Regardless of the setting, whether I’m leading a workshop, lobbying or speaking at an event, I always warm up my audience before delivering my message. When they’re warm, I’m hot.
A Story from the Field
The CEO of the large pharmaceutical company was anxious to meet with an Assistant Deputy Minister (ADM). His company had considerable concerns around a regulatory process and he wanted to share their proposals towards addressing that challenge. He knew that in the weeks prior to his meeting there had been quite a bit of bad press about the ADM’s program. What’s more, the bad press was the result of accusatory comments levelled directly at the ADM by another pharmaceutical company. It was of little surprise to the CEO when he was only granted 30 minutes for the meeting, and even less of a surprise when 30 minutes was reduced to 15 minutes once he arrived.
Rather than launching into his proposal, he started the meeting by explaining that he understood the challenges the department faced. He explained that he thought the press coverage unfair since it did nothing to contribute to an open dialogue between his industry and the department. The ADM who had started the meeting with her hands folded across her chest and her lips tightly pursed, slowly began to relax. When her assistant came into the meeting to get her after 15 minutes, the ADM shook her head and the meeting proceeded. By the time the CEO explained that his company funded a group of independent scientists who would be available for an exchange program with the department due to their specialized knowledge, 45 minutes had elapsed. The ADM was leaning forward attentively and asking how the scientists were chosen and how the exchange might work. The meeting ended after an hour and there were smiles all around.
As government relations exercises go, I have rarely been so impressed with a client for turning what could have been a disaster into a triumph. When we were told we had 15 minutes I wasn’t sure if he would stay or walk out, but he was made of sterner and smarter stuff. It’s a lesson that has stayed with me.
Four tips for managing first meetings:
Do your homework. Understand what challenges and opportunities face your audience.
Assume nothing about your audience’s knowledge of you; make sure your position/attitude is clearly stated at the beginning of the meeting.
Read the body language of the person you are meeting with and respond to it.
Establish rapport before trying to deliver your pitch.
It was Friday afternoon and as I sat in the hotel conference room I wondered how long it would be before the speaker finished. I was restless, well restless and sleepy. I was convinced that if I didn’t move soon I’d drift off. What if I snored? The topic under discussion was the future of health technology. Prior to the start of the lecture, I had been eagerly awaiting the presentation. Now I eagerly awaited its end. The speaker was a senior executive in a large technology firm and his presentation was billed as providing invaluable insight into what the future held for the health sector. However, as the speaker continued with his presentation I couldn’t help but focus on the present. I looked again at the slide that was currently being discussed and looked away. It hadn’t changed in a while. Not surprising really, the densely packed projection was filled with words in 14-point font, they might have been smaller, they certainly felt smaller. He was sharing in one slide what might have been better shared in six or eight.
I looked around the room trying to find something to amuse or distract me and found myself looking into the eyes of other audience members. They too were looking for entertainment since knowledge was not to be found at the front of the room. In fairness to the speaker, a mid afternoon presentation on a Friday is never the best scenario, but the room was full. Although this was not a plenary session that would have drawn the majority of the conference participants, it had still managed to get the attention of at least 250 conference goers. At a health conference, his topic was hot stuff. The problem wasn’t what he had to share, it was how he was sharing it. His tone was fine, he seemed to genuinely care about his topic. He was clearly very knowledgeable but we were being avalanched with information and no one feels safe in an avalanche.
Even if you have information the audience wants and a venue in which to deliver it, you still need to make sure that the information can be understood and digested. Knowledge transfer is never as easy as sending a package of information from one person to the other. The information has to be deciphered, distilled, decorated and delivered with conviction. If that sounds an awful lot like product marketing then that’s because that is precisely what you are doing, you’re selling ideas.
Decipher: Avoid using jargon that only you and a select few in your industry can understand. It may make you sound like an authority, but it also makes you frustrating to listen to because you are hard to understand. Make sure that you are doing all that you can to make it easy for listeners to follow.
Distill: While you want to appear knowledgeable, you don’t have to share everything you know. Simplify your message. The objective isn’t to do a mind dump, but to create knowledge in the recipient, think sound bites. By not being discerning with information the presenter risks not only not getting their message across but alienating the audience.
Best practice is to have one concept per slide no more than four bullets. The bigger the font, the better for easy reading. The letters should be no smaller than 18-20 points depending on the font and even that’s on the small side. The header of the slide should be larger than the font in the body and should give the audience an indication of the points you need to make.
Decorate: Add life to ideas by adding images or colourful text. They help to emphasize your point and transform your presentation into a multilevel message. Avoid clip art, it rarely meets the challenge and can make your information seem inconsequential.
Deliver: Repeat important messages. Know your audience. Your enthusiasm can make up for a number of weaknesses, but you have to be understood. The audience needs to be clear about why what you are saying might be of interest to them.
Mix things up. Every once in awhile and try a different presentation style. If you’d like to try something a little different from PowerPoint, consider using Prezi,Adobe’s Spark,Visme or one of the many other awesome presentation tools out there. Or use them to incorporate some fun into your PowerPoint. The ones mentioned here are free and relatively easy to use.
Ever wonder how great presenters get to be great? While what they are presenting is important, how they present it and what considerations they give to the environment they are presenting in is equally important.
In a recent post I marvelled at how data could actually get in the way of strategic thinking. It isn’t a question of how accurate the data is, though that of course that matters, but even the best data can be overwhelmed by the state of mind of your audience, your own mindset and how you choose to share data.
It is difficult to be persuasive when your body is closed or unfriendly. I explore those challenges in my post, Body Language – Managing You So You Can Deliver Your Message. Even when we physically present a positive demeanour our tone can change how information is received. A grating tone can have a disruptive effect and a soothing tone can create interest.
A few years ago on a Saturday afternoon I was lazing around the house with the TV on when I found myself following along with avid attention to a documentary. I was more than twenty minutes into the program when I had to ask myself, “Since when did you have any interest in cartography?”
Cover of Patrick Stewart
I like a good map as much as anyone, but the history of map making would never have made my top ten TV list, not even my top fifty, yet there I was mesmerized. It was at that point that I realized that the narrator was Patrick Stewart. Being a fan of Star Trek I had always enjoyed his voice and that enjoyment was all that was required to get me to enjoy the making of maps.
Tone is so influential to how information is received that even if you deliver the identical words, if you change where you place emphases, you can change the meaning. One of my favourite exercises to illustrate how the identical words can have multiple meanings is the following sentence.
“I didn’t say she stole my money.”
If you place the emphasis on different words in the sentence you can get at least 7 different meanings.
I didn’t say she stole my money – someone else said it.
I didn’t say she stole my money – I didn’t say it.
I didn’t say she stole my money – I only implied it.
I didn’t say she stole my money – I said someone did, not necessarily her.
I didn’t say she stole my money – I considered it borrowed, even though she didn’t ask.
I didn’t say she stole my money – only that she stole money.
I didn’t say she stole my money – she stole things that cost me money to replace.
If a sentence this supposedly straight forward can change meaning depending on which word we emphasize, is it any wonder that even the most influential data can be misinterpreted based on emphasis?
To further complicate things we have the audience’s emotions to take into consideration. Were they anticipating the information? Are they vested in the outcome? Do they even understand why you are sharing the information? Just because the connection between your data and their interests are obvious to you, doesn’t mean they are obvious to your audience.
The mood of your audience can also have a tremendous impact. If they are tired because it’s mid afternoon on a busy day, you may want to have them do some stretches before beginning. If they are angry it can have a whole host of consequences. Angry people take shortcuts in their thinking and are more likely to blame people rather than a situation for outcomes. Anger will influence how information is perceived and what actions follow as a consequence. In one study conducted at the University of Illinois (Jennifer S. Lerner) and UC Berkeley (Julie H. Goldberg of and Philip E. Tetlock) noted that people who watched an anger-inducing video were more punitive toward defendants in a series of unrelated fictional tort cases involving negligence and injury than were people who had seen a neutral video. The exceptions to the rule were in those cases where they were told that not only would they be held accountable for their decisions but they would be asked to explain their decisions to an expert.
This gives us a good glimpse into best practices when sharing data, which is having the audience have a sense of responsibility about the outcome or a vested interest in the outcome. Letting them know exactly why you feel the information is relevant to them and telling them that you will ask a few questions at the end to get their opinions on the findings is a good way to ensure that they will do more than daydream while you present. If you can associate a sense of accountability with how they manage the decisions as an outcome, you will also produce more thoughtful contemplation of the data.
Finally we come to the data itself. Whether you use PowerPoint, Prezi, video or Skype can influence your audience’s reception of your materials. Some people actually feel nauseous when they watch the movement of a Prezi presentation while others want to curl up and go to sleep at the first signs of a PowerPoint. Whichever vehicle you choose, make sure that that you are not overloading your presentation with data. Next week I will explore common pitfalls in showcasing data including when Prezi can outshine PowerPoint.
What about you? Have you ever had a presentation, pitch or a meeting take a strange turn because of how data was viewed? Have you ever found yourself captivated by the delivery style of a presenter?
First image courtesy of Pakorn/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Developing Better Professional and Private Communications
