Dead Dog Covid-19 Presenters

When times are good a lot of things are kept muted, hidden, obscured.  As Warren Buffett mentioned about dodgy investments, “It’s only when the tide goes out that you discover who’s been swimming naked”.  It is the same with leaders and their presentation and communication skills.  When things are humming along nicely we can overlook their poor efforts.  Today though, there is so much dislocation in business, with whole industries sidelined, people losing their jobs, the Government unable to trace 80% of the Covid-19 cases and so demonstrating that they have lost control of the spread of the virus. People are right to be fearful and be looking to leaders to communicate clearly and convincingly what needs to be done.

What are we getting though?  The best and the brightest?  Hardly, judging from what we see in the various on-line meetings, hosted by economic organisations.  I have been struck by how pungent the foibles and failings are from these captains of industry in a time of crisis.  What we are seeing in the public arena is what their own troops are seeing behind closed on-line sessions.  It is not as if they are suddenly becoming legends of communication skills, when it is their own company’s internal staff briefings.  They are consistently uninspiring, dull, dead dog presenters.

Often they are not in control of their on-line environment.  They haven’t taken the time to understand the location they are now in.  When you are a presenter in the face to face world, you get there early, familiarise yourself with the room, the tech, the lighting, the seating arrangements etc.  This is how professional presenters think, without conscious thought.  It is obvious these leaders we are seeing on-line have not taken any time to work on their thinking about how to adjust across to the on-line world.  Presenting to a live audience of 50 people and 5000 people are entirely different asks and you have to adjust yourself to suit.  Our fearless leaders are obviously not adjusting to suit the world of remote meetings.

They all seem to specialise in having dead faces.  They have allowed this new on-line environment to sap their life energy from them, to drain the blood from the muscles in their faces to make them inert. In a physical room or when on-line, the one thing in a presentation that has to be on fire is our face.  More than any other factor, this is by far the most powerful communication tool we have, followed in second place by our voice and then our body language.  The slide deck is at the back of the field, desperately struggling to keep up. 

These dead dog presenters have just transferred their submission to the all powerful Powerpoint diety in the meeting room to the on-line world.  They were bossed and dominated by the slide deck in a previous life, when they were in the physical room and they remain so in the on-line environment. 

The on-line presenting environment is merciless.  You are reduced to a small box on screen, overpowered by the tech requirements, bumped down the hierarchy of importance.  If you bring your dead dog face and voice to this world, you are the walking dead of on-line presenting.  We need to be really concentrating on congruency.  Dr. Albert Mehrabian’s famous and mostly misquoted research on the visual, vocal and verbal elements of presenting has to be our North Star.  He found when what you say doesn’t match the way you say it, people get distracted.  They are focused on what they see (55%) and how you sound (38%), rather than what you are saying (7%).  If you want to be 100% heard in the on-line world then you need to really lift the communication stakes.

Smile, laugh, frown, peer, raise your eyebrows, duck your chin down or push it up, cock your head, shake it from side in disagreement or nod up and down in acceptance.  We all have to become thespians in the on-line world.  Stage actors have to use all these devices to get their message across and that is the model for us today.  We have to overcome the limitations of the tech, to break free from its chains and get our message across.  If you are worried, drop the dead dog face and look worried.  If you can find something to laugh about, then do it and remove that dead dog visage from our screen.  Look quizzical, perplexed, scared, fearful, elated, optimistic, positive, buoyant.  The point is to transfer that emotion to your face in that little box on screen and then add your voice and body language to bolster your message.  Get the camera up to eye level so you can pull all of this off with aplomb.

Business is depressing enough without our leaders looking like the undertaker at a funeral service for the enterprise.  The leader’s job is to lead people though this hell, by giving them hope and a path through the surrounding flames of burning cash reserves.  Your face, voice and body language have to be conscripted into this fight, if you want to win it. All of you dead dogs out there, be gone from my screen now.  I want to see energy, hope, passion, grit, resilience and inspiration.  And so does everyone else!

Zoom Meetings Starts From Hell – Part Two

In Part One, we looked at planning our first impressions on-line, the importance of rehearsing the presentation, dealing with the tech and having an opening which grips audience attention immediately.   The potential damage you can do to your personal brand doesn’t evaporate, just because you are now in the virtual meeting world.  No one cuts you any slack, just because you are now broadcasting from home.  We have to treat the on-line environment, just as we would the in-person occasion.  The only real difference is that the on-line presenting world is rife with less control, more tech issues and wholly, as opposed to partially, distracted audience.

We can be adding to the distraction factor ourselves.  When there are multiple presenters, the tech must be savagely brought to heel.  The curtain goes up, we start the presentation, but where does the camera automatically focus?  If one of the presenters is unmuted and shuffling papers, then they will suddenly appear on screen, even though they are not aware of it nor ready to go.  The inscrutable tech searches for sound and then synchronises with the camera views, capturing whoever that sound originated from.  The camera view can become quite chaotic, as each person’s inadvertent sound contribution has the audience view flicking from one person to another, without mercy.  From a viewer point of view, this chaos is distracting.   It diminishes our perspective that these experts being rolled out, are actually competent experts.

As mentioned in Part One, have a slide of the event up on screen and keep the presenters in the background until needed.  The host should be muting everyone and no individual’s camera should be turned on until the host gets the proceedings underway.  The host introduces the presenter with both voice and a slide detailing the key points of their resume.  We would do this in a live presentation when we were gathered in a room together, so why not do it on-line as well.  The host then throws to the presenter, who comes on camera and audio for the first time.  As mentioned last week, most presenters have their laptops on a table, so the camera is peering up their noses.  Raise the height of the camera so that it is eye line.  This is hard, but whenever possible, don’t talk to the screen, rather talk directly to the camera.

Also replicate this control environment for the Q&A at the end.  This can be quite comedic, as the control of the tech is lost and the camera and audio are flying around between all of the presenters who are not unmuted and on camera.  The same rules apply. The host takes the question and then passes that question on to the appropriate expert, instructing them to come on camera and answer it, before submerging them back into silent invisibility.

One thing I dislike with Q&A sessions is that you can only lodge your question through typing it into the Q&A section or the chatbox.  Now we are in the hands of someone designated to convey what you have written to the expert panel.  Because they are more intelligent than us, they often decide to rework our questions into their own concoction and present that to the speakers.  This is very annoying because usually they have missed the key point or have switched the nuance of the question. 

Question handling factotums should read the question as is, ignoring the inevitable typos, but keeping to the key import of the question.  The host often asks the first question. Sadly, rarely are those questions intelligent or probing enough. They usually palliative, lazily accepting motherhood statements as is and adding little to the proceedings.  Broadcasting that you the host are actually dim or dumb, isn’t all that good for the personal brand, so be careful when questioning speakers.

If using slides, please spare us the slide deck from hell presentation.  Bad presenters are consistently bad presenters and all of their horrible habits are replicated in the virtual world.  They bridge across from their real world debacles, bringing them faithfully to their virtual stage.  I was attending a webinar the other day and the Japanese presenter had the most dense slides you can imagine.  Laughably, one slide had as the backdrop a Robinson projection of a flat world map, with information on where they had their company branches.  Confusingly, over America they placed the Europe information and over the Europe map, they had their American data.  How hard can it be to visually line up your branches data to match the background map?  How much credit do we give to a company claiming to be professional, who can’t even rise to the most basic of intellectual challenges?

Speaking in a supremely boring monotone, I have noticed is not just a Japanese on-line presenter monopoly.  Often we are getting experts to give us presentations on the legal, taxation, HR, business and health issues associated with the current Covid-19 crisis situation.  These experts are notorious for putting all their eggs into the data dump and specialist knowledge basket and none in the communications, soft skills area.  Their dullness of delivery, in a funeral tone, assaults us during their data overload from hell content unveiling.  They are always like this but it is made so much worse in the on-line environment.  Streaming video on small screens and dubious audio quality take bad and transform it into horrendous.

People on these webinars are employing content marketing concepts during this crisis to show their value to potential buyers.  In many cases, they are revealing incompetence instead.  They fail to approach the on-line medium with a professional presentation mindset.  The tech issues are the fault of the platform provider.  The way the tech is used however rests with the presenters.

Here is a thought to get your head around - on-line audiences are usually vastly larger than what we would normally cram into a room to hear a speaker.  Telling the assembled on-line masses you are clueless is not the outcome you seek, but often the outcome you get.  It doesn’t have to be that way.

Zoom Meetings Starts From Hell – Part One

Like a lot of people, I have been searching for the roadmap to determine how to enable my business to survive this lockdown, work from home, brave new world.  I belong to various Chambers of Commerce, mastermind and networking groups.  I also have 24,000 LinkedIn connections, many of whom are pouring copious video meeting stuff into the daily feed.  This means I can participate in numerous on-line events or watch the videos of people recording their on-line events.  I do all this in the hope I can be become a more effective leader.  Man, it is mainly painful though.

The technology employed usually revolves around having a Zoom video meeting or some similar equivalent screen based live broadcast. Usually, the organisers won’t allow you to join until the appointed time, so you are connected but in standby mode.  Vaguely, you imagine that once the curtain goes up and you can join the proceedings, things will be of a professional standard, as they are now ready to rumble.  Rarely the case though. 

Most often the MC is not ready or there is no MC at all and we get an intimate introduction to how disorganised supposedly expert people are.  What comes up on screen is often a shambles, as people struggle with the tech.  Here is a hint.  Don’t do it that way. 

When you are going to start at the appointed time, you want all the presenters to have been successfully logged on fifteen minutes earlier and in place ready to go.  Audio seems to be the dim cousin of video technology. Usually it is the biggest problem to get logged in properly, so we have to allow for people to log off and log back in, before we kick things off and that requires time. 

We all usually Just In Time our swanning, grand entrance to a scheduled meeting in the office. In the on-line world, as a presenter, that is a high risk plan.  Get there early and fifteen minutes is a good margin for correcting tech issues. These are much more frequent than we would expect or hope.

When the curtain goes up, what is the first thing the audience will see?  It would appear that absolutely no thought has been given to this idea by the organisers.  In a live, in person presentation, we know that the first few seconds determines the first impression of the speaker with the audience.  Accordingly, we make efforts to make that a brilliant opening.  When we are all on-line, that idea doesn’t seem to have carried across.  There is no excuse for not designing the first impression you want to create with your audience, whether it be live or on-line.

For many, this video conferencing technology from home is a new thing.  At the office, the tech team sets everything up in the meeting room and you just turn up.  At home though, you are the tech team.  It is also obvious that few people have spent any time learning how to use the tech, before the presentations.  There are different systems and they all have their functionalities and idiosyncrasies. 

Tooling around through the menus and doing rehearsals beforehand, makes a lot of sense in this environment, yet there hasn’t been an event I have attended to date, where I see any evidence of this occurring.

In the live presentation preparation world, we always stress the importance of rehearsal.  Why would this idea become less significant, in a much higher stakes presentation environment?  You can record your practice sessions and review how you will look on screen as well, which is a great tool for improving how you present on screen.

I recommend you have a slide up on screen, at the start, announcing again what the event is and who are the hosts.  Use only voice at this stage, to announce what is going to happen in this broadcast.  This forces everyone to focus on the screen and not have their vision split between the screen and a small box with a talking head in it.

As the speaker, after you have been introduced, turn your camera on and come on screen.  Make sure you have arranged the environment at home to have a light source illuminating you clearly in front of the camera.  Also, if you are using a laptop, raise the level of the laptop, so that the camera is at the same height as your eye line.  Looking up the speaker’s nostrils, or over their impressive beer belly, because they have their laptop on the desk, is not a great first impression.  Dress for business, so your full suit of armour needed.

In some cases, the technology allows you to have a green screen background, so that your personal living arrangements are not visible to the viewing audience.  If you don’t have that option, then try to pick a spot at home with a background that is not too distracting from you, when you speak.

Just as you would live, commence with an opening statement that grabs everyone’s attention.  Remember the audience are now totally wild and free from all social contracts to behave themselves, when you are speaking.  They can be multi tasking like demons on speed at home.  You can become just one of a number of things going on in their world at the same time.  You need to crash through that clutter and grab their attention.  Make them stop doing all that other crap and pay attention to you and you alone.  This won’t happen by itself, so you have to design it from the start.

Video meetings are a different beast and we need to wrestle that beast into submission, so that we dominate it, rather than the other way around.

Getting Your Staff Messaging Right In A Crisis

There are plenty of experts providing insight and recommendations for corporates with their messaging during this Covid-19 crisis, but not so much attention is being paid to our internal messaging.  The public, customers and shareholders need to be fed updates and assurance by the company’s PR department.  Funnily enough the PR department rarely gets involved in the internal messaging of the boss.  Basically, the leaders are expected to work it out themselves.  Usually they are pretty hopeless communicators at the best of times and now in the worst of times, this ragged assembly are exposed as gross underperformers.

Having people gathered around in the office or neatly arrayed at the town hall, makes communication relatively straightforward and easy.  Having everyone dispersed and sitting at home in ignoble isolation is a different ask of the leader.  The Covid-19 crisis is scary, from a physical health perspective but also from a financial health viewpoint. 

Watching TV and reading the newspapers about rising numbers of people catching the virus and then seeing the associated mortality rates climb, tells you this is serious.  Watching companies shut down, many going bankrupt, millions of workers out of jobs and the share markets plummeting, under the weight of the economic consequences of the virus spread, adds to everyone’s fear roster.

The team are worried about their family’s health, the overall lifestyle disruption, their job security and here you are, their leader.  What are you telling them?  How often are you telling them and what mediums are you using?  There is a tricky balance required.  We must be transparent, without triggering alarm and panic.  We must provide hope, without being Pollyanna. 

We also have to be well informed of what is happening because things change very quickly.  Within a few short days, British PM Boris Johnson went from talking about building “herd immunity” and letting the virus spread, to locking down the whole country.  One minute Tokyo Governor Koike is talking about the calling off of the Olympics being unthinkable, to having the whole shebang postponed.  Within days, President Trump went from saying all the troops would be home for Easter, to instead chastising Governors for not locking down their states to stop the spread of Covid-19.

Most companies in Japan have a daily chorei or huddle, usually in the mornings, amongst the work group.  If you don’t, then now is a good moment to create one. The leader must keep this chorei cadence going, even if everyone is now beaming in by video.  Not everyone might make it, but do your best to insist that this is a priority. Continuity builds comfort that although things have changed, some normality, some stability can be assured.  These are good opportunities to remind everyone of the strategy in place for dealing with this crisis.  If you missed that bit of leadership fundamentals at the start, then put a strategy together pronto.

Update everyone on the company’s situation.  The cash situation is the difference between survival and just becoming a memory of what once was.  Tell people the truth.  This must be coupled with reference to the plan to get everyone through this crisis.  Hope and reality have to be doled out equally. 

Follow up with regular written communication.  If you are a foreigner speaking in Japanese, your range of vocabulary will rarely be equal to that of your mother tongue.  More likely, you don’t speak fluent Japanese.  In both cases get things down in writing as well.  If you have internal resources who are now freed up, get the text into Japanese. Even if that isn’t possible, then send it out in English. Most Japanese read English much better than they can speak it.  The live speech delivery may have presented some audio clarity issues, as well as linguistic challenges, so you can’t be satisfied that everyone got the message. 

Try to increase the amount of one on one communication as much as possible.  Reach out to your people sitting at home. Broken apart from their routine of 16 hours a day at work with colleagues, this new order can be disconcerting and lonely for many of the troops.  Hearing your voice and knowing that you were thinking of them is much more important than the content of your Churchillian call to arms.

Create a coffee time for staff to join in on-line and shoot the breeze.  Staff are constantly chatting, chatting, chatting throughout the day anyway.  Now we can recreate that personal connection with our colleagues, although compressed, into a virtual coffee time every afternoon.  You should join in as well and just chat. Don’t make it a rerun of the morning’s rousing call to crash through or crash.  Keep it light, communal and interactive.  Draw out those who are a bit quiet and have them speak up, so that they feel included and their colleagues can hear their voice.

Use video, text, phone calls and use them more frequently than you imagine is enough.  We are serving the weakest links in our teams in these times of crisis.  You might be independent, resilient, tough, a survivor, but you are also in the minority amongst your team.  Don’t see their world, through your personal prism.