Chapter 4:
Oral Communication
I started the last chapter by stressing the importance of being able to communicate effectively in writing. Mastery of most of the skills and the strategies I’ve talked about in this book become more important as your responsibility and authority increase throughout the course of your career. As I mentioned in the last chapter, writing is different in that an inability to communicate effectively in writing can be crippling to your career almost from the start.
Oral communication is a little different. The fear of public speaking is almost universal, and even people who are comfortable with it report being nervous right before they get up to speak. Being an uncomfortable or ineffective public speaker early in your career as a scientist or technologist is often not debilitating, and finding junior staff members who are comfortable and effective speakers is an exceptional occurrence.
So ineffective speaking isn’t a crushing defect at the start of your career. But it can be the key to your ability to ascend beyond the rank and file and into the senior levels of your organization. This payoff is down the road (and you might not even see yourself taking this track ever), so you might be tempted to put off development of this skill until later in your career, when you “need it.” This is a huge mistake. Here’s why: by the time you need these skills it is already assumed that you have them, and making mistakes in this situation is not well tolerated.
Making mistakes is part of learning anything new, and you are guaranteed to make them, and guaranteed to have bad (probably really, really bad) talks at least once in a while early in your development of these skills. The only way to avoid making a big mistake when the stakes are high is to start getting experience—making your mistakes—early in your career when the stakes are low (or, as we’ll see later, when there are no stakes at all).
The second reason to start developing speaking skills now is that practice really does make perfect, even more so than with writing. The biggest obstacle to effective oral communication for many people is simply not knowing how to deal with the various situations you’ll confront and how to handle the emotions that you’ll have to manage in those situations. The only way to get past this obstacle is to experience the situations and see what solutions work for you, then practice and refine those solutions over many additional experiences. Since for most of us the opportunity to speak to an audience doesn’t come on a daily basis, the only way to get enough practice to become competent is to start early in your career.
The third reason not to put off honing your oral communication skills is that a demonstrated ability to speak well is a tremendous asset to your career, and it can greatly accelerate your advancement. I have experienced this in my own career, and credit my ability to speak well to many different audiences with a large part of my rapid rise in my organization. You may feel that this isn’t important to you; your goal is to remain “in the trenches” for the rest of your career, to stay technical and avoid the management rat race. This is a completely valid career choice. It is not wise, however, to limit your future choices based on a decision you make at the outset of your career. You will change, your company or organization will change, and your ideas of what is and isn’t fulfilling will change as the years go on. Eight years ago I would have denied any interest in becoming the director of the center I work in, but here I am, happy to be doing the job. Twenty years from now may well be too late to decide that you’re ready to go ahead into a leadership track in your company if you haven’t already developed and refined your speaking skills. At that point your “choice” to stay technical is no longer a choice; your decision not to develop certain skills now will make certain decisions for you in the years to come.
To be an enlightened leader, start investing the time now to gain the experience and skills you will need to communicate effectively with the spoken word.
What’s here
This chapter covers the two primary types of oral communication (public and private), and provides pointers on how you can shape the way you think about the spoken word and approach speaking—a way that will help you stand out as a powerful and effective communicator. The purposes of speaking—to inform, educate, and persuade—are essentially the same as the purposes of writing, and I will not revisit the techniques we discussed in the previous chapter (though I do recommend that you revisit them for review). I will also not spend much time at all talking about the more general techniques of effective speaking or the mechanics of creating presentations. There are literally hundreds of books, classes, and workshops that cover these topics and I urge you to take advantage of them to fully develop your ability to speak powerfully. As you develop, look for opportunities to strengthen both the public and private aspects of your speaking skills. There are many nuances and complexities to interacting effectively in small groups or one on one, and you’ll need to develop these skills as well.
Before we visit the particulars of private and public speaking, however, let’s talk about some tips that apply equally well in both settings.
Getting through: attention and understanding
When planning any oral interaction—private or public—you must keep in mind that your goal is to communicate with your audience. We talked about this with writing, and the same thing applies to spoken communications.
In fact, the focus on audiences’ understanding is even more critical with the spoken word than the written. When you are unclear in writing, your audience has a record (the document) that they can study or reference later. But when you are speaking, there isn’t a record of what you have said (unless you are being taped, which is fairly unusual). It is also the case that oral presentations are usually time-limited, so you may have to move fairly quickly from one topic to the next. Thus your only opportunity to communicate your message to your audience is that little window of time you have with them when you are actually addressing that portion of the message. Unlike with the written word, when you are speaking you have to be clear the first time, every time.
In the limit, of course, this is impossible. You cannot hope to communicate your message, and only your message, to every member of every audience every time. Your audience is comprised of individuals with individual histories, vocabularies, and lives. Some of them won’t be paying attention during a key point—perhaps their phone rings. Some of them won’t come away with the sense of urgency that you hoped to communicate, because they reacted differently to the phrase “significant concern” than you wanted. Some won’t be interested in your topic and so won’t devote their full attention to your content, despite your best efforts. There is not much you can do about these problems other than to be aware of them and design around them as much as possible.
It is also important to remember that from moment to moment you are a different person and that your effectiveness as a speaker will naturally vary with each talk as well. Some days you’ll be “up” while other days you’ll be fighting not to let the audience know that there are a million things you’d rather be doing. This too will affect your ability to communicate your message to your audience.
You can take some steps to minimize these risks to your message. You can avoid dependence on vocabulary and shades of meaning—at least those that imply one thing to you but might imply something quite different to others—by describing a problem and its consequences to your audience. (Of course, you must use some vocabulary and you hope you succeed in achieving some nuanced shades of meaning!) Rather than just identifying a software design problem as a “significant concern” you can go on to say that the likely impact of this problem is a delay in getting product to market before Christmas. In this way you empower the audience to individually substitute their own phrase—“crisis”, “emergency”, “disaster” and so on—for yours, and in so doing they can better internalize your message.
You can help avoid inattentiveness by making your presentations short and to the point, and by not reading the implications of slides to your audience in great detail. I find a highly graphic slide with almost no text goes a long way toward capturing the audience’s attention (this is partly because in technology this slide approach is very rare). We’ll talk more about this later.
You can help manage the differences in your personality and style by being familiar with the material and comfortable in the venue.
The magic is in the middle
Your talks will probably start out by saying what you hope to accomplish and probably end by summarizing what you said. The magic—the place where you and your audience will connect and your message will become their goal—is in the middle. Your best insurance that your audience will be with you in the middle, and not mentally rearranging their “To Do” lists, is to be responsive to them and adapt what you are saying, and how you are saying it, to their reactions. In order to make the magic happen in the middle, you have to adapt and respond to your audience from the beginning.
Darwin was right: adapt, or flop
For most of us, learning to communicate effectively with the spoken word is a much longer process than learning to write effectively, and part of the reason for this is that the most effective communicators learn to adapt to, and finally resonate with, the particular audience they are speaking to at the particular time they are speaking. Being this adaptable and responsive to your audience can take years to learn because no two audiences are alike, and in any two presentations you aren’t the same person, either. This makes public speaking something you have to do over and over in order to master it.
A friend once talked to a successful actor who played Mark Twain in a one-man show. The audience enjoyed the show, and my friend observed that many of the punch lines seemed especially fit for the campus where the performance was being held. When asked, the actor revealed that for his two-hour show he always had six hours of material memorized, and that at the beginning of a performance he tested what worked with each particular audience: religious jokes, jokes about politicians, and so on. Then he avoided anything that seemed to offend or bore the audience, and included much more of the sort of things that worked with a given audience early in the evening. That actor was a trained professional focusing on one piece over a long period of time.
We aren’t likely to reach this level of sophistication in our careers (we should certainly strive for it, though), but we can take steps to tailor each interaction to our audience. You might pick up the tempo a little, or slow it down. You might interject stories or humor, or stick to the facts so you can get to a demonstration. You might use pictures with one audience, and text only with another. By and large your message will stays the same—after all, you’ve been asked to speak about some specific thing—while your delivery changes.
How do you adapt? The key to the whole mystery is that you have to pay attention to your audience. At every moment every member of your audience is sending clues about their response to you and your topic out like a radio transmission tower. You just have to tune yourself to the right frequency and start paying attention.
This is often straightforward in a private conversation, in that you have direct intimate contact with your audience—you are in physical proximity to your audience and you are focused solely on him or her. You can watch the eyes and the facial expressions. You should be able fairly easily to tune into the clues that are flying off your conversation partner that will tell you that he or she is lost or following you, hostile or friendly to your topic, and so on. And you can fairly easily ask questions and perhaps even expect honest answers.
When speaking to a larger audiencethe situation is a little different. Your clue-gathering resources are divided among the whole audience, so now you have to find some way to create aggregate impressions. Scan the audience while you talk, and ask yourself some of these questions: are most people following me? Are most people paying attention? Am I getting questions that indicate a wide divergence between my message and their understanding? For small and medium audiences, such as you would find in a team meeting or technical presentation, you’ll be able to canvas all the participants manageably, to make sure you are reaching everyone.
For large audiences, you won’t be able to keep track of everyone and still be coherent enough to present your message. What I do in these situations is pay more attention to the kinds of questions being asked and what they reveal about the audience’s understanding. I also pick four or five “canaries” to help me gauge the audience’s response to my message. I keep my eye on these canaries throughout my talk, and take my cues from their nods of assent or looks of puzzled confusion. This approach isn’t always effective, especially if you are in an audience of strangers and have to pick your canaries at random, but it’s better than nothing.
Some people attempt to connect to their audiences and keep tabs on how effectively they are receiving the message by asking questions of their audience throughout their talk. I have rarely seen this be effective. The problem is that no one wants to look stupid in public, and non-threatening questions that reveal whether or not you understand the topic being presented are pretty tough to come up with. Your questions will most often be greeted with blank stares, you’ll try to recover from the silence, and you’ll have a dent in your rhythm that will probably reduce your confidence for the next several minutes.
Common adaptations
There are a couple of common issues that you might find your audiences facing while you speak. You can address boredom by picking up the pace and skipping over some of the details. This can be hard to do—after all, you put those words in the presentation because you wanted them covered, right? But think of it the other way around and you’ll see that if you don’t start trimming some of the details they are not going to get any of your message. Some is usually better than none.
Inattentiveness can be a little tougher to address. Side conversations can be a sign that you’ve sparked interest or debate in part of your message, and you may want to let those conversations proceed for a short period of time in order to let your audience members follow their own paths of learning throughout your presentation. Longer side conversations, loud conversations, or conversations that are growing to involve a substantial part of your audience need to be either recognized and addressed through you with the whole audience, or they need to be shut down. Either way, you cannot allow a subset of your audience to hijack the presentation away from everyone else by making it difficult to hear and focus on you. I find that a politely phrased question—something like “I’m sorry, was there a question about something I said?”—is a pretty good way to regain control and attention when you need to do so.
When the audience is confused you need to dig a little and find out where the problem is. “I see a lot of puzzled looks out there …. Where was I not clear?” You’ll have to rely on them to tell you that they aren’t following, and if you don’t get any feedback, you’ll have to guess. I suggest you dig in and try to explain the topic of confusion with more or less detail (as appropriate) or from another point of view, and see whether you can alleviate the confused looks. Often this departure off the track will provide the incentive your audience needs to start asking questions, and then you can more effectively pinpoint and address the source of their confusion.
You may occasionally find that you have greatly misunderstood your audience, either in terms of what they already know or what their goals are in attending your talk. When you realize that this has happened to you—and hopefully you will prepare well enough most of the time that this happens only very infrequently—then it is best to diverge from your planned material as far as you can while still remaining comfortable and convincing as a speaker. Some people are comfortable “winging it”, and some people aren’t; but when you find that you’ve come wearing a tuxedo to a barbeque lunch, you’re going to need to adapt. Even if you cannot give your audience exactly what they were expecting, you can at least meet them in the middle somewhere between what you’ve prepared and what they want. If your first fifteen slides cover the history of genetic testing, but you arrive at your talk to discover that most of the audience has done PhD research in this area, you’d be better served to skip those first slides altogether than to torment yourself and everyone else by slogging through them just because they are there. Remember, you are there to communicate something to them. If they already know part of what you had planned to communicate, then move on.
I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date!
All this adapting may have you running short, or long. Running short is usually not a problem provided you cover all your material: it doesn’t impinge on your audience’s schedule of activities following your talk, and it gives you more time for interactions during and after the talk.
Never run long, and never start late. Do not assume that you are the only item your audience members’ agenda for the day. If you are set for a one-hour talk, and you find yourself running long because a few members of the audience want to grill you about every slide, then you owe it to the rest of your audience to regain control of your presentation. Politely defer those questions that you can’t answer quickly until the question and answer session after the body of your talk.
Obviously you’ll need to be judicious when you’re applying this rule. If the questioner outranks everyone in the room and you’re on unfamiliar ground, its probably safest to defer to her wishes on how this time is spent. Likewise, if you are presenting to a group in your organization and your boss is slowing things down by wanting to explore avenues other than those you have laid out, you may want to remind him gently that the topic is off the formal agenda, but do emphasize that you’d be happy to talk about it if that’s what he wants.
If, however, you are at a technical conference away from everyone’s “home turf,” or in a meeting of peers, then you must assume that everyone’s time is equally valuable and not allow a few audience members to hold everyone else hostage. Be polite, but firm. Handling this kind of situation gracefully comes only with practice.
The impermanence of the spoken word
In the last chapter we discussed the permanence of the written word and the particular challenges that durability can pose. In particular the archival aspect of a document places a higher burden for accuracy and unambiguousness on us, at least in as much as the document is actually likely to be archived and referred to in the future.
Spoken communication, we happily notice, is completely free from this challenge (unless you are being recorded, which you should know ahead of time). No need to be careful anymore, right? After all, there is (usually) no record of what transpires during spoken communication. Believe it or not, this is not a good thing.
One truth, two truth, red truth, blue truth
Actually, it’s not quite accurate to say that there is no record of spoken communications. In fact, if this were the case, then the lack of a strong archive equivalent to the written document really wouldn’t be as bad as it actually is, and in some cases it would be downright handy. “I did not say you were fat.” “Oh, sorry, I must have heard you wrong.”
The real problem is that there is not one archival record of an oral dialogue: there are as many records as participants in the original conversation. To make matters worse, each record is transformed from reality by the process of being internalized by individuals: individuals for whom the word “concern” doesn’t mean anything, so they substituted “crisis”, or individuals who heard “we are on schedule” when you actually said “there is no way we’re going to make the deadline and I think you should fire me for my incompetence.” These differences among participant memories of what should be “facts” predictably lead to conflict.
When conflicts in interpretation arise among participants in a spoken exchange, everyone is relying upon memories and mutual negotiation to sort out what “actually” happened. There is no record to review what was actually said. This is why it is so important to focus on being clear from the outset in spoken communications. The more you can reduce the opportunities for ambiguity and misunderstanding of what you say, the better the chance that your audience will all agree on the majority of your message. Or put another way, the better the chance that you actually communicated with them.
Another problem arises with oral communications in that your audience does not have a record to consult to deepen their understanding of a particular issue or set of issues as they do with a paper in print. If an audience member (or worse, the whole audience!) gets lost somewhere on point two, and points three through eleven build upon point two, then the rest of the dialogue is wasted time for you and them. If the lost soul cannot—or does not—ask for clarification on the offending point, he has little chance of internalizing and acting upon your message at the conclusion of the talk.
I can see clearly now
The need for clarity is paramount whether your audience is one, as in the annual performance review process, or one thousand, as in a new product launch or sales meeting. The techniques that you’ll use to achieve clarity will vary somewhat depending upon which end of the spectrum your dialogue is going to occupy, but the need doesn’t change.
Tell a story
We spent quite a lot of time together in the last chapter in a section of the same heading targeted at writing. In that section I started out with the obvious—but usually ignored—observation that when you are preparing your material you need to know what you want to accomplish and to balance that with what your audience wants to accomplish, in order to move them away from their goals toward yours (inasmuch as the goals are different to begin with). Before you start writing your first draft or outlining your presentation, in other words, you need to have figured out what you want to say, to whom, and why.
The purposes for speaking are the same as those for writing: to educate, persuade, and inform. And just as with writing, it is important to know what your audience already knows about the topic you are going to discuss in addition to what they want to do with the information you are going to give them. As with the writing example, a lecture on Internet Protocol addresses for senior executives will contain quite different content from an IP lecture targeted at network engineers. The executives have more power, but their engineers have more knowledge.
I strongly recommend you review this section in the previous chapter to remind yourself of the issues involved here.
Becoming outstanding: the generalities
So you’ve researched your audience, and you’ve carefully prepared your argument. You know your topic, and you think you’ve anticipated all the questions. You’re halfway through your talk, and you notice your audience is starting to nod off or stare longingly at the door. What happened?
In the rest of the sections in this chapter we’ll talk about specific ways you can improve your performance on both public and private speaking assignments. Before we get to that, let’s talk a little about some of the tips and techniques that you can apply to all spoken communications.
To speak well, listen
As with technical writing, your success in oral communications hinges on understanding your audience. If you understand their needs and goals—whether you have an audience of one or one hundred—you must try to make sure that your communication provides the information they need from a perspective that resonates with them.
Also as with written communications, a large part of resonating with your audience is sharing your information with them in a format that they expect, not only with respect to content, but also with respect to style, format, and presentation. Attend presentations given by your coworkers and other members of your organization. Many companies sponsor brown-bag lunch sessions where individuals prepare short presentations on technical topics, hobbies, shared interests, and so on. Even if you aren’t particularly interested in the topics being discussed, these presentations can provide you with an important window into how presentations are done where you work. You’ll see the standard templates that people use and how they are used. You’ll also begin to take notice of the similarities in rhythm, form, and organization among the various presentations. Do people refer to notes? Do speakers always stand or sometimes sit? Are coats and ties the order of the day, or will khakis and a golf shirt carry you through?
Likewise, pay attention to the structured one-on-one and small group interactions you have with coworkers and supervisors in your company. Does your boss stay behind his desk during these talks, or does he come around and sit in a chair beside you? Does this vary as the news is good or bad? In meetings, do your teammates seem to be referring to notes as they provide status reports on their assignments, or do they wing it, frequently interrupting one another to add to this or that point? Do people refer to each other by first name or last name, and how does this vary with rank? (When I was at Walt Disney World as an engineering co-op student everyone was called by first name, even then Chairman Michael Eisner—until you called him Mike, not Michael. Then he was Mr. Eisner to you.)
Just as with written documents, noticing and observing the standards of presentation in your organization will set up an instant communications bridge between you and your audience. As language and accent identify you as a local or an outsider, your presentation’s format and rhythm can put your audience at ease as with a family member, or alert them to the presence of an outsider.
For more formal presentations many organizations—especially large or geographically dispersed organizations and those for whom spoken communications are a core part of the mission—have style guides and standard presentation templates and guidelines. They are probably available on your intranet in the same place as the style guides for written documents. Get them, and read them.
Once you’ve immersed yourself in the style of your organization, create a few presentations to give in informal settings such as brown-bag lunches or to school groups and community tours that come through your office. Practice adopting the nuances of small-group communications that others around you have adopted. If it is common to prepare before the more important meetings, then start preparing. If your boss turns away from his computer when you walk into his cubicle to focus solely on you, then you should do the same when your coworkers come calling at your cubicle.
In other words, make your organization’s style of oral communications your own. Doing this will allow you to take advantage of the instant communication bridge to reach past your audience’s defenses and make your message their own.
Rules are meant to be broken
With all of that said, rules are meant to be broken. As with written documents, however, you must always be sure that you are actually breaking a rule to satisfy some audience-friendly purpose, not out of ignorance or laziness. In formal presentations or large group discussions where slides are to be used, a different template, rhythm, or novel use of graphics and sound (if these are uncommon in the usual presentations) can be used to powerful effect if what you are talking about is a departure from the norm. Small group and individual interactions are a little less tolerant to radical change, however, because here the rules of social interaction start to come into play. A little change here can have a big effect, so you’ll want to make changes more slowly.
No matter what you do though, in general you don’t want to routinely and radically depart from all convention. You must remain focused on your primary motivation: communication. Never depart so far from the accepted standard that your effect drowns out your message, whether in large group or one-on-one interactions.
And it’s not just me saying that too much departure from the expected can be a bad thing. There was a saying in Canon Law “Nemo admirandus ordinandus est,” which means, “Nobody who would be stared at is to be ordained.” The idea is that the messenger (in this case, the priest) mustn’t draw so much attention to himself that the message gets lost.
In general depart from the norm only infrequently, when it really matters, to achieve a specific purpose, and only after you’ve demonstrated a clear command of the usual way of doing things.
Chew on crustaceans
Remember always that your purpose is to communicate. Whatever your topic is, I’ll bet that you are most definitely not speaking to convince someone that you are smart. And likewise you are not giving a briefing or chatting with your boss solely to have performed the act of speaking. You are trying to educate, persuade, or inform your audience relative to a particular topic in which you are the expert.
In the last chapter I used the phrase “eschew obfuscation” to illustrate the point that while obscure words may be fun to use, they generally work against the purposes of communication. So say “be clear” instead.
In oral communications there is even more danger to your message in using $100 phrases like this. If you use big words and odd turns of phrase you are just as likely as not to stumble on them, or worse, to mispronounce them. You will take a huge credibility hit for this. Stumbling over big words highlights to your audience that you are using words with which you are not familiar in an attempt to make yourself look smart. Since you failed in your attempt, you not only don’t look smart, you look manipulative, and your audience will become uncomfortable and probably stop listening to you. Mispronouncing is even worse than stumbling, though, because then you don’t just look manipulative, you look manipulative and dumb. Your rendering of “eschew obfuscation” comes out more like “chew on crustaceans,” making everyone uncomfortable and torpedoing your shot at getting your audience to act on your message.
There are remarkable individuals who were able to overcome their tendency to mispronounce words unfamiliar to them. For example, President Truman was largely self-educated and knew the meaning of a great many words from his enormous reading, words he had never heard pronounced, and which he consequently mispronounced in public. On balance, many people admired him for this because it was part of his “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” attitude. Better still would have been to ask people or study the pronunciations given in dictionaries, of course.
For parallel reasons, don’t use a synonym you find in a thesaurus or dictionary if it isn’t in your active vocabulary. You are very likely to misuse it.
On the plus side, however, making these kinds of mistakes will give everyone something to talk about around the Coke® machine for the rest of the week. We all serve in our own way.
Get feedback
How do you know if you are speaking effectively? As with effective writing, you’ve been speaking effectively when your audience understands your message and is moved to act to support your goals.
You may sometimes have a direct indicator—if your design approach is selected for your project, for example. But early on in your career you usually won’t be working on many of these types of conversations or presentations. The solution is, again, to ask for feedback. And good feedback, feedback you can use to improve your style and delivery, comes almost always in the form of bad news.
The arguments for asking for and acting upon feedback after verbal communications are largely the same as the arguments we’ve already reviewed for documents; I encourage you to take the time to review them now.
But there is one other point that’s worth discussing when the feedback you are after is about your oral performance. Unlike writing, which is something most of us do infrequently (relative to speaking, anyway) and something we all do on purpose (that is, you sit down specifically to “write”), most of us speak all the time and usually without thinking about it or planning ahead of time. One risk we run with oral communications is in assuming that we are already good at it. After all, we talk all the time, right? It is our primary mode of communication, something most of us have been working on since the day we were born. What more is there to know?
A lot! I can say, without fear of being wrong more than one time in ten thousand, that you were not born an effective speaker. Sure, you’ve been talking all your life, but you have no innate ability to give a presentation that doesn’t put everyone to sleep or to have a one-on-one with a key employee that she will walk out of remembering what was said and what she has to do next.
This means that effective spoken communication is something that most of us need to work hard on. Unfortunately many of us don’t realize our own shortcomings, or we turn a blind eye to them because of the emotional baggage we bring to public and private speaking. All this ignorance and avoidance can make getting useful feedback—in other words, bad news about our performance—a pretty painful process. You must fight this reaction and the accompanying urge to become defensive and lash out at the person giving you the feedback. Focus instead on the fact that what she is telling you is probably right, and that by addressing these comments you will become a more effective communicator. Even if she is wrong, it is helpful to know how she reacted so as to try to prevent others from having a similar wrong reaction to your words in the future. Why did she misunderstand? Can you prevent such misunderstanding in your next talk?
Be prepared to prepare
If what you are going to talk about is important, prepare. This is true for audiences of one or one thousand. You may have only one shot to get your message across, so take the time to know what you are going to say, how you are going to say it, and to anticipate your audience’s reactions so you can manage them ahead of time.
This concept is probably not too foreign to you for formal presentations given with slides. For most of us, the prospect of speaking to a larger audience in a formal setting is disturbing enough that we don’t need too much encouragement to plan it out ahead of time! What can be surprising, however, is how poorly important one-on-one or small group conversations can go without a little preparation ahead of time.
If your conversation is important, it is a safe bet that there is controversy involved. You feel you know what the best approach is to outfitting the new wet labs in the research center, but your boss has all but decided to go another way. There are at least two points of view that have to be reconciled, and you are going to have to sell yours.
To sell effectively you have to be clear, focused, and on message. Hemming and hawing, fumbling for the right words, losing the thread of your point, or missing a key aspect of your argument will all torpedo your chances of communicating your message. Even if you get through your primary points successfully, but cannot field the first simple question you get asked, you’ll still sink your cause.
It is surprising to hear, but if your conversation is important, prepare ahead of time. There are lots of great techniques for reasoning out lines of conversation and anticipating questions and alternate points of view; there are also lots of great resources, some even in the form of conversation scripts, that can help you get through typically difficult topics. Learn these techniques, study the scripts, adapt them to your own style, and use them to prepare yourself before you get your one shot at convincing someone to decide a controversial issue in your favor.
Whatever technique you choose to help organize your preparation, here are a few tips on getting the most out of the effort you’ll be putting in. First, organize your message around a few key points that you can cover quickly in review at the wrap-up. Doing this provides your listeners with a predigested take-home message that they don’t have to process themselves. Second, look at the issues from other points of view. You don’t necessarily need to directly address these in your message, but you can structure your talk to diffuse the other viewpoints. Preparing for questions from these perspectives is absolutely essential. If you are presenting your research proposal to the project review board in your division, a key point that your audience is trying to answer for itself is what is unique about your proposal that might put it ahead of your competition’s proposal. To make it easy for them to answer this question, and to make sure they form the answer you want them to form, incorporate this message into your talk. Third, anticipate questions. If you had a proposal funded last year but the project got canceled because the research didn’t look promising halfway through, be prepared to answer questions about how you have learned from your previous failure. Likewise, if you are discussing an employee’s poor performance on a key project, be prepared to answer the question “How can I do better?” Not being prepared to answer these questions swiftly and confidently will seriously degrade the chances of your message being received, at least for the questioner.
But be careful here: everyone gets a question once in a while that they just flat don’t know the answer to. When this happens, do not wing it. In this situation the safest thing to say is “I don’t know. I will find out and report back” Practice saying this ahead of time, and get it into your head that you don’t know everything and that it’s OK not to know everything; this phrase can be very difficult to squeeze out when you’re in the hot seat. When you do have to use it, however, make sure you follow up with the answer, either in person or by e-mail, as quickly as possible after the conclusion of the talk.
Winging it is definitely not the way to go, for a couple reasons. First, and especially in talks surrounding controversial or high-stakes issues, people will ask questions they know the answer to hoping that you will get the answer wrong so they can nail you. Don’t give them the opportunity. Second, when you start winging it, you often start off down dangerous paths that contain even more stuff you don’t know. At some point you’ll get in so far over your head that you’ll lose all credibility with your audience. And finally, you are human, and your audience is too. You don’t know everything, and no one can reasonably expect you to know the answer to every conceivable question. But if you find yourself saying “I don’t know” too many times over the course of several interactions, that should be a signal to you that you aren’t spending enough time in preparation.
I practice this preparation technique often, but most especially when I am giving bad news or when I am “selling” a concept to a large group. The act of preparation forces me to organize my thoughts and gives me the opportunity to double-check my reasoning for flaws and wrong thinking. Seeking out the other points of view so that I can prepare for questions and rebuttals also makes sure that I am at least sensitive to how my audience may see the issues in question. Occasionally this process even convinces me that I am in the wrong or have the wrong approach, but in every case both my audience and I benefit from the time spent in preparation.
Becoming outstanding: The peculiarities of public speaking
I love speaking to a crowd. Public speaking combines two things that I truly enjoy: the opportunity to teach, and a chance to connect with a lot of people at one time.
For me, the essence of public speaking is teaching. When I am giving a structured talk to an audience—even a small audience—there is almost always a component of education, even when the primary purpose is something completely different. For example, the primary purpose of a presentation may be to update your sponsors on the progress of your new biological memory model prototype, but in doing this you will have to convey to them the new things that you have learned. Guess what? You are teaching. The same thing goes for research proposals (you are teaching the reviewers what your idea is and why it’s better), and even marketing plans (you are teaching your audience how your customers are going to view your product and how it should be marketed to them).
I didn’t start out with this strong connection between public speaking and teaching. I didn’t even start out liking public speaking at all. As an undergraduate student in electrical engineering, I was required to take speech. I took it in the summer to concentrate the pain and get it out of the way. I did both, and didn’t learn much in the process. Then, early in my master’s degree program, a fantastic thing happened. I was asked to give a tour of the research center where I was working. The center was very large with a strong educational mission, and the director at the time (one of my earliest mentors and an extraordinarily gifted man) felt strongly that the best way to convey that mission was to have students give tours. I did an OK job, and was asked to repeat my performance several times over the rest of the semester. After that, the situation stuck and I became one of the official tour guides—they even made me a badge (mostly as a joke) proclaiming me at the official tour guide. It was in this environment that I learned most of what I know now about dealing effectively with, and adapting to, large audiences.
Early in my tours, probably the whole first semester, I was very nervous every time. To fix this, I figured that what I needed was to have a script (thinking like an engineer!). I walked around by myself and rehearsed until I had a pattern memorized. After the first couple of tours, however, I started to notice that my audience was usually not paying attention to me. They seemed to be going through the motions of listening and walking around behind me, but they weren’t really “connecting” with the message.
This really should not have been surprising. I had memorized a script, and every time I gave a tour I was going through a set of memorized motions. Guess what? My audience responded by going through the motions too. I wasn’t really engaged, so how could I expect them to be? Also, I made another fatal error: I created a one-size-fits-all script. The secret about one-size-fits-all presentations is that they rarely fit anyone. Every audience is different. Every time you present you are different. Every time you talk you need to incorporate these differences into your presentation.
My first step in tearing down the wall of dull I had built was to research my tour groups ahead of time. Who were they? Were they parents, a team of external reviewers from the National Science Foundation, potential sponsors, or secretaries from around the university? Clearly parents of potential first-year students weren’t going to be interested in the nuances of the partial differential equations we were solving. I should save those equations for the NSF team, and focus instead on the camaraderie, the quality of the educational experiences, and the fantastic facilities we were so fortunate to have. Likewise I started to ask the director what message he wanted to convey to the tour groups, and to work that in. Sometimes the answer was “no message, just show them around.” This left me freedom to follow my interests and judge their reactions, and in doing this I found a range of topics that I could mix and match to create a semi-custom tour for just about any group.
This approach was essentially about creating a framework for my tours, rather than a script, and selecting elements from the framework that addressed the needs and interests of each individual tour. It worked, but it required a lot more effort on my part. I needed to know a little bit about everything in the center, not just the things I was personally involved in. I spent a lot of time up front learning the basics of all the research activities in the center. This allowed me to leave my dependence on a memorized script and to be able to talk more naturally and comfortably about a range of topics, responding to the audience’s interests.
And, suddenly, they were interested. I was more comfortable, more relaxed, more engaged, and more connected to the audience. If I sensed the audience getting bored or talking among themselves, I would change the topic or change my approach to talking about the topic. I was talking about the things that I knew ahead of time they were likely to be interested in, and I was doing it in a style that was conversational (even though I had spent way more hours preparing for this “conversation” than they would ever be aware of).
And the wonderful thing about this approach is that when you connect to the audience this way, you can feel it. It is really quite extraordinary. An almost electric bond is formed between you and the audience, and you as the speaker begin to draw on that energy to feed your performance. That bond, that energy, is one of the most addictive experiences I’ve ever had. Once you have it, you’ll want to create it again and again. You’ll want to do this for yourself, but the audience is the true beneficiary, as they walk away feeling appreciative, connected, and in tune with your message.
This point is important, and bears repeating. You cannot ever hope to achieve this bond, and to spread your message to it’s full potential to your audience, by reading from a script. Even great actors who pretend to be reading at a podium have memorized what they are reading, and have much more eye contact with the audience than they ever could if they were really reading. You may have notes in front of you in case your memory fails, to glance at quickly, but never read long passages. One great Classics scholar gave a long lecture with a notebook open in front of him. A lady asked to borrow and photocopy it. It said “Zeus. Humanity. Zeus.” That was enough with his habitual knowledge and fondness for speaking on the subject to steer him. Strive for this model.
This type of connection to the audience is not limited to tours and more informal sessions. Even (perhaps especially) in formal presentations where I am standing in front of a darkened room running PowerPoint slides, I am trying to get this connection going with my audience. It is a little different, since most PowerPoint audiences aren’t terribly interactive, but I have found that the lessons I learned giving tours move pretty easily to giving presentations. Once you learn to read your audience’s reaction to what you are saying and know to look for the connection clues, you have all the tools you need to adjust and adapt your talk as you are speaking to connect with your audience.
Is all this work? Yup! Is it tiring? You bet—it can be exhausting to prepare and then connect in this way with so many people, and a series of tours for a big event at the center would mean an early bedtime for me. Didn’t I still get nervous? Absolutely, and I still get butterflies before each and every single tour and talk, for every group of Senators and janitors and Cabinet Secretaries and high-school students. Even after doing it for over fifteen years. But it’s all worth it when you can connect with your audience in a truly personal way. One of the greatest personal rewards I get is the feeling that someone has learned something new in exchange for the time they have given me.
But wait!
I don’t want to leave you with the impression that every one of my talks and tours is like a circus spectacular. I wish this were the case! While it is true that I connect with my audiences more often than not, sometimes the magic just isn’t there. Sometimes it’s my fault: an off day, too many tours, or lack of focus. Sometimes it’s the audience’s fault: they just aren’t interested in the subject. Sometimes it isn’t anyone’s fault: there’s construction in the room next door, and no one can pay attention. But although I am a connection addict, at times like this it’s important to remember that there are other purposes being served. Keep trying to connect with your audiences, but when all else fails do the best you can with what you’ve got and move on.
Now, let’s talk specifically about how you can tune up your public-speaking engagements.
I practice, you practice, he practices, she practices
As you’ve probably gathered by now, I believe that the biggest single key to success in just about everything is practice. And practice. And did I mention that you should practice?
There are so many opportunities you can take advantage of to get practice speaking publicly: volunteer for tours, volunteer to mentor a group of students during the summer and spend at least some of your time “lecturing” to them with slides and presentations, volunteer to give the project updates in your bosses staff meetings, volunteer for proposal and presentation teams, work with local schools and charities.
A fantastic opportunity for improving your own public speaking skills is to get on the tour circuit for your organization. If you are in school, you are definitely within easy striking distance of all the tours you can handle. The technology majors are usually in departments that perform a great deal of external research under contract to a wide variety of organizations: the National Science Foundation, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, various departments in the federal government, and public and private companies. Every contract has a sponsor, or group of sponsors (someone who pays the bills). Frequently these sponsors, and potential sponsors, will come to the university to see firsthand the fruits of their funding. These visits are usually treated as VIP occasions, and tours are the order of the day whenever any VIP is within a half-mile radius of any research activity. Beyond VIP tours, academic departments of every stripe spend time recruiting top students and their families, and the tour is a big part of a family’s visit to campus. There is a also whole host of other people with a vested interests in your institution, and they stop by to see what’s going on as well: state, local, and federal elected officials, alumni, governing boards, and many others.
All these visits mean tours. Universities and colleges love for students to give these tours, because there is no better advertisement for the quality of an academic instruction than meeting an excited, intelligent student. Chances are someone at your school will fall all over himself or herself if you volunteer to help with tours.
I’ve already talked about the tours I used to give for the research center in which I did my graduate work. I was also a member of my college’s “ambassadors.” We were a captive audience for the college’s fund-raising team to call upon when an important potential donor was coming to campus. It was a great experience for us because these individuals were always leaders in their field, and when they came part of their agenda included a discussion with us about careers and what it was like out in industry (for example, the President of Eastman Kodak at the time was a speaker). We also toured these people around the campus, and getting exposure to the kinds of questions that CEOs ask is an experience that I look back on as invaluable to my career now.
But if you are out of school, don’t despair! If you work in a research facility or a federal laboratory, you’re still in luck, because these places have almost as many tours as universities. If not, there are opportunities yet to be had, but you may have to look a little harder. Remember, you are looking for ways to practice your public speaking skills, so it doesn’t really matter if your company doesn’t often have visitors or give tours, as long as you can find some group in your community that does. It’s the practice that matters, not the venue. Rotary and Lion’s clubs, your church or synagogue, local schools and colleges, and the Chamber of Commerce are all possible places in which you can become involved and practice your craft. Volunteering in a community organization can provide a lot of practice giving tours and speaking to large groups—these organizations depend upon individual donations, and many of the donors want to see where their money is going. Many churches offer Sunday schools or Bible studies or informal lay groups. If you are a member of one of these, take a turn as the leader of the session. This has all the parts of public speaking, including preparation, practice, and presentation, without the stakes usually associated with work-related talks.
Another great option is to become a part of your local Toastmasters International club (http://www.toastmasters.org). Local chapters of this organization meet regularly for the sole purpose of improving their members’ public-speaking skills. Meetings include prepared and extemporaneous speaking opportunities, along with structured feedback from the rest of the club to the speaker.
If none of these options works for you, look for “Brown Bag Lunch Talks” in your club, company, or organization. In many organizations, especially technical ones, groups of staff get together regularly (perhaps once a month) to listen to a relatively informal talk by someone in the group or by an invited outside speaker. These talks are often given in a conference room at lunchtime, and the audience eats while the speaker gives a 30- to 45-minute presentation. The presentations can be technical and related to work or research being performed by the speaker, but may also be extracurricular if the group gathers to discuss a shared interest or hobby. If you can’t find a gathering like this where you are, create one. Come up with an interesting topic for the first meeting, post flyers or recruit friends, and get a speaker or volunteer yourself. Creating a gathering like this will benefit those who attend and those who speak—a win-win proposition!
Practice’s evil cousin: feedback
At least once, and preferably several times, set up a video camera or recruit a friend and tape yourself giving a tour or talk. Without realizing it, people stick their tongues out between sentences, juggle change noisily in their pockets, grin at inappropriate moments, say “You know?” at every comma, and so on. Watching themselves on video helps enormously.
Video cameras are so cheap these days that if you don’t have one, someone you know does, or you can borrow one from your department or company. Many larger schools and businesses have special rooms outfitted to record presentations for archival purposes, and you can probably take advantage of these just for the price of asking. My alma mater has even created a special facility to allow engineering students to videotape themselves day or night as they hone their speaking skills for project presentations; perhaps your school has the same kind of facility.
Once you have the video camera set up, tape yourself giving a talk. You may want to give your talk to an empty room, or wrangle a couple friends to sit in the audience. This gives you the added advantage of having actual people to interact with and connect to, which will probably improve your performance, and it provides a source of outside feedback. Whether you tape yourself in an empty room or with an audience, you’ll also want to do some sessions with “friendly” practice audiences that you can count on to give you external feedback after you are done. I suggest you start by fixing what you see on the tape yourself, then graduate to feedback from a friendly live audience.
The tape and your practice audiences are going to provide you valuable feedback: pay attention to them. Odds are you are going to feel squeamish about watching yourself on tape or asking your audience to tell you what you did wrong. Do not cheat! Don’t watch the video on fast-forward: your audience has to sit through the whole thing in real time, and you should too. Also, beware of making excuses for yourself: if you notice something annoying, your audience will too, so fix it. And don’t take “you did great” as good feedback from your practice audience. If they tell you this and you haven’t been giving presentations for years, odds are they are sugarcoating the truth.
Dig harder. You may actually have done pretty well, but dig for questions about everything. Did you jingle your change? Move around too much? Too little? Stand in front of your slides so your audience couldn’t see them? Ask questions until they start to give you feedback that you can use to improve. Take notes. Once you get this feedback, you’re going to want to keep practicing and getting feedback until you’ve worked out all the major kinks and defeated your nastiest nervous habits (more on these below).
