Episode #199: Getting Close With Your Audience In Japan

Engaging our audience is one of the prerequisites for having persuasion power. Smart people sometimes make simple errors which diminishes their ability to get their messages accepted.

Lawyers in Japan are an elite group. Senior lawyers are the elite of the super elite. When I landed in Tokyo on April 1st, 1979, Tokyo was completely different city than what it is today. A low rise, rambling, conurbation maze of small streets and ugly grey buildings, long stained by air pollution. Like the city itself, many things were a surprise back then, including Japanese lawyers. In those days, the pass rate of the Japan bar exam was one point four percent and the average time it took after University graduation, to pass the bar exam was seven years. With the launch of many new law schools in Japan and changes to the system, the bar exam pass rate has now climbed to thirty nine percent. So if you meet a senior Japanese lawyer, they will be part of the older cohort of the super, super elite. I was expecting a lot from these super lawyers, yet in some respects I was severely disappointed.

I attended a legal symposium, involving these super elite Japanese lawyers and some invited international lawyers coming in from outside of Japan. The whole affair was conducted in English, and the level spoken by the Japanese attendees was very high. It was impressive. These are very smart people, often playing a key role in resolving international disputes and enabling international commerce. In the Japan group, all had their legal practices and additionally also lectured at leading Japanese Universities, on different aspects of the law.

Yet, the communication skills on offer were incongruent with their elite educations and high societal status. I can never resolve how intelligent people can manage to stand up in front of an audience and position themselves such that they fully ignore one third of their audience. We were seated in a theatre style arrangement with raised seating. A fairly wide room, it obviously functions as one of the main lecture theatres. As professional legal educators they are all are used to speaking to large groups of students and so could be expected to speak to the whole group, rather than just those seated to their right. This is not a tricky skill, but there was obviously no self-awareness, so you have to conclude this is how it is every time they give a lecture, be it in English or Japanese.

So here is a hint to ourselves. Whenever we are standing before an audience, always make sure we position our feet such that they are facing ninety degrees directly forward and just turn our necks and upper body, when we want to involve each side of the room in eye contact.

Actually there wasn’t any real eye contact underway either. Speaking to everyone and nobody at the same time, is a common lack of professionalism in many speakers in Japan. In normal everyday conversations, making continuous direct eye contact can be too confronting for the normal societal standards of human interaction here. From a young age, Japanese people are taught to look at the throat, chin, and forehead of their interlocutor, rather than their eyes.

When we are speaking to an audience though, we are in a different role now and have different requirements. Winning the audience over to us, getting them to listen carefully to what we are saying and drawing them in to our point of view, are all aided when we use eye contact.

In the whole symposium, I don’t think I saw anyone using eye contact properly. We don’t want to bore a hole in the eyes of our audience though. That is why we seek to hold eye contact for around six seconds, before we move our gaze and make eye contact with another member of the audience. When we do this, we really engage our audience. Those on the receiving end of the eye contact feel as if we are talking directly to them, as if there was no one else in the room. This is a powerful connector.

In typical Japanese fashion, the main speakers were allotted a table to sit behind, decorated with a microphone stand. In this seated position, out came the sheets of the speech transcript to be read to us in a monotone voice. Extremely painful and ineffective. One guest speaker from overseas however was very modern, reading from his iPad. He even used voice intonation when reading, to stress certain words. The same scenario – same seat, same microphone, reading the speech, but what a difference this made. By spotlighting key words in each sentence, the speech came alive. We should be doing the same thing when it is our turn to speak.

Now as a native speaker of English and a truly senior international expert in the law, I wondered why this speaker had to read the speech at all? He could have stood and delivered that speech, without notes and in a more professional manner, fully utilising all the tools at his disposal. We should be more brave I was thinking to myself.

We must always keep in mind one key advantage we have over our audience. Only we know what we are going to say. If we forget something or if we deviate off topic slightly, well, only we know that. So whenever possible we should stand and deliver, no safety net, in full gaze of the audience without notes and use our eye contact to draw everyone into our message.

The last part of the day was devoted to panel discussions. Notes don’t work in these situations and everyone did a splendid job of speaking about complex legal matters in English off the cuff. A couple of things to keep in mind for ourselves, if ever we are engaged in a similar panel discussion. Learn how to use the microphone correctly, so we can be heard clearly. I notice, so many people don’t speak across the mesh of the microphone properly, so they are not getting completely picked up by the audio technology.

Another thing to be careful of is eye contact. The speakers on these panels religiously devoted their looking lines to the panel members, ignoring their audience completely, as they answered questions or offered comments. No, no, no! When we receive the question or are asked to comment, we should be addressing the panel members as well as the audience. We should be using our eye contact to convince the audience of what we are projecting, by appealing directly to them.

What often happens though is the speaker will exclusively look back at the moderator who asked the question, instead of engaging as many people as possible in the room. This applies to any opportunity we may have for doing the Q&A. Look at the questioner initially for the first six seconds of the answer only. Then branch out and engage as many of the audience members as you can, with six seconds of eye contact, as you make your answer.

These are highly educated, super elite people in Japan and yet they make these fundamental presentation errors. So it tells us that being well educated and being in a prestigious job, does not automatically anoint us with the magic fairy dust of successful public speaking professionalism we all need. Remember, these are our personal and professional brands we are holding out there for all to see. To bolster your brand, get the training, because today is the age of persuasion power and we must master this skill if we want to be fully successful. Connecting with our audience is one of the key business skills we need to add to our repertoire when presenting.