can be easily seen. For some curious reason, a lot of people hold their gestures at low waist level and apart from being difficult to see, this bit usually gets cut off in the editing process.
What we are doing with our face also is important. Having one facial expression may be very energy efficient, but it looks wooden on video. Our face should be showing what we are talking about. If results are good, then look happy. If they are bad, then look concerned. If you ask a rhetorical question, then look puzzled. I think you get the idea. One thing the camera doesn't like is when we drop our chin down, while we are talking. It looks like we are talking down to our audience, we also look very constrained. So we need to keep that chin up the whole time. Try it for yourself and you will be amazed at the difference it makes, to how we come across to our audience.
If we are just speaking off the top of our head, then we had better be pretty good or the video will be butchered in the editing process, as we have to stitch all those corrected mistakes together. It becomes very jerky in the final version, which is super distracting from our message. Zooming in and zooming out at these edits makes it appear less choppy, but you still don’t want too many of these to have to contend with.
Teleprompters can fix this and a bit of adjusting for font size and speed is needed to find the right balance. The secret here is to only look at the left side of the screen as the words roll up. Otherwise, you will find yourself reading from left to right and on screen you will look like you are reading it. This rather defeats the purpose doesn’t it. Have a look at my shows on YouTube and see if you can tell I am reading it off a teleprompter? Remember, our peripheral eyesight is good enough to focus on the left side and still read the words which are on that same line off to the right.
Video is a different game and we need to make this medium a winner for us. Try these hints for yourself and your image and impact will be much improved.
Too smooth politicians, silky salespeople, urbane company thrusters all set off alarm bells. We can meet impressive people and we can meet impressive looking people. Over time we have learnt how to plumb the difference. The world of presenting is made up of the top 1% who know what they are doing and the 99% who have no real clue. The 99% group are often card carrying sceptics, who have finely tuned radar for anything that looks different to what they know. Also, by definition this clueless 99% are our audience when we present. Are we in danger of turning them off if we come across as too professional?
This is certainly the case in Japan. Standing out and being outstanding are not welcomed here. The most insightful cultural norm in Japan is captured in the traditional wisdom of “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down”. Owning the auditorium, dominating the podium, being a powerful stage presence are all “nail sticking out” issues. Looking supremely confident, being Mr. or Ms. Smooth, operating at a high level, are all viewed with suspicion. We have a similar idea in the West. When we meet a “smooth talking salesperson” we get worried about them taking our money.
Japanese culture appreciates humility, harmony, group consensus, not putting yourself forward and modesty. Hello to all of our American fans out there. This Japanese viewpoint is absolutely the formula for not getting ahead in aggressive, competitive societies. Interestingly enough, as an Aussie, I think this Japanese approach is close to our cultural norms too. In Australian parlance, someone who “big notes” themselves is a self aggrandising, big talker and they won’t get very far Down Under. A Donald Trump telling everyone how rich he is, how smart he is, would be impossible for an Australian politician to replicate. As presenters, we operate within the bounds of our cultural rules and limits.
So how do we do a professional job of presenting in Japan, when the whole ethos is against the display of high levels of professionalism? There is a difference between being very professionally prepared and being a boring oaf on stage. Talking about yourself, except in terms of self-degradation, is out. That means we frame what we say about ourselves from a more humble lens. We do design a blockbuster opening though, to capture audience attention. We do set up the flow of the talk, so that the navigation is simple and easy to follow. We do provide evidence to back up any assertions we make. We do prepare two closes, one for before and one for after Q&A. We do rehearse numerous times to perfect the content, polish the cadence and make sure we are on time. In other words, we are a total professional in the way we prepare the presentation.
The friction points arise by the way we carry ourselves. I have lived here for 36 years and I have never seen a Japanese presenter stride confidently to the podium or the microphone. They walk slowly and hesitantly to the stage centre, stooping, wearing the greyest of the grey clothing, so they can be as boring as possible. They open up immediately with a series of apologies, to establish that they are not superior to anyone in the audience, even if they are.
I can’t see me doing any of that when I am presenting. I will be a little more conservative in my dress, only because I don’t want a pocket chief or tie or shirt ,to compete with my message. I won’t be bounding up on to the stage like a panther ready to devour my audience. I will walk tall, with subdued confidence and go straight into my opening, without any time wasted on getting the tech right. There will be no microphone thumping because I will have tested it all before the event started. I won’t be fiddling around to get my slide deck up, because I will have someone else doing that for me, while I use those first few vital seconds to engage my audience.
I won’t be making any faux apologies for my poor preparation or poor public speaking ability, because I will be moving straight into explaining the value the talk will bring to the listeners. I won’t be making flamboyant gestures or utilising any thespian artifices. I will be business like and focused on helping people through the messages I am delivering. The way I deliver the talk will be congruent with the content. It won’t feel slick, but it will feel competent and that is what I want, in order to have my messages accepted. I won’t attempt to be sardonic, cynical, use any idioms or try to be an amateur stand up comic. By Western standards, I will come across, as an understated expert in my topic. By Japanese standards, I will come across as a confident, but business like person, dedicated to their message for the audience. I will have threaded the needle between the two extremes and that will be a good result.
English versus mathematics? Easy choice for budding engineers at High School and for when they get to University. Science is logical, knowable, understandable. Presenting seems to have little in the way of science and more art involved, so best avoided. Actually they do a pretty good job of avoiding it, until a certain stage in their careers. These days clients want to talk to the engineers, so they have to front up and visit the buyer with the salesperson. If the counterparty is another engineer, then the code is in place and everyone is fine. Line managers, decision makers, CFOs are different beasts and more difficult. Even more annoying is the client conducts beauty parades to decide which company’s engineers they are going to select.
This is where the skilled engineer who can present in a skilled way eats everyone’s lunch. One engineer mumbles, rambles, doesn’t look confident and is struggling with basic coherence. The other is clear, concise, in command of the material and making the key points like a legend. Well, the choice for the buyer is made pretty easy.
In other cases, the engineers get promoted and have to represent their section to the senior leaders in the company. This is often when we get a call. “Can you help us please. We have a great engineer leading the team but his communication skills and presentation skills are dismal and the senior leadership have tasked HR to fix the problem, by finding a training company who can help”.
This sounds good but it is often a difficult task. The major issue tends to be a lack of awareness around the importance and value of presenting. These skills are soft skills rather than the hard skills, which their profession demands. They can see them as a bit “fluffy”. Presentation skills are very much in the eye of the beholder too, so opinions can vary regarding what is a good presentation. This lack of agreed, concrete measurable aspects can be an anathema to engineers.
Fluffy or otherwise, persuasion power is a real thing. This requires good skills in the design of the talk, the gathering of evidence and in the delivery. Design here means does the talk flow logically resulting in a clear conclusion, that is credible, because of the evidence assembled to support the main argument.
Ace engineer or not, if we start the presentation with a lot of fiddling around with the tech, there is a strong chance our audience is distracted and reaching for their phones to find something more interesting to do. We have to know that this is the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism and attention spans are functioning at microscopic levels. No matter how brilliant our evidence is, we will have lost many in our audience in those first few vital seconds, as we establish that first impression between speaker and listener. Online is even worse because now everyone is granted a free license to multi-task in the background and ignore the speaker.
Our opening has to be a gripper, such that the audience want to hear more, they want to know where you are going with this presentation. We must speak clearly and confidently. Easier said than done for laconic engineers, who are not prone to speaking a lot. Also, not doing a lot of presentations or probably, avoiding to do presentations, has left a confidence vacuum that is filled with nervousness. Sounding confident to an audience when you are not requires a level of thespian ability, which is usually beyond the grasp of hard skill trained engineers.
Rehearsal is the saviour here and lots of it is required. We don’t want to spend all of our time building the slide deck. The delivery is what sells the message and that relates straight back to the fact we have to buy what we are saying first and then communicate that belief to the audience. If we don’t understand the power of persuasion, we are likely to fluff off the rehearsal component of making the speech professional.
I have never been able to trace this supposed Japanese saying but it does sound good, “more sweat in training, less blood in battle”. Let’s make our mistakes in practice, get the talk timing right, work on the cadence, the order and the delivery. If we have the right mindset, then good things will happen and all of these other pieces of the puzzle will fit into place nicely.
Everyone is getting very swish with the tech these days, as we spend more and more hours in online meetings. Consequently, we are more and more likely to find ourselves in a breakout room to discuss a topic. When we first started doing this March 2020, as we ran our first LIVE On Line training, we discovered some disconcerting things about the medium. In many cases they were disparate individuals from different companies and also sometimes disparate individuals from different sections of the same firm. Initially, we found sending people who didn’t already know each other into breakout rooms perplexed them. For the breakout room captives, there was no hierarchy, no psychological safety and no trust. Many times, three people in a breakout room would just sit there for three minutes and say absolutely nothing to each other.
We learnt we had to set up some social order and ground rules for them. We needed to tell them that a certain person will be in charge of the reporting for the group. That person will keep a record of the points raised and we also nominated another person to lead the discussion to create the points. This left everyone else to be a contributor, with the expectation they would do just that and respond to the leader’s request for their opinion.
We also found that groups were unclear about the exact point they were discussing. We may have believed we explained it perfectly well, but often they were not sure what to talk about. Part of the reason was that when they heard they were going into a breakout room with strangers, their minds stopped listening to the instructions. Now they were focused on who would be in the group, how would they be perceived by strangers and how would they be judged for what they said in a public arena. With all of this front and center in their minds, the details of the question had receded into the background.
So we asked for a green check or a show of hands, around who understood what was happening. We would then call on some of those people to tell us the protocol for the breakout room and repeat back the question or issue they were going to discuss.
The third thing we found was that we had to enter each room and just check that there were no questions. If there were none, then we would leave them to it and move to the next room to check. Surprisingly, even with all of this formatting going on, we would still enter a room to hear stone cold silence, with no one playing their designated leader role. If this was the case, we would become the leader and get the conversation going amongst the participants.
I thought this was just Japan, but lately I have joined a study programme run by a global online education organisation. We were sent off to breakout rooms and it became obvious that most of the people participating from all around the world, really hadn’t a clue how to interact in that situation. Part of it is language, as English was not the mother tongue FOR some of the participants. However, many of the factors which applied in Japan were also in evidence around shyness, lack of hierarchy, being judged and trust.
So, if you are sent off to virtual oblivion in a breakout room, here are some tips on how to get the most out of the situation. Seize that initial shy silence and be the one to introduce yourself and say where you are from. Next, talk about how much you are looking forward to learning from the other members of the group. “ I am not an expert in this area and so please give me feedback, if what I am saying makes no sense. Also, let’s all take full advantage of this chance to help each other grow. So, who would like to get us going and give a comment on the question?”. That takes about thirty seconds to explain. If nobody feels sufficiently comfortable yet to kick things off, then you lead with your prepared comment. I say “prepared comment”, because before this session you have gathered your ideas into a series of bullet points, which you can easily to talk to. You are not trying to wing it and make stuff up on the fly. Being prepared is much better than trying to be a spontaneous genius. And the rest of us can tell the difference.
By being active and asking questions of others in the group, people start to feel more comfortable and free to express their ideas. It is a good idea to praise people’s contributions, by saying, “Great insight there, referring to XYZ. Could you go a bit deeper on that point please, I am keen to hear more”.
When you speak, be concise, clear and please don’t try to hog the airwaves. Say your piece and then ask others for their ideas and comments. In this way, your reputation as a person of value goes up and your humility is noted and appreciated. No one enjoys the blowhard who wants to spend the majority of the time making sure everyone else has to listen to their voice.