Episode #233: PM Yoshihide Suga’s Lessons On How Not To Do Public Speaking

Succeeding Shintaro Abe as Prime Minister, Yoshihide Suga has now been thrust into the public arena in a new dimension. When he was the Cabinet spokesman, he made a valiant effort to say as little as possible at press briefings, be defensive and always treat journalists with complete disdain and disregard. He didn’t need to be appealing or a good speaker, because his job was to look down the whole time read from the prepared script in a monotone and obfuscate at all turns. Actually, he was the “black hole” of public speaking, drawing all of the press energy into the void and just extinguishing it. Maybe you will replace your boss one day and have to take over the role of representing the organization to the wider world. Can you do a better job than Suga?

Keiko Ishikawa, a public relations consultant, was quoted in the media noting Suga’s choice of vocabulary is “not that bad”. Rather it is “how he attempts to convey the words that is the problem”. The role of second fiddle mouthpiece for the Abe Cabinet and being the Prime Minister in your own right, require substantially different skills. Actually, there are few skilled public speakers in business, government and politics in Japan, so Suga blends in nicely with the ineptitude and many failings of his peers and colleagues. The problem is that being hopeless like everyone else does not help you to be persuasive.

Ishikawa noted, “As his facial expressions and words and phrasings almost never vary, there’s no strength in his eyes. We can’t understand what he wants to emphasis and where his heart is”. Robotic would be a good descriptor of his approach to public speaking. Yes, I appreciate that Japanese is a monotone language but that is no excuse, although many will volunteer it to justify their personal lack of ability. Even in Japanese, we can pull the twin levers of speed and strength to gain vocal variation and this is open to Suga too, but he chooses to drone on instead. We know he is bad, but how about you? If we recorded your talk, would it be a deadly monotone, driving everyone deep into slumberland?

Professor Mehrabian’s research in the 1960s flagged the issue of the way we speak not matching the content of the words being a problem. When we are not congruent, only 7% of our message is getting through to the audience. As a speaker, achieving only a 7% success rate of verbal message transmission should get you fired from your job! With Suga and many other leaders in Japan, facial expressions are wooden from start to finish. If it is bad news, then look worried and if it is good news, then look happy. Those reactions would be congruent. Suga is not doing that, so he is giving up a tremendous persuasion tool – his facial expressions. Our face is a million watts more powerful than any slide deck on screen.

Ishikawa also complained, “His articulation is bad and could be improved by practicing moving his mouth, speaking clearly and changing the tempo of his speech”. The fundamental issue here is there is no interest or will to be a clear communicator. He was the master of obfuscation in his former job and he has carried that like a badge of honour into his new role. The Liberal Democratic Party has a very comfortable majority and no real challenge from the opposition parties, so a sense of entitlement is strong in their ranks. “Who cares about being a good public speaker, because the punters are going to have to vote us back in anyway, so whats the problem?”.

The will to persuade listeners is a fundamental professional skill requirement. We see so many Japanese business executives, just like Suga, pathetically going through the motions reading their speeches, with no passion for their talk. In some cases, they may want to do a better job, but they worry if they slip out of lockstep with the rest of their hopeless colleagues and do a professional job, they will draw negative comments. I was coaching a new President to give his first key speech to the company’s stakeholders. The content was terrible. Dry, boring and devoid of any life or interest. He rejected the proposed changes to improve it, because he didn’t think his audience would accept a professional version of his talk. He was limiting himself in order to blend in with everyone’s zero level expectations of a professional speech. In Japan, this becomes a self-perpetuating nightmare, where the entire country’s leadership remain duds when it comes to public speaking.

There may be hope with the next generation. The much younger Environment Minister Shinjiro Koizumi was not very good at public speaking at the start of his political career. The difference was he became serious about his communication skills. He studied rakugo (traditional storytelling) and listened to recordings of his own talk and speeches. He made an effort to improve his presentations. Today he is a million times better than his boss and is talked of as a future Prime Minister.

Japan’s politicians, bureaucrats and business executives are not your role models. The lesson is that in the Kingdom of the Blind, the one eyed man is King. When you see everyone is aping Suga and his ilk, when it comes to professional presentation skills, run a mile in the opposite direction. Rather, become professional, persuasive, gain self confidence and have presence when you speak. How do you do that? Like the rest of us, get trained!.