Episode #298: Don't Let Fear Drive Unprofessional Presentations

Imagine an experienced, senior executive from a name brand major company giving a one minute introduction of the company, while holding a piece of paper, reading the introduction to the audience. What would be your impression of that executive and by extension the professionalism of that company? I am sure it would be highly negative. If a senior person can’t manage a one minute talk without reading it, we will be wondering what sort of people are working there?

The problem today is we are awash in high levels of professionalism around presenting from the professionals. Netflix, Disney, Hulu, HBO etc., are pumping huge budgets into streaming content with unbelievably high production values and oozing with high levels of script quality and professional actor delivery. We become accustomed to these images of professional presenters and then a lame amateur turns up, holding their piece of A4 paper and just destroys their reputation on the spot.

Business seems to be the last refuge of scoundrels who cannot present in a professional way, but that is not an acceptable situation. The audience today are heavily armed with mobile phones which can connect them to the internet in seconds. The delights of social media can quickly outweigh the appeal of the speaker and their topic, if the delivery isn’t professional. Even when the content is good and the delivery is okay, it doesn’t hold the audience’s attention as it once did.

I was at a presentation recently and the speaker was doing an okay job – not great but not horrendous either. That didn’t stop the gentlemen sitting next to me at my table from getting out his phone, then his iPad and later his laptop during the presentation. He was checking and answering emails, scrolling around social media and generally “multi-tasking”. This is the nadir for the speaker – to be reduced to competing for audience attention when they are half listening and are simultaneously busy doing something else.

The paper reading speaker I mentioned earlier puzzled me, so I approached him and asked him why he had to read a one minute speech. He told me he was afraid of his English ability. This was an interesting comment, because we were famously chatting away in English for about five minutes before we go to this gritty subject. I said to him that was a surprising comment given his English was absolutely fine.

Actually he didn’t need the piece of paper, but his fear of linguistic imperfection was driving his behaviour. He had been focused on the wrong thing. Perfection is not required in communication. I know this because my Japanese is certainly not “perfect” but I can communicate freely in Japanese and listeners can follow what I am saying.

This is the same for English, a language mainly spoken by non-native speakers in fact, if you add up the population numbers. That means that a good portion of the time, native speakers are listening to a variety of accents in English with some exciting departures from grammatical norms. No problem though, because we can connect the dots and work out what it is they are trying to say and without missing a beat, give them a response which matches the flow of the conversation.

Fear was his impediment, but a false fear, a self-induced and self-limiting fear. This happens in our presentation classes too. The participants start totally consumed by their concerns and worries and are relatively oblivious to the audience, because they are totally focused on themselves. After a few hours of practice with coaching, they, without knowing it, have now switched their focus from themselves to trying to engage with their audience.

If our speaker had thrown away the A4 paper and instead used his minute to engage his audience, he would have rescued the brand. If he had done all of that and spoken with great energy and enthusiasm he would have actually accentuated the brand. If he had a few grammatical errors or pronunciation slip ups, no one would have cared, because they would have been tuned into his communication, not to the actual degree of linguistic perfection of his delivery.

Interestingly, he was not Japanese and yet the majority of the audience were Japanese speakers. When we speak a foreign language, it is often the case that we can be more easily able to understand non-native speakers because they have very simple vocabularies. He didn’t take this factor into consideration when thinking about who would be in his audience. That was another error on his part – his preparation didn’t factor in who would be the audience for this one minute promotion of his company. This has to be the first thing we do, every time!

Don’t let the fear of speaking hold you back. Prepare thoroughly, understand who is going to be in your audience, spend your delivery time focused on engaging your audience, bring your enthusiasm and passion and forget about linguistic perfection. If he had done that, then his personal brand and his company’s brand wouldn’t have been shredded on the spot, as actually happened. Today, the risk is simply too high to let people who have no clue what they are doing, to go around representing the brand in public. Why do it that way? Give them training and then let them go forth and become a terrific brand ambassador for the organisation.