Kata, the way of doing things and Kanpekishugi or perfectionism are wonderful traits in Japan. Everything works well and as expected. Things have an order here and there are certain ways of doing things which will brook no adventurism. Things must also be done properly, no half measures. As a transplanted wild Aussie, I fought against both for many decades. “Why does it have to done this way?”, I would ask my wife, who would just answer, “because that is how it is done”. “Near enough is good enough” I would assure her, but she wasn’t having any of that either.
This mindset flows into language usage too. If speaking in a foreign language like English then it must be perfect or the speaker feels shame. Sometimes the amount of exposure to the language or the amount of study hasn’t been sufficient to be perfect, but that is never accepted as an excuse. The burning, hot flush of shame exists regardless, if a mistake is made.
The pressure ratchets up when Japanese business people have to give a presentation in English and they embrace all sorts of craziness in that pursuit. A recent case came to my attention regarding a very senior Japanese executive in a global firm, who has to give talks internally as well as externally. His pursuit of perfection drove him to read religiously from the prepared notes, word for word, so that it would be grammatically perfect. He also had the forethought to arrange some Sakura or “plants” in the audience, to ask him predesignated questions for which he had carefully curated answers. Everything was perfect, except it wasn’t.
The senior leaders are grooming him for a huge job and when they see this type of behaviour they worry. This degree of over engineering presentations isn’t authentic from their point of view. They want him to be natural, imperfect, understandable and capable and confident enough to handle questions from an audience, without having to nobble the proceedings. Here is where perspectives diverge. He seeks perfection in a foreign language and his bosses are okay with imperfection in English.
When you think about it, how many people do you know who are perfect speakers of their own language? Not every native speaker is perfect. We make a mess of the tenses sometimes, getting the verb wrong, using “is” instead of “was” for past tense. I have heard very well educated native speakers say “somethink” instead of “something” or “everythink” instead of “everything”.
I have a Ph. D., an MA, and a BA with Honours. Am I 100% confident in my own command of my language of English? Certainly not. I am always paranoid about mispronouncing words I don’t know or hear very infrequently. English grammar has defeated me since Year Three of elementary school. I am certain I make mistakes in these podcasts, I just don’t know where.
If we cannot claim purity in the linguistic applications of our own language, then we certainly know we are not able to operate at perfection levels in a foreign language. Yet this is exactly the type of crazy pressure which Japanese business executives place on themselves. They need to lighten up a bit.
The high powered Japanese Executive in question has not had my coaching at this point, as discussions continue. One of the first things I will be teaching him is to get rid of any perfectionism baggage holding him back. You don’t have to be a perfect speaker of English when giving presentations because nobody cares. If they are fellow Japanese, they cannot say anything, because they are not perfect either, so no casting of the first stones of criticism by them. If they are foreigners, then they have likely grown up listening to non-native speakers mangle the grammar and mash the pronunciation of English. They accept it for what it is and if they cannot understand what is being said, they just ask for it to be repeated.
Studying Japanese here for the first time back in 1979 I made a revolutionary discovery. If you wait to manufacture the perfect sentence to lob into a conversation, you will never get to speak. The conversation will have moved on to another topic before you get a chance to use it. Therefore, perfect or otherwise, SPEAK. Get it out and if they don’t register what you mean then say the same thing in a different way, until they do get it.
If we are doing a presentation, then there can be perfect text on screen as we speak imperfectly to the content, rounding out the information further. We can also take comfort that audiences don’t remember the detail of the talks, but they do remember the speakers. They will overlook imperfections in speech from a dynamic, passionate, energised speaker, because they will remember the speaker as impressive. A perfect rendition in English by a native speaker, delivered with no passion in a monotone, will dispatch that person to oblivion in the memory of the audience. Perfection isn’t needed but passion for the subject and for the audience is. Focus on those two things and the world will be right, non-native speaker or otherwise.
Being persuasive is a key element to business success. You can argue the rights and wrongs of that statement, but it is the reality. We cannot avoid the fact that being able to present to others and get their agreement is a critical skill which we all need. Now we meet vigorous, go, go, go people and so when they give a presentation, their passion, motivation and power come to the fore. For them, they are not even thinking about being a high impact speaker, this is who they are. For others though, they are demure, calm individuals who speak quietly, even softly. Both types are being their true self and being authentic, so isn’t that enough? Actually no.
Being an authentic individual and being a professional and successful speaker are related but not derivative. Being authentically boring isn’t much help. Being authentically monotone in your delivery doesn’t work. Yelling at people for the entire forty minutes of the talk, so that all the audience hair is being blown back like we see portrayed in cartoons is not humorous in real life. Authentic yes, but grossly ineffective.
Regardless of the style of the presentation, the content and the structure of the talk have to be well constructed. This is a given. However the impact of the delivery is not a given. The best, highest quality information with the best navigation for the talk can be a disaster if we are yelling at the audience the whole time or speaking so softly that hardly anyone cares what we are talking about.
You might think it is easier to calm down the fast talking, high energy speaker, so that they can get some variety into their delivery. You think this would be the easier of the two to fix. Not in my experience. They are both tricky and for different reasons. People who speak fast get on a roll and away they go. They disconnect from the audience and have created a new audience of one – themselves. They are talking to themselves, the way they like and are not focused on the listeners at all. Because this is their normal speed range, slowly down really kills them. They find it so uncomfortable and fake, they hate it.
The softer presenter, when encouraged to put more energy into the delivery and ramp things up they stop going any further, because they feel they are screaming at people. I tell them to double their output and the most they manager is a five percent lift. Well they aren’t screaming at anyone and there isn’t much appreciable difference from what they normally do, so there is a lot of scope to become more energised, but it feels uncomfortable and they stop.
These are the two extremes of speakers – the loud and the quiet. Should they do us all a favour and not become presenters? Every single one of us can improve what we are doing, me included and certainly it is not game over for these representative extremes. This is where coaching comes into help them develop range in their energy and voices.
A good metaphor for public presentations is classical music. We are not sitting there subjected to crescendo after crescendo. Nor are we being put to sleep with a constant lull in proceedings. There are passages in the music which are intense and some which are almost inaudible. There is distinct power in both and we have to learn to master both.
Not every word in a sentence of a presentation is equal. Some words require more emphasis than others. That doesn’t mean those words have to always be yelled out. It can be equally powerful to deliver them like an audible whisper, a conspiratorial sharing of some key information. The point is to decide which words or phrases need emphasis and then decide how we are going to deliver them.
For those who speak quietly, the conspiratorial whisper will be easy to pull off. The high energy speaker will be dying to speak so quietly. The going hard part presents the opposite problem and the quiet speakers believe they sound crazy at that amplification. We video our presentations and when we do the review, the quieter speakers are always amazed that they don’t sound or look like they have lost their minds. The most common reaction is that “this person on screen looks very positive and committed to their message”. That is a good thing for a speaker to be doing isn’t it. The boisterous speakers comment that “this person looks very professional and considered”. Again, a good result by any measure.
The key is to get the coaching and to do lots of rehearsal. Usually business speakers give their talk once – when they are in front of their audience and usually they get no coaching beforehand. This is pretty adventurous stuff, given these are our personal and professional brands that we are putting out there on display. If you are too quiet or too loud, then you need to work on your range and find the strength in what you are good at and add to your presentations, elements you are not good at. The coach will make that happen for you because it is very, very difficult to do it by yourself. What you think is soft is still yelling and what you think is yelling sounds soft. Our range sensitivity is not well calibrated enough to make the adjustments by ourselves. Get coaching and do rehearsals would be my advice.
Presentations have a cadence. Notices are sent out to the mailing list or promoted through some form of media. Interested people sign up and attend the event. There is a hosting organisation representative delegated to get proceedings underway. I went into detail on that component last week, so if you have missed it, please go back and listen to that episode #280 on “How To Introduce A Speaker”. When the presentation is over the host organisation has to wrap things up. Usually, in well organised events the role of the MC and the person thanking the speaker are separated. The MC will call on the person designated to give a vote of thanks to the speaker and then conclude the event once that part is completed. If that is you, it is important you do a good job, because all of this is coming at the end of the event and this is contributing to people’s final impressions. Those final impressions will also include how they think about you and this will be one of the last things they remember. Last impressions can be deadly, if we don’t plan for them to succeed.
If we have been given that task to thank the speaker, we need to pay careful attention to what the speaker says, so that we can refer to it at the end. If we can get hold of the slides or the speech outline before the presentation, this will make our job that much easier.
We have to remember that we are in the public eye, when we carry out this role. This is like a mini-presentation of our own. Again, these are our personal and professional brands on show, so people are judging how well we can do it.
However, it shouldn’t become a complete summary of the speech, so that we come across as wanting to compete with the speaker. Have you ever seen that? The person thanking the speaker decides to take this opportunity to promote themselves and they try to hog the limelight. People are mentally heading for the door and their next appointment and here is some windbag raving on, wasting everyone’s time. We need to keep it short, sharp and terrific. I didn’t pay much attention to the final thanks to the speaker because most of them were very pedestrian or they were a self-centered rendition of this person’s own views on the subject.
That changed when I heard Thierry Porte, then President of Morgan Stanley Japan, give the thank you speech at an event I attended. The actual presentation was a disaster. The banker giving it had put up his actual text document on screen and was scrolling through it. The font was abysmally tiny and basically he was reading to us what was on screen. It was a dagger in the heart of his firm’s brand at that point, because this guy was obviously clueless about giving presentations. Then Thierry, who later became my boss at Shinsei Bank, gave his comments thanking the speaker for his talk. Actually his short comments were a lot more impressive than the actual presentation.
I didn’t know Thierry at that point, so it was my first exposure to him and today I cannot remember the detail of the points he made years earlier, but what I do remember was that I thought they very intelligent and concise. It was impressive and I recall thinking, “this guy is really smart” and I made a point of exchanging business cards with him. It also showed me the power of being able to thank the speaker in an intelligent way and make an impression with the audience, promoting your personal and professional brands at the same time. The point is to think like that – “this activity is going to add to or subtract from my personal and professional brands”.
So how should we carry out this important role? We have a formula for this we can rely on called the TIS model.
This degree of familiarity will vary depending on our personal relationship with the speaker and the culture we are in. Japan is a very formal country, so it is more likely we will be using their title or highly polite forms of address like sama instead of san. So I would say “thank you Suzuki sama” rather than “thank you Suzuki san”. There is a world of difference in Japan between those two polite forms. Recently, I attended an online webinar and the person giving the presentation was a bengoshi or lawyer and the person giving the final remarks addressed him as “Sensei”, which is a very polite reference taking into account his prestigious line of work.
There are always different levels of understanding of simple roles in a presentation event and the thing I notice is how few people actually understand how to do them properly. From now on, pay careful attention to how the MC opens and closes proceedings and to how the person designated to give the thanks, carries out their role. You quickly realise it is very easy to get into the top 1% of professionalism in these areas, because most people are not much good. What a great opportunity to build our personal and professional brands!
Today we are going to look at how to introduce a speaker, something which we may not do so often, but still an important facility which we should do well. I am sure we have all seen the MC introduce the speaker. I am also sure we have seen very few do a good job of it. One of the problems is that the MC hasn’t connected this role with their personal and professional brands. They are mumbling and bumbling along. Often they don’t see this role as particularly vital and so do a very offhand version of the introduction.
They make a mess of reading the Bio they have been provided by the speaker or even worse they dispense with the document altogether and they freestyle, giving their own half baked version of the Bio. This is particularly annoying from the speaker point of view, because we will have written that introduction to maximise our credibility with the audience and also to stimulate their interest in the content to come. Having been on the receiving end of these MC introductions, I notice they will often leave important parts out, get the order wrong or make mistakes with the dates.
Basically, what they deliver is an insult to the speaker because they are not taking the proceedings seriously enough. Remember, it doesn’t matter how long we have in the public limelight, we are being judged by the audience. Even if we are an audience member and we ask a question after the speaker’s presentation, we are being judged by everyone present. If our question sounds stupid or our delivery is awful, everyone present is making a mental judgement about us.
The MC role is important because this is how we quiet the audience and grab their attention for the speaker’s message. We are preparing the audience to accept the speaker into our midst. There is a delicate balance needed here though. You may have also seen the MC start to take over the presentation. They begin the introduction and then start telling us what the speaker is going to cover in too much detail. The MC should be brief and get us to the main speaker smoothly and should intrigue us with their introduction, so that we want to hear more.
We can use the TIQS model when it is our turn to introduce the speaker at the event.
If there is no one to introduce us, then we should do it ourselves and start by stating our name and our organization. Next, we talk about the topic we have chosen for today. We now talk briefly about our qualifications to give this talk. The introduction to the talk is an important element in the event and we need to give it proper care and attention. Done well probably nobody notices, but done badly it jars and distracts from the professionalism of the event and the talk. Let’s all make sure this part of the proceedings is a winner, whether we are in the speaker or the MC role.