Episodes

  • 337 Don't Freak Out During The Q&A In Japan

    337 Don't Freak Out During The Q&A In Japan
    Feb 2 2025
    Q&A can destroy your personal brand. Creating and delivering the presentation sees you in 100% total control. You have designed it, you have been given the floor to talk about it, all is good. However, the moment the time comes for questions, we are now in a street fight. Why a street fight? Because in a street fight there are no rules and the Q&A following a presentation is the same – no rules. “Oh, that’s not right” you might be thinking. “What about social norms, propriety, manners, decorum – surely all of these things are a filter on bareknuckle duking it out in public?”. That is correct but it is not a guarantee. When doing public speaking, there are different personality types assembled in the room. In Japan, often the English language presentation occasions are like mini-United Nations’ assemblies, in terms of national representation. Different social norms apply in countries apart from your own. My French friends tell me the French educational system promotes critique of statements and ideas and that is seen as an illustration of superior intellect. My fellow Australians are often sceptical, doubting and don’t hesitate to mention it, in a direct assault on what has just been said. There are also different personality types in the room. Some people are naturally aggressive and want to argue the point, if the speaker has the temerity to say something they disagree with. What is considered rude, aggressive or inappropriate behaviour is a relative judgment depending on where you grew up, how you were educated and how you individually see the world. Even in Japanese society, there are occasions where there is heated arguement and a lot of the typical Japanese restraint is out the window. As the speaker, we are pumped full of chemicals when we get up to present. If we are nervous, then the flight or fight adrenaline chemicals are released by the Amygdala inside our brain. We cannot stop this, but we can control it. It is interesting that if this state is held for a long period of time, we lose the feeling of strength and have a sense of weakness. A forty minute speech is a long time to be in a heightened state and by the time we get to the Q&A, we may be feeling denuded of strength. Just at the moment when we come under full force street fighting attack. The face of the speaker is a critical indicator during the Q&A. I caught myself shaking my head to indicate disagreement with what was coming my way in the form of a question during the Q&A. Without initially realising it, I was sending out a physical sign that I wasn’t accepting the questioner’s bead of disagreement to what I had been pontificating. From an audience point of view, this looks like you are inflexible, closed to other opinions and just dismissive of anyone with an opinion that differs from your own. Even if you are not a rabid head shaker like I was, the expression on your face may be speaking volumes to your audience. You might be displaying a sceptical visage of doubt and rejection of what is being said before you have heard the whole argument out. You might even be pumping blood into your face so that it goes red in colour. There is a female businesswoman I know here, whose skin goes bright red when she is in the public eye and begins to look like one of those warning beacons. There is probably nothing she can do about that, but it is definitely not a good look. Or maybe your general demeanour is one of disdain for the questioner and you look arrogant and disrespectful of alternative opinions. Given the chemical surge leading to denuding of strength I mentioned earlier, we may look like we are defeated by the questioner. This impacts our credibility. We need to be showing we are true believers in what we said and are fully committed to that line of argument. We don’t want to appear like we have collapsed in the face of pushback during the Q&A. Maintain a brave front, even if it is all front. The audience won’t know the difference. Nodding during the questioning is also a big mistake. We do this in normal conversation, to show the speaker we are paying attention to them. Unfortunately, this bleeds over into public speaking events as well. I learnt this when I did media training. The television media love it when you are nodding, because they can take that bit in the editing and transpose it to sync with the voice of the person disagreeing with you and it appears you are accepting their argument. Very sneaky isn’t it. When you pop up on the TV replay agreeing with your questioner attacking all that you have said, it is too late. Even if there is no TV there, don’t look like you are agreeing with the questioner and control that nodding right from the start. So during Q&A maintain a totally neutral expression on your face and don’t allow you head to nod. If you feel anxiety from the question, take some secret slow deep ...
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    13 mins
  • 336 Team Glue Insights In Japan

    336 Team Glue Insights In Japan
    Jan 26 2025
    Staff can be a nightmare. Teams are composed of the most difficult material ever created - people. That requires many capabilities, but two in particular from leaders: communication and people skills. Ironically, leaders are often seriously deficient in one or both. One type of personality who gets to become the leader are the hard driving, take no prisoners, climb over the rival’s bodies to grasp the brass ring crowd. Other types are the functional stars: category experts; best salesperson, long serving staff members; older “grey hairs” or the last man standing at the end of the recession. Usually, communication skills and people skills were not prominent in their rise to this position of trust. How do we handle such a contradiction? What does it take to be successful as a team leader? Here are nine different adhesives to help glue the team together. Don’t criticize, condemn or complain When we criticize people for mistakes or poor performance, they stop listening to us and use all of their brainpower to marshal their defense or assemble their excuses, about why it isn’t their fault. We have created a barrier with them and they are in denial. The scolding, harsh direct approach may make us feel better but it leads nowhere useful, so don’t bother. Give honest and sincere appreciation Snowing staff with false praise or fake appreciation doesn’t work. People have well-tuned gauges for flattery. When they detect it, they do two things simultaneously: they ignore it and they don’t ever fully trust the perpetrator. They are saying to themselves, “Do you really think I am that dumb?”. Instead, we need to become “good finders”. Look for what people are doing well and recognise it. When we give appreciation, be very specific about what they did well, this makes it real and believable,. Look for strengths to develop, rather than trying to pull people down because they are not perfect. Arouse in the other person an eager want As leaders we want a lot of things to happen. Our targets, accountabilities and directives from above drive us. It can very quickly become all about “me” and what “I” want. Others are not that excited about what we want compared to what they want for themselves. If we can coalesce what we want with what others want we will do a lot better in terms of getting cooperation and achieving our desired outcomes. This is a communication skill we absolutely need to master. Become genuinely interested in other people We are all firmly attached to ourselves. We are the center of our universe and we want all things that are good to flow to us. As the leader though, you have to flip that self-absorption and get focused on your people. You can work 100 plus hours a week, but your team of 10, only working a 40 hour week can out work you with four times the input of hours. So working 100 hours yourself is dumb and getting your team fired up and working at peak performance is smart. Why would they do that? Because they feel there is something attractive in it for them. They feel that way because the leader has been an excellent communicator to explain the connection between hitting their own goals and hitting the firm’s goals. They are committed because they trust the leader. When Dale Carnegie did it’s global study on the emotional drivers of engagement, they found that “feeling valued” by the immediate supervisor was the trigger to having people become highly engaged. You have to know what your team values, in order to help them understand they are highly valued. Your personal values are only interesting to you. Their values, for them, are the key. Once you are really genuinely interested in your team, you will naturally understand what they value. Then you can arrange for good things to happen for them, based on what they want, not what you want. Smile We think we smile, but we do it more rarely than we imagine. We are swimming through a flood tide of emails, meetings and reporting every week. We are under pressure to produce the goods. Our internal rivals are nipping at our heals, our external competitors are making life hell. It becomes hard to smile in the face of difficulties. What our team sees is a serious face, maybe an explosive face, when the pressure gets too much. Our mood every day is the barometer of how the team feels. If we are stressed out, we transfer that stress to everyone and we take their mood straight down. We have to be up, regardless of the pressure, the irritations, the stress. Remember to smile and pass this on to your team, to keep their mood positive. Remember names Presumably you can remember your team’s names. However, in a big organisation that may not be that easy. In Japan, in larger operations, it is interesting that often colleagues can’t remember their workmate’s personal name, only their family name. You need to send an email and you ask, “what is so and so’s personal name?”. The answer is often, “I don’t ...
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    15 mins
  • 335 Servicing Your Buyers In Japan

    335 Servicing Your Buyers In Japan
    Jan 19 2025
    Enterprise killers can include Customer Service. We know that all interfaces with the customer are designed by people. It can be on-line conversations with AI robots or in-store interactions, but the driving force behind all of these activities are the people in our employ. The way people think and act is a product of the culture of the organisation. That culture is the accountability of senior management. The common success point of organisations is to have the right culture in place, that best serves the customer. The success of senior management in making all of that work is a combination of their leadership, people and communication skills. This sounds infinitely reasonable in theory, but the reality is often so different. Senior leaders, ambitious, ever upward individuals, who themselves are not particularly people focused, expect their customer interaction designers and in store staff to be the epitomy of customer focused. They don't walk the talk themselves and what is worse, they don't see the contradiction. They haven't worked out yet that good customer service begins with good employee service. Love your staff and they will love your customers. Richard Branson is widely referenced with his philosophy of employees first, customers second. His idea is to produce the right mental framework for employees to then put the customer first. Our emotions lead our behaviors, which determine our performance. Fine, love all of that, but how do we get it right? Leadership has to be clearly understood by the leaders. It is not a function of education, rank or longevity in the organisation. Instead, it is a function of the degree of cooperation we can get from our team. We might believe things are rolling out beautifully, in a pre-ordained way, in relation to how we treat the customer. Sadly, the front-line customer experience with our service could be entirely different from how the leaders planned it and how they want it. As the leader, to get that employee cooperation to buy into what we believe is the correct way forward, we need to have well developed people and communication skills. We also need to make sure that our middle managers also have those same skills. We could be doing things really well up in the clouds, at the top of the organisation, but our middle managers may be sabotaging the culture we want to build and we just do not see it. If we want sincerity to be a function of our customer service, then, as an organisation, we have be sincere. If we want customers to feel appreciated, we have to appreciate our staff and do it in a sincere way. People can spot fake from a mile away. If we spend all of our time finding errors and faults, we may miss the things that are being done well, which we can communicate that we appreciate. Are you a “good work finder” or the opposite? We might want many things in business such as personal success, greater revenues, reduced costs etc. We can only achieve these things through others: either our own staff or our customers. They may however want different things. We have to find the means to appeal to our staff and customers such that they want what we want. This is not manipulation. This is well developed people and communication skills. In this way, the trust is created and we lead others, to also want what we want. As Zig Ziglar famously noted, we can get whatever we want in this life, if we help enough other people get what they want. To create that trust we have to be genuinely interested in others. This starts with our staff because we want them to be genuinely interested in our customer. When they do this, they build the trust with the buyer and a bond that is very difficult to break. If we don't demonstrate this genuine interest in our staff, we are not building the culture where they will naturally pass this feeling on to the customer. There is an old Chinese saying that, “a man who cannot smile should not open a shop”. Yet in modern business, we have plenty of people floating around who don't smile. It could be the very top executives who are too hard driving, bottom line focused and serious to smile at their staff. They set up a culture that is dry and remote, but expect that at the interface with the customer, there will be an emotional connection with the brand. They just don't see the double standards, miscalculation and self-delusion involved here. Are you self-aware enough? Bosses are often great order givers but poor listeners, who imagine that their front line staff are all doing an excellent job of listening to the customer. What if that is not the case? If the bosses want to create a culture of good listening habits, then starting with themselves is a reasonable idea. When we listen, we learn more than we already know....
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    27 mins
  • 334 Those Vital Few Seconds When You Start Your Talk In Japan

    334 Those Vital Few Seconds When You Start Your Talk In Japan
    Jan 13 2025
    Don’t let your speaker introduction be a disaster. Usually when we are speaking we are introduced twice. Once at the very start by the MC when they kick off proceedings and then later just before our segment of the talk. The MC’s role is quite simple. It is to set the stage for the speaker, to bring something of their history, their achievements and various details that make them a credible presenter for this audience. This can often be a problem though, depending on a few key factors. How big a risk taker are you? Are you relying on the MC to do the necessary research on you? Are you sure they can properly encapsulate your achievements and highlight why you should have the right to stand up here in front of everyone and pontificate on your subject? Most people in the MC role are not expert or trained speakers. Usually, they are clueless about this MC gig and just happen to have control over you for this brief interlude. They are probably too busy to do better than a perfunctory job of preparing your intro and often they won’t appreciate what particular points need grander highlighting than others. Be warned. It is always best to prepare your own excellent introduction. Keep control of what is being said about you and the areas you wish to showcase. You can decide for each occasion which elements of your history or current focus are going to be most impactful for this particular audience and topic. Don’t make it too long though, because we are in the Age of Distraction, where audience concentration spans are frankly pathetically brief. I was recently organising a speaker for an event and his self-introduction was very long, a potpourri of his entire life. He obviously couldn’t discriminate between very, very high points, very high points and high points, so he cobbled the whole thing together as a single lengthy unit. I wasn’t the MC that evening, but the actual MC simply ignored the whole thing altogether, deposed their own role and just said, “you have seen his biography in the meeting event notice, so I won’t go through it now”. Well, yes, we may have glanced at it, but we were not remembering it in detail. Thanks to this lazy and incompetent MC, the chance to reconnect with what was in the flyer was no longer there for the speaker. As you can imagine, the person in the MC role can be difficult to handle for the speaker. They can choose to ignore everything you wrote and then give their own ad hoc version. Usually this is laced full of distortions, errors, exaggerations, serious gaps and miscommunication. Some MCs have pretty big egos too. They think they are the star of the show and that they can do a better job than any offerings from you as the speaker. What actually comes out of their mouth is usually an amazement to you, because you know what they were supposed to say. It is seriously late by then though and no repairs are possible. For this reason, my advice is to only feed the MC the key points. Completely deny them the option to seize hold of your reputation and background and pervert it into something totally unrecognisable or unsatisfactory. You only need them to set the stage and give you a chance to connect with your audience. When it is your turn to speak you can go freely into the details you want to highlight about your glorious career thus far. I would also not rush into your background immediately following on from the MC. We need a break and the biography is not the best way to start your speech anyway. The start of the talk has only one purpose. That is to stay the hand of every single person in that audience from secretly reaching for their phone, to escape from you, to the irresistible charms and siren calls of the internet. Take the first few seconds of your talk very, very seriously. Design a blockbuster opening that will grab the attention of the audience. Only after that introduce yourself, rather than the other way around. Starting with your history is too passe, too expected. It doesn’t get any excitement going. When you get to your self-introduction, rather than reading your resume, look for opportunities to tell a brief story that brings some highlights to the attention of the listeners. This is a more subtle way of telling everyone how fantastic you are. This also limits the amount of content you can share with the audience, ensuring it doesn’t get too long and too detailed. We will remember your story more than any other part of your introduction, so choose something that is highly memorable about you. Make it positive rather than negative. In other words, set yourself up for success. You can tell plenty of stories in your talk about how you suffered and eventually learnt through failure, but for the introduction, choose those incidents which portray you in a good light. This is what you want people to associate you with – success, ability, innovation, bravery, learning. Don’t...
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    12 mins
  • Dealing With Ambush Speaking Requests

    Dealing With Ambush Speaking Requests
    Jan 5 2025
    Suddenly you hear your name being called upon and you are being requested to make a few remarks. Uh oh. No preparation, no warning and no escape. What do you do? Extemporaneous speaking is one of the most difficult tasks for a presenter. It could be during an internal meeting, a session with the big bosses in attendance or at a public venue. One moment you are nice and comfy, sitting there in your chair, taking a mild interest in the proceedings going on around you and next you are the main event. Usually the time between your name being called and you actually being handed the microphone can be counted in milliseconds. By the time you have heaved yourself out of your chair, your brain has well and truly started to panic. A mental whiteout is probably fully underway and your face is going red, because of all the blood pressure of the moment. Here are a couple of things we can do in this situation. Firstly, take a realistic look at the task at hand. The length of your talk will not be expected to be long. If you are a seasoned speaker, you could get up and wax lyrical for an hour without a problem. For everyone else, we are talking two to three minutes. Now two to three minutes seems rather short, except when you are suddenly thrust in front of a sea of expectant eyes of an audience. Once upon a time, I completely forgot my next sentence and discovered the pain of prolonged time. I was asked to give a brief talk and chose to speak in Mandarin to a crowd of around a thousand people, when I was Consul General in Osaka. It was a special event for the departing Chinese Consul General Li, who was heading to New York. Actually, I was going okay but I paused to allow some applause to die down – this turned out to be a major error on my part. I found when you suddenly go blank, a single microphone stand doesn’t provide much cover, up on a very big stage, with all the lights on you and everyone staring at you. That 30 seconds or so of silence, where I was totally lost and unable to recall what came next, seemed like a lifetime. So I know that two to three minutes can appear really daunting when suddenly called upon to speak. Begin by thanking whoever unceremoniously dragged you up the podium for the chance to say a few words. Try and smile at them, through gritted teeth if you have to. You have to say something, so take the occasion and put your comments into some form of context. You can use the concept of time as your ally. For example, this is where we were, this is where we are today and this is where we are going in the future. This past, present, future construct will work for just about any occasion and any subject. That is the type of ready to go format you need to be able to call upon when you don’t have much preparation time up your sleeve. Another good construct is macro and micro. Talk about the big picture issues related to the occasion, then talk about some of the micro issues. This is useful for putting the event into a frame you can speak about easily. There is always a big and small picture related to any topic. Again, this construct travels easily across occasions and events. We can use the weather, the location, the season or the time of the day as a theme. We can put this event into any of those contexts rather easily. Remember, it doesn’t have to be a long presentation. We can talk about people that everyone would know, who are related to the event. They might be present or absent. We can make a few positive remarks about our host. Then we can thank everyone for their attention, wish them our best and get off the stage. Let me give you a real life example. I was at an event for Ikebana International, sitting there calmly minding my own business, when I heard the speaker suddenly call me up to the stage to say a few words. I had the time from standing up to walk to the podium to compose myself about what on earth I would say. At the extreme outside that time gap was probably 10 seconds. I was going to need to speak in Japanese, so that just added another level of excitement to the challenge. It had been raining that day, so I miraculously dreamed up a water related analogy. I began by thanking the host for allowing me to say a few words, although I secretly I wasn’t so happy about being put on the spot. I mentioned that the stems of the Australian cut flowers that were being exhibited that day, contained water and soil from Australia, as they had just arrived that morning by air. I said that as a result here in Japan we had a little bit of Australia present and each of these flowers were like a floral ambassador linking the two countries together. I then wished everyone all the best for the event and got out of the firing line pronto. Probably not an award winning talk, but good enough for that occasion, with that amount of notice. And that is the point. You need to be able to say something ...
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    14 mins
  • 333 Real World Leadership

    333 Real World Leadership
    Dec 22 2024

    Change is hard to create anywhere in the world. Getting things to change in Japan also has its own set of challenges. The typical expat leader, sent to Japan, notices some things that need changing. Usually the Japan part of the organisation is not really part of the organisation. It is sitting off to the side, like a distant moon orbiting the HQ back home.

    There are major differences around what is viewed as professional work. The things that are valued in Japan, like working loyally (i.e. long hours) even with low productivity, keeping quiet, not upsetting the applecart, not contributing in meetings, getting deep into the factional constructs of the organisation, are not seen as positive.

    Inefficiencies seem to beg for correction. Innovation seems to be a foreign concept in both senses of the word. Doing what we have always done, in the same way as we have always done it, has eliminated most of the opportunities for making mistakes, so why change anything? Doing things in a new way is inherently risky, because there is no reliable road map. We are going to have come out of our comfort zone to do that and we might make a mistake – not appealing whatsoever to the Japanese staff.

    Meritocracy is a given to the new expat leader and so personnel changes are a prime interest. People are where they are for many reasons and merit is not always the reason. Longevity, who entered the company first, who is your patron, always have a big determinant on whose who in the zoo in Japan.

    Talented people are supposed to keep in line and do what they are told. Showing too many smarts seems they are getting uppity before their betters and the hocho, that is the razor sharp Japanese knives, rapidly come out. The “nail” sticking out is about the get a good whack from everyone who can hit it hard.

    Nevertheless, ignorance is bliss, so our expat hero or heroine plunges in and starts shaking things up. Entrenched interests, who have created this current system to suit themselves, now feel threatened. They are not stoics. They make a very keen calculation. Can we outlast this clown, who is so rude, so ignorant about how to properly lead in Japan, so annoying and so dangerous to our vested interests. If the answer is “yes”, then a guerrilla war commences, where those most threatened band together to slow down progress, obfuscate the vital issues, hide key information, isolate out the new leaders pets to weaken them and look for petards on which to hoist the expat.

    If the answer is “no”, then it is a bare knuckle street fight. There are no rules. Classic weapons are looking for points of failure with new innovations to blow them up on purpose. Anyone close to the boss becomes a target internally and all sorts of societal pressure is brought to bear, to “turn them” into a spy for the “good guys” against this lunatic from outside. They are reminded that our hero won’t be here forever and the rest of us will be. “We will get you. You are going to be toast when the boss heads to the airport for departure to the next foreign assignment. You aren’t going anywhere sunshine, remember that”.

    Out of nowhere and nothing, headquarters starts to get anonymous communication about various crimes and misdemeanors that are pure fiction. Sexual harassment is a favourite, because they know Western companies are really sensitive to these types of allegations. Power harassment which was a preferred, traditional boss leadership technique, has now made it into the upper ranks of crimes, as this has become something flagged in Japanese society.

    Unsuitability for leadership in Japan. Ignorance of the market, clients, business practices, damage to the reputation of the firm locally are all trotted out to paint a dismal picture. The staff engagement survey for Japan is always the lowest score in the world and this shows what a miserable job our expat hero is doing. It is always the lowest in the world, but HQ isn’t usually that smart or well informed enough to know that.

    HQ is demanding Japan’s results improve, but are not happy to see any pushback when changes are introduced. The expat boss has to keep everything as it is, the exact same structure but produce greater results and they have to keep everyone happy about achieving that. The boss is on a hiding to nothing here. Welcome to Japan!
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    11 mins
  • 332 Presentation Visuals

    332 Presentation Visuals
    Dec 15 2024
    Last week we talked about when presenting, you need to transfer your energy to the audience. However don’t have your energy levels at the maximum volume all the time. That just wears an audience out and wears you out too. Instead, you need to have some variation. Very strong and then sometimes very soft. And I mean drop it right down. Remember to have that in the voice range. Sometimes say your point in an audible whisper. I remember when I gave a presentation in Kobe. It was at a university summer school for students who had graduated and were going back to their home countries. I was giving this uplifting talk about how they could use the experience they had in Japan back in their home country. It was powerful, a very powerful presentation. It was an urging my comrades to “man the barricades” type of speech. The speaker after me was a Korean professor. Maybe because of the way I presented, I don’t know, but he spoke very quietly. He spoke in a very soft voice throughout the whole presentation. It really forced you to lean in and listen to him, because you had to work a little bit harder to listen to him. So he got peoples’ attention by having a softer voice. At the time, I thought, “wow look at that”. That was very effective and I realized, ah, just operating at one power level all the time is not going to work. I need to have variety in my voice, so I should have times when I am very powerful and other times when I am very soft. So just watch yourself that you are not getting into too much soft or too much strong mode. Variety is the key. I said before gestures are very important. Be careful about getting your hands tied up with things. If you are saying one thing is important, hold up one finger. If it is the second thing, hold up two fingers. This is important. When you hold up your fingers like that, hold them up around head height. Don’t hold gestures around waist height. It is too low and people struggle to see it. Get your gestures up high in a band from chest height up to around head height. That zone is the key height you want for showing gestures. When you want to show a big point, open your hands right out. Don’t be afraid of big gestures. Use gestures that are congruent. Be careful about waving your fist at your audience though. It looks aggressive. It looks unfriendly and combative. Use the open hand rather than a closed fist. And don’t hit your hands together, slap them together or slap them on your thigh. That activity creating noise becomes distracting. Just use the gestures by themselves. As I said before, 15 seconds is probably at the maximum you want. You can walk around on the stage, but be careful about walking around too much, especially pacing up and down. That makes you look nervous and either lacking in confidence about your message or lacking control over what you are doing. Try and hold the main center point of the stage and move because you have got a good reason to move. Using the names of people in your audience is a great thing to do. If you get there early, meet some of your audience. Have a conversation with someone. It is a nice connector with the audience to refer to that person and say, “I was just chatting with Jim Jones over there before and he made a very interesting point about current consumer trends. In fact, Mary Smith made an addition to that point, when she said “blah, blah, blah…” Suddenly you have both people very much proud of being recognized and involved in your talk. They have been recognized by the speaker and they like it. The audience now feels that you have a stronger connection with those listening. Refer to people by name. It is very, very effective. Don’t leave it to chance, try and look for those opportunities to engage with your audience. Let’s concentrate on the basics. What is the point of your presentation? Who is your audience? What is the point? Be conversational and customize the delivery to your listeners. Have exhibits or have demonstrations or whatever that are custom-made to match that audience or match the point that you are making. Don’t just bring out a set off the shelf points you recycle for every presentation. You might have an existing basis for a presentation, but think about who are you talking to? What is the key point and then take it and re-work it, re-package it up, customize it. I have given 530 presentations in the last 20 years here in Japan. I have never given the same presentation twice, ever. Even with the slides, I will always have some small variation. Certainly the way I present it will be different every time. This keeps it fresh for me, as a speaker. And it also keeps it fresh for an audience. If I feel stimulated and interested in what I am talking about, then the chances are that is how the audience will feel about it too. They ...
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    13 mins
  • 331 Ending Presentations Secrets

    331 Ending Presentations Secrets
    Dec 8 2024
    This is a tricky part of designing and delivering our presentations. Think back to the last few presentations you have attended and can you remember anything from the close of their speech? Can you remember much about the speaker? This close should be the highlight of their talk, the piece that brings it all together, their rallying cry for the main message. If you can’t recall it, or them, then what was the point of their giving the talk in the first place? People give talks to make an impression, to promulgate their views, to win fans and converts, to impact the audience, etc. All weighty and worthy endeavours, but all seemingly to no effect, in most cases. What can we do to stand above this crowd of nobodies, who are running around giving unmemorable and unimpressive talks? The keys to any successful talk revolve around very basic principles. Vince Lombardi, famed American Green Bay Packers football coach would always emphasise that the road to success in his game was blocking and tackling – the basics and so it is with public speaking. Design must not start with the assembly of the slide deck. Yet this is how 99% of people do it. Instead start with designing the final closing message. In other words start with how you will finish. This forces clarity on you, drives you to sum up the key takeaways in one sentence and gets to the heart of what it is you want to say. It is also excruciatingly difficult, which is why we all head for the slide deck formation instead. Once we have sieved the gold nugget from the dross, grasped the key point of the talk, then we are ready to work on the rest of the speech. The main body of the talk will flow naturally from the close, as we assemble data, facts, examples, stories, testimonials and statistics to support our main point. We then array this vast army of persuasion ready for deploy at our summation. It must flow in a logical progression, easy to follow for the audience and all pointing back to support our main contention. The opening and close can have some connection or not. The role of the opening is very clear – grab the attention of the assembled masses to hear what it is we want to say. We can state our conclusion directly at the start and then spend the rest of the time justifying that position. Or we can provide some general navigation about what we are going to talk about today. Or we can hit the audience with some nitro statement or information, to wake them up to get them to listen to us. At the end there will be two closes, one before the Q&A and one after. The majority of speakers allow the final question to control the proceedings rather than themselves. If that last question is a hummer, a real beauty, right on the topic and allowing you to add extra value to your talk, then brilliant. How many times have you seen that though? Usually the last questions are a mess. All the better, intelligent questions have been taken, the best insights have been plumbed and now we have some dubious punter who wants a bit of your limelight. Their questions can often be off topic, rambling, unclear or just plain stupid. Is this how you want your talk remembered? The final two closes can reflect each other and be an extension of what you have already said or you can split them up and give each its specific task to make your point. The close before the Q&A can be a summation to remind your audience of what you spoke about and prime them for questions. Obviously recency, the last thing people will hear, will have the most powerful impact, so the second close must be very carefully designed. Be careful of the event hosts wanting to take over immediately after the last question and not allowing you the chance to make your final close. You might have gone overtime or they need to vacate the venue or face a bigger bill or whatever. They can be thanking the audience for coming and wrapping things up with their news of their next event, before you can blink an eye. You need to word them up at the start that you want to make a final close after the Q&A and then you will give them the floor. The other component of the close is the delivery. So many speakers allow their voices to trail off and allow their speaking volume to descend at the peroration. You want to be remembered as someone passionate about your subject, excited to be there to share it with this audience and a true believer of your message. That means you need to drive the volume up, hit the last words with a lot of passion and belief. Make it a rousing call to action, to storm the barricades and to change the world. That is how you want people to remember your message AND you as a speaker as they shuffle out of the venue and go back to work or home.
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    12 mins