As an Aussie, I can’t vote in the American elections, so I am a casual observer of what is going on. I was watching a very recent interview with Donald Trump and he briefly made mention about his public speaking approach. That got my attention, because I teach this stuff. Of late, I have been using Joe Biden as an hanmen kyoshi or teacher by negative example on public speaking, so let me now bring in Trump too.
You could make the argument that neither of them are relevant to those of us in business, but I think there are lessons to be learnt. Admittedly, as business speakers, we won’t have an audience of cult like followers, who hang on our every word. I would absolutely love that, but after giving 560 business speeches so far, that hasn’t materialised as yet.
When you see Trump rallies with the background of patriotic American flags, various message placards and sea of MAGA red hats, you know he has assembled the true believers and I doubt they are much aware of the intricacies of his public speaking techniques. According to the studies I have seen, he is most popular with non-college-educated males. That automatically impacts the content and his delivery mechanisms.
In business, here in Japan, we will be speaking to the very well-educated, most sophisticated international businesspeople, Japanese and foreigners. This requires we be operating at a very high level of public speaking, because the crowd isn’t going to automatically be with us and, in fact, may think we are just spreading fake news. What we say and how we say it becomes very important in these circumstances.
In the interview, Trump said he looks for a reaction in the crowd to what he says. If he reads from a script or a teleprompter or from his notes, he found that he couldn’t get the same reaction as when he speaks extemporaneously. That is why he is so keen to wander off topic and ramble along, looking for embers to convert into flames amongst the faithful. In his Convention acceptance speech, he couldn’t keep to the main points and started to wander off, looking for inflammatory content to rev up the crowd.
I agree with Trump that this direct engagement is the best approach to working an audience and owning the room. Now, ironically, as far as I know, he doesn’t usually employ a slide deck at his political rallies. Having said that, the slide deck is the only reason he is alive today. That assassin’s bullet should have penetrated his skull and killed him, but at the most critical moment, he moved his head to the side to look at a graph up on a big screen to his right. That screen saved his life without a doubt.
In business talks, we can usually use a slide deck or we may choose to not do so. The slide deck advantage is it creates the navigation path for us and we don’t have to remember the order of what comes next. If we don’t want to use the slide deck, we can just have a simple list of topics to talk to in front of us to keep us on track. Trump’s point about looking down and not engaging our audience is correct. A quick glance at the next topic, however, is certainly not going to be a crowd disperser.
What he has found is that the eye contact with the crowd and his observation of their energy has been central to keeping the crowd with him. If we are looking at our page notes or at a laptop screen or a tablet, we are not looking at the people in front of us and that is a big error. As business speakers, we need to be equally hard working to engage our audience. This means looking at their faces and choosing our words carefully.
When we see their energy or concentration flagging, we know we have to step it up and change the pace. We may do that by hitting certain keywords much harder or even much softer. It sounds counterintuitive, but dropping down to a conspiratorial whisper is also very effective. It forces your audience to lean in to what you are saying. It is also a pattern interrupt.
When there is a change in the proceedings, that pattern break is what jars with the crowd and forces them back to listening to us. If we hammer the audience with a full power download from start to finish, we exhaust them and they tune out. The highs and lows are what we need and that variety is what maintains the crowds’ focus on what we are saying.
Whether we like Biden, or now Harris, or Trump, there is always something to learn from the positives and negatives, if we take that moment to reflect on what is going on full faced in front of us. Most people just view the speech, but never bother to analyse what they can take away from it. I am agnostic about learning from the good and bad and will happily lift, pillage and copy all that I can to improve my own speaking abilities. I suggest we all be agnostic too and look for where we can find things to make ourselves more effective communicators.
