Fail to prepare; prepare to fail.
Anon.
The deadline approaches and you finally sit down with a pad in front of you, determined to start preparing your talk, unable to find any more excuses for putting it off. You search for inspiration and desperately seek an opening line. If you’re preparing for a large meeting, you may skim through a book of jokes because humor is supposed to “warm up” the audience, but nothing seems appropriate. You may try three or four different opening paragraphs which all end up in the wastepaper bin. I’m not surprised, because you are starting in the wrong place.
Before you start a journey, you need to know where you are heading and where you want to get to — in other words, what is your destination? Later, you choose a path to reach this destination, but if you don’t know where you are going, it is difficult to decide how to get there.
Setting an objective for your talk is like choosing a destination. Before you even consider what you want to say, you must ask yourself why am I speaking? What do you want to achieve? How do you want your listeners to feel when you have finished? What is the reaction you most want from your audience? Allow yourself to daydream on the ideal outcome of your talk. Don’t worry about whether it’s likely, or even possible. At this stage, simply identify what you want to accomplish.
Sometimes my clients find it difficult to pinpoint exactly
what they want to achieve. They tell me, “I’m speaking because it’s the Annual Sales Conference — I’m speaking because I’ve been told to —I’m speaking because I am the Chairman —I’m speaking because it’s my turn,” and so on. If you are unsure of how to identify your objectives, here are some pointers.
Start with general objectives
General objectives fall into the following categories:
• To inform/teach/train.
• To stimulate/motivate/inspire.
• To persuade/convince/sell.
• To explore/debate/negotiate.
• To amuse/entertain.
Writing down your objective in clear, precise terms is often difficult, but if you refer to the general objectives, they may help you. Remember that you will sometimes need to combine several objectives. When I speak to the personnel director of a large company about my training courses, my objective is to sell training to him. However, I also inform him of the content of the courses, inspire him with stories of previous successes, motivate him by showing him how economical our training is in comparison with other companies, persuade him with logical arguments and even shame him by pointing out how poorly his staff perform compared with those in other companies. Remember that one general objective should predominate: don’t confuse yourself with a mixture of too many general objectives, but always aim to include some entertainment.
When you write out your objective, remember it must be specific but also achievable. If your objective is to convince your boss you should have a company car (which may be an achievable objective), don’t insist that it should be a Rolls- Royce (probably an unachievable objective).
Recently I was advising a hospital manager on a speech she was gicing to a convention of doctors. She was concerned that she had nothing new to say and that she would bore her audience. She was unable to find the means to straighten out a jumble of thoughts until I asked her what changes in their
behavior she would like to inspire. Suddenly she saw how she could prepare a very passionate speech on doctors’ attitudes toward nursing staff. Once she had an objective her thoughts became directed and fell into a logical sequence. When she had decided her destination, she was able to choose her route to it.
Another client, a managing director, annually “addressed the troops” (his words). Each year he spoke for twenty minutes and although for many of his staff this was the only occasion when they saw him, most of them considered it to be a boring waste of time. I asked him how he would like his staff to feel after he had spoken. For some time he talked vaguely of motivation and productivity 7 and feeling happy at work and finally he said he wanted them to understand how much he genuinely needed them. We then started to look at how he could achieve this. He had a destination so he could start examining the various paths that might lead there.
You may be saying to yourself that’s all very well for anyone who needs to speak in public, but you only need to speak at internal meetings. I suggest that before your next meeting, you set aside a few minutes to think about objectives and answer the question, what do you want to accomplish by speaking? Is it to convince a colleague that your ideas are better than his? Do you want to stimulate a sales force? Maybe you want to impress your boss. Be honest and find your real objective. It should be:
• Written down.
• Specific.
• Achievable.
Where’s the action?
As you set out your objective, be sure to identify exactly what you want to achieve and how you will measure whether or not you have been successful. Sometimes an action will follow. In selling, you know you have achieved your objective when the customer agrees to buy. But you also can have a fall-back position or a secondary objective; you may not make a sale, but your customer gives you the names of several companies who
might be interested in your product. Your boss may not agree to a company car immediately, but does agree to your having one in six months.
You may find that identifying the action that you want from your listeners helps you to set an objective. Recently I was talking to a manager who had been asked to speak at a convention which was to be attended by politicians, members of the press and senior representatives of his industry. As he was uncertain as to what he should say, I asked what he would like them to do as a result of what he had said. He found lots of actions, so he started from the action and worked backwards. To identify the action, you must ask yourself how you want people to behave or what you want people to do after they have heard you speak. An office supervisor may identify the action that he requires as “a decrease in the number of telephone calls which are put through to the wrong extension.” His objectives might eventually look like this:
• To instruct the switchboard operators on the new telephone equipment.
• To motivate them to take pride in their job so that fewer phone calls are put through to the wrong extension.
When you have completed this first stage of your preparation, you should have a clear and concisely written objective which answers the question:
Why am I speaking and what do I want the outcome to be?
You might be tempted to skip this step as it can be time- consuming to write a succincdy worded objective which is achievable and honest. But the time and effort you spend on objective setting now will be saved later on in your preparation, as it 11 be easier to select material and identify key points.
Now that you’ve identified your destination, who are you going to take with you on your journey? You are not ready to choose
a path until you know more about your fellow travelers, because paths which may be suitable for one group may be inappropriate for another, so that you lose them before you reach your destination.
I have no way of knowing if you are reading this book because you need to speak at departmental meetings with eight people or whether you anticipate addressing a conference of 80 or 800. So for the rest of this book, I’m going to use the word audience to describe anyone who is listening to you speak. You may feel that a group of your workmates doesn’t constitute an audience, but if you are speaking to them at a business meeting, that is exactly what they are.
Whether your audience is large or small, if you’re going to be an effective speaker, you must find out as much as possible about them. I wonder if you have ever had the experience of listening to a talk where nothing the speaker said was relevant to you? You found the material unoriginal and self-evident, and from the shuffling and inattentive audience, you judged they felt the same as you. Let me tell you that there was probably nothing wrong with the talk at all; it was simply given to the wrong audience.
I remember a group of bank managers who asked me to advise them on the presentations they were giving to school graduates. Naturally they hoped to encourage these young men and women to open bank accounts, but somehow they weren’t having the success they had hoped for. It was hardly surprising. These middle-aged men didn’t realize the need to understand their audience. It was no good talking about security, savings and pensions to a group of people who were longing to spend, spend, spend. Once the bank managers made their talk relevant to sixteen-year-olds, their presentations were successful.
Finding out about your audience will enable you to make your talk relevant to them and thereby overcome many of the difficulties that listeners face when trying to follow the spoken word.
Or, to put it another way, you should plan your journey according to your fellow travelers. Taking a group of schoolgirls wearing open sandals over rough terrain is not impossible, provided you have anticipated that they will need to make die
journey in short easy stages. With a group of experienced walkers wearing hiking boots, you could probably complete the journey in half the time.
You know why you are speaking, but do they?
So ask yourself:
• Why are they there?
• What do they expect?
• What do they want or need?
If you re speaking at a meeting in your own workplace it is possible your audience has no choice about attending —they are there because it’s the Friday afternoon meeting; or because there is a threat of a walkout on the factory floor; or it’s the distribution department’s monthly meeting.
Sometimes you have invited your audience to listen to you — you are making a sales presentation to a prospective customer. Alternatively, a client may have asked you to give a progress report on their project. At a public conference, your audience may have paid to attend.
Ask yourself whether your audience has chosen to listen to you and are there of their own free will, or whether they were sen t this can make a significant difference in their attitude toward you. Occasionally I find mysell facing a classroom of antagonistic managers who feel resentful that they have been sent on yet another useless course when they have a desk full of problems to be solved. They are not receptive to my training and begrudge the time wasted on the course. When I am aware of this attitude I can try to overcome it.
You must satisfy their expectations. If they are expecting a report on your experience with flextime for office staff, telling them about the problems you have finding a suitable garage to
service the company vans will not be relevant. A group of businessmen expecting a light-hearted after-lunch speech will not welcome a plea for more money to be spent on training for young people in industry.
In both cases the audience might well be interested in the alternative talk, but if it is not what they were expecting, they will not be receptive listeners.
When a client engages me to teach effective speaking, I know I can spend an amusing morning telling the audience of some of die disasters which I have faced in my speaking career. It would be entertaining but inappropriate if they were expecting to be taught; they might learn from my mistakes, but I would not be teaching them.
Beware of confusing your objective with your audience’s expectations. They are not the same. A client of mine made a classroom presentation in which he identified his objective as: “To convince the audience that Spain has more interesting holiday resorts than Greece.” He started his talk by saying, “Pm going to convince you that....” No audience wants to be told that. They want to make up their own minds. In the above example die audience wanted to be informed on the relative merits of Greek and Spanish holiday resorts. The speaker may know he is going to convince them, but the audience resents being told so, and will erect a mental barrier against the speaker’s arguments.
What are the wants/needs of the audience?
To achieve your objective, or reach your destination with all your fellow travelers, you must make the journey relevant to them. Your message must satisfy their needs. This doesn’t mean that you change the content of your message, but simply that you put yourself in your audience’s shoes and present it from their point of view.
I heard a manager arguing that he should have a car phone because all the other managers on his level had one. He was refused. He didn’t understand the listener’s needs. He should have pointed out that currently he was wasting considerable time looking for a telephone booth which wasn’t vandalized in
order to keep in touch with his office, and that on occasions he had arrived at canceled meetings because his secretary couldn’t reach him. He could have said, “My wasted time is costing you a lot of money —with a car phone I would be more efficient.”
In general, you can be fairly sure that one or more of the management needs listed below should be satisfied by your argument:
• Saving money.
• Increasing productivity and efficiency.
• Saving time.
• Improving quality.
If you are talking to your workforce, you may find that other needs are paramount:
• Earning more money.
• Recognition of work effort.
• Security of employment.
• Job satisfaction.
• Career advancement.
This is by no means a complete list; you’ll be able to identify the needs of your audience more accurately than I can.
Recently I had to advise a client whose accountants were unable to convince applicants for grants of the importance of accurate form filling. Each form submitted had miscalculations, omissions and incorrect information which was causing more work for everyone concerned. Although the applicants had been told several times that the forms were important, they continued to till them in with careless mistakes. We suggested that the accountants look at it from the applicants’ points of view. What did they want? What were their needs? The answer was that the applicants wanted their grants as quickly as possible. The next question was how can this need be satisfied? By accurate form tilling; and the accountants went on to explain how this could be achieved. When the applicants were shown how they could benefit from accepting the accountants’ instructions, they were prepared to listen.
If you are facing an unwilling audience, you’ll need to tell them at the beginning of your talk how they will benefit from
listening to you. In order to do this, you must, of course, know their needs. With reluctant managers in my courses, I tell them that I can show them how to save time in their talk preparation; how they need never fear boring an audience; how I can teach them to overcome nervousness; and how they can look and sound more professional. At the end of this little speech, I hope I have partially gained their attention and overcome their reluctance to be there.
Here are some more questions you must ask as part of the audience research:
• How much do they already know about the topic?
• How much do they think they know?
• How much do they want to know?
• How much do they need to know so that you achieve your objective?
The last question is the most important, but you can only answer it when you have some idea of tire knowledge they have already. If you were explaining how new legislation could affect your company, you would choose a different starting point if you were addressing the personnel director than if you were talking to the warehouse manager. You may have been part of an audience or group at which the speaker assumed a common background knowledge which you didn’t have, and consequently you found it difficult to follow her arguments. Alternatively, if you are familiar with a subject, it can be irritating to listen to fulsome explanations. In both situations, if the speaker has not done sufficient audience research, he will be unable to make his message relevant and will lose his listeners, who go wandering down Route 350. The uninformed group will try to fathom the speaker’s meaning; the more knowledgeable one will be bored by the content. You may be thinking that with a large audience it is very difficult to find out all this information. But there will usually be a contact whom you can ask, and at the end of this chapter I have provided a checklist for the occasions when you are talking to larger outside audiences.
In a situation when you know that there will be a varied level of knowledge, you can give enough background information to enable everyone to understand your talk without annoying the better informed by using the following phrases: “As you probably know ... I expect you’re aware .. . Let me remind you....” For example, “You’ll probably remember that the dip in sales revenue last October was due to the cancellation of the large Australian order. I think we need to bear this in mind when looking at these figures.”
Avoid saying, “For the benefit of those who don’t know. . .” or “For the less experienced among you....” No one wants to be identified (even by himself) as one of the ignorant.
What is their attitude likely to be to you and your views? In favor? Against? Indifferent? Open-minded?
If, before you speak, you are aware of attitudes, you can attempt to overcome objections within your talk: “You may be wondering how we can achieve this without taking on more staff....” “If this sounds like an expensive proposal, may I suggest you look at it this way....” “Many people say I look too young to have enough experience to cope with the problems of this department....”
Have they had any past experience which will influence them towards or against you?
Bad experiences color people’s judgments and often create an invisible barrier which prevents your message from being received and understood. You must acknowledge and remove this obstacle if you are to reach your destination with your listeners: “I know that a similar experiment using temporary staff failed last year, but let me show you how my scheme is different. ‘Some of you may have given up using an outside contractor because of the communication problems that it posed. We can prevent this happening by.. . . ”
Here are some more questions which you should be asking about your audience, particularly if you are addressing an audience outside your company:
• How many will be present?
• What is their position/occupation/title?
• What is their background/education/culture/race?
• What is their sex — male/female/male and female?
• What is their age?
On occasions you may be asked to speak as a panelist, as a guest speaker, as a workshop leader chairing a discussion or as an after-lunch or dinner speaker. Always ask your contact person specific questions and if he is unable to answer them, you should find someone who can. The more you can discover about the audience and the location, the more confident and effective you will be as a speaker.
Who? Find out about your audience; ask your contact person all the questions listed above.
Where? Exact address and telephone number, available parking, nearest railway station/airport. Type of room/hall/office/ conference center.
When? Day of the week, the date and the exact time.
What? The topic and any specific angle as well as the reason for inviting you.
How? Will there be a stage/lectern? Is there a microphone, and, if so, what type? What equipment is available? How will the audience be sitting—in rows/semicircle/with tables?
Duration? How long should you speak and does this include question time? When will the questions be taken? Will there be a panel discussion?
Other speakers? Names and telephone numbers are useful.
In your preparation you have chosen your destination and you’ve discovered as much as you can about your fellow travelers. Your third step is to study the map. What routes will be most
effective in helping you reach your destination? What material should you include in your talk to help you achieve your objective?
You may need to speak in a variety of different situations, but the method I’m going to describe for researching your material can probably be applied equally well to all of them. From now on I will refer to your “talk,” although you may be making a presentation, giving instructions, leading a training group, presenting a report or making a speech.
When you have been asked to give a talk, the usual reaction is: Why me? I don’t have anything to say. When the initial panic has died down, you’ll probably realize that you have a great deal to say and your real problem is deciding what to leave out.
I expect most of your original ideas come to you at inconvenient moments like driving on the highway in the fast lane, under the shower or in the middle of the night. I’m going to show you a method of capturing interesting ideas when it’s most convenient for you.
Unfortunately, much of our education has trained us to think in a logical and linear manner. As you sit with a blank piece of paper in front of you to prepare your talk, you may even start by writing a (1) in the margin, but most ideas don’t arrive in a numbered sequence; it’s difficult if not impossible to be creative and structured at the same time. So instead of forcing your creativity into a linear structure, draw a circle in the center of your paper and write in it the subject of your talk. Let >our mind freewheel around it, and jot down any ideas that come to you. Place your ideas on lines radiating from the central topic. You’ll find that each idea triggers off others so that you can continuously build on them. The advantage of this map of ideas is that you have plenty of space to add new thoughts and you can also expand on those you have already jotted down. You’ll have to avoid the temptation to reject material before you have written it down. This is not an evaluation
exercise. It is simply a method of brainstorming with yourself so that you can put on paper everything that you know about your subject. You mustn’t assess whether the material is relevant or logical — that can come later. I find that if I build the map of ideas over several days, new thoughts and angles occur to me at odd moments during that period.
Sometimes when I suggest an ideas map to clients, they dislike the concept, they find it messy or confused. At this stage that doesn’t matter. It’s more important that you follow
“I suspect that most of your original ideas come to you at inconvenient moments, like under the shower.”
through thoughts, views, opinions and information which may lead to examples and illustrations that in turn will help your listeners to understand your talk.
I oo often we curb our creativity when we judge material as unsuitable or when we decide that it doesn’t fit a predetermined structure. With an ideas map, there are no restrictions and ever}' idea and thought has equal merit.
If you didn't like the untidiness of the ideas map, you’ll appreciate the next stage in your preparation. Now you must look at the map and decide which paths or ideas are most suitable for your fellow travelers so that you can all reach your destination together.
Look at your objective and at your audience profile. Ask yourself what material you need to achieve your objective, knowing what you do about the audience.
You must assess each idea against your objective, always bearing in mind how your audience is likely to react. An idea which is totally comincing for a group of middle-aged businessmen may not be appropriate for a group of young male and female arts graduates.
On one occasion I heard a sales trainer advising a predominantly female audience that country clubs were useful places in which to extend their range of contacts. Good advice maybe, but not for that audience. So your first criterion must be to select material which is relevant to your audience, and which will make it easier for you to achieve your objective.
Secondly, refer back to your audience’s needs. How can you satisfy them? Can you present your report in such a way as to show that your recommendations will save the company money? Can you persuade your staff to accept the new schedules by offering them greater job satisfaction? Are you addressing a large audience consisting of people who want to achieve recognition in their own field? Any audience will want to know what’s in it for them, so select the material which will satisfy their needs and their expectations.
If you overload your talk with too many good points, your audience will forget all of them. Remember that after a couple of days they will only have retained approximately one quarter of what you have said. You will be more effective if you choose one or two points, develop them, present supporting evidence, choose relevant illustrations, and recap and summarize frequently.
• Why are you speaking? Identify and write out your objective.
• Who is going to listen? Find out about the audience.
• Draw an Ideas Map. Don’t be judgmental; be creative.
• Select ideas. Choose a few key points to achieve your objective.
In other words, you choose a destination, get to know your fellow travelers, study the map and finally choose the paths that will take you there.