Episode #78: How To Murder Your Personal Brand In Japan

When you get up and speak in front of an audience, you are putting your professional and personal brand on the line. The event is advertised, people are alerted to the fact you are speaking and a proportion will bother to turn up to hear what you have to say. They may be drawn in by the fact you work for a famous or powerful company, so their expectations are high. What we often forget is that unconsciously, they are also turning up to hear how you say it. Everyone is an armchair critic on oration and usually the level of intensity is diametrically opposite to their own level of speaking ability.

When you get up to speak, it doesn't matter which prestigious University you graduated from or which mega corporate you work for. When you are on stage, your degree doesn't help you nor does your job title - you are on your own and you sink or swim accordingly. Our speaker on this occasion sank.

The sad part is there was no reason for that to happen. Our speaker made three key errors. Firstly, they did zero research on who was in the audience. The point of the talk may have resonated with someone working in another similar mega corporate, but there were few of those characters in the room that day. I know, because I was exchanging business cards and didn't run across too many brand name employer companies represented at the speaking venue. The degree of difficulty on checking on who is going to be in your audience is this hard: call the organisers and ask who is in the room, who do they represent, what is the gender balance, age balance, and what are the position levels they hold within their companies.

I think anyone could manage to do that and the results would impact how you prepared your talk. Our speaker didn't bother to do that, so the talk failed to persuade.

Another error was the speaker had obviously done no practice on the presentation before delivering it to the audience. Here is a simple rule - "never practice on your audience." Sounds fairly straightforward, but few speakers run through any attempt at rehearsing their talk before they give it. They just turn up on the appointed day and hour and away they go. Fairly hard to work that thinking out, given the high level of attention which is about to be placed on your personal and professional brands. We should all be running through our full length presentation at least three times before giving it. We need to do that to work out the cadence of the speech and to check that we are on message. We know we have to be doing something to energise the audience every five minutes and we have to plan for that.

The speaker’s delivery was distracting us from the key messages. The Ums...were coming thick and fast, the talk was low energy and the voice too soft, even with the microphone. They had obviously not checked the room or equipment before the talk started. They were not speaking in a monotone but it was a pretty close thing. This was a very unimpressive, totally forgettable effort and it didn't have to end like that.

The third error was this person had not been coached on public speaking. The irony was that their company policy was to do all of their staff development work in-house. I know the speaker wasn't a product of any internal coaching because there hadn't been any practice done in the first place. As a professional trainer for presentation skills, I doubt the managers in that company would be adding much value anyway, even if they had done some coaching. A case of the half-baked leading the half-baked.

Ironically, the speaker included the fatal words “Presentation Skills” in their LinkedIn profile, as one of the many skills they possess. That proved to be a very bold assertion. They were hopeless. Watching their performance and reading the profile now makes you doubt their level of expertise in the other areas they listed. Get the training and brush up your skills. It will just make such a tremendous difference.

Take every opportunity to speak in front of others because this is a brilliant way to promote your personal brand. But plan properly, practice privately and be ready to add to and build your personal brand in the business community. Getting training is a great idea because now you are lifted out of the limitations of your own organization. We all need to have the best practice, professional ruler run over our abilities and get the right level of coaching to improve.

Avoid these three errors and you will do a much better job than our speaker did. None of these ideas are rocket science, just common sense, yet supposedly "smart" people working for the megacorps get them wrong. Take some of these some ideas and apply them toward how to accentuate, rather than murder your personal brand.