Trapped in a small screen in the corner of the monitor has become everyone’s reality when we have group meetings. I have been holding training sessions online now since March, as well as participating in numerous public webinars. There are some things that clearly don’t work, but here we are about to go into fall and no one seems to be making any significant changes, to up their online game. It is not for a lack of insights. I have been writing about these issues for months, as I am sure have others, so obviously the messages are not getting through.
The monitor screen saps our energy levels, as they appear to others. We might think we are showing lots of energy, but the reality is, it is less than we imagine. In a recent training session, 19 people had to give their presentations one after another. The contrast was striking. Those who were more highly energised were more credible and appealing than those who looked lethargic and tired on screen. The attendees of the training were all highly engaged and they were giving their presentation of their own creation, so the buy in factor to the exercise was 100%. They were not tired, but they appeared that way, because they were not maximising the use of their energy for the small screen.
When we are presenting, we want the audience to buy what we are recommending or suggesting. Even if it is just an “inform” style of presentation, we still want the viewers to believe in the value of what we are proffering. Reactions to presentations are heavily biased in favour of those who seem to believe what they are saying, as opposed to those who seem to be just going through the motions.
The impression we receive, to a great extent, is determined by the amount of energy the speaker is putting behind the words they are saying. We hear that the speaking volume is high without it being too high. The audio systems the major online platforms use, do not handle shouting terribly well, so we have to up the volume, without it going over the top. Hitting key words in sentences, bringing our energy to them, really accentuates the messaging and is a very effective use of our voice.
One of the speakers was terrific at adding in facial expressions to increase the power of her messages. Combined with a strong, confident voice, she was a winner. Most of the other speakers were holding a neutral expression on their face, regardless of the words they were saying. In these cases it is diabolically easy, for the audience to escape.
Dr. Albert Mehrabian’s oft quoted research mentioned that if you are incongruent when speaking, ninety three percent of the time, you don’t get your message across. What he meant by incongruent was that the words and the way we are saying the words, have to match up. If it is a happy event, then we look happy. If it is a serious affair, we look serious. Having no facial expression at all, means there is no energy coming out of the muscles of our face to support our key messages.
Gestures are tricky on the small screen, particularly if you are using a green screen background, to deny the viewing audience the inner workings and secrets of your household. Gestures are powerful though and they can really light up a presentation. If you are revealing the shambles of how you live to the audience and have no green screen effect, then you are free to use gestures of any variety, as long as you keep them in shot, based on your distance from the camera lens. It is a good idea to practice gestures on camera, to see where the limits are.
If you are using green screen backgrounds, then any gestures going wide will suddenly see half your arm disappear, like a magic trick. Try to keep your hands in front of you and move them toward the camera. There is less chance of them getting chopped off that way. The scale of the gestures in this case, are a bit more contained, but you can still bring additional power to your words with gestures.
There is no doubt, that adding energy to our presentations on screen is important. Also, whatever you think is enough energy output, add another 20%, to actually come across as you imagine you are doing.
We have all grown up in business watching internal presentations at our firms. It might be a big announcement, a town hall, a shareholder’s meeting or just a weekly meeting. Then we have those cases where we go outside the company and present to clients, industry groups, Chambers of Commerce etc. The sad thing is that rarely are any of these presenters any good. How can that be? None of the things I have mentioned are new items. These types of presentations have been given, in one form or another, since we had things called companies. The people giving them are not stupid. They are invariably well educated, well experienced and talented. Not too many companies want useless, stupid people speaking in front of others or representing the brand. So why don’t we see scintillating and sizzling business presentations as the norm?
There are cultural norms. In my experience, America seems to have an education system and society, where speaking up is encouraged and blowing your own horn is not an issue. As an Australian, that is an issue. We have a thing there called the “tall poppy syndrome”, which means that any poppy flower that tries to get above everyone else, gets cut down to size. Japan, interestingly, has the exact same concept with the “derukugi” (出る釘は打たれる) idea, where the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Every other country falls somewhere on this scale of self-aggrandizement with America and Japan, probably being the bookends.
When you make a presentation you are thrusting yourself forward. This can be a booster for your career or a career limiting disaster, or something in between. The interesting thing is very few people are able to make it a career booster. Part of it can be self-limiting beliefs about your ability to actually stand up in front of others, without quivering like jelly, from head to toe. Another part of it can be possessing no concept of the importance of the act of presenting and its solid link to career building. Companies promote people who are articulate, clear and persuasive, because they know these are the requirements for leaders. Many specialists imagine their technical ability will carry the day and they can get a free pass on being capable as a presenter. That is possibly true but only up to a point. If you can’t be persuasive, your technical abilities are not a substitute when firms are considering who to promote into leadership roles.
So we could expect that people who are motivated to push forward in their careers and get to the top echelons of the company, would all be rushing out to get trained on how to be a professional when presenting. Rarely the case in fact. Well why is that? Part of it can be the concept of “good” is the enemy of “great”. They are smart enough to do a good job and have concluded that is enough. Or they may still be clinging to the belief that being a great lawyer, doctor, engineer, architect, accountant, dentist, etc., is the first and only order of priority, as far as building a successful career goes.
When the people around you are equally talented and knowledgeable about their profession, how do you stand out? There was a little known Senator from Illinois who projected himself to national attention at the Democratic Convention, eventually becoming America’s 44th President and the first African American to do so. Barack Obama did that by giving a great presentation at that Convention, in a political world packed to the gunwales with thrusters, self-promoters and self-aggrandizers.
Business is fiercely competitive, be it winning the client or winning the promotion. Changing our mindset about presenting and facing the reality of being able to present well, in order to advance through the ranks, is a necessary starting point. Next we need great training to stand out amongst the crowd. Even though most business presentations you have ever seen have been boring, you don’t have to join the ranks of those dud presenters. With the right mindset and training, you can quickly advance to the top 1% in your field as a presenter.
Look around you and quickly realise, it is not crowded at the top. Idea application is all, so take action and get properly trained.
“Don’t round your back”, “Stand up straight”, “Pull your shoulders back”, are common parental commands when we were growing up. Kids do tend to have rounded shoulders and don’t stand up straight, but so what? Why are parents worried about their kids deciding to have a rounded rather than straight posture? The concerns relate to health based on a straighter posture allows better breathing to take place and better aligns the spine. The concerns also relate to public perception. A confident person has a straight back and stands tall, ergo anyone slouching around, obviously lacks confidence. We have all seen those studies that correlate height, with those in leadership positions. This leads to an idea that being taller and therefore standing straighter to enhance our height is a good idea. Now this may or may not be true, but there is that perception.
A speaker whether striding across the stage or plonked down in front of their laptop on screen, has to be sure they have the right posture. As speakers, we are trying to convince others to buy our philosophy, ideas, decisions, direction, strategy or suggestions. We want to marshal all of our resources behind that aim. Standing up straight and holding our chin up, so that we are looking ahead, rather than looking down is a good idea, if you want to instil confidence in you from the audience. We may choose to drop our chin and even lean forward toward the audience if we want to make a strong assertion, as we literally point our body language at the audience. That is a conscious choice, as opposed to a posture achieved through habit, that is permanently leaning forward.
When we get older, we start to lean forward from the hips. We can no longer stand up straight, as our backs become bent over. We basically look physically weaker compared to younger people standing up ramrod straight. Consequently, there is a mental linkage to poor posture and weakness in the common mind. As the presenter, we don’t want to appear to be weak, as this will negatively impact our credibility. So straight posture becomes associated with trust, reliability and respect.
When we are presenting online we have to be conscious of posture as well. I was on a webinar recently with multiple expert speakers, talking about how the current Covid-19 crisis has impacted their businesses. Two of them stood out, but in a negative way. One speaker had excellent, straight back posture but no clue on how to align the camera lens. He had the laptop on the desk and the lens was pointing up at him. He looked distant, superior, disdainful and aloof, because of the way he was engaging the camera. If he had raised the camera lens to eye level, he would have been projecting a completely different image, as a respectful, knowledgeable businessperson.
Another speaker had better height control of the camera lens, but was rounding his shoulders and leaning down and into the camera. It really stood out on the broadcast, how his rounded posture compared with everyone else. He didn’t look confident or knowledgeable. He also did a lot of umming and ahhing as well, which didn't help his cause to appear an expert member of the panel. So the speech hesitation, combined with the posture hesitation, added up to a big loss of credibility on what he was saying.
We need to get that camera height up to eye level. If we can stand up when presenting all the better. One of the speakers did just that and he was much better able than the others to use his body language to support the points he was making. He had the most authority amongst all of the speakers, just by how he presented himself. When presenting online, we need to sit up straight and keep looking into the camera lens. We have to maintain that posture throughout the session. Absolutely never sink into the back of your chair or slump into the back support. It looks way too casual when presenting. Sit up and a few centimetres away from the back support and try to be as vertical as possible in front of the camera.
Perception becomes a bigger factor when we are on the small screen of webinars. We have limited ways of expressing ourselves and so we have to make the most of the tools available to us. Getting the correct eye line and straight back doesn’t cost anything or take any great preparation. Having the right posture can make a huge difference to how we are perceived and how well our message is received.
We have all migrated back to our homes, waiting for the great pandemic to subside, so that when the coast is clear we can scuttle back to the office in safety. Or maybe, we have concluded that we don't need to be at the office as much anymore or at all. The end result is that we have been relegated to a low tech environment, with almost zero tech support. If we were presenting in a meeting room, we would have the crowd right there in front of us. Perfect communication conditions, where we can marshal all of our persuasion capabilities and let them loose on the audience. We would have a big screen with our slides up there for all to see. If the room was big enough, we would have a high quality microphone at our disposal.
Meanwhile, back at home, we have our laptop and that is about all. I was on a webinar which featured some heavyweights from the public and private Japanese financial sector, as well as other worthies. No one on that call had a clue about how to arrange their laptops so that the camera angle was correct or so that the lighting was done properly. If we want to get our message across we have to show up in a way that has credibility, visibility and reliability. Of course, everyone was seated when doing the calls, which meant their body language was truncated. I didn’t see much animation in the faces or much tapping into body language going on either.
If we are just an attendee at an online meeting or a participant in a webinar presentation, as one of the audience, then just sitting there makes perfect sense. Nothing better for multitasking when boring presenters are on screen than sitting down to easily access all the tech escape routes. Unfortunately when it is us on screen presenting, we want none of that to be occurring. We want everyone hanging on our every word, diligently taking notes of the gold nuggets, we are delivering and exercising total absorption in our message.
The cameras in the laptops are invariably wide angle only. If we are going to be presenting regularly online, we should consider buying a separate attachable camera and look for one which has a narrower range of field. We want to be in closeup mode as much as possible, in order to diminish the competition in our background. We also should invest in getting some better lighting arrangements, so that we are in full shot and not too much else. I was watching a webinar a few days ago and one of the participants, who I know quite well, had so little light on his face, he looked like an extra in a horror movie, as he wafted into shot emerging from the gloomy darkness of his home.
We should also arrange the height of our laptop so that we can stand up. This of course means wearing a suit, including the trousers, as we will be getting an almost full body shot. We will still be very close to the camera, so we are still going to be clearly visible for the audience. If you think about a presentation at a venue, the speaker can be anywhere from three to thirty meters away from the audience. We will seem much closer in our onscreen version, than what a typical audience sitting in the cheap seats at the back, would experience.
Standing helps us to release our body language and particularly our gestures. The seated non-use of our hands is one of the biggest presenting mistakes in this current online meeting universe. When we are seated, we are also very much constricted in terms of how much energy we can put out. Standing will enable us to seem more powerful, dynamic and persuasive. It is also a lot more relaxing to be standing, I have found, because of the freedom it supplies.
As always, the key is to keep looking at the camera lens and not the faces on the screen. If we have slides, then we should do what we always do and use a slide advancer of some configuration. It might just be a cordless mouse or something a bit more elaborate. You can also ask your producer to relieve you of all the tech related duties, so that you can concentrate on your message and your audience. As speakers, standing is a more natural situation and one which has been presenter normality until recently.
This work from home situation and therefore, present from home reality, isn’t going away anytime soon. Short term thinking, employing jerry-built solutions, is what amateurs do. The professionals understand the situation and adjust accordingly. Which one are you?
“Don’t waste a good crisis” is the sort of advice you don’t really wish to receive. Who wants a crisis at any time? The pandemic however has certainly created economic and social turmoil. It has also created instant experts, charlatans, wannabees and plenty of dodgy advice. I have been watching webinars on how to present online by people so incompetent it is breathtaking. I admire their pluck, front, chutzpah to have a go, but am less convinced of their questionable sense of civic duty, to help out during a crisis. When things get tough, I like the competent to get going, not just the tough.
Individuals with no track record of ever delivering anything online are now self inducted experts on the “how to” bits. This extends from the equipment salespeople all the way up to the various Chamber captains of industry. The tech is the most fun because it is the simplest. Just get the gadgetry, the whizbang and away you go. Live streaming is great as long as you are great when “live”. That would automatically cancel out most people. Being able to string two words together, with no editing fallback, means you are up on the high wire with no safety net. You need to be an expert in your field, lucid, confident, articulate and practiced. That wipes out most “self proclaimed experts of online presenting” right there.
A high tech rendition of you umming and ahhing is no help. The audience will soon lose focus and in this Age of Distraction will quickly move on to more interesting things. The camera technology is so good today, it is mind boggling. A great close up, crystal clear of you struggling is fantastic for production values, but no so great for persuading anyone of what you are saying. If the live video is later worked on, those ums and ahs can be edited out, but depending on your frequency of usage, that may mean a lot of transitions in the final video.
The real bug bear with the tech is the fact that most people are not in a studio, surrounded by tech heaven. Fundamentally, we don’t want to travel to the studio. We are bundled up at home, at the mercy of the lens in our laptop and the dubious lighting in our room. At the beginning, everyone thought we would all be back to normal – “the boys will be home for Christmas” before the slaughter started type of Phony War. So, don’t worry about the sound or the lighting, but here we are, with no end in sight. So, we do need to get a little excited about upping the ante on our tech and technique.
Buy the light you need for when you are on camera. Get the lens up to eye level so you are not shooting up your nostrils. Look at the lens rather than the faces on the screen. Wear a headset with mic, so you have access to the clearest sound. If you find you need a separate mic then get one. This global isolation ward we find ourselves in is destined to continue for some time longer. Accept that none of the platforms are reliable, so have an emergency crew on hand, ready to rescue people swept overboard from the webinar into sound loss hell.
Lift your energy by 40% at least, to compensate for the draining effect of the camera. Be much more animated than normal. Move your head angle, so it is not always simply one dimensional, straight on to the camera. If you want to know what I mean, just watch the professional broadcasters on television. They have realised a static head position is dull and leads to people switching their attention to all of the other multitasking goodies they have at their fingertips.
The good thing with these platforms is that you can record yourself for review. Here is a pro hint – do that before the broadcast, not just reviewing the carnage, after the fact. You can experiment with angles, heights, lighting, fake greenscreen backdrops, content and delivery. See how you will look on the small screen. You will also have time without pressure, to learn how to share your screen, get your slide deck up and control what the audience can see. Get your first impression nailed. Your online buddies may be a mess, but you don’t have to join them in that regard. It might be a bit disarming to learn how boring you are on playback. Better to adjust to that truth before the curtain goes up and then make the necessary adjustments beforehand.