The Presentations Japan Series

Today's On-Line Presenters Are Demented One Dimensionals

Webinar and after webinar, I see presenters delivering such substandard efforts that I quiver with fear for the personal brand damage they are doing to themselves. Once upon a time, they might be showing fifty people they were unprofessional, but now the online meetings can have hundreds in attendance. Camera up the nose, talking down to what is on screen, not looking at the viewers, waffling away in a demented monotone, being all at sea with the broadcast platform, using delusional, inpenetrable slide decks and somehow expecting we can unravel the florid mess on screen - the list of virtual presentation misdemeanours goes on and on.

I laughed the other day, when the expert panel had been thrashing around before the start, getting organised and vaguely trying to work out how to do polls, to get the show on the road. At sixty seconds to blast off, one of the host geniuses suddenly realised they had all been naked to their audience, in their pathetic pre-show glory, for the last fifteen minutes of online presenting preparation vaudeville.

Organisers need to plan carefully for the start of the programme. First impressions are quickly formed and are unforgiving. If you come across as unprofessional, then the audience will be reluctant to accept your subsequent professional contribution. This is show business folks, so carefully craft what happens when the curtain goes up. The impresario planning element needs a lot more work for the preparation. What about the post show review. I doubt anyone is doing the latter, because they keep shovelling out the same drivel.

The amateur hour, one way, passive delivery is also very droll. They each speak in turn, we listen and we are commanded to get our questions into the chat or the Q&A box at the end. The formula is always the same. After months of experience with the medium, you would think presenters would be wanting to push the tech to its limits. Nope.

They are timorous types, trapped by the nerd eminence grise armies at Zoom, WebEx, Teams, GoToWebinar and all of the other not quite satisfactory platforms out there. Yes, the tech platforms have their limitations, but the presenters are falling well within the boundaries of the commonplace, rather than pushing hard against what is possible.

Online presenting is different to physical room environment. Live venue audiences give speakers visceral feedback through body language, eye contact and energy. Online, all of that is masked, hidden, contorted and mainly unfathomable. Therefore, we really need to engage the audience with the tech tools available. But you never see this being attempted by the speakers.

During the talk, we can get a raised hand, a green check or a red cross, smiley face emojis of bewildering variety or a simple one word comment in the chat. But we never ask for it. We can also get members of the audience to comment during the talk, as we can unmute them and seek their reaction. It is still all very much an "us and them" affair. The erudite panel are over here and the punters are over there. No fraternisation among the ranks allowed during online parade.

Why should it be like that? This is a different medium and it needs extra effort to get audience engagement. We should be using all the reaction tools at our disposal. Polls are good for humour, self awareness and real time information dissemination, but these tools are used with such sparing pluck. It reveals what a bunch of dilettantes we have in charge of these mighty organisations and what a gauche group of amateurs we have running the show. The organisers are doing a pretty poor job and they are failing their presenters at every turn. When the presenters are clueless on the tech possibilities, the host has the job of educating them.

The engagement tools exist, yet no one makes any effort to learn them first, before launching forth with their webinar effort. The hosts of the programme need to take the presenters through what is possible for them and lead them to the understanding that they can employ these tools to be more effective communicators in this medium.

Every four to five minutes of a talk, there should be some interaction with the audience in the live venue world. Well that rule applies just as much in the on-line world. All you need to do is plan for it. Let's scope out beforehand at which points it makes sense to get some feedback from the audience. Waiting until the end is outdated, old school.

We are all in the multitasking like demons on speed world now. If the online speaker isn't getting engagement, then the audience remains oblivious to their message. There is a lot of flame and quite a bit of smoke being put about in the webinar world today, but precious little light. The punters who turn up online are not online. They are doing something else at the same time, on the internet, with their email, with their papers, their phones. All the while, the expert panel are bumbling along in the background in their mind-numbing, monotonous monotones. Organisers in Japan, please be more professional and release us from this online webinar hell.

When Is High Energy Over The Top?

Recently, I was watching a presenter online, teaching others how to do online presentations. Man, he was really jumping around. The body language was rocking hard, the voice was powerful, the gestures almost pungent, the facial expressions were on fire and his eyes were blazing. The thought floated across my mind about how his audience was receiving this advice? Most of the people I see online in these various webinars provided by the good burghers of Tokyo's business community are necrotic. They are almost like one of those death stars, where all the energy collapses inward and the whole thing just disappears into oblivion.

Many of us rant about getting more professional with online presenting, yet the same house captives who attend these castings of pearls of wisdom on the subject, do nothing to alter their approaches. They still zoom the laptop camera up their own noses from its position on the desk or over their ample beer bellies. They still sit there talking in a monotone, with a lifeless delivery style guaranteed to cure the most severe cases of insomnia. They are not getting it.

There seems to be an absence of interest in being a professional in business. They will argue against that view of course and say that in their area of expertise they are the goods. I would answer that by venturing that their vector is too narrowly defined. Being a business professional relies on deep knowledge but also the facility to broadcast that knowledge to others. We know that the modern audience has been brought up on computer games, reality television, DJs severely trimming songs, hand held devices with immediate access to the temptations of the internet and social media as their source of news. In sum, they are easily distracted. If the presenter is not engaging this audience then baby, they are long gone.

You can see this phenomenon live in your own home, as the participant names or numbers on the online call, begin to drop alarmingly, as the massively oblivious presenter just drones on and on and on. People weren't particularly patient before, but Covid-19 has made them even less so, it would seem.

The presenters may feel speaking in a voice with passion and energy is too fake for them. They are usually boring, warm beer types and so think this is how they need to rise to the occasion, to be a professional in business who delivers content in the online world. They forget they are competing with such a plethora of escape options, that their precious message will not even get close to a look in, by those on the call.

If you come across like you are not sold on what you are speaking about, let me assure you, the rest of us won't be either. We can tell you are passionate about your subject because you demonstrate that passion. Your voice, body language, gestures, eyes are all screaming at us – believe me, believe me, believe me!

Now do you have to be throttling along at 150 miles an hour? No. You just need to raise your energy at certain points in the talk where you are making a key point. You need to start your comments at a higher energy level, than would be your normal speaking voice. Interestingly when we are training people in public speaking and we ask them to double the energy when they are talking, they raise it ten percent. We just keep asking them to double it, until we get to a pitch level that sounds like they are sold on their own presentation. It is not a shrill trumpet call, but louder than normal. To them, it seems like they are wild banshees wailing at the top of their lungs. To the audience, it sounds like they believe what they are communicating.

Getting the presenters to realise that their over the top level is still well within the professional range is a struggle. This is where video is so useful. When we play back their rehearsal presentation and they see the enhanced body language, purposeful gestures and good eye contact with the camera, they are amazed it looks so different to what they imagined. They expected unhinged, demonic, batty, lunatic ravings on screen. All they got was a much better professional presenter, dominating the medium and engaging the audience. And as the audience, that is exactly what we want from presentations – that they be truly professional.

How To Moderate OnLine Meetings

It is a curious word "moderate". It means "make or become less extreme, intense, rigorous, or violent". The chances of being responsible for a meeting which became violent or extreme in business, would be a fairly exotic occurrence. If opinions were charged and opposing, the situation could become intense and the vigorous exchange of opinions might become rigorous. How often do we see any of these things in Japan? This is a country of conservative counterbalance between personal and collective interests. Disturbing the "wa", the group harmony, is an anathema in this society and so attacking other speakers in public is not going to surface anytime soon. I have been here thirty five years and have only experienced it once.

So the moderator's role in Japan is a walk in the park compared to more bolshie societies. Having said that though, if you are active in foreign community groups like chambers of commerce, national societies, etc., you can always relive the good old days back in your own country, where people will push the boundaries of polite society and you are the one supposedly in control of the situation.

I will deal with dealing with difficult people a little later, so let's turn our attention to the more garden variety aspects of the role. It should be clear to you, that you are not the star of the show here. Sounds trite, but how often have you seen the moderator want to hog the limelight, to show off how intelligent and massively well informed they are? The traffic cop metaphor is a good one. Your job is to direct the traffic flow of conversation.

There is a balance required between the speakers. The seriously self awareness challenged and thrusting must be contained and the more decorous members of the panel need to be allowed to get their words in edge wise. They usually don't have a dog in the fight, so you need to draw them out of their quizzical state and encourage their contributions.

Online this can be a bit challenging, because of consistent issues with audio delays and technical incompetence on the part of panellists. In the in person meeting room, the moderator can more easily interject themselves mid-flow during the panellist's comments and shut them down, to open up to the views of another panellist. Online, we both wind up speaking over the top of each other, because of the slight delay in the audio being broadcast. The end result is no one can hear clearly what is going on from anyone. Our body language signals are also eclipsed, because we have become a tiny talking head, in a tiny box, in a remote part of the screen territory.

Live or online, the moderator cannot just brazenly front up to the session and start bossing people around. Each panellist has an academic and work history, which informs us of their possible range of expertise and experience on the subject. We need to talk to them beforehand, to ascertain when we can best call on them for comment. Asking a panellist for comment on a subject they don't have much experience or knowledge of, casts a gloom over the proceedings, as the interlocutor has now publicly embarrassed the panellist and themselves. A more professional moderator would direct the questions to the person most expert in that area and the proceedings would flow seamlessly.

The moderator is also duty bound to dig in a bit deeper with panellist comments, to yield a richer vein of insight. Experts will sometimes make statements which are obvious to other experts and need no further elucidation, but to the rest of us, they sound elusive. We need to challenge the panellist, in a supportive way, to explain in more depth what they have said. Drawing in other comments from the panel is also needed, to get the right balance of views and airtime. Keeping silent mental score on how much speaking time each person has received and then adjusting the balance is the mark of a skilled moderator. All of this is a bit easier in the on line world, because the moderator is usually invisible to the audience, as the tech focuses on whoever has active audio.

It makes a lot of sense to have the audience cameras off and everyone muted throughout, except perhaps for question time. The same visual and vocal isolation should apply to the panellists. As the moderator, we have briefed them that when they are called upon by us to comment, they need to come on camera and unmute themselves. How often have you seen one of the other panellists suddenly lurch unprepared on screen, because they left their audio on and made a scuffling noise in the background, triggering the tech to focus on them? Or a specific panellist is asked to speak and away they go, but they have forgotten to unmute themselves, adding a certain tragic, comedic aspect to the affair.

Refereeing heated exchanges between fired up panellists is always brimming with danger. Without too much effort, you can be dragged into the affray, as the attacker goes after you as well. This is when you pull out the "professionals reference" get out of jail card, when one or more of the panellists goes ballistic. You appeal to all the panellists that "we are all professionals here, so let's have a robust yet fair debate, devoid of any malice". You have now framed anyone who continues to be obnoxious as a loser. At this point you cleverly circumnavigate the brawlers and get comments from the remaining non-combatants on the panel. This allows everyone to calm down a bit and the focus is no longer on you as the moderator.

Moderating panels looks easy, but when you reflect on your own observations, you realise few do it well. When it is our turn, let's make sure we bolster our personal professional brand.

Be Clear With Your On-Line Instructions

When we are immersed in our subject, be it a topic we are speaking on or a work theme we have lived and breathed, we need to be careful about letting familiarity breed confusion. In the on-line world we are often asking people to go into breakout rooms to discuss various weighty topics and then come back and report. The host can usually pop into these sealed off rooms and join the discussion. What you find when you do this can be alarming.

Either when you are in the room or when everyone comes back you discover the punters were not really clear what they were supposed to be discussing. Now we will get this same phenomenon in the real world as well and the puzzled punter can just ask for a clarification. In the on-line world, people are hesitant to mention they didn't quite understand the task, before they are rocketed off to the breakout room, because they don't want to admit they missed what everyone else seemed to get. All those little faces with beady eyes in tiny boxes on screen, can be a bit terrifying.

Once in the breakout room it becomes apparent they were not alone and no-one is exactly sure how this is supposed to work. I was on an international on-line session recently with nearly 170 people spread around the planet. We were given our task and swiftly bundled off to our rooms. Now being the note taking type, I had dutifully written down the steps we were we supposed to work through. What I discovered though, was that I was the odd ball bunny, because no one else had taken any notes. Consequently, they didn't have a clear picture of what they needed to get to work on.

When we are running these things ourselves, we are captured by the tech and the breakout room requires a bit of finessing of the tech to get every one in place, so we are usually pre-occupied with the process. We forget to ask if anyone has a question or to double check on what people think is about to happen. It is a good practice to get the instructions on to a white board or a slide before we propel people into the ether and isolate them from humanity for the next number of minutes. Getting people to take a photo of the screen before they embark on their cyber journey is also handy.

My international on-line excursion was instructive, because the speaker was authentic, entertaining, the real deal and had bucketloads of knowledge of his subject. Yet at the crucial furlong he faltered and was spilled, unseated and we were left lost as we descended into cosmic isolation, trying to plumb what he said we needed to do. We may be doing the same thing with our people, when we have them on-line. We may be forgetting that if you ask 20 people to turn right, at least three will turn left. The simplest of instructions doesn't compute for some people, because they weren't listening or they were preoccupied with other more attractive thoughts, than listening to us drone on.

Zoom meetings with a lot of people with their cameras turned on can be quite distracting. I suggest to turn them off and have none or only your face in that pathetic little box you get given on-screen. Do we really need to see all of those faces, all of the time. In a real life meeting, we are seated such that we can see the speaker and we hardly even look at the people seated to the left or right of us. Now in the on-line world, the speaker has to compete with all of these other faces vying for the attention of the audience. Cut the competition for your message down and have people focus on you alone. Turn the cameras off, hit "B" to make the slide deck go to black and then everyone is forced to concentrate on you. Hit "W" to bring up the slide deck again and keep going.

Breakouts give us the chance for discussions that are done with a manageable number of people. However, if people don't know what they are supposed to be doing, because we flubbed it, then the whole exercise becomes one of frustration, dissatisfaction and pointlessness. Make sure everyone knows what is expected of them before you dispatch them to the on-line equivalent of the isolation ward.

Confused Or Competent Online Presenting?

The tech factor in online presenting is a juggernaut which sweeps all in its path. I was finishing up a three hour online Successful Public Speaking class, when one of the participants asked me what I thought was the most difficult aspect of presenting online. Many issues flooded my mind, but by far the most elusive of a fix, would have to be the technology. The screen with your face in it, is a tiny, little, even microscopic image, the audio is dodgy, the punters can't get into their breakout rooms, the pre-prepared polls evaporate before your eyes. The tech God leads us astray from the fundamentals of a good presentation.

We should have divined our clear purpose with this talk. Are we here to inform people of insights, information, data, or knowledge? Are we doing this to persuade them and bring theminto the fold of our way of thinking? Are we here to inspire them to storm the barricades, to take up their cudgels and right wrongs, to become the complete person they can be? Or are we here to motivate them by using our communication skills, to have them determine they want to do something we think makes a lot of sense, and which they now desire. Depending on our purpose, the design, content and delivery will be wildly different.

We need to know our stuff. That means we bring a lot of intellect and experience firepower to the fore. We don't have unlimited time to present and presenting online is supremely tiring for both parties, both presenter and audience. We need to strike a rich vein, unearth the motherlode and then be scrupulous about the gems we bring forth. One hour of online presentation deserves a short break for everyone.

Sharing video of your own nasal passage with everyone, by locating your laptop on your desk, is a bad look and seriously sad first impression. Yet so many people do this. Amazing. Get the camera up to eye height and then spend as much of the time as you can, looking at the camera, rather than the screen.

Online can become very one way and boring. We need to engage our audience. Most of the platforms have polling. This is always useful as way to inject humour or create deeper self awareness. Instead of disappearing off to secretive breakouts all the time, we can also use the whole room together, as a way to share ideas and insights. I am not keen on the chat box because if you have a lot of people, it starts to become a Las Vegas slot machine, with the screen information rapidly spiralling upwards out of control.

The machine adds each new chat at the bottom of the column, pushing the previous comments higher and higher, until you cannot physically keep up anymore. We had 150 people doing a Stress Management class online, broke WebEx and temporarily lost all audio and had to retreat to the chat. What a nightmare that proved to be, at that volume of punters adding their two bits worth.

Whiteboards are okay if you have a limited number of people and have time. You have to make sure the font size works too, because often the default is microscopic and you can hardly read it. We can share files which is truly dangerous. Before you know it, you the presenter, are now a slave to the slide deck. The screen is taken up by your visuals and you get a 5% share of the screen real estate, dangling in some corner, with your tiny little head rammed into a tiny box. Definitely keep your slides spartan, pare back as much content as you can and go for images which require you to explain what it means in this context, so that you can wrench back some modicum of control.

Video is the refuge of scoundrels in presenting. This applies in the online presenting world just as much as it does in the live meeting venue. Video is what the President often goes to for dross, pap and filler from the marketing department or even worse from the Goebbelian Investor Relations pond scum, propaganda merchants. It is extremely rare in my experience that the video ever significantly matches the content of the presentation or adds any value.

Presenters are invariably gun shy about rehearsing their presentations, preferring to grapple with the finer points of slide deck construction. In the online world, this is a formula for tech humiliation. Practice with the tech, until you have mastered it and then practice a bit more for when the tech betrays you, stabbing you in the back, just when you were depending on it to come through for you. You don't need Plan B. You need Plans B, C and D with today's treacherous tech.

When the audio crashed out on WebEx, in that infamous 150 person all singing, all dancing extravaganza, our producer quickly phoned in to re-establish audio and did a tremendous job tap dancing, until the trainer could log back in and pick up the pace again. You don't want to be trying to work this stuff out on the fly. Practice, practice, practice.

Dealing With Confrontational Questions In The On-Line World

When we give our presentation on-line we are in full control of the situation. We know what we are going to say. When we get to the end, or part way through, and someone asks us a really tough question, this can be difficult to deal with. Especially, if they are stressed and ask the question in a very aggressive or accusatory manner, we can easily react emotionally. The normal response for human beings in these cases can be the release of chemicals into the body to get ready for flight or fight. This is how we survived from cavemen days, when confronted by a sabre toothed tiger and it still applies today. Regardless of our species roots, we have to make sure we keep our control and a cool head. Good in theory, but not so easy.

Apart from our release of chemicals into the body, we find our mind can often become confused, as we try to think of the best way to respond to our interlocutor. We usually never know when we are going to be hit with a tough question, asked in an angry or aggressive manner. The ambush factor is the reason we have trouble knowing how to respond. If we know the person will be difficult, then we can mentally prepare ourselves. We need to have a plan. It is when the person is new and unknown, or a known person suddenly behaving unpredictably that we can get into trouble.

Because of the random nature of these occurrences, it means we need to consider this possibility before every meeting. We should consider what might be some issues the members of the audience may raise with us and think about how we should answer them. When we get hit with a tough question, we can quickly go to an emotional response. We need to consider those answers beforehand about why what they said isn't true or not the scale of the problem they say it is. We should also prepare some positive messages to get ourselves back on the front foot and in control of the conversation.

The other area we need to pay attention to is our voice tone. We may show to the client that we are lacking in confidence by mumbling or sounding hesitant or unsure of what we are saying. We may sound like we are scared of what they said or the way they said it. We may sound defensive and even angrily dismissive of their opinion. We need to maintain a cool, calm and collected tone, totally unfazed by what they have just said. This makes us sound more confident and credible.

We should ask clarifying questions before we try to give an answer. We want the verbal assassin to give us more detail. It well may be there has been a misunderstanding or there has been some miscommunication. We need to know that before we try to respond. Letting them hang themselves on the ridiculousness of their outburst is a good ploy.

Here is 7 step process to follow

1. Listen carefully to the outburst, without stopping them, interjecting or starting to answer them.Leave a long deadly pause after their attack. In the on-line world this is unnerving for them.
2. When we hear the complaint or angry outburst, we make sure to mask our voice tone so that we sound calm, even if we aren't.
3. We need to buy some thinking time for ourselves, so we use a cushion before answering, such as "well that is an important issue and thank you for raising it".Five seconds is enough thinking time to keep cool enough to remember to then ask them, "why do you say that?". Make them to do the work to justify their crap before you try and answer anything.
4. We keep the counterattack pressure on with further clarifying questions to find out what the real issue is, so we can concentrate on answering the highest priority item.
5. We try to flip the balance of the conversation away from 100% negative to a better balance between positive and negative.We do this by starting with our positive messages. We can apologise for any inconvenience they have suffered and then lead in by saying, "the good news is… Now let me deal with the issue you have raised".
6. We respond to their issue in a calm manner, supporting what we are saying with irrefutable evidence or proof.
7. We check to see if we have fully resolved their issue and if we haven't, we outline the steps we are going to take to resolve it going forward.

Tempers are frayed because of the business disruption generated by Covid-19. People are more stressed than normal and outbursts will arise without warning. We need to anticipate rather than react. Consider every meeting to have the potential to blow up in your face and if it doesn't, great, but if it does we must be ready to roll.

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!

Zoom Meetings Starts From Hell – Part Two

In Part One, we looked at planning our first impressions on-line, the importance of rehearsing the presentation, dealing with the tech and having an opening which grips audience attention immediately. The potential damage you can do to your personal brand doesn't evaporate, just because you are now in the virtual meeting world. No one cuts you any slack, just because you are now broadcasting from home. We have to treat the on-line environment, just as we would the in-person occasion. The only real difference is that the on-line presenting world is rife with less control, more tech issues and wholly, as opposed to partially, distracted audience.

We can be adding to the distraction factor ourselves. When there are multiple presenters, the tech must be savagely brought to heel. The curtain goes up, we start the presentation, but where does the camera automatically focus? If one of the presenters is unmuted and shuffling papers, then they will suddenly appear on screen, even though they are not aware of it nor ready to go. The inscrutable tech searches for sound and then synchronises with the camera views, capturing whoever that sound originated from. The camera view can become quite chaotic, as each person's inadvertent sound contribution has the audience view flicking from one person to another, without mercy. From a viewer point of view, this chaos is distracting. It diminishes our perspective that these experts being rolled out, are actually competent experts.

As mentioned in Part One, have a slide of the event up on screen and keep the presenters in the background until needed. The host should be muting everyone and no individual's camera should be turned on until the host gets the proceedings underway. The host introduces the presenter with both voice and a slide detailing the key points of their resume. We would do this in a live presentation when we were gathered in a room together, so why not do it on-line as well. The host then throws to the presenter, who comes on camera and audio for the first time. As mentioned last week, most presenters have their laptops on a table, so the camera is peering up their noses. Raise the height of the camera so that it is eye line. This is hard, but whenever possible, don't talk to the screen, rather talk directly to the camera.

Also replicate this control environment for the Q&A at the end. This can be quite comedic, as the control of the tech is lost and the camera and audio are flying around between all of the presenters who are not unmuted and on camera. The same rules apply. The host takes the question and then passes that question on to the appropriate expert, instructing them to come on camera and answer it, before submerging them back into silent invisibility.

One thing I dislike with Q&A sessions is that you can only lodge your question through typing it into the Q&A section or the chatbox. Now we are in the hands of someone designated to convey what you have written to the expert panel. Because they are more intelligent than us, they often decide to rework our questions into their own concoction and present that to the speakers. This is very annoying because usually they have missed the key point or have switched the nuance of the question.

Question handling factotums should read the question as is, ignoring the inevitable typos, but keeping to the key import of the question. The host often asks the first question. Sadly, rarely are those questions intelligent or probing enough. They usually palliative, lazily accepting motherhood statements as is and adding little to the proceedings. Broadcasting that you the host are actually dim or dumb, isn't all that good for the personal brand, so be careful when questioning speakers.

If using slides, please spare us the slide deck from hell presentation. Bad presenters are consistently bad presenters and all of their horrible habits are replicated in the virtual world. They bridge across from their real world debacles, bringing them faithfully to their virtual stage. I was attending a webinar the other day and the Japanese presenter had the most dense slides you can imagine. Laughably, one slide had as the backdrop a Robinson projection of a flat world map, with information on where they had their company branches. Confusingly, over America they placed the Europe information and over the Europe map, they had their American data. How hard can it be to visually line up your branches data to match the background map? How much credit do we give to a company claiming to be professional, who can't even rise to the most basic of intellectual challenges?

Speaking in a supremely boring monotone, I have noticed is not just a Japanese on-line presenter monopoly. Often we are getting experts to give us presentations on the legal, taxation, HR, business and health issues associated with the current Covid-19 crisis situation. These experts are notorious for putting all their eggs into the data dump and specialist knowledge basket and none in the communications, soft skills area. Their dullness of delivery, in a funeral tone, assaults us during their data overload from hell content unveiling. They are always like this but it is made so much worse in the on-line environment. Streaming video on small screens and dubious audio quality take bad and transform it into horrendous.

People on these webinars are employing content marketing concepts during this crisis to show their value to potential buyers. In many cases, they are revealing incompetence instead. They fail to approach the on-line medium with a professional presentation mindset. The tech issues are the fault of the platform provider. The way the tech is used however rests with the presenters.

Here is a thought to get your head around - on-line audiences are usually vastly larger than what we would normally cram into a room to hear a speaker. Telling the assembled on-line masses you are clueless is not the outcome you seek, but often the outcome you get. It doesn't have to be that way.

Zoom Meetings Starts From Hell – Part One

Like a lot of people, I have been searching for the roadmap to determine how to enable my business to survive this lockdown, work from home, brave new world. I belong to various Chambers of Commerce, mastermind and networking groups. I also have 24,000 LinkedIn connections, many of whom are pouring copious video meeting stuff into the daily feed. This means I can participate in numerous on-line events or watch the videos of people recording their on-line events. I do all this in the hope I can be become a more effective leader. Man, it is mainly painful though.

The technology employed usually revolves around having a Zoom video meeting or some similar equivalent screen based live broadcast. Usually, the organisers won't allow you to join until the appointed time, so you are connected but in standby mode. Vaguely, you imagine that once the curtain goes up and you can join the proceedings, things will be of a professional standard, as they are now ready to rumble. Rarely the case though.

Most often the MC is not ready or there is no MC at all and we get an intimate introduction to how disorganised supposedly expert people are. What comes up on screen is often a shambles, as people struggle with the tech. Here is a hint. Don't do it that way.

When you are going to start at the appointed time, you want all the presenters to have been successfully logged on fifteen minutes earlier and in place ready to go. Audio seems to be the dim cousin of video technology. Usually it is the biggest problem to get logged in properly, so we have to allow for people to log off and log back in, before we kick things off and that requires time.

We all usually Just In Time our swanning, grand entrance to a scheduled meeting in the office. In the on-line world, as a presenter, that is a high risk plan. Get there early and fifteen minutes is a good margin for correcting tech issues. These are much more frequent than we would expect or hope.

When the curtain goes up, what is the first thing the audience will see? It would appear that absolutely no thought has been given to this idea by the organisers. In a live, in person presentation, we know that the first few seconds determines the first impression of the speaker with the audience. Accordingly, we make efforts to make that a brilliant opening. When we are all on-line, that idea doesn't seem to have carried across. There is no excuse for not designing the first impression you want to create with your audience, whether it be live or on-line.

For many, this video conferencing technology from home is a new thing. At the office, the tech team sets everything up in the meeting room and you just turn up. At home though, you are the tech team. It is also obvious that few people have spent any time learning how to use the tech, before the presentations. There are different systems and they all have their functionalities and idiosyncrasies.

Tooling around through the menus and doing rehearsals beforehand, makes a lot of sense in this environment, yet there hasn't been an event I have attended to date, where I see any evidence of this occurring.

In the live presentation preparation world, we always stress the importance of rehearsal. Why would this idea become less significant, in a much higher stakes presentation environment? You can record your practice sessions and review how you will look on screen as well, which is a great tool for improving how you present on screen.

I recommend you have a slide up on screen, at the start, announcing again what the event is and who are the hosts. Use only voice at this stage, to announce what is going to happen in this broadcast. This forces everyone to focus on the screen and not have their vision split between the screen and a small box with a talking head in it.

As the speaker, after you have been introduced, turn your camera on and come on screen. Make sure you have arranged the environment at home to have a light source illuminating you clearly in front of the camera. Also, if you are using a laptop, raise the level of the laptop, so that the camera is at the same height as your eye line. Looking up the speaker's nostrils, or over their impressive beer belly, because they have their laptop on the desk, is not a great first impression. Dress for business, so your full suit of armour needed.

In some cases, the technology allows you to have a green screen background, so that your personal living arrangements are not visible to the viewing audience. If you don't have that option, then try to pick a spot at home with a background that is not too distracting from you, when you speak.

Just as you would live, commence with an opening statement that grabs everyone's attention. Remember the audience are now totally wild and free from all social contracts to behave themselves, when you are speaking. They can be multi tasking like demons on speed at home. You can become just one of a number of things going on in their world at the same time. You need to crash through that clutter and grab their attention. Make them stop doing all that other crap and pay attention to you and you alone. This won't happen by itself, so you have to design it from the start.

Video meetings are a different beast and we need to wrestle that beast into submission, so that we dominate it, rather than the other way around.

Getting Your Staff Messaging Right In A Crisis

There are plenty of experts providing insight and recommendations for corporates with their messaging during this Covid-19 crisis, but not so much attention is being paid to our internal messaging. The public, customers and shareholders need to be fed updates and assurance by the company's PR department. Funnily enough the PR department rarely gets involved in the internal messaging of the boss. Basically, the leaders are expected to work it out themselves. Usually they are pretty hopeless communicators at the best of times and now in the worst of times, this ragged assembly are exposed as gross underperformers.

Having people gathered around in the office or neatly arrayed at the town hall, makes communication relatively straightforward and easy. Having everyone dispersed and sitting at home in ignoble isolation is a different ask of the leader. The Covid-19 crisis is scary, from a physical health perspective but also from a financial health viewpoint.

Watching TV and reading the newspapers about rising numbers of people catching the virus and then seeing the associated mortality rates climb, tells you this is serious. Watching companies shut down, many going bankrupt, millions of workers out of jobs and the share markets plummeting, under the weight of the economic consequences of the virus spread, adds to everyone's fear roster.

The team are worried about their family's health, the overall lifestyle disruption, their job security and here you are, their leader. What are you telling them? How often are you telling them and what mediums are you using? There is a tricky balance required. We must be transparent, without triggering alarm and panic. We must provide hope, without being Pollyanna.

We also have to be well informed of what is happening because things change very quickly. Within a few short days, British PM Boris Johnson went from talking about building "herd immunity" and letting the virus spread, to locking down the whole country. One minute Tokyo Governor Koike is talking about the calling off of the Olympics being unthinkable, to having the whole shebang postponed. Within days, President Trump went from saying all the troops would be home for Easter, to instead chastising Governors for not locking down their states to stop the spread of Covid-19.

Most companies in Japan have a daily chorei or huddle, usually in the mornings, amongst the work group. If you don't, then now is a good moment to create one. The leader must keep this chorei cadence going, even if everyone is now beaming in by video. Not everyone might make it, but do your best to insist that this is a priority. Continuity builds comfort that although things have changed, some normality, some stability can be assured. These are good opportunities to remind everyone of the strategy in place for dealing with this crisis. If you missed that bit of leadership fundamentals at the start, then put a strategy together pronto.

Update everyone on the company's situation. The cash situation is the difference between survival and just becoming a memory of what once was. Tell people the truth. This must be coupled with reference to the plan to get everyone through this crisis. Hope and reality have to be doled out equally.

Follow up with regular written communication. If you are a foreigner speaking in Japanese, your range of vocabulary will rarely be equal to that of your mother tongue. More likely, you don't speak fluent Japanese. In both cases get things down in writing as well. If you have internal resources who are now freed up, get the text into Japanese. Even if that isn't possible, then send it out in English. Most Japanese read English much better than they can speak it. The live speech delivery may have presented some audio clarity issues, as well as linguistic challenges, so you can't be satisfied that everyone got the message.

Try to increase the amount of one on one communication as much as possible. Reach out to your people sitting at home. Broken apart from their routine of 16 hours a day at work with colleagues, this new order can be disconcerting and lonely for many of the troops. Hearing your voice and knowing that you were thinking of them is much more important than the content of your Churchillian call to arms.

Create a coffee time for staff to join in on-line and shoot the breeze. Staff are constantly chatting, chatting, chatting throughout the day anyway. Now we can recreate that personal connection with our colleagues, although compressed, into a virtual coffee time every afternoon. You should join in as well and just chat. Don't make it a rerun of the morning's rousing call to crash through or crash. Keep it light, communal and interactive. Draw out those who are a bit quiet and have them speak up, so that they feel included and their colleagues can hear their voice.

Use video, text, phone calls and use them more frequently than you imagine is enough. We are serving the weakest links in our teams in these times of crisis. You might be independent, resilient, tough, a survivor, but you are also in the minority amongst your team. Don't see their world, through your personal prism.