It Is Not Back To Normal As A Presenter – Part One
Gradually people are streaming back to the office, after having been sequestered away at home for many months. As a presenter, whether you are the boss, one of the troops or representing the company in public, things are not going back to what they were pre-Covid-19. The chances of making a public speech in front of a live audience are slim to none at the moment and likely to remain that way for a little longer. Because of physical distancing protocols, our favourite venues can’t handle the same numbers as before, so that changes the dynamics of the money needed to pay for the space. People are just staying with online presenting as a result. In the office though, bosses have to lead and team members reports have to be given.
A lot has been forgiven of public presenters since February. Online presentations are pretty bad. The audio is usually dodgy at best. The people delivering the presentation are rarely in charge of the tech. They compound this ignorance with a dead dog style delivery. Their monotonous voice deliveries are on full display. They point the laptop camera up their nose and they are constantly looking down at the screen, rather than up at the camera, so no engagement with the audience is possible.
People’s exposure in Japan to excellent talks and presentations was pretty much missing pre-Covid-19. So for the vast majority of the population, the ugly experience of dealing with failing presenters, has just moved out of the meeting room or the public venue, on to the online world of trapped tiny faces, in tiny little boxes in the corner of the screen.
This is such an opportunity. I doubt many presenters have been busily honing their craft during the lockdown. So again, those with excellent skills are going to stand out. They will be more persuasive and more powerful in their messaging, than their colleagues and competitors. In any aspect of professional work in business, reaching the top one percent in any category is extremely difficult. Well, that is except when it comes to giving presentations. It is certainly not crowded at the top.
Being highly effective in getting people to buy your message makes an enormous difference in how many people will follow what you recommend. These are the types of people, the company upper echelons love to promote into leadership positions. They do this because they recognise these individuals can move people and therefore move the needle and produce out performance. No matter how smart or technically skilled people can be, if they are inarticulate, hesitant, lacking in confidence in what they are saying, can’t be clear and concise they will not be convincing when speaking to others. Those on the receiving end will not follow them at all or with much enthusiasm. They are totally reliant on position power, because they themselves have zilch in terms of personal power.
Where do we start? No matter what the occasion or the audience, we need to begin by determining what is the purpose of this talk. Is it to inform, convince, inspire or entertain? This is such a simple step that most presenters miss. They dive straight into the details, labouring over the slide deck assembly, debating which slide to include and which to drop. Don’t do that. Instead, start with your WHY. Once we know why we are giving this talk, we can begin to construct the format we need to deliver it.
Next, who is our audience? What degree of knowledge do they have already on this topic? What are their preconceptions about this subject? What is the age and gender range? What are main their interests? How will this talk fulfil a need they have? Forget about what you want to say. Knowing what they want to hear is the key and then we build backwards to make that a reality for them. How do we work out what they want. What has Covid-19 done to change people’s expectations and outlook? We can’t just mope back to February and pick up the threads, as if nothing has happened in the last four months.
If we don’t know most of the audience members already and if we are not working together every day, we won’t have a lot of pre-knowledge of who they are and what they want. We can query the organisers of the talk about why they chose this subject matter. Who has signed up and what sectors are they from? We can ask people we know in the same sectors about what are the current hot topics or the main pain points. If the hosts will release the details, we can call a small sample of those who registered and ask them what we could cover that would give them the most value.
In Part Two, we will go deeper on how to structure the talk, the delivery finer points and how to handle difficult or even outright hostile pushback to what you are saying.
Oh Yeah, Another Critical Thing For Both Online and In-Person Presenting Success
So far I have looked at the eye and voice power aspects when presenting, whether you are full form in front of an audience or struggling to get out of that tiny box in the corner of the screen that, Zoom or WebEx or whoever, has relegated you to, when you are online. What about body language? Does this remain the bastion of live presentations only and we are unable to muster much of its power, when we are looking down the barrel of a camera lens at the top of our laptop?
Certainly, it is very powerful when we are in person. We have three distances, three angles and three stage positions when in front of an audience. The three distances are as close as possible to the audience, standing somewhere mid-stage and moving to the back of the stage. Now these distances may be contained, when we are using slide decks and projecting on to a screen. If the screen is at head height, rather than lofted well above us, we need to be mindful of our position. We should be standing audience left next to the screen, so that the punters will look at us, read the screen and then look at us again. What we don’t want them captivated by the screen content and oblivious to us.
Whether we are next to the screen or not, we can still change our distance engagement with the audience. When we want to make a strong point, we can move as close as possible to the audience. We can’t stay there though, because the pressure on the audience is too much. So, we move back to the mid-stage area, a type of neutral ground. If we want to make an expansive point, we move to the rear of the stage area and embrace the whole audience at one time.
The three angles are chin straight, up and chin down. At the center position, our chin is straight. When we move to that expansive position, we need to slightly elevate our chin. When we are close to the audience, we tuck our chin in, ever so slightly. This chin adjusting business just strengthens the power of the position we are speaking from. Try it. Stand close to the audience with your chin up and it won’t have anywhere as much power as when standing in the same position, with your chin being held slightly down.
There are also the three stage positions of center, left and right. This allows us to engage with all of our audience. Those sitting on the extreme sides, can feel remote from the speaker. By moving to the extreme left or extreme right, we bring them into our presentation. To engage those right at the back, we stand on the very apron of the stage with our chin up and looking at those in the distant “cheap seats”. When moving across the stage apron, try not to fall into the orchestra pit. Don’t laugh, stages are often curved and without too much difficulty you can be head up, watching your audience and not watching where you are going. Next thing, down you go.
What about in the online world? We are often seated, but if it is a presentation, why are we seated? Why not mount the laptop so that the camera is head height, when you are standing. I was giving a presentation on giving presentations, to this year’s JMEC or Japan Market Expansion Competition participants and doing it online. I chose to stand when giving this presentation, because I wanted full access to my body language. That mean mounting a folding set of steps on my study desk and having my laptop precariously balanced on some books, so that I achieved the required eye height.
One thing I didn’t figure well enough into the equation was that I need a dedicated light source for my face, rather than relying on the room lighting in my study. This is something we need to work on, when presenting online. It does make a big difference to the clarity of our presence on screen.
On camera we are more limited in our movement range, so we are more dependant on our facial expressions and gestures. We don’t want to be swaying around like a drunken sailor, as that doesn’t look terribly convincing on screen. We need to stand in the one spot, but stand up straight and project credibility, reliability and professionalism. We can move our hands forward, rather than sideways and stay in shot more easily. So rather than showing something large, by spreading our hands wide from left to right, we can hold one hand close to our body and move the other closer to the camera. It communicates the size concept, without us going out of camera range.
Energy is much easier to generate and project when we are presenting standing up. We can access our full body power. Then we combine this with our hands, face, eyes and voice for a total wall of power effect on the audience. We might be wearing a headset and microphone combination for the best audio quality and usually we are able to stand close enough to the laptop to connect the cables. If we have to stand, such that we are using only the laptop microphone, we can expect that the audio quality may not be as good. You might also get some room echo on the audio, when you are positioned away from the camera. We can also use slide advancer technology, so that we are released from the laptop or we can just use the remote mouse.
The key is to always maximise your body language power, regardless of whether you are in person or online.
One More Critical Key For Both Online And In-Person Presenting Success
Previously I talked about the importance of eye contact when presenting, whether online or in the venue with the audience. Another major element is how presenters use their voice when in front of their audience, be they sojourned in tiny boxes on screen or live in the room, standing right in front of us. You would think this was the easiest thing in the world. We talk to our friends, family and colleagues, so what is the big deal about talking when we are presenting? Good question and yet so many erstwhile presenters make a mess of it.
The online world is full of traps for presenters. The audio quality of every system I have used so far has been dodgy. This means that our voice is not easily heard and what we are saying is not always being comprehended. Some presenters just use the built-in microphone in their computers, rather than using a more specialised, sophiticated headset and microphone combination. This adds to the underlying issue with the various already flawed broadcast platforms. The lesson here is use a good quality headset and microphone combo.
In the live audience situation, we have those individuals who flee from the microphone, those who manhandle it, rendering it ineffective and those who know what they are doing. Leaning over to speak into a rostrum mounted microphone stand should only be allowed for those with lustrous and ample hair. Bald spot spotting is never a pleasant pastime. Actually even those with amply hirsute proportions, are forced to look down when they address the audience, when using a low microphone stand. Get there early and ask for a better microphone stand or a pin microphone. Lavalier microphones have the added benefit of freeing you from penal servitude, locked away behind the rostrum. You can move across the stage and engage members of the audience seated to the extreme left and right as well as those in the middle.
When holding a hand microphone, hold it by the handle and speak across the mesh. A common error is holding the microphone too low. Amazingly, I see people holding it at waste height and then expecting the equipment to pick up their sound waves. Please do not wrap your paws around the top, in a savage attempt to strangle the implement. I can never understand why some people cover the microphone top with their palm and then expect it to broadcast their contribution. By the way, if you are nervous and the microphone is now frantically wiggling in your palm, just pull your hand to your upper chest, hold it there and speak across the mesh. If you are really nervous, use both hands.
Apart from the tech issues there are the human own goals being scored with alarming frequency and consistency. The most common is the lack of understanding of that most wonderful instrument – our own voice and what it can do. When we are online, the microphone technology in headsets is very good, so we don’t have to yell to be heard. Before you start your online presentation and before the participants are allowed into the virtual room, do a microphone check, for the right speaking level you will need throughout you talk. We normally do this in a room, before the audience arrives. Online presentations need this sound check too. Remember for online, we need to be able to speak with more energy than normal, without becoming deafening.
When we are speaking with friends, we don’t need to project our voice very much because even with social distancing we are usually physically close to them and if we did, they would ask us to stop shouting at them. On stage, in front of an audience, we need to up our energy levels. When we push out our ki or our intrinsic energy, we connect with the audience physiologically. I have been practicing traditional Japanese karate for 50 years now. When I speak in public, without even thinking about it, I am directing a lot of ki to my audience. The audience literally feels the power of my conviction, in what I am saying and what I am recommending to them. This ki projection allows you to reach every member of the audience, no matter how far away they are seated. It also creates a type of powerful magnetic field that turns their mobile phones into kryptonite and keeps them attracted to what you are saying.
Online and in-person, the absolute message mangler is the monotone delivery. I hereby expose these nefarious presenters as card carrying members of the Guild of Public Speaking Flat Heads. This is not an organisation you want to join. They assault us with their flat delivery, flat energy and flat commitment.
In Japan, this means immediate and automatic audience slumber permission has been granted. It has a hypnotic effect on many Japanese, similar to the gentle swaying of the trains. Off they go to the Nipponese equivalent of the land of Nod. The cure for banishment to purgatory by monotone voicing is variety. There are three elements: tonal, strength and speed. European languages have that rise and fall tonal variety, whereas the Japanese language is spoken in a flat manner. Regardless of linguistic chauvinism regarding tone, all languages can access the acceleration and deacceleration of speaking speed. We can speed it up and slow -it - down. We can also vary the strength output, to go from a roar, to a conspiratorial stage whisper.
I opted to personally narrate my own two books “Japan Sales Mastery” and “Japan Business Mastery”, despite the excruciating stamina involved, dragged out over many painful hours. There was only one reason for this insanity. I know which words I want to emphasis in my sentences, whereas a professional narrator won’t have a clue. Whether we are speaking to people in the virtual world or those sitting in front of us, we must keep in mind that not every word in a sentence is created equally. Some are there for more emphasis, to help us sell our message. We have to either hit those words harder or softer for effect, to be an effective speaker.
Virtual or in-person, our voice carries the day. Presenting is a world of its own and we need to rise to the occasion to match its requirements. Variety is the key, so focus on that and your audience will be with you from the start until the finish. In this Age of Distraction, that is a big achievement.
One Critical Key For Both Online And In-Person Presenting Success
Lockdown has ended in Japan and we are caught in a sort of phony war, where neither online nor in-person has won the ultimate battle for audience attention. Online is still more prominent at the moment, but the cobwebs are being cleared away and the dust wiped off the “live and in the room with you” presenters. These two major delivery vehicles are fundamentally different.
Trapped in a tiny box at the top of the screen, we do our best to engage our audience when we are online. Our virtual background is perhaps marginally better than our humble abode’s interior. All the stickybeak viewers ponder about the backgrounds of our homes, wondering what we have there on the shelf or the wall, rather than paying full attention to us as the speaker. The alternative is the green screen technology virtual backgrounds being employed. They are definitely dodgy though, as whenever we move, half of our head is quickly cleaved off the screen. The reality is that, as presenters, we will have to become like the skilled samurai of old, in the Miyamoto Musashi tradition of nitoryu or two swords mastery. We will have to become the modern masters of the presenting weaponry needed for both mediums.
Travelling to give talks may become redundant, as organisers have discovered they can run events virtually. The time, cost and general wear and tear factors speak in favour of everyone staying in the comfort and safety of their homes. Thankfully, battling through airport security may become a less frequent unedifying experience than it has been. So even if getting in a room, together with the multitude makes a comeback, the odds are that we will continue to be called upon to present online.
There is one key thing we need to do for both worlds - make expert eye contact.
On screen though, this is rather tricky. You have people faces right in front of you on screen and we are trained to talk to people’s faces. The camera however is usually located many centimetres above or to the side of these faces. On most laptops and desktop computers, the camera is zeroing in on the top of our head and even though we are looking at people’s faces, we have no actual eye contact with anyone.
We are allowed to look away, to consult our notes, so we don’t have to maintain constant eye contact with the camera. Most presenters though, cannot manage to make any eye contact with the camera, so their ability to engage their audience is shredded. It takes concentration to suspend the reality you see in front of you and shift your eye contact to the camera and away from the faces on the screen.
In the face to face audience situation, we still have plenty of amateur and dud presenters who don’t make eye contact with their audience. This is such a waste. We are no longer trapped in a little box, we are now full form and on stage. We should be making expert eye contact with the members of our audience. When we are online and on screen, we need to keep looking at one single point - the camera. But in the live situation, we need to move that eye contact around. We select someone in the audience and for the next six seconds we speak to that person, as if they were the only person in the world. We then move our gaze and repeat the process with the next person. We do this right throughout our talk and try to make eye contact with as many people as possible.
On screen, we cannot easily tell the reaction of the audience to what we have said, because either their cameras are off or they are also in a trapped in a little box in the corner. In real life though, by constantly using eye contact we can see if our audience are agreeing with us or if we are losing their attention. We can adjust our flow, energy or content to suit.
Audiences who are multitasking, while participating in an online event, are a nightmare for the speaker. One good tactic to deal with multitaskers is to stop speaking. It works in both the live situation and online. When we inject a pause, we break the rhythm of the talk and the audience members brains record there has been a change and now they need to pay attention again. Their brains are thinking the talk is over, so they engage with the speaker again, because they think it is time to get out of there.
Online is going to remain an important medium for presenters and we will be back in person at some stage soon. However, it is not a great joy being hopeless in one or both mediums, so let’s at least get this one element of presenting right. Eye contact is a super power when you know how to use it, so let’s make sure we master this facility as presenters, every time we present.
Today’s On-Line Presenters Are Demented One Dimensionals
Webinar and after webinar, I see presenters delivering such substandard efforts that I quiver with fear for the personal brand damage they are doing to themselves. Once upon a time, they might be showing fifty people they were unprofessional, but now the online meetings can have hundreds in attendance. Camera up the nose, talking down to what is on screen, not looking at the viewers, waffling away in a demented monotone, being all at sea with the broadcast platform, using delusional, inpenetrable slide decks and somehow expecting we can unravel the florid mess on screen - the list of virtual presentation misdemeanours goes on and on.
I laughed the other day, when the expert panel had been thrashing around before the start, getting organised and vaguely trying to work out how to do polls, to get the show on the road. At sixty seconds to blast off, one of the host geniuses suddenly realised they had all been naked to their audience, in their pathetic pre-show glory, for the last fifteen minutes of online presenting preparation vaudeville.
Organisers need to plan carefully for the start of the programme. First impressions are quickly formed and are unforgiving. If you come across as unprofessional, then the audience will be reluctant to accept your subsequent professional contribution. This is show business folks, so carefully craft what happens when the curtain goes up. The impresario planning element needs a lot more work for the preparation. What about the post show review. I doubt anyone is doing the latter, because they keep shovelling out the same drivel.
The amateur hour, one way, passive delivery is also very droll. They each speak in turn, we listen and we are commanded to get our questions into the chat or the Q&A box at the end. The formula is always the same. After months of experience with the medium, you would think presenters would be wanting to push the tech to its limits. Nope.
They are timorous types, trapped by the nerd eminence grise armies at Zoom, WebEx, Teams, GoToWebinar and all of the other not quite satisfactory platforms out there. Yes, the tech platforms have their limitations, but the presenters are falling well within the boundaries of the commonplace, rather than pushing hard against what is possible.
Online presenting is different to physical room environment. Live venue audiences give speakers visceral feedback through body language, eye contact and energy. Online, all of that is masked, hidden, contorted and mainly unfathomable. Therefore, we really need to engage the audience with the tech tools available. But you never see this being attempted by the speakers.
During the talk, we can get a raised hand, a green check or a red cross, smiley face emojis of bewildering variety or a simple one word comment in the chat. But we never ask for it. We can also get members of the audience to comment during the talk, as we can unmute them and seek their reaction. It is still all very much an “us and them” affair. The erudite panel are over here and the punters are over there. No fraternisation among the ranks allowed during online parade.
Why should it be like that? This is a different medium and it needs extra effort to get audience engagement. We should be using all the reaction tools at our disposal. Polls are good for humour, self awareness and real time information dissemination, but these tools are used with such sparing pluck. It reveals what a bunch of dilettantes we have in charge of these mighty organisations and what a gauche group of amateurs we have running the show. The organisers are doing a pretty poor job and they are failing their presenters at every turn. When the presenters are clueless on the tech possibilities, the host has the job of educating them.
The engagement tools exist, yet no one makes any effort to learn them first, before launching forth with their webinar effort. The hosts of the programme need to take the presenters through what is possible for them and lead them to the understanding that they can employ these tools to be more effective communicators in this medium.
Every four to five minutes of a talk, there should be some interaction with the audience in the live venue world. Well that rule applies just as much in the on-line world. All you need to do is plan for it. Let’s scope out beforehand at which points it makes sense to get some feedback from the audience. Waiting until the end is outdated, old school.
We are all in the multitasking like demons on speed world now. If the online speaker isn’t getting engagement, then the audience remains oblivious to their message. There is a lot of flame and quite a bit of smoke being put about in the webinar world today, but precious little light. The punters who turn up online are not online. They are doing something else at the same time, on the internet, with their email, with their papers, their phones. All the while, the expert panel are bumbling along in the background in their mind-numbing, monotonous monotones. Organisers in Japan, please be more professional and release us from this online webinar hell.
When Is High Energy Over The Top?
Recently, I was watching a presenter online, teaching others how to do online presentations. Man, he was really jumping around. The body language was rocking hard, the voice was powerful, the gestures almost pungent, the facial expressions were on fire and his eyes were blazing. The thought floated across my mind about how his audience was receiving this advice? Most of the people I see online in these various webinars provided by the good burghers of Tokyo’s business community are necrotic. They are almost like one of those death stars, where all the energy collapses inward and the whole thing just disappears into oblivion.
Many of us rant about getting more professional with online presenting, yet the same house captives who attend these castings of pearls of wisdom on the subject, do nothing to alter their approaches. They still zoom the laptop camera up their own noses from its position on the desk or over their ample beer bellies. They still sit there talking in a monotone, with a lifeless delivery style guaranteed to cure the most severe cases of insomnia. They are not getting it.
There seems to be an absence of interest in being a professional in business. They will argue against that view of course and say that in their area of expertise they are the goods. I would answer that by venturing that their vector is too narrowly defined. Being a business professional relies on deep knowledge but also the facility to broadcast that knowledge to others. We know that the modern audience has been brought up on computer games, reality television, DJs severely trimming songs, hand held devices with immediate access to the temptations of the internet and social media as their source of news. In sum, they are easily distracted. If the presenter is not engaging this audience then baby, they are long gone.
You can see this phenomenon live in your own home, as the participant names or numbers on the online call, begin to drop alarmingly, as the massively oblivious presenter just drones on and on and on. People weren’t particularly patient before, but Covid-19 has made them even less so, it would seem.
The presenters may feel speaking in a voice with passion and energy is too fake for them. They are usually boring, warm beer types and so think this is how they need to rise to the occasion, to be a professional in business who delivers content in the online world. They forget they are competing with such a plethora of escape options, that their precious message will not even get close to a look in, by those on the call.
If you come across like you are not sold on what you are speaking about, let me assure you, the rest of us won’t be either. We can tell you are passionate about your subject because you demonstrate that passion. Your voice, body language, gestures, eyes are all screaming at us – believe me, believe me, believe me!
Now do you have to be throttling along at 150 miles an hour? No. You just need to raise your energy at certain points in the talk where you are making a key point. You need to start your comments at a higher energy level, than would be your normal speaking voice. Interestingly when we are training people in public speaking and we ask them to double the energy when they are talking, they raise it ten percent. We just keep asking them to double it, until we get to a pitch level that sounds like they are sold on their own presentation. It is not a shrill trumpet call, but louder than normal. To them, it seems like they are wild banshees wailing at the top of their lungs. To the audience, it sounds like they believe what they are communicating.
Getting the presenters to realise that their over the top level is still well within the professional range is a struggle. This is where video is so useful. When we play back their rehearsal presentation and they see the enhanced body language, purposeful gestures and good eye contact with the camera, they are amazed it looks so different to what they imagined. They expected unhinged, demonic, batty, lunatic ravings on screen. All they got was a much better professional presenter, dominating the medium and engaging the audience. And as the audience, that is exactly what we want from presentations – that they be truly professional.
How To Moderate OnLine Meetings
It is a curious word “moderate”. It means “make or become less extreme, intense, rigorous, or violent”. The chances of being responsible for a meeting which became violent or extreme in business, would be a fairly exotic occurrence. If opinions were charged and opposing, the situation could become intense and the vigorous exchange of opinions might become rigorous. How often do we see any of these things in Japan? This is a country of conservative counterbalance between personal and collective interests. Disturbing the “wa”, the group harmony, is an anathema in this society and so attacking other speakers in public is not going to surface anytime soon. I have been here thirty five years and have only experienced it once.
So the moderator’s role in Japan is a walk in the park compared to more bolshie societies. Having said that though, if you are active in foreign community groups like chambers of commerce, national societies, etc., you can always relive the good old days back in your own country, where people will push the boundaries of polite society and you are the one supposedly in control of the situation.
I will deal with dealing with difficult people a little later, so let’s turn our attention to the more garden variety aspects of the role. It should be clear to you, that you are not the star of the show here. Sounds trite, but how often have you seen the moderator want to hog the limelight, to show off how intelligent and massively well informed they are? The traffic cop metaphor is a good one. Your job is to direct the traffic flow of conversation.
There is a balance required between the speakers. The seriously self awareness challenged and thrusting must be contained and the more decorous members of the panel need to be allowed to get their words in edge wise. They usually don’t have a dog in the fight, so you need to draw them out of their quizzical state and encourage their contributions.
Online this can be a bit challenging, because of consistent issues with audio delays and technical incompetence on the part of panellists. In the in person meeting room, the moderator can more easily interject themselves mid-flow during the panellist’s comments and shut them down, to open up to the views of another panellist. Online, we both wind up speaking over the top of each other, because of the slight delay in the audio being broadcast. The end result is no one can hear clearly what is going on from anyone. Our body language signals are also eclipsed, because we have become a tiny talking head, in a tiny box, in a remote part of the screen territory.
Live or online, the moderator cannot just brazenly front up to the session and start bossing people around. Each panellist has an academic and work history, which informs us of their possible range of expertise and experience on the subject. We need to talk to them beforehand, to ascertain when we can best call on them for comment. Asking a panellist for comment on a subject they don’t have much experience or knowledge of, casts a gloom over the proceedings, as the interlocutor has now publicly embarrassed the panellist and themselves. A more professional moderator would direct the questions to the person most expert in that area and the proceedings would flow seamlessly.
The moderator is also duty bound to dig in a bit deeper with panellist comments, to yield a richer vein of insight. Experts will sometimes make statements which are obvious to other experts and need no further elucidation, but to the rest of us, they sound elusive. We need to challenge the panellist, in a supportive way, to explain in more depth what they have said. Drawing in other comments from the panel is also needed, to get the right balance of views and airtime. Keeping silent mental score on how much speaking time each person has received and then adjusting the balance is the mark of a skilled moderator. All of this is a bit easier in the on line world, because the moderator is usually invisible to the audience, as the tech focuses on whoever has active audio.
It makes a lot of sense to have the audience cameras off and everyone muted throughout, except perhaps for question time. The same visual and vocal isolation should apply to the panellists. As the moderator, we have briefed them that when they are called upon by us to comment, they need to come on camera and unmute themselves. How often have you seen one of the other panellists suddenly lurch unprepared on screen, because they left their audio on and made a scuffling noise in the background, triggering the tech to focus on them? Or a specific panellist is asked to speak and away they go, but they have forgotten to unmute themselves, adding a certain tragic, comedic aspect to the affair.
Refereeing heated exchanges between fired up panellists is always brimming with danger. Without too much effort, you can be dragged into the affray, as the attacker goes after you as well. This is when you pull out the “professionals reference” get out of jail card, when one or more of the panellists goes ballistic. You appeal to all the panellists that “we are all professionals here, so let’s have a robust yet fair debate, devoid of any malice”. You have now framed anyone who continues to be obnoxious as a loser. At this point you cleverly circumnavigate the brawlers and get comments from the remaining non-combatants on the panel. This allows everyone to calm down a bit and the focus is no longer on you as the moderator.
Moderating panels looks easy, but when you reflect on your own observations, you realise few do it well. When it is our turn, let’s make sure we bolster our personal professional brand.
Be Clear With Your On-Line Instructions
When we are immersed in our subject, be it a topic we are speaking on or a work theme we have lived and breathed, we need to be careful about letting familiarity breed confusion. In the on-line world we are often asking people to go into breakout rooms to discuss various weighty topics and then come back and report. The host can usually pop into these sealed off rooms and join the discussion. What you find when you do this can be alarming.
Either when you are in the room or when everyone comes back you discover the punters were not really clear what they were supposed to be discussing. Now we will get this same phenomenon in the real world as well and the puzzled punter can just ask for a clarification. In the on-line world, people are hesitant to mention they didn’t quite understand the task, before they are rocketed off to the breakout room, because they don’t want to admit they missed what everyone else seemed to get. All those little faces with beady eyes in tiny boxes on screen, can be a bit terrifying.
Once in the breakout room it becomes apparent they were not alone and no-one is exactly sure how this is supposed to work. I was on an international on-line session recently with nearly 170 people spread around the planet. We were given our task and swiftly bundled off to our rooms. Now being the note taking type, I had dutifully written down the steps we were we supposed to work through. What I discovered though, was that I was the odd ball bunny, because no one else had taken any notes. Consequently, they didn’t have a clear picture of what they needed to get to work on.
When we are running these things ourselves, we are captured by the tech and the breakout room requires a bit of finessing of the tech to get every one in place, so we are usually pre-occupied with the process. We forget to ask if anyone has a question or to double check on what people think is about to happen. It is a good practice to get the instructions on to a white board or a slide before we propel people into the ether and isolate them from humanity for the next number of minutes. Getting people to take a photo of the screen before they embark on their cyber journey is also handy.
My international on-line excursion was instructive, because the speaker was authentic, entertaining, the real deal and had bucketloads of knowledge of his subject. Yet at the crucial furlong he faltered and was spilled, unseated and we were left lost as we descended into cosmic isolation, trying to plumb what he said we needed to do. We may be doing the same thing with our people, when we have them on-line. We may be forgetting that if you ask 20 people to turn right, at least three will turn left. The simplest of instructions doesn't compute for some people, because they weren’t listening or they were preoccupied with other more attractive thoughts, than listening to us drone on.
Zoom meetings with a lot of people with their cameras turned on can be quite distracting. I suggest to turn them off and have none or only your face in that pathetic little box you get given on-screen. Do we really need to see all of those faces, all of the time. In a real life meeting, we are seated such that we can see the speaker and we hardly even look at the people seated to the left or right of us. Now in the on-line world, the speaker has to compete with all of these other faces vying for the attention of the audience. Cut the competition for your message down and have people focus on you alone. Turn the cameras off, hit “B” to make the slide deck go to black and then everyone is forced to concentrate on you. Hit “W” to bring up the slide deck again and keep going.
Breakouts give us the chance for discussions that are done with a manageable number of people. However, if people don’t know what they are supposed to be doing, because we flubbed it, then the whole exercise becomes one of frustration, dissatisfaction and pointlessness. Make sure everyone knows what is expected of them before you dispatch them to the on-line equivalent of the isolation ward.
Confused Or Competent Online Presenting?
The tech factor in online presenting is a juggernaut which sweeps all in its path. I was finishing up a three hour online Successful Public Speaking class, when one of the participants asked me what I thought was the most difficult aspect of presenting online. Many issues flooded my mind, but by far the most elusive of a fix, would have to be the technology. The screen with your face in it, is a tiny, little, even microscopic image, the audio is dodgy, the punters can’t get into their breakout rooms, the pre-prepared polls evaporate before your eyes. The tech God leads us astray from the fundamentals of a good presentation.
We should have divined our clear purpose with this talk. Are we here to inform people of insights, information, data, or knowledge? Are we doing this to persuade them and bring theminto the fold of our way of thinking? Are we here to inspire them to storm the barricades, to take up their cudgels and right wrongs, to become the complete person they can be? Or are we here to motivate them by using our communication skills, to have them determine they want to do something we think makes a lot of sense, and which they now desire. Depending on our purpose, the design, content and delivery will be wildly different.
We need to know our stuff. That means we bring a lot of intellect and experience firepower to the fore. We don’t have unlimited time to present and presenting online is supremely tiring for both parties, both presenter and audience. We need to strike a rich vein, unearth the motherlode and then be scrupulous about the gems we bring forth. One hour of online presentation deserves a short break for everyone.
Sharing video of your own nasal passage with everyone, by locating your laptop on your desk, is a bad look and seriously sad first impression. Yet so many people do this. Amazing. Get the camera up to eye height and then spend as much of the time as you can, looking at the camera, rather than the screen.
Online can become very one way and boring. We need to engage our audience. Most of the platforms have polling. This is always useful as way to inject humour or create deeper self awareness. Instead of disappearing off to secretive breakouts all the time, we can also use the whole room together, as a way to share ideas and insights. I am not keen on the chat box because if you have a lot of people, it starts to become a Las Vegas slot machine, with the screen information rapidly spiralling upwards out of control.
The machine adds each new chat at the bottom of the column, pushing the previous comments higher and higher, until you cannot physically keep up anymore. We had 150 people doing a Stress Management class online, broke WebEx and temporarily lost all audio and had to retreat to the chat. What a nightmare that proved to be, at that volume of punters adding their two bits worth.
Whiteboards are okay if you have a limited number of people and have time. You have to make sure the font size works too, because often the default is microscopic and you can hardly read it. We can share files which is truly dangerous. Before you know it, you the presenter, are now a slave to the slide deck. The screen is taken up by your visuals and you get a 5% share of the screen real estate, dangling in some corner, with your tiny little head rammed into a tiny box. Definitely keep your slides spartan, pare back as much content as you can and go for images which require you to explain what it means in this context, so that you can wrench back some modicum of control.
Video is the refuge of scoundrels in presenting. This applies in the online presenting world just as much as it does in the live meeting venue. Video is what the President often goes to for dross, pap and filler from the marketing department or even worse from the Goebbelian Investor Relations pond scum, propaganda merchants. It is extremely rare in my experience that the video ever significantly matches the content of the presentation or adds any value.
Presenters are invariably gun shy about rehearsing their presentations, preferring to grapple with the finer points of slide deck construction. In the online world, this is a formula for tech humiliation. Practice with the tech, until you have mastered it and then practice a bit more for when the tech betrays you, stabbing you in the back, just when you were depending on it to come through for you. You don’t need Plan B. You need Plans B, C and D with today’s treacherous tech.
When the audio crashed out on WebEx, in that infamous 150 person all singing, all dancing extravaganza, our producer quickly phoned in to re-establish audio and did a tremendous job tap dancing, until the trainer could log back in and pick up the pace again. You don’t want to be trying to work this stuff out on the fly. Practice, practice, practice.
Dealing With Confrontational Questions In The On-Line World
When we give our presentation on-line we are in full control of the situation. We know what we are going to say. When we get to the end, or part way through, and someone asks us a really tough question, this can be difficult to deal with. Especially, if they are stressed and ask the question in a very aggressive or accusatory manner, we can easily react emotionally. The normal response for human beings in these cases can be the release of chemicals into the body to get ready for flight or fight. This is how we survived from cavemen days, when confronted by a sabre toothed tiger and it still applies today. Regardless of our species roots, we have to make sure we keep our control and a cool head. Good in theory, but not so easy.
Apart from our release of chemicals into the body, we find our mind can often become confused, as we try to think of the best way to respond to our interlocutor. We usually never know when we are going to be hit with a tough question, asked in an angry or aggressive manner. The ambush factor is the reason we have trouble knowing how to respond. If we know the person will be difficult, then we can mentally prepare ourselves. We need to have a plan. It is when the person is new and unknown, or a known person suddenly behaving unpredictably that we can get into trouble.
Because of the random nature of these occurrences, it means we need to consider this possibility before every meeting. We should consider what might be some issues the members of the audience may raise with us and think about how we should answer them. When we get hit with a tough question, we can quickly go to an emotional response. We need to consider those answers beforehand about why what they said isn’t true or not the scale of the problem they say it is. We should also prepare some positive messages to get ourselves back on the front foot and in control of the conversation.
The other area we need to pay attention to is our voice tone. We may show to the client that we are lacking in confidence by mumbling or sounding hesitant or unsure of what we are saying. We may sound like we are scared of what they said or the way they said it. We may sound defensive and even angrily dismissive of their opinion. We need to maintain a cool, calm and collected tone, totally unfazed by what they have just said. This makes us sound more confident and credible.
We should ask clarifying questions before we try to give an answer. We want the verbal assassin to give us more detail. It well may be there has been a misunderstanding or there has been some miscommunication. We need to know that before we try to respond. Letting them hang themselves on the ridiculousness of their outburst is a good ploy.
Here is 7 step process to follow
Tempers are frayed because of the business disruption generated by Covid-19. People are more stressed than normal and outbursts will arise without warning. We need to anticipate rather than react. Consider every meeting to have the potential to blow up in your face and if it doesn’t, great, but if it does we must be ready to roll.
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.
Engaging Covid-19 Isolated Audiences
Once upon a time, isolation from our audience meant we were not getting our message through to them. We were a poor presenter or the quality of the message was sub-par, so the audience wasn’t buying into it. Today, our audiences are in isolation at home, either through Government mandated lockdown or company designated instructions. Our communication patterns have been totally displaced.
In many cases, the equipment solution has been to have people use their phones or their tablets, rather than laptops. That choice really limits the communication tools which are available and reduces messaging to very simple interactions. The danger here is that communication becomes one way and rather limited. Sharing data, especially visual data, becomes tricky depending on what hardware you are using.
Today’s technology is amazing, but still audio connections can be fragile and internet overload can make connecting to on-line meetings a challenge. This is all a new experience for us, so we are often losing communication opportunities because we are in the midst of scarcity thinking. We see the problems, the difficulties and we are locked into our normal ways of interacting, so we not seeing the opportunities.
There are technical limitations, but where possible, have some degree of visual communication with people sitting in isolation. Just seeing other people’s faces for a few minutes is enough to re-establish the personal connection. If you have the bandwidth to sustain that throughout the meeting, that is best, but if not, then at least have some visual exchange, before moving to voice only. Remember to look at the tiny, little camera itself and not the big screen in front of you. The location of the camera is usually set well above the screen, so we are in fact making eye contact with the screen, rather than our audience.
Our strong voice tone and speaking speed become very important. We need to be really clear, because often the audio connections can be rocky and people can miss part of what is being said. Sometimes the way people uses microphones is not very effective, so if you can’t hear people, ask them to get closer to microphone and to speak more loudly. This is why checking for understanding on a regular basis is important. We need to be much more conscious of this, because there may be little actual understanding and we are just waxing lyrically to ourselves and no one else, but we don’t have any way of knowing that.
Also tell people that if they missed something, to let you know, because you will repeat it. Normally, we wouldn’t make that request because we are all expected to be paying attention. In an on-line environment, the tech may be the issue, so we have to accept that communication cannot continue as business as usual. Assume people are not following you, rather than the reverse.
It also means that we have to be agile, to keep our place when we get interrupted. It is a bit like consecutive translation. You say something, the interpreter conveys that and in the meantime you have forgotten where you were with what you wanted to say, because your concentration and flow were interrupted. When we are making an on-line presentation, we need to be making notes of what comes next if we get interrupted, so that we don’t lose our flow and can pick up where we left off.
Normally, we speak, then we take questions at the end. In the on-line world, we need to build in opportunities for discussion at certain points in our talk. This is the best way to engage the audience throughout the talk. We just stop talking and invite comment from the listeners. Now they feel part of the proceedings and can have a sense of ownership of the discussion. We then pick up the threads of the talk and move in until the next scheduled interaction. Some technology handles this interaction live and in other cases, we are relegated to the dreaded chat box.
I don’t like the chat box all that much, because we are now focused on the typing of the messages which means a time delay. It is much better to have live comments, in real time, if possible. If you have to use the chat box, then slow down and adjust the time for the talk or the content quantity, because you will need more time for the delivery and response.
We need to switch the way we plan our talks, the amount of content for the talk and the way we deliver them, to cope with a different receiving environment compared to all being in the same physical room.
Free Live On Line Stress Management Sessions
On a separate note, we are running public Live On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English). We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered Live On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients. This allows us to help our clients and our community.
The registration process for these free stress management sessions is being offered on our website, so please go to this specific page: http://bit.ly/dale_stress_e
Screen Based Strong Messaging Techniques
Most people have trouble getting their message across when they are in front of others and doing it in person. Being on screen while everyone is working at home, makes the whole proposition so much more difficult. A mediocre presenter becomes a shambles in this new medium. There is the tendency to imagine that the screen based delivery medium makes lousy messaging and amateur presentations acceptable. Well they aren’t, if you have a message to deliver, in fact you have to do a lot better in this case, than you normally would.
Get the logistics sorted. Dress for success, so don’t beam in wearing your pyjamas, Aloha shirt or your favourite deathmetal band T-shirt or anything other than full business battle attire. Go for power colours rather than pastels. Avoid narrow stripes because sometimes there can problems with the video technology not handling stripes all that well. Looking professional adds to the credibility of your message. A business suit looks a lot more powerful on screen than casual clothes, if that is the normal attire at the office.
Get yourself a mouse to whiz around the screen with, rather than using the trackpad on your laptop. Get a webcam camera if your laptop or home computer isn’t up to snuff. The audio when connecting remotely can be a problem if your internet connection at home isn’t all that robust. Headphones with a microphone attachment makes communication so much easier and clearer. Also, most technologies allow you to record the session, so certainly make good use of this opportunity so that you can see how you come across to others using this medium.
Eye contact is really important in this screen based world, but so often we have nostril focus, because the laptop camera is shooting straight up the speaker’s nose. This is distracting us from what the speaker is saying. The screen is confusing too, because the camera is above the screen and we all tend to talk to the screen rather than our audience. We have to get used to speaking to camera and ignore the screen. We can look at the screen, in the same way we would look at notes in front of us. The key point though is focus on spending as much face to camera time as possible. This is how technically difficult this is – raise the laptop height so the camera is at eye level. I think we can all manage that.
Make sure there is some decent lighting in the room. Often we don’t think about this and we and the room can be gloomy. Arrange extra lights to be focused on you as the centerpiece so we can see you clearly. We are used to close up shots in movies and television and this is the same thing with us when we are the focus. When you are speaking during an on line broadcast, most of the technology transfers your face to the full screen for the audience and you are now a massive close up.
You may or not be able to control the background but we should try, so we don’t have competition for our message. Some broadcast technologies offer virtual backgrounds, if you have the bandwidth, so your humble abode is not front and center of the broadcast. If you can’t manage that, then try to eliminate things which might be distracting from you when you are speaking. You may be able to drop the background behind you into darkness by turning off some lights and only have light on you.
Everyone is feeling tense and uncertain about where we are going with the Covid-19 virus and attached business meltdown. Without knowing it your face could be reflecting these worries, so don’t forget to smile on camera. You may not have a killer smile, but do the best with what you have. You can simply put a smiley face or the instruction SMILE above the camera to remind you to smile and that actually works quite well. Smiling shows confidence and friendliness. It also helps to build confidence in your audience that you know what you are doing, because you look relaxed and in control. Frowning, creasing your eyes, stiffening your facial muscles all do the opposite, so avoid these simple mistakes.
Don’t forget your body language is a powerful communicator. The screen can diminish you, if you allow it to. Instead try to own the screen and use your gestures and posture to your advantage. Sit up straight and forward and get your hand gestures to sync with what you are saying, to underscore the message. Don’t be afraid to stand up and present standing, because the camera just moves to a wide shot. Don’t stand too far back though, because the audio might not pick you up as well as you need it to. Also be animated and speak with passion, rather than droning on as a talking head on screen.
In the room, on screen, on video, it makes no substantial difference. The basics of presenting apply everywhere, although we do have to make a bigger effort when broadcasting remotely. Awareness is the key and repetition and practice assist us to become more professional in this screen environment.
Free LIVE On Line Stress Management Sessions
On a separate note, we are running public LIVE On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English). We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered LIVE On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients. This allows us to help our clients and our community.
The registration process for these free stress management sessions is being offered on our website, so please go to this specific page: http://bit.ly/dale_stress_e
Covid 19 And On-Line Presentation Skills
GIGO is a useful acronym from the past, which we can employ for the current problem we have conducting business meetings and presentations on-line. Garbage In Garbage Out on-line interactions is not what we want to be promoting in this current Covid-19 driven business and health crisis. Note that I put business ahead of health in this discussion. This is not to ignore or belittle the consequences for the health of those over 70 or with an existing health condition, who we know suffer the highest mortality rates. I just want to make the point that the business impact of the current crisis affects billions of people, while the virus affects hundreds of thousands. Businesses locate people in their homes rather than offices, to try and contain the contagion of the virus, yet companies are ill prepared for the human dimension of conducting business remotely.
There are tech issues around on-line meetings, which impact how many people can be on-line together and the stability of the streaming systems. There are also audio issues depending on whether you are using a headset with mic or just your computer mic. Many home offices in Japan are the dining room table or whatever can be rigged to set up the computer and not so many have a printer at home. Given the strong culture of working long hours at the office, the home office concept is relatively underdeveloped here. In fact, not so many Japanese companies issue laptops to staff, because everyone normally spends their entire time in the office using desktops.
There are also cultural issues around appearing on-line. Japanese homes were designated “rabbit hutches” back in the day, because of their small dimensions and crowded nature. Not much has changed, as most people live in small apartments. Turning on your camera to appear on-line, means you are now showcasing the family abode to everyone else. I do a lot of video conferences with Dale Carnegie in the US. One of the American meeting participants from Dakota, the land of endless vistas and big skies, noticed my camera background and asked me if I was doing the meeting in my closet. How could I explain Japan to her, so I just said “yes!”.
The upshot is that many participants joining the on-line meeting won’t want to show themselves and their homes to the other company members, so the ability to connect individually with everyone becomes more difficult. All you see is their name on screen and no face. Also, when you have many participants on-line, even if they leave their cameras on, the sheer weight of numbers reduces the individual on-screen boxes to a very small size. That means it is okay when you are talking, because your face is full screen, but everyone else looks like they are beaming in from Lilliput, where the people are six inches high. It is very hard to get any visual feedback to what you are saying, as the screens are too small and there are too many tiny faces to be able to focus.
We are now talking to nobody and everyone at the same time. We are speaking into a void, which can be very disconcerting. Usually people taking part in meetings when they are face to face, are underwhelming as presenters, but now the problem is amplified. They are dead dogs in person and become world champions at boring when they go on-line. The meetings become lifeless, mundane and rarely satisfactory or motivating. Your business communication becomes as dull as dishwater. Hardly a recipe for great work to be produced at home.
When we are on-line, we need to really power up our voice, use big gestures, bring energy to the screen and project our message with authority. Actually, all the things we should be doing in a face to face presentation. We have to go a bit harder than in person though, because we are reduced to a small screen version and that can minimise our messaging if we allow it. Don’t allow it. So go big, certainly much bigger than normal.
It is hard to see audience reactions, so ask for feedback. Most on-line systems have a chat box, so get people to write their feedback or questions there. Some systems allow checkmarks or icons such as smiley faces or raising hands. Get the audience to tell you when they have a question by raising a hand or that they are good to go with your message, with a reassuring check mark or a smiley face. Make the most of the tech available to you. As the presenter, you must remain the central focus though, just as you would in person. Keep people honed in on your message, by ramping up your presentation energy.
Free Live On Line Stress Management Sessions
On a separate note, we are running public Live On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on March 19 (English) and 24th (Japanese) and April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English). We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered Live On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients. This allows us to help our clients and our community.
The registration process for these free stress management sessions is being offered on our website, so please go to this specific page: http://bit.ly/dale_stress_e
Covid-19 Challenges Leaders’ Communication Skills
Most leaders tend to underestimate the importance of communicating with their teams even in normal times. We are now definitely far removed from “normal times”. Panic buying, lockdowns, quarantine isolation, working from home are just some of the features of the response to the virus. The health issue gets most of the focus, but the real dangers lurking in the shadows are economic. People are not yet connecting what all this dislocation will mean for business. An economic downturn can get sparked by the stock market crashing, a major collapse in consumer sending, rising unemployment rates, trade restrictions, and supply chains grinding to a halt. Actually, we are facing all of these right now.
The virus is global and so are the effects on business. It won’t be one country or a couple of countries being impacted. The interlocking of business means we face an escalation of economic effects across the world. The virus will mainly kill those already in poor health or over the age of seventy, but the economic disruption will hit billions of people and kill off millions of businesses. As the leader, what are the messages we need to be presenting to our team and what are the mediums we should be using?
Japan is the most experienced capitalist country dealing with the virus. We are six weeks ahead of everyone else, so we can see the business impact of the virus, as it drives down the basis of commerce – the free exchange of goods and services. This exchange is grinding much more slowly than before and that has ramifications for small medium enterprises’ survival.
PM Abe suddenly closes all schools elementary level and above and this immediately hits the school lunch suppliers, the part time workers at the schools, and this impact is transferred down the food chain. Events are not held, tourists both internal and external stop travelling, restaurants are emptying as people stay at home, Hotels lose bookings etc., etc., and everyone expecting related revenue gets nothing now. They in turn stop spending too, because they are in a tough cash flow situation.
The initial leader communication efforts were focused on avoiding the virus and the health issues involved but things are moving much faster now and business bankruptcy is a prospect which must be faced. The economy was already slowing down, because of the trade friction between the US and China and the additional two percent increase in the consumption tax. The virus economy impact is already pushing Japan further into recession and the possibility of no Olympics being held will just add to the damage to business sector. The danger is that the virus dissipates, as the temperatures climb, only to return again in Autumn. Things may start to improve, only to fall back in a few months time and we go through all of this disruption again.
The time for a leader in Japan, to gather the troops together for a town hall has passed. No one wants to get together in a big group, because of the risk of contagion from people who may not even be aware they are infected. That means we are down to video calls and emails. People are increasingly working at home or are at work, but avoiding human contact as much as possible.
The messaging needs to be transparent, factual and realistic. Papering over the economic ramifications of the approaching recession won’t fly with a sceptical workforce, who have already seen the blunt incompetence of Japan’s political leadership. Trying to pretty up the money situation is pointless. You tell everyone that “we are fine” financially and then a few weeks later, you may be telling people they need to take a pay cut or take unpaid leave. It doesn’t take long for small companies to burn through their cash reserves.
The leader needs to communicate the real situation and get everyone’s support to weather the storm together. The danger is people will lose faith in you, and faith in the company. If you survive the economic impact of the virus, you may find your best people will leave when the opportunity presents itself, as things stabilise. They will look to go to a bigger, more robust company that provides a safer financial situation for them. You come out of this crisis substantially weakened and then it gets worse again.
Being honest, transparent and flagging what may need to be done to survive can have the effect of rallying everyone together to fight. This effort needs constant communication with the whole team, a good chunk of whom may be sitting at home with lots of time on their hands, just worrying about their future. In this situation you cannot over-communicate what is happening. Constant updating should be the norm. Communicating your confidence that the company will make it through this and come out stronger must be the message. People need repeated reassurances from the leader. Are you ready?
Free Live On Line Stress Management Sessions
On a separate note, we are running public Live On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on March 19 (English) and 24th (Japanese) and April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English). We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered Live On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients. This allows us to help our clients and our community.
The registration process for these free stress management sessions is being offered on our website, so please go to this specific page: http://bit.ly/dale_stress_e
Should I Recycle My Content Between Presentations?
We go to a lot of effort to prepare for our presentations. We find the best quality information, assemble the slides to showcase that data and we make big efforts for the successful delivery of the talk. Once it is over, then that is the end of it. It was a lot of effort for a one time event. It reminds me of that esoteric Japanese art Sunae, where you craft sand into artistic landscapes and designs and then discard the artwork thereafter. We craft our artistic efforts and then as the presentation comes to an end we discard the work. Isn’t this a waste? Or should each presentation stand alone, representing a point in time in our speaker journey?
For me, I try to create the opportunity to give the same presentation a number of times. Obviously, repetition helps to improve the presentation. We learn so much from the first time we gave it, that it seems motainai or a complete waste not to be able to use those insights and try again. The problem is how to create the opportunity to repeat the presentation? Various host organisations have some degree of requirement for exclusivity and they want their members to have the virgin roll out and not the recycled rendition. They resist allowing you the opportunity to offer them the new and improved version because they want to differentiate themselves from other organisations.
I understand the point but in fact no two presentations are ever the same anyway. The speech is not being read out aloud (if you are doing that please contact me immediately!), so we are usually talking to the points we bring up. What we say in the moment may be phrased an entirely different way to last time. In fact one would hope that was the case, because the idea is we learnt something from last time and now we can offer a better version.
We may have supplemented the slide deck or thinned it down based on our last experience with the limits of the time, for the quantity material we prepared. Hopefully these were not too far apart, because we should have been rehearsing before we gave it, so we should know the time required for the delivery. After we gave it the first time we realised that now there may be some slides which no longer fit, given the time interregnum between presentations or we may have found something better since the last time.
We may have left bits out the first time, in our fevered efforts to get through the presentation and this second time we want to make sure they are not missed. The audience questions may have raised issues we hadn’t considered when framing the presentation and now we can incorporate the answers to those issues this time around. Or we may have been given constructive feedback and have now been able to incorporate that into this delivery.
We might worry we will be flat the second time around, as it has become a bit ho-hum for us. That is rarely the case though, unless you are doing the exact same presentation every week for months, which for most businesspeople is highly unlikely. Even stage actors, who have their shows run for weeks, always manage to freshen up their performance. If you see the same show twice, you will notice that the two performances are slightly different.
If we can, we should try to convince the good burghers in our towns, to have us present the same topic to different groups, within a reasonably close span of time, to reap the benefits of what we learn from actually doing the presentation in front of an audience. I remember when I gave a talk to a 5000 person audience. I found the scale of the venue was so different from normal, that I had to change how I presented. I instinctively knew that in order to master that environment and that situation, I would need to repeat that experience at least five times a row in order to master it.
Keep all of your presentation materials and notes and plunder the past for the keys to future glory. Practice makes perfect, so manufacture lots of opportunities to speak. Don’t wait for the phone to ring, instead get on the phone and get the next gig. That is how the pros did it and why wouldn’t we do the same.
Owning Your Material When You Didn’t Create It
The minions are swarming around the venue. There are people setting up cameras, sound equipment, teleprompter invisible screens, and additional hangers on and assorted riff raff just standing around watching the chaos. In swans the big shot to rehearse the delivery and the tension in the room rises. This is Japan, a no defect, no mistake, no error society where big occasions scare the hell out of everyone. The pointless game of panic induced “what if” now gets going, as various nobodies try to run the speaking coach ragged, in their efforts to head off the thousand things which could possibly go wrong.
The speaker has not had much time to even look at the content and the time allowed for the rehearsal is zen like minimalist. Someone in the marketing department or the PR department has prepared the material or maybe it came from the big name PR company. The speaker certainly had very little chance to even look at it, let alone rework it. To reduce the amount of speaking time, the geniuses organising the speech have stitched videos into the proceedings, unknowingly sacrificing valuable face time for the speaker, who is now relegated to the second string, behind the video images.
This is what it is like being the speaking coach to big shot executives in Japan. In one case, the speaker was thrashing around trying to fit into the straight jacket his staff had created for him and the speech rehearsal was going nowhere. The teleprompter set up had just one screen, so the speaker was very efficiently speaking to only the left side of the room. The rest of the audience were being blanked by the speaker and that is not a good look.
When I looked at the material, I wondered why does the President of this company have to read his speech at all. Doesn’t he have some personal knowledge of the business? Can’t he just throw out the prepared script and speak to a number of pertinent points, following the theme of the talk? He could tell this set up wasn’t going to deliver him the best opportunity to get his message across. In the end he tossed out the teleprompters and came up with his own speaking points and used those at the international event. It was so much better.
Another senior Japanese executive from the automotive sector was due to speak overseas in English, even though his English wasn’t strong. The slide deck from the PR company had speaking notes for every page, written in perfect English. The speech was short, only seven minutes, but even so memorising the entire speech was folly. I assured the executive that speaking English perfectly was unimportant, because communication goes beyond words. Mimes discovered that centuries ago and there was an entire silent movie industry that thrived for decades without any words ever being spoken, until the “Talkies” arrived.
Next the slide deck presented a problem. How was he supposed to follow the script? He could spend his time with his head down, reading the words in English for each slide. If this is all that was required, we could keep him at home and just show a video of him doing just that and have almost the same lack of impact as having him do it in person. Instead, I asked him to distil the essence of what each slide meant to him, down into one single sentence and then one single word. That word was placed on each slide in Japanese kanji, like a secret code, and all he had to do was speak to that word. By telling the audience what that slide meant to him he was authentic. His English may have been garbled and the grammar mixed up, but it didn’t matter. He was communicating from his heart what the slide content meant to him and that message registered with his audience, in a way a speech just read out loud to the audience could never do.
No matter how busy we are, we take a big personal brand risk of allowing others who know nothing about presenting, to decide how we will appear as a speaker. Get an expert to help, if the stakes are high or work out a way to own the material. Make it yours and the speech will go more smoothly and easily. The impact on the audience will be significant and the key messages will get through. That is what we want isn’t it.
How Much Selling Should You Do During Your Presentation?
The organisers of public presentations are usually not very happy for the presenter to start flogging their company’s products to the audience. They are looking for good information for the assembled masses and no propaganda. This makes sense because if you are sitting in the audience and you start to hear what sounds like a commercial for the speaker’s products or services you feel offended and belittled by the presenter.
I was in such a gathering when the host of the Chamber of Commerce event introduced himself as an “expert”, in his particular line of work, when kicking off proceedings. It had a bad smell about it. If you have to go around telling everyone you are an expert, then we will question just how much of an expert you really are. Participants will also complain to the organisers about you and your blatant self promotion and you may not be invited back to speak.
Obviously we give these public presentations to promote our personal brands and our companies. Where is the tipping point when you have pushed it too far? Subtletly is always the best policy. I still remember visiting the German Pavilion in the Tsukuba Expo in 1985. There was a long, winding staircase to the second floor and all along the wall were framed photographs of all the German Nobel Prize winners. There was no banner announcing “we Germans are smart”, but the huge number of faces peering down, as we wound our way up the stairs was a subtle tour de force of German intellectual power.
We should rely on some key elements when selling ourselves when presenting. Bald faced telling people you are an “expert” is completely up for debate, but showing through the quality of what you present that you really know your stuff, is very convincing and makes you highly credible. There needs to be some fresh data or perspective to cut through all the competing messages floating around the internet and media.
I like Jesper Kohl’s presentations. He is a perennial favourite of different Chamber events here in Tokyo. He is a leading economist in Japan and I have probably seen Jesper present twenty times or more over the years. Every time he is super engaging as a presenter and always has new and high quality information on the Japanese economy. He is the master of the pregnant pause when asking his audience members questions. Just as the victim is ready to bumble out their answer, Jesper slips in the answer, revealing that was a rhetorical question after all and not requiring an answer. As an audience member it certainly keeps you on the your toes! He doesn’t have run around telling us he is an “expert”. His content and delivery tell us that.
Delivery is the other indicator of expertise and professionalism. You can be beautifully attired, shoes with a mirror shine, hair perfect like looking like a Hollywood idol and still be a dud if the presentation isn’t done correctly. I was watching a VIP visitor to Tokyo, representing a huge multinational energy company, who gave a very dull presentation. The information was fine, because some minions in the marketing department had cobbled it together in a workman like fashion. The perfectly coiffed, suited and booted presenter delivered the whole thing slowly, clearly and completely devoid of passion. It was painful and decimated his personal brand.
To be credible and prove you are the goods, have first class content and deliver it in a completely professional manner. Blatant self promotion is self defeating and your speaking career will be short lived, as the invitations dry up. Please never allow the claim that you are an “expert” leave your lips. We are not that dumb.
Advice For Your First Major Presentation
At different stages in our careers we are asked to give a presentation. It may be a simple reporting on progress on a project or the state of play with the current results. The audience usually starts with our colleagues and bosses. Over time, as we rise through the ranks, the scope of the presentations we have to give increase in complexity and the audience size also increases. It might be at a whole firm kick off event, an offsite with senior management or a public presentation representing the firm or the industry. The leap from talking in front of colleagues to the company Board or to a public gathering is quite steep. The nervous tension is also profoundly different.
We can feel quite confident in front of colleagues but presenting to the members of the Board raises the stakes completely. Consequently we become a lot more tense and nervous. When we are in the spotlight it can often feel more like an interrogation lamp. Our pulse rate climbs alarmingly, we start perspiring more than normal, our palms become sticky, our throat is parched and our stomach feels a bit queasy.
This is the fight or flight adrenalin rush kicking in. The blood is directed to the larger muscle groups like the arms, shoulders and thighs, away from the internal organs, which is why our stomach feels a bit strange. The pulse rate quickens due to the chemical cocktail floating around our system, as we prepare for action. Logically, we are not about to sprint out of the venue or engage in hand to hand to combat with the members of the audience, but that doesn’t matter because our brain’s instructions to the body has overridden that logic and is prepared to just such occurrences.
Deep breathing to slow down the pulse rate or purposely striding around in some private space, away from prying eyes, helps to burn off some of that nervous energy. There is only so much you can do to calm down the chemical reaction. It also doesn’t necessarily matter how many times you may have presented either, because the nature of the event, the composition of the audience and the scale of the occasion can make us nervous. I read once that even such a regular performer as famous singer Frank Sinatra, was always nervous about getting that first note correct.
The other antidote to nervousness is good preparation. You would think this was the most obvious and logical thing in the world, but an amazingly high proportion of people spend all of their preparation time on the wrong things. The slide deck gets all the love and attention and rehearsals are totally neglected. This is lunacy but also reality.
A competent presentation needs a couple of elements. Understanding who is in your audience and what they want to hear is very basic but often overlooked. I attended a senior executive’s talk on personal brand building. It was odd, because it was basically aimed at people who work for similar major companies. The audience was 99% small and medium enterprise staff. The speaker had not considered her audience at all when she developed her talk.
A clear point of the talk boiled down into one sentence, brings clarity about how to structure the talk. What evidence can we gather to support this central point of our talk. How will we wrap the talk up both before and after the Q&A. What is a grabber opening which will draw the audience in to want to hear what we have to say.
We also have to be clear who is the boss on stage – the slide deck or us? So many presenters become slaves to their slides and that content becomes the main event not the presenter. I am about to coach a senior Japanese car company executive on a speech at an international car show to be held shortly. The PR company has prepared the slides and the draft English content for each slide. They asked me if the content was suitable. Well it is great, except that he will never be able to use it. There is no way he could memorise that amount of content in English for that length of speech and still put in a good delivery as a presenter.
My suggestion is for him to think what does each slide means to him, boil that down to one word and let’s put that word on the slide and he can elaborate on that word during his talk. No memorisation needed and he will speak in his authentic voice about what that image says.
Get the basics right, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse and once you start the nerves will calm down. You will be able to switch your focus from you and everything that is a problem, to your audience and trying to get them to buy your message. Keep doing that and presentations will lose their scariness.
Who Are You Presenting For?
My regular Rotary meeting held every week at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo has a featured speaker. Our speaker this time was a celebrity in his eighties and very well known to the audience. Rotary runs like clockwork and every section of the hourly meeting is choreographed and the meetings always finish on time. Not this time though. Our speaker gave a rambling talk, which seemed to lack any direction or point. For no good reason he also managed to go way over his allotted speaking time, so the meeting finished late. This Rotary audience is full of the captains of industry in Japan and so they are busy executives, for whom time is their most valuable resource. I was sitting there thinking what have we go there with this speaker?
My conclusion was that this speech was for his pleasure. He wanted to ramble around and across a number of unrelated subjects. He clearly liked the sound of his own voice and was happy to have a big audience in front of him. The fact that he managed to go over the time was amazing given there was almost no structure to his talk and he could have ended anywhere really. Japan loves its celebrities, so they get cut a lot of slack and are indulged. This has probably been the speaker’s experience for decades and today he is quite indulgent with himself, because there are no boundaries.
It reminded me though of the importance of focusing on our audience. The danger can be we become wrapped up in our subject or in this case, wrapped up in our own importance. This happens in business too. High powered CEOs jet in to give a speech, they have people fawning all over them and are treated like rock stars. A few years of that and their sense of proportion starts to drift. The issue, as speakers, is they represent the brand. If they are too impressed with themselves and their superior expertise and ability, the audience can feel it. They are focused on themselves and not the message or the audience. This is not a brand plus.
It can happen with passionate speakers too. They may be legitimate experts in their field and are fully sold on the merits of what they Are doing or offering. All great, but this can lead to a shift in focus away from the audience on to the details of the subject and their glorious part in it all. In many ways this talk is all about them and their love for the subject. We don’t want that.
From start to finish the focus has to be on getting the key messages into the brains of the audience and selling them on why those messages are important. We the speaker are the vehicle not the main act. As we get more confident speaking in front of audiences and as we start to enjoy holding sway over crowds, the danger arises that this becomes an extension of our egos about how great we are. Anytime we switch focus off our audience, be it to the details of the technology or to our glorious selves, then we are going in the wrong direction.
The design and execution of the talk should be solely focused on the audience and giving them what they want. We know this by our prior research into who is coming - gender, age, job titles, company name - and by mingling with the early arrivals, to get a sense of what brought them here etc. We know that the Q&A section will help us address specific interest points for individuals in the audience, which may not have been fully covered in the maIn body of the speech.
The starting point of why we are doing this talk should be clear. It is not about us, but about those who have taken the time and made the effort to listen to us. If we start the design phase from that perspective we will be well down the track to get the talk right for that audience.
The Big Idea When Presenting
The podium is a powerful place for powerful ideas. The audience has no idea what you are going to say and where you are going to take them during your presentation. In Japan, at least, they will politely hear you out until the end and then perhaps offer up a question oR two. For the thirty or forty minutes allotted to you, you are the master of the universe, omnipotent over all seated before you. And what have you done with this remarkable opportunity so far? Not that much I would reckon.
In business we are very pragmatic, practical, down to earth, focused. No one expects a businessperson to be giving a fiery, impassioned call to storm the Bastille and put the heads of useless politicians and leaders on pikes to be paraded through the town square. In fact, we bend over backward to be apolitical on the basis that we have customers of various allegiances and beliefs and we don’t want to upset our revenues or hurt our brand.
This tends to breed a focus on the details of elements of our business when we speak. We might be doling out useful advice based on our own experiences to date. It is all kept pretty locked down, neutral and safe. We don’t challenge ourselves and so don’t challenge our audience either. This is not varsity, where a lot of airy fairy stuff can be debated for intellectual stimulation. This is the real world.
The only issue with this “steady as she goes” model is we don’t push ourselves to go higher. We focus on what we know and have seen, instead on what could be imagined. We don’t try to think about issues at a more holistic level, to take a local company issue and elevate it to a conundrum facing the industry. We don’t try to project our intellects to a higher plane of thinking because we are caught up in the weeds of the detail of our speech. We spend vastly more time deciding the order of our sides than on any big idea.
This doesn’t mean our business speech has to whir off on a philosophical tangent far removed from the reality we all face. It does mean though that at a couple of points in our talk we can try to go higher than our own self interest and look at the bigger picture at the industry, country and international level. It may just to be offering up issues for consideration or to project different angles to a problem. To push ourselves to see something in a new light and from a bigger perspective.
The dealing with everyday problems can bury us in the everyday, every day of our working lives and that is a limiting factor in our own intellectual development in business. By taking the opportunity of the podium presented to us, we can challenge ourselves to see what we can say on a bigger topic. One or two big insights per speech is probably enough though, otherwise it sounds like we are on our soapbox, indulging our egos. This should not dissuade us though from thinking “what bigger points can I make about the world of business in my speech? Where do I see future danger points for the industry, the society, the country etc?”.
So when we are next preparing our talk, let’s ask ourselves “what can I say on this topic that will elevate some issues beyond today and my small part of it?”. That act alone elevates our own thinking and vision. Our job in the actual presentation is to do the same for the members of the audience. To challenge them to think more deeply and think differently.
Small Target Tactics For Hostile Audiences
Presenting isn’t always adoration, adulation, regard and agreement. Sometimes, we have to go into hostile territory with a message that is not welcomed, appreciated or believed. Think meetings with the Board, the unions, angry consumers and when you have sharp elbowed rivals in the room. It is rare to be ambushed at a presentation and suddenly find yourself confronting a hostile version of the Mexican wave, as the assembled disgruntled take turns to lay into you. Usually, we know in advance this is going to get hot and uncomfortable.
We still have our message to get across but we have to make some adjustments to head off trouble. The essence of the issue is disbelief. The audience, for whatever reasons, simply don’t believe what you are telling them or they just don’t trust you, regardless of what you tell them. The first casualty of this type of speaking engagement has to be big, bold statements. In less tense situations we might be throwing these types of statement around with gay abandon and not face much resistance from the audience. If what we have said gets brought up in the Q&A we bat it away without breaking into a sweat. No problem, we have this one!
In more fraught circumstances, those big statements will get us hammered, maybe even as soon as they are issued, with no regard for waiting for the Q&A, as the interrogation gets underway immediately. By the way, if there is an intervention by someone in the audience, we should redirect them to ask that question in the Q&A, which is where we will handle all questions. This stops your flow being interrupted and the proceedings being hijacked.
We need to be more circumspect about claims we make. We need to introduce ideas surrounded and buffered by evidence. Instead of saying, “this is how it is”, we need to say, “according to the research, this is how it is” or “according to the experts, this is how it is”. We swiftly and subtly slip off to the side of the attack and let the third party reference take it between the eyes, rather than ourselves.
We need to wrap up our statements in cotton wool and preface them with comments like, “as far as we know…”, “according to the latest information…”, “to the best of our knowledge…”. In this way, we are not holding ourselves up as the oracle, the all knowing, all seeing sage, unburdened by limitations of self awareness. We are making ourselves a small target, harder to attack and providing many loopholes to leap though, should we need to.
We need to lead with context and background. Making statements, drawing conclusions, before we get to the evidence part, is ritualistic suicide as a speaker facing a hostile crowd. We need to take a note from the pages of the Japanese language grammatical structure. Unlike English and most European languages, in Japanese the verb comes at the very end of the sentence. This is a great metaphor for dolling out the evidence.
In Japanese, we don’t know if the sentence is past, present or future oriented, if it is negative or positive until we get to the end of the sentence. That means we have to sit there and absorb all of the context, background and evidence before we can make a judgment about whether we agree with what is being said or not. This is what we should do with a hostile audience – load them up on the details, the data, the evidence, the testimonials, the expert statements, before we venture forth with what we believe to be true.
We deliver this this deluge of facts piecemeal, so that the audience is taking the information, processing it in their own minds and jumping to conclusions about what they have just heard. Our object is that the conclusion they have jumped to is the same one that we have reached, based on the same information. It is almost impossible to disagree with our context. They may not agree with our conclusions from our understanding of the context, but the context itself is usually inviolable.
Before we go into Q&A we must publically announce the amount of time available for questions. It is going to get heated and we don’t want to appear like a cowardly scoundrel beating a hasty retreat, because we can’t take the rigour of investigation of what we are saying. By having stated the time available at the start, we can simply refer to it later and say, “we have now reached the end of the fifteen minutes for question time” and go into wrapping up the evening with our final close.
Hostilities will commence immediately we begin to speak, so we have to be mentally ready for that. We also need to switch our presenting tactics to account for the pushback which will come. By making ourselves as small a target as possible, it becomes much harder for any enemies in the audience to successfully attack us. If they are going after you, they are definitely not your friend, so keep that in mind when your are preparing.