Until a number of weeks ago, I had only vaguely heard of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. I read he was an actor who played the role of the Ukranian President in a television drama production and then turned that into reality, by winning the election and becoming the leader. I was thinking of a reality TV star like Donald Trump or a B-grade movie actor like Ronald Reagan both becoming the leaders of America and put him in the same basket. In terms of presentation skills, Reagan gave some very good speeches in his time as President and although we credit him, we should also be crediting his speech writers. Trump generally tended to avoid set pieces as far as speeches went and preferred speaking to a few key points in his talks, offering a much more spontaneous style. As masters of media, they were both effective in using the bully pulpit to get their messages across.
Zelenskyy’s comment back to the Americans that “I don’t need a ride, I need ammunition” when offered an escape from the Russian invasion, was a spectacularly successful one liner. I doubt that a room full of his media advisors had spent hours anticipating and preparing that response. It sounded impressive because it came across as spontaneous and genuine. In one sentence he said, “we Ukrainians may have been written off by all the military and political experts but I am their leader and we are not giving up”. Many of us had the image of previous Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani fleeing the country, as the Taliban pushed into Kabul. Zelenskyy’s stock as a leader went straight up with that comment and he was perceived as a brave person and a real leader. Coming up with a breakthrough one-liner is certainly not easy but definitely worth the effort to try and craft a zinger. Try it and see what you can come up with. We only need one in a speech to have real impact.
Zelenskyy has obvious comfort in front of a camera from his work as an actor and he knows how to work the medium. I broadcast three TV shows a week on YouTube every week, plus produce vast quantities of video content relating to leadership, communication, sales and presentations. So after thousands of hours in front of a camera, I have become more comfortable with it, but it wasn’t natural or easy for me. Most business leaders only ever have a fleeting and random relationship with the medium. As a result, few business leaders can really work the medium and get the maximum gains from it, so there is still some way to go. If I can do it, trust me, you can do it too and probably you will do a better job than what I am doing.
All modern politicians today need to gain this skill and they do learn it, so there is no differentiation here particularly. Zelenskyy has done a good job though using his speaking opportunities with the various politician audiences of countries sympathetic to Ukraine. He has been beamed into joint sittings of the upper and lower houses of these countries political elites and has proven very adept at adjusting his angle of approach.
Japan’s example was a reminder for Americans of the Pearl Harbour attack that reeked such disaster, death and havoc in Hawaii and brought the USA into the war. The Japanese Tohoku earthquake, tsunami, triple nuclear reactor meltdown in Fukushima was a reminder for Japan of the damage that event caused and linked it to the current destruction that Russian missiles and long range weapons were inflicting on the villages and cities in Ukraine. For the French it was calls forLiberte, Egalite, Fraternite to be applied to the Ukraine in their hour of need. The speech to both houses of the British parliament rekindled memories of Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s calls for national sacrifice to fight to the bitter end against Hitler, no matter what. When speaking to both houses of the Australian parliament, he mentioned the Malaysian Airline flight MH-17 which was shot down over the Russian separatist controlled Donbas region, in which 38 Australians died. None of Zelenskyy’s references were random and we should be doing the same. We need to spend time to select examples, stories and use these rhetorical flourishes to get our messages to resonate with our audiences.
The point here is that he tailored his messages very carefully to gain maximum appeal with his audiences. Yes, there is an element of emotional manipulation involved here and I am sure everyone in these audiences were aware of that. It nevertheless worked, because he was able to link his country’s current dilemma with the emotional wellsprings of his audience and to get everyone to feel a sense of shared commitment to Ukraine’s successful outcome in the war against Russia. This ability to connect at an emotional level with our audience is an absolutely critical skill which presenters need to work on continuously.
We always stress the importance of knowing our audience before we give a presentation. In theory this is what is supposed to happen, but how often have you attended a talk and really felt this was tailored to your interests and needs. Most business talks feel like the speaker is talking at us, rather than speaking with us and there is a world of difference between the two. We must plan how we are going to forge an emotional connection with our audience, rather than concentrating on downloading a bunch of stuff, which will all too soon be forgotten.
“Who is going to be attending and how can I meet the conversation going on in their minds about the importance of this topic I am going to be addressing”, is what I have in my mind when I am preparing my talks. The audience will have some thoughts about the topic. They will have some points they wish to hear more about and may have some need of ideas, insights, answers or recommended actions. What would these encompass? This is the type of analysis we need to be undertaking ourselves, when we are getting ready to give a talk. Preparation is the key, but that requires that we make the time available to do it properly. Remember, every time we get up and present we are putting our personal and professional brands on display.
Zelensky’s dress code for these talks is usually a military T-shirt, rather than a business suit. He is projecting he is a man of action and is ready for combat. He knows his audience will be dressed in suits and he could wear a suit too, but the stark contrast in dress lends more urgency to his appeals for support. In the same way, we need to dress for battle too. Depending on who you are talking to, it may mean a business suit of armour or it may mean something more business-casual. We are anticipating how our appearance will make it easier for us to connect with our audience. When I dress in the mornings, I consult my diary first to see who I am meeting that day, what I am doing and what impression I want to make. On that basis, I make my selections with the plan in my mind to have maximum impact on my activities for that day. Style, colours and combinations can quickly alter the image we want to project, but first we have to make decision about what we want to project. How do you decide what to wear each day? Is it based on what is clean or pressed? Grab your diary and do some thinking about what sort of a day you want ahead of you.
It is good that we go to this degree of trouble about how to project our appearance, yet do we also spend the time thinking about how to design the content of our talks, so they will resonate with the audience? We should spend the time to research who will attend, what they are interested in and then zero in on those points for maximum impact. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s example offers us a chance to reflect on what we are doing to further develop our own communication skills.
Slava Ukraine!
It is a tricky balance to be clear, concise, articulate and also plausible. I was thinking about a podcast interview I heard by a titan of industry. He had obviously been trained in how to handle the media, so as soon as he spied the microphone, he went into media interviews 101 mode. Media interviews by their very nature are a fake environment. Those being interviewed are taught to be glib, keep it short, think in sound bite terms, don’t reveal too much or you will get yourself into trouble. Many journalists are looking for a scoop, a chink in the corporate armour, a gotcha moment. You may come away from the interview with the gold still in your teeth and relatively unscathed, but how did you come across to the audience?
We don’t sound authentic. Well this is entirely natural. You are under siege, so forget about authenticity and focus instead on survival. We don’t sound conversational because we are avoiding conversation and trying to chop our thoughts up into media bites bite sized pieces. We are always aware that unscrupulous editors can rearrange our comments with a later recorded overlay, that makes us look bad. There is a lot going on in the mind when being interviewed.
Here is a little word to the wise. If you are ever being interviewed by the media, whether it is audio or video, always assume the camera or audio recorder is still rolling when the journo says “thank you - that is the end of the interview”. They have learnt from experience that this is when we relax and they get us to make an off-hand, untoward comment, which we will make in haste and later regret at leisure. This offering gives the interviewer a big score and big kudos from their boss and journo colleagues back at headquarters.
The interview I referred to earlier started out wound up like a tight spring. The corporate titan’s propaganda blitz on the worthiness of the company came across as a total fizzer. Pumping out the party line is a dud in these interviews. Trying to make the firm look good in an obvious, self-congratulatory manner is self-defeating. It begins to sound like the type of drivel a lot of people posing as PR types try to foist on us, to get us to like the company.
Fortunately, finally, the interviewee realised this wasn’t a gotcha, media style interview and just a humble podcast seeking insights. Once he relaxed, the entire line of the conversation moved from fake to real. You could literally spot the transition point. The quality of the answers, the elongation of responses and the credibility of the speaker all lifted.
It was almost as if there were two people being interviewed – the fake and the real. We have to be clever with interviews and work out who is the audience, what is the interviewer’s “form” from past interviews and understand how we can add value to the conversation in a relaxed and natural manner. We want to connect with and engage the listeners. If we try to be too smart, too smarmy, we will trigger warning signals in the minds of our listeners. We have all been trained to be wary of the smooth talking conman and anytime we hear something that smacks of that effort, we become uneasy about the person and what we are hearing.
Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, is infamous for dropping in very erudite, learned words into his speeches. He went to Eton College and Oxford university, so he is well educated and he doesn’t brook from flouting that fact. He also drops a “big word” and then as a throw away remark says “look it up” to acknowledge that he knows he is using vocabulary which is beyond the understanding of his audience and he does it in a humorous way to reduce the rejection facet. I always feel undereducated about my English ability, so I have bought a number of his books, because they are positively brimming with vocabulary which is rare or entirely new to me, in a desperate effort to expand my vocabulary range.
The point is Boris somehow manages to get away with it, but for the rest of us, let’s do our best to be clear, without being glib. Let’s be concise without masking our valuable thoughts. Let’s strive to be articulate and do so in order to add value, rather than to come across as a smarty pants. If we deem the interview to be “safe”, then let’s relax during the interaction and try to connect with the audience in a way they will appreciate. Explaining complex ideas or information in a simple manner requires a certain level of genius and this is what we should be striving to achieve. Let’s drop the corporate doublespeak and be authentic in our revelations about the contributions our company makes to the world.
I was sitting in the lecture theater, as usual in the front row, so that I could catch everything that was being said. University was a big deal for someone who climbed out of the trench and put the shovel down on a Friday and hit the campus the next Monday. Calling me earnest about my studies doesn’t even get close. On this occasion we had a guest lecturer, who was giving a talk on the battle of Sekigahara, a turning point in Japanese history which would usher in hundreds of years of rule by the one family, the Tokugawas.
The Professor was reeling off the ten reasons why Tokugawa Ieyasu won the battle and I was diligently scribbling down all of these logical, worthy points. At the end of the ten points, he then said these were not the reasons and then spent the remainder of the lecture explaining his view on the real reasons for Ieyasu’s success. This was very clever.
By providing sound, credible reasons first, he had established his command of the literature and the related scholarship. It all sounded very convincing to me and what is more I had invested myself in recording it all. The bait and switch technique now elevated him above the rough and tumble of academic insurgencies over the finer points of history, to stand above the fray and position himself as the one who really knew his stuff. His reputation was enhanced by a conjurer’s trick of making the penny disappear and then draw it out from behind your ear.
Academic illusionist or not, it worked like a charm. Think about the standard business presentations you have been exposed to. They are usually pedestrian affairs, involving the doling out of data and information, specialised only in delivering the talk in a deadly boring manner.
Today we presenters face the most difficult presentation environment in history. It has never been this bad. Our audience are glued to their phones and live in the internet for disturbingly long periods of the day. They have microscopically short concentration spans, are quickly distracted and constantly moving, ever doom scrolling and unable to settle. Then we turn up for our little party piece representing our industry and firm. Getting and keeping people’s attention has become the search for the holy grail for presenters.
Are we allowed to use magic tricks to grab and hold their attention? Absolutely we are! This is a zero sum game we are involved with here and we either get our point across or we don’t even get a desultory reception. Technology and social media have made us experts at pattern recognition. This has always been a strength of our species, which has kept us going, as we anticipate trouble before it arrives. This means that as speakers the pattern interrupt aspect of what we are doing becomes very important.
The lecturer mentioned earlier took us down a predictable path, with a fulsome list of plausible explanations. He then executed a pivot and pulled off a pattern interrupt telling us all of that was codswallop. We were invested in what he had told us and I for one, had written it all down, so the shock was palpable when he said to forget about all that stuff. “Hello, hello”, I thought, “what is going on here”. He had removed the central pillar of our commitment to the content and now promised to replace it with a much sexier version.
When we are giving our talks, this can sometimes be added to our repertoire of techniques for commanding the attention of the audience. We can start with a predictable, safe version for the crowd, leading them up the garden path with content which is persuasive, plausible, cogent and rational. Throwing all of that overboard creates a vacuum. Our brain doesn’t like that and wants the correct version to be implanted, so we are all ears to hear the truth, the real story.
We have also self-elevated ourselves above the fray and self-selected ourselves as the superior being, the enlightened purveyor of the most accurate knowledge and best quality information on the subject. This is a major credibility boost and the audience is wide open to it, because of the way we have set it up. The flip side is you have to have the goods. If you say the standard interpretation is rubbish, then your next contribution had better be totally worthy of the rock star you are purporting to be.
Obviously, we wouldn’t put ourselves up on the high wire without a safety harness, if we were not confident we could carry this off. This is where we need to have real knowledge and better research on the subject than our audience. We also have to deliver the talk with a passion for sharing key information with our audience. They will absorb the trick if they feel the intention was pure. Just being a trickster won’t work. We have to deliver unexpected value and exceed audience expectations.
I was recently asked to be interviewed by a University senior for a project he was doing on communication in business. I don’t know if I was a good choice. After I left High School, I was working for an insurance company during the day and joined then dropped out of a night course on Communication at the Queensland University of Technology. The “communication” study idea sounded great, but what I found was the course was very theoretical and not what I was expecting. Subsequently, I have become a disciple of content marketing, which basically means you see your company as a publishing firm, in addition to your main thrust of your business. We push out copious quantities of information on speciality topics for free, to signal to potential buyers, that we are experts in these areas. In that sense, I agreed to the interview, because I have released 4 books, 1480 podcasts and have written thousands of blogs, so I thought maybe I qualify.
In the course of our interview, he mentioned that he was going to give the commencement speech at the graduation ceremony later this year. We have all seen these types of affairs. The student selected to give the talk, begins by thanking the University, the Dean of the Faculty, the worthy Professors and teaching staff and congratulates all of the fellow graduates. Boring and predictable.
As we know, the opening of our talk has to be a gripper. It has to keep the audience away from their mobile phones and instead transfixed on us. Anything which smacks of clique, predictability, platitudes or bromides will dissipate the attention on us. “I would like to thank the university…” is a death knell of an opening, so let’s avoid that one. In business it is the same thing. “I would like to thank the Chamber of Commerce…”, is another dud opening.
This senior had been at that institution for four years, so he will be brimming with experiences, memories, events accumulated during that time. We have been in our companies for many years, working away in our industries, so we have accumulated tons of stories. Our stories are a good place to start. We need to look at who is in our audience and divine an occurrence which will be relatable for the listeners, something topical, pertinent and uplifting. It should be uplifting. We don’t want some downer memory being trotted out for such a festive occasion.
There should be a series of stories in this talk. The first one has to be short though. We are going to get to all the usual words of appreciation to everyone, but before that we can grab attention with a quick story. If we had some defining moment at the university, something which was profound and which shows the institution, the professors or the students in a shining light, that would be a good choice. If it is a business talk then we can look for something about this association or the hosts organisation we can say nice things about.
After we deliver this little episode, we get to the ordained appreciation piece and then we should look for other stories we can tell in the time remaining, to make a point about the experience we have collectively had. In a five minute commencement speech, there will be time for maybe one more story, but in a forty minute business talk, there is plenty of scope. Anytime we have data we wish to impart, then carefully bundling that up inside a story is bound to get it remembered, rather than just trying to deliver the information by itself.
Stories work better when they have some key elements included in the retelling. Placing people the audience knows in the story is very powerful. It could be a contemporary figure or a historical figure, it doesn't matter, because we can easily see them in our mind’s eye and that is what we want. We need to include the season, the location and the timing. Again, we are laying breadcrumbs for our audience, to get them to the same visual image and join us inside our story. For example, “Two years ago prior to Covid, on a muggy Tokyo summer day, I made my way to the gorgeous wood panelled Boardroom of our client in Otemachi, to meet Mr. Tanaka the new President”.
We know how muggy Tokyo is in the summer, we remember life before Covid, we know there are a lot of expensive high rise office buildings in Otemachi, we can see the luxurious Boardroom scene and may we even know this President Tanaka through the media or through industry contacts. We are in that room.
When we engage our audience to that extent then we are able to get our key messages across more easily. Let’s avoid being predictable and instead seek out openings and stories which will keep our audience rivetted to us and what we are saying.