• 322 Structure Counts In Presentations
    Sep 29 2024

    It is a bad sign when a presentation makes me sleepy, especially if it is at lunch time. It is very common to have speakers address a topic over a lunch to a group of attendees. After lunch, you might explain away a bit of the drowsiness, but during the lunch is a warning sign. The speaker had good voice strength, so nobody was struggling to hear him. He was knowledgeable on his subject having worked in this area for a number of years. He was speaking about what his firm does everyday, so he is living the topic. So what went wrong?

    Thinking back to the talk, I wondered whether his structure was the issue? When a speech doesn’t flow well, the audience has to work hard. Actually, they choose not to work hard and instead just drop out and escape from you. This was one of those cases.

    If we think about giving a speech, we have to plan it well. In his case, he had prepared slides, but the style of the lunch and the venue meant it was a no slide deck presentation. He had some side notes written down on his laptop screen to follow. That is fine for the speaker, because it aids navigation through the topics. The problem was that the points were not ordered or structured well. This made it hard to follow, as it tended to jump around, rather than flow.

    We design our talks from the idea spark. In one sentence, we need to isolate out what is the key point we want to make to our audience. This is not easy, but the act of refining the topic gives us clarity. We create the opening last, because its role is to break into the brains of the audience and capture their full attention for what is coming.

    The middle bits between opening and closing is where the design part comes in. Think of the sections like chapters in a book. The chapters need to be in a logical order that is easy to follow. They need to link to each other so that the whole thing flows. To create the chapters we take our central conclusion and ask why is that true? The answers will come from the points of evidence or our experiences. We need to get these down and then get them in order.

    It might be a simple structure like “ this is what happened in the past, this is where we are today and this is where we are going in the future”. We could use a macro-micro split. This is the big picture and here are the details of the components. It could be advantage-disadvantage. We investigate the plusses and minuses of what we are proposing. It could be taking the key points of evidence and breaking them down to make each a chapter in its own right.

    The key is in the sequencing. What is the logical flow here to move from one chapter to the next? We need a bridge between chapters to set up what is coming next and to tell our audience we are changing the focus. We need to constantly loop each chapter back to what is the central point. We can’t just put out evidence and leave it there, expecting the listener to work it out themselves. We have to tell them why this is important, what it means for them and how they can use it.

    Visuals on screen do assist in this process. It does make it easier to follow because we are hitting more points of stimulus with our audience. When we don’t have slides, we need to use word pictures to draw the audience into our topic. I am struggling to recall any stories he told about the topic, which is the best place to create those word pictures.

    So break the talk up before you go anywhere near the slide construction. What is the point you want to make? What are the reasons for that and turn them into chapter headings. Check that the flow of the chapters is logical and easy to follow. Then create a blockbuster opening to grab attention. If our speaker had spent more time on the design then the talk would have been more accessible to the audience. Get that wrong in this Age Of Distraction and you have lost them immediately.

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    10 mins
  • 321 Servicing Customers Well
    Sep 23 2024
    All interfaces with the customer are designed by people. It can be on-line conversations with robots or in store interactions, but the driving force behind all of these activities are the people in our employ. The way people think and act is a product of the culture of the organisation. That culture is the accountability of senior management. The common success point of organisations is to have the right culture in place, that best serves the customer. The success of senior management in making all of that work is a combination of their leadership, people and communication skills. This sounds infinitely reasonable in theory, but the reality is often so different. Senior leaders, who themselves are not particularly people focused, expect their customer interaction designers and in store staff to be customer focused. They don't walk the talk themselves and what is worse, they don't see the contradiction. They haven't worked out yet that good customer service begins with good employee service. Love your staff and they will love your customers. Richard Branson is widely referenced with his philosophy of employees first, customers second. His idea is to produce the right mental framework for employees to then put the customer first. Our emotions lead our behaviors, which determines our performance. Fine, love all of that, but how do we get it right? Leadership has to be clearly understood by the leaders. It is not a function of rank or longevity in the organisation. Instead, it is a function of the degree of cooperation we can get from our team. We might believe things are rolling out beautifully, in a pre-ordained way, in relation to how we treat the customer. Sadly, the front-line customer experience with our service could be entirely different from how the leaders planned it and how they want it. To get that employee cooperation to buy into what we believe is the correct way forward, we need to have well developed people and communication skills. We also need to make sure that our middle managers also have those same skills. We could be doing things really well up at the top of the organisation, but our middle managers may be sabotaging the culture we want to build and we just do not see it. If we want sincerity to be a function of our customer service, then, as an organisation, we have be sincere. If we want customers to feel appreciated, we have to appreciate our staff and do it in a sincere way. People can spot fake from a mile away. If we spend all of our time finding errors and faults, we may miss the things that are being done well, which we can communicate that we appreciate. We might want many things in business such as personal success, greater revenues, reduced costs etc. We can only achieve these things through others: either our own staff or our customers. They may however want different things. We have to find the means to appeal to our staff and customers such that they want what we want. This is not manipulation. This is well developed people and communication skills. The trust is created and we lead others, to also want what we want. As Zig Ziglar famously noted, we can get whatever we want in this life, if we help enough other people get what they want. To create that trust we have to be genuinely interested in others. This starts with our staff because we want them to be genuinely interested in our customer. When they do this, they build the trust with the buyer and a bond that is very difficult to break. If we don't demonstrate this genuine interest in our staff, we are not building the culture where they will naturally pass this feeling on to the customer. There is an old Chinese saying that, “a man who cannot smile should not open a shop”. Yet in modern business, we have plenty of people floating around who don't smile. It could be the very top executives who are too serious to smile at their staff. They set up a culture that is dry and remote, but expect that at the interface with the customer, there will be an emotional connection with the brand. They just don't see the miscalculation and self-delusion involved here. Bosses are often poor listeners, who imagine that their front line staff are all doing an excellent job of listening to the customer. What if that is not the case? If the bosses want to create a culture of good listening habits, then starting with themselves is a reasonable idea. When we listen, we learn more than we already know. This is so important when dealing with the customer. We need to make sure we have a culture of good questioning skills to trigger the opportunity for the customer to talk to us. In these conversations we can better come to understand what would be best for the customer and how to properly service them. One of the frustrating things about training salespeople is the difficulty of getting them to stop focusing solely on what they want (bonuses, ...
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    17 mins
  • The Easy Way Of Selling
    Sep 15 2024
    The object of a sale is to exchange a good or a service for money. The degree to which that money can exceed the variable and fixed costs associated with delivering it, determines the success and longevity of the company. We all know that nothing happens in business without a sale. If that is the case then salespeople have a critical role to produce as much revenue as possible for the firm. There are prices set for goods and services. Goods are tangible items and plotting the costs and the margin of profit are relatively straight forward. Buy low and sell high is an old business maxim. Services are more difficult to price because they are intangibles. In both cases, the value proposition of the price against what is being delivered, is the communication piece that salespeople have to master in order to be successful. Imagine my surprise, as an expert in sales training, when I meet salespeople who have not spent even one second trying to master the bridging of the gap between value and cost. Sitting in the audience at a speaker event, next to a thirtyish Japanese sale’s guy, I was astounded by a few things he said as we discussed selling over lunch. I was interested in hearing what his sales process was. He didn’t really understand my question because he had no defined process. He had been selling for this firm for seven years so he was an experienced salesperson. He contacts a lead, gets an appointment, shows up and explains the service and submits a quote, he told me. Really? On the blank side of meal menu, I mapped out the elements of the sales process for him. Prepare for the meeting and focus your intention on one thing – getting the re-order, not just the solitary sale. Build trust through establishing rapport. Create interest by asking extremely well designed questions to understand the client’s needs. Now tell the client whether we can help them or not and if we can, explain the how of our solution. There may be points of insufficient clarity, concerns, hesitations or downright objections to what we are proposing. We need to deal with those before we proceed to ask for the order, and then we do the follow up to deliver the service or good. He was impressed by this structural approach to the sales call, as he should have been, because he was certainly doing it the hard way. Having a roadmap makes the whole process much easier for both buyer and seller. I then asked him what does he do when the buyer says, “too expensive”. With a cherubic mien, he told me he offered to “drop the price”. Incredulous, I asked “by how much do you usually drop it?”. He quoted 20% as the number. There were four other sales people in his team and if that is how they roll over there, then that is an expensive first response to client pushback on pricing. He was an experienced guy, but that was the best he could come up with. Why would that be? He didn’t have any other knowledge about how to deal with that type of situation. Do you think price comes up fairly regularly in sales conversations with buyers? Of course it does, so how could this continue like this, as if it were acceptable. He should have said, “why do you say that” when told it was too expensive? Was the price objection genuine, a ruse, sport negotiation, time bound, or irrelevant because they haven’t seen enough value yet to understand the price point? There will be one highest priority element in the too expensive objection. It might be the actual volume of cash involved, budget allocation timings, internal competing project competition concerns, etc. Which one is it – we need to know. I have been told “too expensive”, which I recognise is a short form summary of a host of reasons for not proceeding. When I questioned the why, it was a “budget issue”. Now as sale’s professionals we have to dig deeper, “why is it a budget issue?”. “Because that number will exceed our budget allocation for that quarter”. That means it is not too expensive after all. It is just too expensive if paid in one quarter, but fully capable of purchase if the payments are split across quarters. Except you would never know that, if your response was to drop your price by 20%. Would you be willing to help the client out and split the payments across quarters? I would guess you would prefer that to having to drop your price. The moral of this story is to take a very detailed look at what your salespeople are doing. Don’t confuse seven years of sales experience with one year of experience seven times. Also, don’t imagine that they have a process, that they know how to explain the value or to deal with objections. Based on what we see in our sales training classes and talking with clients, in Japan, the chances of that being the case are very low.
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    13 mins
  • The Power Of Rhetorical Questions
    Sep 8 2024
    Questions in general are powerful tools for speakers. They bring focus to key points we want to get across. They are particularly useful in getting our audience engaged. They also have danger within them. Knowing when to use questions and what types of questions to use are things which must be worked out in the planning of the presentation and shouldn’t be done on the fly. If you want to get yourself into trouble then ask the wrong question, at the wrong time, in the wrong way and brace yourself for the reaction. There is a cadence to any talk or presentation and in the planning phase we can break the delivery down to five minute blocks. It doesn’t have to be five, it could be four or six, but five minutes is a long enough time to go deep with a thought, idea or imparting some information without losing the concentration of the audience. Actually, audience concentration spans are a nightmare today. They have become so short and everyone has become addicted to multitasking. Even if they are enjoying the presentation, they are scrolling through their screens right in front of you anyway, without any hint of shame. This is the new normal folks. We will face this problem forever and we are never going back to the good old days of people politely listening to us right through our presentations. This is why we need to be switching up the presentation every five minutes or so, to keep the audience intrigued with what we are presenting. This is where great information or insights really help. The audience access to something new or valuable will pry them away from their phone screens for a few minutes longer. We will need to be using the full range of our vocal delivery skills to keep them with us. Any hint of a monotone delivery and the hand held screens will light up and be blazing throughout the room. Questions are an additional assist to break through the competing focus for audience attention. By simply asking a well constructed question we can grab audience attention. Even a simple question can work. If I suddenly asked you, “What month were you born in?”, you will return your attention to me from wherever you were straying. In our talk, we may have been waffling along taking about some pressing issue or downloading some precious data, losing our listeners in the process. However, when we lob in a question, we magically get all eyes back on us. We have now gotten the audience thinking about the point we have raised. The downside with asking questions though is people in the audience want to answer them. They see the question as a great opportunity for them to intervene in the proceedings. They may have a counterview and enjoy the chance to debate with us. They may have their own personal agenda and this break in the traffic is perfect for them to weigh in with what they think. They may even get into debates amongst themselves and exclude us entirely. Within no time at all, the proceedings have been hijacked and we are no longer in control of the agenda. This is where rhetorical questions are so handy. They give us the ability to capture the mental attention of our audience on the topic we are discussing, get them engaged, but we maintain control. A rhetorical question and a real question are identical. The audience cannot distinguish one from the other. This is good, because we can keep them guessing. What we want them thinking about is whether this is a question they have to answer and are they ready to do that or is this a rhetorical question and all they have to do is listen? The difference between the two is the timing of the break before our next contribution. If we stop there and invite answers then they know it is time to speak up. If we leave a pregnant pause, but then answer the question or add to it, then they know they are not being required to contribute. The key point here is to design the questions into the talk at the start. In those five minute blocks we need to have little attractions to keep interest. They might be powerful visuals, great storytelling, vocal range for effect or rhetorical questions. The key is to have variety planned from the start. In a 40 minute speech, apart from the opening and the closings, there are going to be 5-6 chances to grab strong attention. At the start we can use vocal range and visuals but as we get to the middle and toward the end, we need to bring in the bigger guns as people’s concentration begins to fade out. We can’t flog the audience with a series of rhetorical questions and wear them down. We can maybe get in two or maximum three in a forty minute presentation. Any activity we repeat with our audience gets boring very fast. Anything that smacks of manipulation absolutely gets the wrong response. There is a fine line to be walked here. We do want to control the agenda, the debate, the timing, the attention of the listeners, without appearing ...
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    13 mins
  • Leaders Who Have R.E.A.L.
    Sep 1 2024

    We love acronyms! Our workplaces are thriving with them such that we can hold extended conversations composed entirely of seemingly impenetrable codes. They are handy though and this one R.E.AL. is short and serviceable to describe best practice leadership attributes. It always good to have evidence around pontification. This summary of the great and the good tendencies amongst leaders is based on research we did in the USA, on what respondents thought leaders needed to do to be more successful. REAL is composed of these key elements – Reliable, Empathetic, Aspirational and Learner.

    “Reliable” is an obvious choice and though much upheld in principle, tends to break down in practice. “Managing upwards” is a buzzword for describing how to deal with one’s boss. It used to be called “sucking up to the boss” to get ahead. Climbing the greasy pole meant taking all the glory for yourself, Teflon-like blaming others for mistakes and stepping on the bodies of your staff, to elevate your own brilliant career.

    Reliable however is an attribute that leads to trust only when the staff observe that what is said is actually done, that promises are kept and that their own personal development is being given a high priority. “What is in it for me” is a common human frailty. Bosses who keep this in mind when making sure the organisation and individual goals of their staff are aligned, get more loyalty and more accomplished. Misunderstandings arise, usually traced back to poor communication. More work need by bosses!

    “Empathetic” is closely linked to listening skills. Taking the viewpoint of the other person is difficult if we don’t know what that viewpoint is. The Japanese expression kuki wo yomu or summing up the real situation, is a great phrase to explain emphathy. What is being said is important but more often, what isn’t being said is where all the insight is buried.

    Busy bosses though don’t have much time to get below the surface calm of the workplace. Some don’t care – just get me the numbers – or else! Using our position power works up to a point but we miss out on a lot of creative potential as the opportunity cost. If we want to know what is really going on and what people are really thinking, we have to spend time and work at it. Expressing we actually do care is also another orphan amongst communication skills. Successful bosses have good awareness and confidence to communicate they really do care about their people.

    “Aspirational” reflects ideas about grasping the bigger picture. Hovering above the melee of the everyday to see the vision to be realised on the far horizon. It means communicating beyond this quarter’s goals and placing each individual’s role in terms of their contribution to the bigger goal. The framed glass protects the vision statement, ceremoniously hung on the wall. While it may not fade in the sunlight, it fades in the collective memory. No one can recite it, let along live it, so it is as meaningful as the flower arrangement on the reception desk. Pleasant enough idea but ephemeral. The leader has to inject the ideas and concepts involved into terms that resonate with each person individually. This takes time, which is why so few organisations get any return on their investment in their vision statement.

    “Learning” gets nods of approval but many executives have had one year of experience thirty times rather than thirty years of experience. Their views are still locked away in a mental vault, for which they have lost the key. Too busy to learn. Busy, busy working in their business, rather than on their business. They are up to date on Facebook but way behind where the industry is headed and where their company needs to go. Well informed yet ignorant, because they lack perspective and acuity. If we aren’t prepared to permanently kill our darlings, our favoured ideas and concepts, we must be prepared to risk falling behind, trampled by our competitors.

    REAL, another acronym heaven dweller, is easy to remember and that at least is a start to actually realising its power. We know all of these things – we just forget or get too busy to do them. Let’s change that.

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    11 mins
  • Project Team Leadership
    Aug 25 2024

    Projects are too common. Because of this we take them for granted, seeing them as part of everyday work, but we don’t approach them properly. We usually gather the team together and then dive straight into the details of the project, without really applying a professional approach. We certainly don’t apply as much planning expertise to the task as we should, as we wade straight into the mechanics of the execution. Why is that? Poor leadership and lack of skills make for dangerous dance partners, as the team launches forth rocking and rolling with no strategy and little expertise.

    Often, there is no existing documented planning process in place. This can be rather ironic because often the projects are repeated or very similar projects are undertaken. Templates and structure are missing so everyone just wings it, making it up as they go along, re-inventing the wheel.

    The goals of the project are often vague. This is a lack of direction from the top leadership to those tasked with doing the work. The project leader has to push back and manage upwards, seeking clear reasons for the WHY of the project and then make sure everyone involved in the team understands the WHY.

    Project scope creep is like a cancer that can kill the project, denying it success. The project begins with vague boundaries around what is to be done. In quick order, either external parties or the team themselves, become like Emus and are attracted by bright shiny objects. Very quickly the additional tasks multiply but the time frame and the resources committed to the project do not change. This never ends well.

    The implementation strategy regarding roles, budgets, timelines and follow-up is weak or non-existent. Well, when you are having fun and winging it, you are super busy getting on with the actual work, so no strategy needed. Later things go wrong because timelines were not clear nor properly planned. The resources do not turn up at the required timing or the sequencing of the work is found to be skewwhiff, so there are delays you cannot easily cover or resolve.

    You quickly find that people, rather than logistics, are the trickiest part of project leadership. All the coolest project management software and sophisticated systems in the world won’t save you from people problems. You may not have been able to match the project team resource with the skill sets required and you have to make do with what you have. There may be incompatible working styles in the team and you are now also chief psychologist, in addition to team project leader, spending a lot of time and energy dealing with staff or division conflicts.

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    12 mins
  • Minimalist Presenting
    Aug 18 2024
    Zen study is a way to strip out all of the non-essentials in life. The noise, the distraction, the things that are not so important. People sit around concentrating on their breath cycle or one word or any number of other methods to quiet the mind. They are seeking to get more clarity about themselves and what are their real priorities. As presenters, this is a good metaphor for when we are in front of people speaking. You would think with all those thousands of years of Zen in Japan, in art, in design, in temples, gardens, in history etc., that the Japanese people would be legends of simplicity and clarity when presenting. Not true! Presenting as an idea only came to Japan around 160 years ago. Fukuzawa Yukichi who founded Keio University and who graces the 10,000 yen bank note, launched public speaking in Japan in the Meiji period. There is still an enzetsukan or speech hall preserved on the grounds of Keio University, where presumably the first public speeches were given. Western society plumbs the wisdom of ancient Greece and Rome, parliaments allowing debate and Hollywood for models on speech giving. Japan has no traditional home grown role model. If the authorities needed you to know anything in old japan, a notice board would have it written there for you. No shogunal oratory from the castle walls to the assembled masses. No Mel Gibson Braveheart style speeches before vanquishing the foe in battle. Japan bypassed all of that until Fukuzawa Yukichi decided this was another area of modernization that needed implementation in Japan, like wearing ties, boots, hats and petticoats. Of course there were no slide decks in those days, but Japan certainly was an early adopter of the technology for giving presentations – the overhead projector, the slide projector, the modern light weight projector, large screen monitors, electronic pointers, etc. Any venue you go to in Japan will be bristling with cool tech gear. Interestingly, the content on the speaker’s screen will also be bristling. There will be 10 graphs on the one page, lurid diagrams employing 6 or more vivid colours, numerous lines of text so small you could use it for an optometrist’s eyesight test chart. Where has the zen gone? To be an effective presenter, we don’t need any tech or screens or props or gizmos. We can just speak to the audience and enjoy being the full focus of their attention. As a result of this visual conflagration, many speakers are competing for attention with what is being displayed on the screen. Company representatives love to play the video of their firm or product or service. They can be quite slick, the joy of the marketing department. They are the pit into which a chunk of money was thrown for the production company, directors, designers, film and sound crew, talents and innumerable others who all got a slice of the pie. The question to ask though is does this video actually assist the speaker to make the key point under consideration. Often they are like eye candy, but are not on point to the main argument. Unless it strongly reinforces your message dump it. It will only be competition for you the speaker and it will suck up valuable time which could be spent better with you as the main focus. I saw Ken Done, a well known Australian artist, give a talk in Japan many years ago. He has a very unique visual painting style. He moved around from behind the lectern, stood next to it and just spoke about his art to the audience. It was very engaging because it was so intimate. The Japanese audience loved it. There was only one source of stimulation for the audience and that was Ken Done. This is what we want – to be the center of our audience’s world for the next thirty or forty minutes. Don’t use a slide deck unless there is something in that content and presentation on screen which really helps bring home your argument. If it is for information purposes, then that will work well. If you are there to persuade, then you will be so much more powerful if all the attention is concentrated on one point and that point needs to be you. In this case we have stripped away all the visual noise, so we have to fill the void with word pictures. We need to transport the audience to a place where they can see what we are talking about, in their mind’s eye. If you have ever read the novel after seeing the movie, you find yourself transported visually to the scenes from the movie, as you read the novel’s pages. This is the same idea. We have to usher the audience to a place, time and situation that we are describing in words, in such a way that visually they can imagine it. We don’t always have to have slides or visuals. We are the message, so let’s manufacture the situation so that we are the center piece of the proceedings and all eyes and ears are on us, totally focused on every word we say. We need to Zen our way to speaking and presenting ...
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    12 mins
  • Project Management Fundamentals
    Aug 11 2024

    Projects have been around for a long time of course and in the modern era we have accumulated a vast amount of best practice on how to manage them. It isn’t usually that we don’t know what to do, it is that we don’t actually do it. We get into trouble when we just leap in and dig straight into the logistical entrails, without giving enough thought to a macro 360 degree view of what is involved. We see this tendency all the time. Any group of people given a project task go straight into the gruesome detail. In project planning, a pinch of planning goes an extremely long way. Having a common and clear set of rules helps to ensure we are all approaching the project in the same vein.

    Here are ten rules for ensuring that what needs to get done is completed on time and to expectations.

    1. Mind our business. Keep our eye on the ball, especially defining what is inside and outside the project scope. This often changes mid-steam so we need to be nimble and adjust accordingly.
    2. Know the customer’s requirements. Double check you have properly understood the detail, document it and keep checking against that documented record, especially if there are changes needed.
    3. Plan well. The plan will cover the scope, schedule, cost, approach etc. Involve task owners to gain buy-in and apply a strong reality check to what you have created. Strangely, the planning value comes from the creation process and not just the project outcome. It forces some hard thinking, tough prioritisations, player commitments, clear controls, smooth coordination and cooperation. Basically, the things at which most companies are usually rubbish.
    4. Build a great team with strong ownership. Motivation of the team is critical, so we need total clarity around the WHY, trust, communication, sufficient resources and mutually agreed deadlines.
    5. Track progress. Frequent reviews, wide visibility, broad communication and clear goals are needed. There are hard and soft aspects to most projects, so ensure we don’t overlook the soft skills needed to succeed.
    6. Use baseline controls. These are the fundamental building blocks against which we steer the project forward and against which we alter course when needed.
    7. Write it, share it, save it. Here is the Holy Grail of project management – write it down - if it isn’t written down it doesn’t exist. Document procedures, plans, evolving designs. Baseline controls are compared against the preserved records. Repeatable projects especially need this record, to which are added the fresh set of insights and learnings of the current project.
    8. Test it. Jumping into new territories with both feet can be high risk. Better to develop test cases early to help with understanding and verification of what is required to succeed. Resources and time are the most often underestimated elements, so an early testing helps to flush out the gaps.
    9. Ensure customer satisfaction. Make the customer’s real needs the prism through which everything is viewed. Undetected changes in customer requirements or not focusing on the customer’s business needs can in fact blow up in our face.
    10. Be pro-active. Be proactive in applying these principles and in identifying and solving problems as they arise. Review and search for problems, knowing there are people dedicated to hiding issues. Vigilance is a virtue we all need to practice when working on projects, especially anticipating trouble before it arises or becomes too explosive.
    11. Stop the same old, same old and take a fresh look at your methodology for approaching projects. It seems so simple, but it can simply go wrong so easily. You might be surprised at how loose and inefficient your current methodology is. We can always do better and these ten rules will help us on that journey.

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    11 mins