Ep 15 How to Change Your Corporate Presentation Culture

Do you have a corporate culture or organizational culture where all the speeches, all the presentations are generally awful, boring? Would you like to change not just your speech or one speech, but the entire culture? I'm going to show you how.

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public, to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

This is something I hear about all the time from all of my clients. Doesn't matter if they work for small governments, big governments, small companies, big companies, United nations organizations, it doesn't matter what country or continent they're from. Everybody says the same thing, which is tj. The culture in our organization is just everyone's a bad speaker. Everyone does a boring dump, data dump. Everyone is sort of going through slides. People in the audience are sort of half listening. Meanwhile they're checking email and sort of only giving a little bit of attention and ah, yeah, yeah. And it's just awful. What can I do? There is a solution, but I have to tell you, it's not particularly difficult. It's not expensive, but it does involve taking people out of their comfort zone. The biggest change is not about using some expensive new piece of technology. It's simply a mindset change. And part of it is just definitional. If you tell yourself a presentation is a deck, a slideshow deck, a PowerPoint presentation, a series of bullet points on a Word document that is to be emailed back and forth for approval. If you tell yourself that is the presentation, well, the game is over, friends. You've already lost. You have guaranteed mediocrity for everyone in your entire culture. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but it is reality. If you tell yourself the presentation is the deck, then the deck is stacked against you and you are guaranteed failure. So let's start off with basic definitions. I'm going to use the terms interchangeably. Speech, presentation, talk, boardroom presentation, formal presentation, all of these are just words for when you're having to talk to people to convey some idea that isn't just about chit chat, about last night's game or the Voice TV show in a business setting, a government organizational setting. It happens all the time. And the question is, how are you going to be effective? Most people think a speech is an opportunity to just start gathering lots and lots of facts and data, putting it on a PowerPoint slide. Again, that is not a presentation. It may be a part of one, but the presentation is literally you or some person talking. You could be standing, you could be sitting, but the presentation is you actually presenting. Words are coming out of your Mouth. If it's just emailing a document that's not a presentation, stay at home in your pajamas and just write and text people all day long. But that's not what gets people nervous. Generally that's not what bores people. Because if someone's emailing you a document and it's boring, you can just hit delete. No more boredom. You can start reading it. If you're distracted, put it down and come back to it. So I want to talk about when someone is actually speaking, typically in the same room, often standing. If that is what you're worried about, if that's what you're thinking is awful or boring, there is a solution. And here it is. It starts from the top. This is kind of a top down solution and forgive me apologies for those who say this is authoritarian and, and somehow anti democratic. I guarantee you, if you could have a vote and ask people, do you want everyone else in the company to have to do it this way? They would say yes. Here's the solution that I'm offering. No one will ever be allowed to give a presentation again in your organization until they have recorded a practice of their presentation on video, looked at it and redone it until they are happy with it and then they send it to their boss for final approval. Now I can tell you vast, vast, vast majority, 99.999% of companies don't do this. You know what? Most people are very dissatisfied with the level of presentation skill displayed in their organization. And it's because no one has ever looked at their speech, them giving it. So when someone is giving a presentation in front of that Monday morning staff meeting or that quarterly board meeting, they're literally stating it for the first time. So they have no idea how they're coming across. It's way too much data. It's a boring data dump. And it's their rough track because they're saying it for the first time. Well, you're guaranteeing that it's going to be awful when you do it that way. And yet that is the de facto mode of communication, process and control in most corporations. Now you may have gone back and forth on the draft of the slides and had legal debating it and you've changed the font, you've sent it out to graphic experts and you may have done $15,000 worth of billable hours processing that slide deck. Complete waste of money unless your goal is to put everyone to sleep. Again, I'm not anti slides. Some of my best friends are slides. I use slides and presentations from time to Time. But that isn't your presentation. So if you want to change the culture and you're a boss, you can do it like that. You just tell your employees you are not allowed to ever give a presentation. You will not give a presentation unless you sent a video to me in advance and you've looked at it and you're happy with it. Now, how do you actually do that? I'll tell you in just a moment.

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So how are you going to get your employees to do this? They'll say, well, we don't have a TV crew here. We're not a production company. Yes, you are. Pull out a cell phone. Every smartphone has a video recorder on it. These days you're not looking for a video that's so great that you're going to send it to clients or post it on the Internet. All you're looking for is video where that individual person can see themselves speaking and hear them, and you can watch it and see it and hear it as well. That's all you're looking for. So they can use any webcam, an iPad, a cell phone. It really doesn't matter. The whole learning moment is if someone is forced to practice their speech and they were going to do some big boring data dump and you force them to watch it and they actually look at it, here's the response they're going to get. Oh, my God, this is so awful. This is so boring. I can't subject people to this. And it will force them to redo, will force them to refine their presentation, make it more interesting. Now, first few times they do this, they may stay up till two in the morning trying to figure out how to get it better. And they may hate you for that, but when they give the presentation, they'll like you and appreciate it and more important, the audience. And if you're in the audience, you're going to like it a lot more because you're going to actually see somebody who's more comfortable, more confident, more familiar with the stuff and isn't tremendously boring. That's really what's most important.

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So as this is being broadcast to you, those of you are watching a different time. It is the beginning of a new year, but when it comes to speaking, it can be the middle of July. You might as well think of it as it's time to start with something new and fresh. So that does bring Me to the question that I have for you.

A question for you.

The question I have. Are you willing to require, not request, but to require employees who report to you to send you a video of their next presentation? Because I guarantee you, I would say guarantee your money back, but you're not paying for this job. I do guarantee you that if you do this, you'll get some grumbling, you'll get some complaints from your employees. You know, I'm already overworked. You know, Smithers, clients coming in from Chicago, it's not a good. People will come up with all sorts of excuses. You'll be amazed at the creativity of your team when you start listening to their excuses as to why they can't record themselves. They're all liars. Sorry, but it's like listening to me tell my wife why I can't clean the garage. Oh, it's a busy week, I've got to travel. I can come up with all sorts of excuses. The bottom line is I'm lazy when it comes to cleaning up my garage. And it might not be laziness specifically, but it's a combination of being insecure, not wanting to try new things, and not wanting to face the reality of watching your own speech. That's what's keeping your employees from doing this. So if you say please, if it's convenient, or I prefer. I'd like you to. I strongly recommend that you practice on video if you have time. Believe me, absolutely nobody is going to send you a video of their presentation. It's just not going to happen. Now, if you want to sweeten the pot, what I would recommend is you send all of them a video of your presentation. Because if you're having to present to the board of directors and all of your direct reports are presenting, let's show some leadership here. Let's practice what we preach. I try to practice what I preach. If I'm giving a speech, I guarantee you there's virtually nothing out of my mouth that I haven't seen myself say on video. I might not necessarily rehearse that entire speech numerous times, but it's because I'm using stories, messages, vignettes, examples that I've used many times on video and that I've seen myself. So I know how I'm coming across. It doesn't mean it's perfect, doesn't mean everyone will love me, but I know how I'm coming across, and I know it's the best I can do. And I know exactly how I'm coming across. That's the beauty of practicing on video, it is within your power. Do not let them off book by saying there's no time. One of the ways you can do this institutionally is to require that the script or the talking points or the PowerPoint slide has to be finished 72 hours or at least 48 hours before it is to be delivered. So you then have a very specific window of time for there to be practice rehearsal on video. Because if you don't do this, the supply of time fills up with work and people will be working till 7:59 in the morning on the deck and rewriting bullet points and slides. If the deck has to be delivered in a presentation at 8am that day, if you give people the option, it's infinitely easier to be typing, let's change this comma, let's change this font, change this color of this background. Complete, utter waste of time. And it's just an excuse to not do what's really important, which is practice on video. So that's my other big recommendation to people, is you've got to mandate a specific time for the messages to be gathered, the slides to be finished, and then you have to require, I hate to sound coercive and like some dictator, I just don't know how else to do it. You have to require, require your colleagues to send you the video of their presentation that they're already happy with. And if you can tell they're reading and it's blah, blah, blah and it's monotone, you got to write back to them or call them and say, you really looked at this and you're happy with it. Because quite often people say, oh, I didn't look at it. Well, if you're not willing to look at your own speech, why do you think anyone else would want to? So it doesn't do any good if they just record it on video once. It only works if they record it, watch it, figure out what they like, don't like, keep doing it until they like it. If you do that, you will very, very quickly change your corporate culture. Meetings are going to be a lot more interesting to go to. And when your people are speaking outside of the company, trade industry, other executives, prospective employees, everyone is going to like you more, be more impressed with. The organization will just seem to be a more interesting place. So that is my suggestion on how to change your corporate culture when it comes to presentation skills. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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