Episode #129: Dealing With Feedback When Presenting

We can receive feedback in the rehearsal stage and after the actual presentation itself. Both can be very dangerous. Asking your loved ones at home for feedback is tricky. They may love you, but they may not know much about the subject itself, the subject of presenting and techniques for giving feedback. Pretty toxic cocktail right there, with potential to create domestic issues at home, if you don’t have enough already.

“What do you think?” is a bad move in the feedback game. When you are practicing, you cover many aspects of presenting and asking such a broad and unfocused question, invites in irrelevant comment which is unhelpful. Rather than asking such a combustible question, start by sitting down and creating your own checklist.

You can break this up into a few categories. You might nominate the structure of the talk. In this way, you can isolate out the sections of the talk, looking at the potency of the evidence you presented in each section to back up your point. You can nominate other areas, such as the transitions between sections, the opening, the first close before Q&A, the second close after Q&A, Q&A itself. In this way you are dissecting your speech. You are breaking it down for the person listening, to consider before they give a comment. You might have them score you on a simple scale, just to get an idea of what resonated with them. Remember though, this is an audience of one and you have to consider how expert they are and how representative they are of your audience.

In another section of the review sheet you are creating, you can include aspects of the delivery of the speech. How was your posture, speaking speed, degree of clarity, pauses, eye contact, gestures, vocal variety. They can score on each of these to give you a guide on how you were doing.

By having various people observe your speech you can get a variety of viewpoints. One big problem in Japan is no one here wants to give you critical feedback or even constructive feedback. They will just try to flatter you and are fairly useless when it comes to the feedback game. This is especially the case if you are their boss. They won’t be so willing to tell it like it is. If you are giving the talk in English then there is the additional curve ball of their ability in English to fully understand the nuances of language you might be using.

Feedback can also be fear producing. This is especially the case when all you are getting is what was wrong with your talk. This is the natural flow for people giving feedback. They want to tell you what was wrong and so your confidence gets killed as a result of all this tough love. Actually, you don’t want critique. What you want is for the feedback to focus on only two things – what was good and how can you make it better. If you start to get critique, stop them right there and redirect them by asking for good/better feedback.

During the actual presentation, you can gauge how the audience is reacting to your talk. If they are falling asleep that is a bad sign, although in Japan that is fairly common behaviour, so don’t beat yourself up too much. That is why we never let the organisers turn the lights down to see the screen more easily. Within one minute, you will lose a big chunk of your Japanese audience. Keep the lights up so you can see their faces and check how they are reacting to your talk. If you get people nodding to your points take that as a win. The more of those the better obviously.

If you get mild or vicious questions, then you can interpret these results as good or bad depending on the purpose of your talk. You might want to be provocative and want to outrage some in the crowd. Or you want to win everyone to your way of thinking, so you are looking for questions that enable you to convince others, to adopt your preferred position on the topic.

Asking people you know or your staff, “How do did it go” is just a waste of time. You want your feedback sheet selectively distributed before the talk, so that you can get additional feedback to what your eyes are telling you during the talk. I would count people coming up to you after the speech and saying how great you are as flattery and of doubtful value, unless they are an expert in the topic or on the subject of giving speeches. I know it sounds a bit harsh, but almost no one is going to approach you and feedback to you that you were crap. So be wary of praise and look long and hard at who it is coming from.

For both rehearsal and for the talk itself, video is the best method of evaluating how you went. You have your checklist so you can be very diagnostic on the video review component. If you have your coach there during the practice, that is ideal and also important to have them in the audience as well, to give you the good/better feedback. If you don’t have a coach, what are you thinking? You should get one, because this speaking lark is a brand builder or a brand killer. It is never neutral. You are either winning or losing and don’t kid yourself otherwise.