Episode #118: Three Absolute Fundamentals for Success

Highly knowledgeable people are often at a big disadvantage in business. They have expertise and experience. Their opinion is sought after, they have high personal levels of credibility. They often went to prestigious schools, elite universities, completing challenging degrees. They have paid their dues and have worked they way up the greasy pole to the upper reaches. Yet, they have feet of clay when it comes to representing their section, division, department, company or industry. They are a dud when presenting.

There is a skill to presenting. We talk about “born salesmen”, “born leaders”, “born presenters”. What we are doing is acknowledging that the roots of their skills have been long in the making. They showed some capability at a young age around being confident when talking in front of others, or persuading others to follow their lead or selling their suggestions successfully to their peer group.

Success breeds success and so as they grew up, these attributes became more and more refined and polished. By the time we meet them they seem the complete package. The idea that you had to be born with these skills becomes entrenched in the popular mind. Usually, it is an excuse for the observer’s own shortcomings. They haven’t done the work, so they misname the condition as wrong genes rather than wrong attitude.

The education of the highly specialized person means many years of diving deep into the nitty gritty of their area of expertise. This is done at the expense of developing other skills. The reason we have an MBA or Master Degree in Business Administration is because engineers were so hopeless at everything other than engineering. At school, they were avoiding English classes in favour of science and mathematics. They never bothered with fluffy soft subjects like debating or philosophy or history or the social sciences. They were hard science types. Then they got promoted.

Now they were having to do tasks way outside the engineering realm for which they were woefully undereducated, so they had to be sent back to university for some remedial education. This became the MBA and as the professional consulting firms started hiring them, the degree became a brand and a road to higher pay and positions in companies. Now with so many mediocre folk running around with MBAs, the playing field has been leveled again and people are being judged on their ability and not the degree brand.

So here we have high knowledge/low skill/low attitude constructs for some leaders who find they need to present. The low attitude, in this example, doesn’t refer to their commitment, dedication, engagement or enthusiasm for their work. It refers to their dismissal of the importance of presenting, as part of the total professional’s toolbox. They see it as froth on beer, fluff, smoke and mirrors, style with no substance.

It is hard to master presenting when this is your starting point. So, they bludgeon their audiences with boring, heavy, data laden talks, devoid of stories, delivered with a stern face and a serious air. These days, within seconds, they have lost their audience. First impressions are the basis of our decision to continue to listen to the speaker or to escape to the internet, secured in our hand, hidden under the desk. We know that audience distraction is at a level never been experienced before by human kind. We had better have a killer opening to the talk, because we have between 3 and 30 seconds to capture the attention of our audience. We can deliver facts without emotion or we can deliver them with passion and belief.

“Knowledge is all I need” speakers with this mantra don’t get it. It is not enough anymore. We need to be able to communicate with people across all levels of understanding of the subject, with various interests and biases. We need to be memorable, to be building our personal and professional brands. People won’t recall all the detail of the talk but they will walk away with either a positive, negative or non residual impression of our talk. Conviction and confidence sell our messages, build credibility for our argument and convince others of our point of view.

In a world awash with information, alternative facts and fake news, being remembered as trustworthy, knowledgeable and reliable is more important than in the past. The trustworthy and reliable bits come from our ability to marshal our knowledge and deliver it in such a way that the audience is attracted to our key messages and to us as speakers. These soft skills are required more than ever. It is time to switch attitudes, add skills and become the complete package as a presenter. This means being knowledgeable, skillful in delivery and having the right attitude toward wanting to win the audience over.