Dead Dog Covid-19 Presenters
When times are good a lot of things are kept muted, hidden, obscured. As Warren Buffett mentioned about dodgy investments, “It’s only when the tide goes out that you discover who’s been swimming naked”. It is the same with leaders and their presentation and communication skills. When things are humming along nicely we can overlook their poor efforts. Today though, there is so much dislocation in business, with whole industries sidelined, people losing their jobs, the Government unable to trace 80% of the Covid-19 cases and so demonstrating that they have lost control of the spread of the virus. People are right to be fearful and be looking to leaders to communicate clearly and convincingly what needs to be done.
What are we getting though? The best and the brightest? Hardly, judging from what we see in the various on-line meetings, hosted by economic organisations. I have been struck by how pungent the foibles and failings are from these captains of industry in a time of crisis. What we are seeing in the public arena is what their own troops are seeing behind closed on-line sessions. It is not as if they are suddenly becoming legends of communication skills, when it is their own company’s internal staff briefings. They are consistently uninspiring, dull, dead dog presenters.
Often they are not in control of their on-line environment. They haven’t taken the time to understand the location they are now in. When you are a presenter in the face to face world, you get there early, familiarise yourself with the room, the tech, the lighting, the seating arrangements etc. This is how professional presenters think, without conscious thought. It is obvious these leaders we are seeing on-line have not taken any time to work on their thinking about how to adjust across to the on-line world. Presenting to a live audience of 50 people and 5000 people are entirely different asks and you have to adjust yourself to suit. Our fearless leaders are obviously not adjusting to suit the world of remote meetings.
They all seem to specialise in having dead faces. They have allowed this new on-line environment to sap their life energy from them, to drain the blood from the muscles in their faces to make them inert. In a physical room or when on-line, the one thing in a presentation that has to be on fire is our face. More than any other factor, this is by far the most powerful communication tool we have, followed in second place by our voice and then our body language. The slide deck is at the back of the field, desperately struggling to keep up.
These dead dog presenters have just transferred their submission to the all powerful Powerpoint diety in the meeting room to the on-line world. They were bossed and dominated by the slide deck in a previous life, when they were in the physical room and they remain so in the on-line environment.
The on-line presenting environment is merciless. You are reduced to a small box on screen, overpowered by the tech requirements, bumped down the hierarchy of importance. If you bring your dead dog face and voice to this world, you are the walking dead of on-line presenting. We need to be really concentrating on congruency. Dr. Albert Mehrabian’s famous and mostly misquoted research on the visual, vocal and verbal elements of presenting has to be our North Star. He found when what you say doesn’t match the way you say it, people get distracted. They are focused on what they see (55%) and how you sound (38%), rather than what you are saying (7%). If you want to be 100% heard in the on-line world then you need to really lift the communication stakes.
Smile, laugh, frown, peer, raise your eyebrows, duck your chin down or push it up, cock your head, shake it from side in disagreement or nod up and down in acceptance. We all have to become thespians in the on-line world. Stage actors have to use all these devices to get their message across and that is the model for us today. We have to overcome the limitations of the tech, to break free from its chains and get our message across. If you are worried, drop the dead dog face and look worried. If you can find something to laugh about, then do it and remove that dead dog visage from our screen. Look quizzical, perplexed, scared, fearful, elated, optimistic, positive, buoyant. The point is to transfer that emotion to your face in that little box on screen and then add your voice and body language to bolster your message. Get the camera up to eye level so you can pull all of this off with aplomb.
Business is depressing enough without our leaders looking like the undertaker at a funeral service for the enterprise. The leader’s job is to lead people though this hell, by giving them hope and a path through the surrounding flames of burning cash reserves. Your face, voice and body language have to be conscripted into this fight, if you want to win it. All of you dead dogs out there, be gone from my screen now. I want to see energy, hope, passion, grit, resilience and inspiration. And so does everyone else!
