Episode #27: Best Practice Women Presenters

Before we get into this week’s topic, here is what caught my attention lately.

Foreign tourist spending numbers for 2017 are showing a 17.8% increase to a record 4.42 trillion yen or 39.9 billion dollars. The numbers of tourists has surged by 19.3% to record 28.69 million. Chinese tourists are the big spenders totaling 1.69 trillion yen, compared to 574.4 billion yen from Taiwan visitors and 512.6 billion by South Korean tourists. Chinese spending is up 14.9%, Taiwan is up 9.5% and South Korea up by 43.3%. The per head Chinese tourist spend is averaging 230,000 yen compared to around 200,000 yen for visitors from the US and Europe.

This is episode number 27 and we are talking about Best Practice Women Presenters.

Soredewa ikimasho, so let's get going.

I attend lot of events in Tokyo and probably the vast majority of business audiences that I see here have a 70/30 male to female ratio. For any presenter understanding your audience is a key part of the preparation and delivery. I have noticed a few commonalities amongst the most successful women presenters in this male dominated environment here in Japan. Here is what I have seen work well for businesswomen when speaking in public.

Confidence is the overwhelming positive first impression. This is communicated in a number of ways. The voice is strong and clear. Even relatively soft female voices can become powerful enough, through using the microphone technology available today, so there is no excuse for letting a weak voice derail the presentation.

Funnily enough, many macho male businessmen seem clueless about how to use microphones. You see them actually wave off the offer of the microphone, because they have a fear or distaste of it. Now if your voice is strong and the venue not so cavernous, then that may be OK. If not or you have any concerns, spend some time with the microphone to understand how to use it properly, beforethe audience arrives. Tapping the microphone at the start of your presentation and asking your audience if they can hear you at the back is the mark of the rank amateur. Also, consider a lapel microphone or a hand microphone, as good options for mobility during your presentation.

Eye contact is another useful tool. Looking at the audience allows us to connect with them. This might sound obvious, but sometimes looking at the many faces in the crowd peering wistfully back at us may suddenly trigger nervousness and self-doubt. We can go into flight mode from our feelings of fear. The successful women I have seen in action pick out members of the audience, look straight at them and speak directly to them. They are constantly doing this throughout their entire talk. They are only holding the gaze of each person for about 6 seconds, so it is neither too short nor too intrusive. Good eye contact allows the speech to improve from being a one to many, to one to one. It is so powerful because when the speaker looks directly at us, we feel they are personally connecting with us. Compare the next speaker you see and notice where they concentrate their vision during the talk. Very few know what they are doing, so if we use our eye power correctly, we can join the ranks of the top presenters quite easily.

Looking at our laptop screens , the big screens behind us or our notes, takes our eyes off the audience. We don’t want that. We need to see the audience to ascertain whether they are buying what we are selling or not. Studying their body language, their faces helps us to read how we are doing with our audience. Are they following us, are they bored, are they in rabid disagreement? We need to know so we can adjust our delivery accordingly. Absolutely do not let some helpful venue staffer turn off the lights, so the room becomes darker. You see this all the time from people who never give presentations themselves or who are just clueless about how to make a great presentation.

In my own case, I was presenting to a visiting delegation of lubricant distributors from Vietnam and sure enough the Hotel staff member suggested to me that we turn off the lights to make the screen easier to read. No, no, no! We want the audience to see us and we want to see them. The projector technology today is very good, so we can leave the lights on and everyone can still read the screen. Especially when you are presenting to an audience in English and they are not native speakers, you want to know if you have lost them completely, whether they are following what you are saying, if you should slow down more etc,. If someone suddenly turns the lights off, stop presenting and politely request they turn them back on again. Wait until they do so.

The successful presenters want to use all of their body language to assist their communication, so they are not trapped behind the podium. Podiums can be a danger for shorter ladies. Trust me, having seen this a number of times, your carefully arranged coiffure bobbing just above the waterline of the top of the podium is not the best look. Always get there early and check the arrangements. If the podium is too high, ask for a small platform to stand on, to give yourself some air space.

Don’t apply a vice like grip to the podium, this negates our ability to use gestures to emphasis key points we want to make. Men do this all the time and they wind up peering down at the audience, because they have slumped their shoulders to get closer to the microphone. Stand up straight and bring the microphone to you not the other way around.

Standing apart from the podium, to the side or in front of it also works very well. You can turn the podium around ninety degrees, so that you can see the laptop screen and push any buttons, without having to stand behind it. When the speaker comes out from behind the podium and stands closer to us, we feel a stronger personal connection with the presenter. This is what we want to achieve.

So how do we maximize this opportunity to impress an audience and convert them to our way of thinking??

Freeing ourselves from the podium is good and powerful female presenters don’t then pace across the stage, backward and forward, showing possible nervousness. If you have ever seen a presenter endlessly wandering across the stage you find it is very distracting and after a while, just plain annoying. Professional presenters usually stand to the left side of the screen, so that the audience will look at their face, listen to their voice and then read the screen left to right. They are communicating “look at me, now look at the screen”. In this way they dominate the screen, rather than the other way around.

What successful female presenters put up on the screen is the minimum content possible, following the “less is more principle”. Think Zen garden here rather than Times Square. They see the value in having more images than text. We can speak to the image, without having to drown the screen in words.

They have one graph per screen not four and they don’t go crazy with more than two colours. They make themselves the centerpiece of the presentation, not what is put up on the screen. By contrast, Japanese male CEO screen presentations are usually totally horrible. Crowded, obtuse, ugly, impenetrable, gaudy – they may be modern day Japanese samurai businessmen but clearly no Zen is happening here.

Persuasive women demonstrate their confidence by NEVER EVER apologizing for their state of health, degree of nervousness, lack of preparation or any other excuses. I see this from the amateurs who want to burden us with excuses for their presentation quality or their condition on the day. I doubt very many men care about the speaker’s health status or any other excuses from any presenter. The successful women have worked this out and they keep their health issues etc., to themselves and want to be seen as true professionals. They don’t seek sympathy by telling us: “I am sorry, I have a cold today” or “I didn’t have enough time to put this together”. In my experience, men don’t care all that much for that type of detail and there is no particular empathy for these types of excuses.

If these successful women presenters are ever feeling anxious, they make sure not to show it. Consequently, they are taken at face value by the men in the audience and get full credit for being a business expert in their area of expertise. Men are simple. They believe what they see in front of them.

I was at a presentation recently by a visiting speaker and everything was going fine until about 5 minutes into the presentation. She started to lose it, surprisingly, she announced she was losing it and that she needed a deep breath. After a couple of repeats of this routine, she finally pulled herself together. She had done quite well at the start, telling us about her rise to success and how she did it, but at the meltdown point, as she got into her key topic, her entire credibility flew straight out the window. She damaged her personal brand beyond repair and forever.

The interesting thing is, unless she had told us, we probably would never have known she was so nervous. She didn’t look nervous or edgy at the start, so who knew? So no matter what, carry on as if it is all part of the plan. We men are not that smart or sensitive, we will never know unless you tell us. Don’t tell us!

There are plenty of professional, competent female speakers in Japan, so ladies, please take note of what is working for them and join their ranks. For the men watching today’s show all these things apply just as much to our presentations so let’s join the ranks of the competent, rather than continue to embarrass our personal and professional brands.

Action Steps

1. Know who will be your audience and prepare accordingly
2. Master the microphone technology before the audience arrives
3. Speak to your audience while looking at them, make eye contact
4. Free yourself from the podium trap
5. Dominate the screen
6. Apply “less is more” to the screen content
7. Never make excuses
8. Never show us you are nervous