The Articulate CEO

Tell Them What You're Going To Tell Them, Tell Them... Oh Spare Me!

It's the holy grail of presentations training:

"Tell them what you are going to tell them; tell them; tell them what you have told them"

It's also quite possibly the biggest load of nonsense I have ever come across and the one piece of advice that, if followed, is guaranteed to make your next presentation a boring one. The simple format outlined above is great if you are a six-year-old doing show and tell at your school. It gives the little tike some basic structure to bolster their confidence and help get them through the dreaded five minutes they have to fill. If you are an adult, however, you require something more.

Repeating something three times does not make it interesting or engaging. Nor does it make it memorable (particularly when your audience has nodded off in the first ten minutes). If you want an audience engaged and interested in what you have to say then you need themes and stories rather than mindless repetition.

The ability to articulate your story or that of your company is crucial in almost every phase of business management. It works all along the business food chain: A great salesperson knows how to tell a story in which the product is the hero. A successful line manager can rally the team to extraordinary efforts through a story that shows how short-term sacrifice leads to long-term success. An effective CEO uses an emotional narrative about the company’s mission to attract investors and partners, to set lofty goals, and to inspire employees.

The "tell them what you are going to tell them" approach is a poor substitute for great storytelling. It's also a poor substitute for mediocre storytelling. Every presentation should be built on good stories and a common theme that binds them altogether. Only then are you interesting and engaging.

Sizzle or Steak? A Lesson From The World of Advertising

One of the biggest battles I face when dealing with CEO's is convincing them that their communication issues are not the result of what they think they don't do well but rather what they think they already have a handle on. In other words, when it comes to communication, it isn't the presentation skills or surface displays that are letting them down but the message.

It is an attitude that is the corporate equivalent of "sell the sizzle not the steak" but you can only do that if you are dealing with quality steak in the first place. Sadly, in the corporate world the "steak" or message is often quite awful. The fact is that if your message is overly complicated, irrelevant, discredited, boring and predictable then no amount of dressing it up is going to help and the proof of this is all around us - it's called advertising.

Think about it... the vast majority of advertisements you see on T.V. are slickly produced and beautifully made. They are well lit and cleverly filmed. They employ quality actors who know how to deliver a tag line and how to look good doing it. They are even scheduled for maximum impact in a timeslot specifically tailored to their target audience and they are repeated ad nauseum in case you missed it the first time. There is hardly a criticism to be made from a "sizzle" point of view but many miss the mark and fail to influence those that they were aimed at. Why? Because the "steak" is crap.

Just because an ad agency knows how to make an ad does not mean they know how to communicate a message. Seriously, how many times have you sat in front of your T.V. wondering what "creative" idiot thought that ad was a good idea and, more to the point, what kind of idiot executive agreed with them? As a counterpoint, stop and think for a moment how many porrly produced ads out there have actually done a realy good job of getting their message across. In fact, some of the most memorable ads are those that weren't slickly produced or employed acting talent - they just had a simple, credible, relevant message delivered with some heart in a way that left you pleasantly surprised.

In communication it ain't the sizzle... it's the steak!

 

The Curse of Confidence

Is there anything more common than a nervous public speaker? Actually there is - a confident public speaker.

It's not the nervous-nellie making a complete hash of things as they stumble over their words that is the bane of the business speaking world. Rather it is the complete opposite that I see most often. That is a confident, secure public speaker making a complete hash of things as they insist on ploughing through their ill-conceived presentation.

The fact is that most business people (certainly senior business people) are quite happy to get up in front of a group of people and talk. If not happy they at least don't fall apart at the thought of it. Confidence is not their problem nor, for the most part, are presentation skills themselves. That isn't to say that presentation skills couldn't be improved it's just that they wouldn't make that much of a difference. The truth is that we teach presentation skills primarily to give people confidence rather than to make them a more effective presenter. For most people presentation skills aren't designed to make you better - they are designed to make you feel better about being very average. Ultimately, even if mastered, presentation skills are simply the icing on the cake not the cake itself. Things like gestures, vocal variety and stagecarft may appear desirable but the world is full of people who communicate brilliantly without them. Stephen Hawking, for example, speaks in a monotone provided by a machine while unable to move and yet remains compelling. The key is in what he has to say more than how he happens to say it.

Content matters more than delivery and therein lies the problem with our business leaders. Their delivery is polished to the point of being robotic but their content is awful. What is often perceived as a presentation skills issue by those who don't know any better is actually an inability to formulate an argument, identify a simple message, articulate the core issues and structure a presentation so it makes sense.

The scary thing is if they can't do that with their communication then how the hell do they effectively run a business? I suspect the answer is they don't.

 

 

 

If I knew you were presenting, I’d have baked a cake…

If ever a client of mine is concerned about their lacklustre presentation style, I ask a logical question: “Can you make a cake?”

If they haven’t already started backing slowly away from me, most will say yes.

I delve further: “Can you make a cake that’s as pretty as someone who makes cakes for a living?” Most admit they probably couldn’t. (But there’s always one.)

“But,” I ask them, “is it still a cake – even if it’s not the prettiest or tastiest?” Of course it is.

“Can people still enjoy your cake?” Most certainly.

The self-appointed communication ‘experts’ would have you believe there’s only one way to make a cake. It must look and taste exactly like the specific, restaurant-quality recipes they teach… or it’s no good.

That’s the problem with rules, which are proscriptive statements demanding a specific action regardless of the circumstances: they wrongly assume there’s one ‘best’ cake recipe. But communication is a nimble beast; activities need to be structured on a case-by-case (or is that cake-by-cake?) basis.

If the ‘experts’ had their way, we’d have two things: a very limited array of presentation styles (and patisseries) to choose from; and a lot of train-wreck presentations conducted by people without the necessary skill or understanding of the communication process to apply the rules effectively.

But we all know there’s more than one way to make a cake. There are many styles to choose from, each with hundreds of recipes ranging from home made to Michelin star. You can then mess with the ingredients and the process.

So it is with public speaking – you don’t need to stick to the limited, rigid presentation styles most training advocates. It’s far more important to find the style that suits the circumstances, and your talents.