Why are journalists so rude to PR people? Feature
Lindsay Williams

Why are journalists so rude to PR people?

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This weekend I read this on LinkedIn.

“Working in PR is tough. I’ve received hefty abuse from some journalists, including death threats. I took a PR role because I struggled financially as a freelance journalist. …I always see tweets criticising PRs. Granted, there are some rogue PRs out there. But I think some people forget we’re only trying to do a job – ultimately to pay the bills and put food on the table. Let’s be kinder to each other.”

I don’t know the writer, and his industry and role were not clear.  The reference to death threats was unexplained and is thankfully rare, at least in the UK.  However, some journalists do behave quite badly.

And I know there are PR professionals all over the country who are scared to answer the phone to journalists!

Why are journalists so rude to PR people?

That may be hard to imagine but it’s true. The Media Coach has, on several occasions, been asked to work with such teams and explain how journalists think and why they can be so challenging.

I can only imagine that as a new graduate, in your first PR job, keen to get it right, with no experience of the rough and tumble of a newsroom, it must be highly disconcerting to have journalists speak to you with disrespect or even rudeness.

So, to all newbie PRs, this is my guide to how journalists think, and how to deal with them.

Professional Juxtaposition

First, let’s remember the context: given the two professional roles, it would be impossible to avoid tension. Journalists both need PR people but sometimes, despise them. And vice versa.

Journalists want seemingly simple information and access to senior people, the right people on the right day, for a story. Journalists believe their job is to find the facts, hold people to account, to shine the harsh light of truth into the murky corners of spin. And to do all that today.

PRs are sensible gate-keepers and often refuse to provide information or deny access, judging the information is not so simple and any interview comes with some risks, and might not be in the best interests of an organisation. And besides, they can’t get access to the right senior leader until next week. In this case, the PR has the power, and they use it to thwart the journalists.

And then a week, a month, or a year later the boot is on the other foot.

PRs are tasked with winning coverage for a positive story. Suddenly, they become salespeople.

Most journalists, who are busy professionals like everyone else, are fighting off press releases, emails, phone calls, or Twitter DMs, from PRs. The PRs are often peddling a half-baked story to the wrong person at the wrong time.
In this case, the journalists have the power.

So, we have two groups of people that need each other in different ways at different times and both have to be firm, steadfast and sometimes robust in holding the other at bay.

Of course, there are some occasions when PRs and journalists want the same thing, but this happy overlap of the Venn diagram of life is rather a thin slice.

Why are journalists so rude to PR people?

Culture Clash

Mostly, we have two types of professionals tasked with ‘managing’ each other.  Each living in a very different professional culture. PRs are typically in large organisations with lots of rules and clear hierarchies, not a lot of shouting.

Journalists work in newsrooms which can be very intense places to work. Here are some of the reasons why.

  • Tight deadlines. Most journalists’ deadlines are a few hours in the future, sometimes in broadcast it is minutes or seconds away, and the pressure can be intense. Journalists who miss deadlines do not stay in work for long. This makes for short conversations and abrupt responses.
  • Journalism is highly competitive. It’s not just one team against another team. As a journalist, you are competing with your colleagues for the best stories, top billing, the front page.
  • Journalists need to think differently. The job is to cut through the misleading spin of political and corporate life. Their holy mission is to think ‘if this is costing £3m, who is paying?’ ‘If 85% are successful what is happening to the other 15% and how many people is that?’ This can mean if you walk in and say ‘Good Morning’ you might find someone disagreeing with you!
  • Related to the point above, as a journalist, you must not be taken in by charm, or money, or power. Your job is not to be influenced by these things.
  • Journalists are lied to. If you are a journalist, people lie to you all the time. Clearly, you end up assuming people are probably lying, even when they are not.
  • You have to hustle: to get to the bottom of stuff, to get interviewees on camera, to find the person who knows, you have to hustle. Newsnight would never get on air and The Times would never get published if the journalists did not hustle. Journalists push people when others would give up.
  • And finally, as a journalist you are rewarded for getting the story, writing the scoop, getting the interview. No one, but no one cares (in your newsroom) that you upset the PR woman or were rude to the receptionist, in order to get what the story needed.

To take an extreme example of this, the BBC’s World Affairs Editor, John Simpson and his cameraman upset almost the entire Muslim world by posing as women – disguised in burqas – while being smuggled into Afghanistan in 2001. In his book ‘News from No Man’s Land’ Simpson talks about discussing the plan and weighing the future cost of such upset. He was totally aware that there would be a huge outcry, but he decided to do it anyway, to get the story. Simpson narrowly escaped having a worldwide ‘fatwa’ issued against him.

I realised a long time ago that journalists are good company, their take on life is refreshing but the profession rewards bad behavior. Of course, not all journalists succumb to rudeness, disrespect or aggression. Some remain courteous and reasonable whatever the pressure, whatever the story. But perhaps not so many.

And it should be noted that there are many PR-journalist relationships that are cordial, even friendly. The two parties have mutual respect, perhaps have some good history together or just hit it off. An experienced PR person will have built trust along with their media list, they will have dropped an exclusive, or bought lunch, maybe even given some useful background in the past. Maybe they’ve just been straight. These relationships don’t need a blog.

How to Deal with Journalists

This is written for those who find it challenging to handle the Fourth Estate. So, assuming you are a polite, diligent PR person how should you deal with journalists?

  • First understand, if they do sound a bit aggressive, it is not personal.
  • Second, accept that journalists live by rather different rules than you do. You don’t have to approve, but just as you would accept a tantrum from a child, or swearing from a drunk, understand journalists tend to be very direct, very RED if you are familiar with the Insights Discovery psychometric testing tool.

 

Why are journalists so rude to PR people?

  • Third, you are more likely to get the respect of journalists if you are direct. You don’t need to be aggressive (even if they are). Just be happy to say ‘Sorry I am not able to answer that question.’ ‘We are not putting anyone up for interview’, etc. Directness shows strength and builds trust. [Just remember not to be quotable as you do this. If you say ‘wild horses would not drag Mr X to a media interview in the middle of all this’ – you may find the quote all over Twitter and on the front page!]
  • Don’t waste journalists’ time. Make sure you have your story straight before you pitch. Pitch in a very few words and explain what you are offering them i.e. data, an interview, a quote. Don’t worry about being nice. Worry about being clear and succinct.
  • Call or email back when you said you would.
  • Don’t ring just before a deadline.
  • Finally, always think about helping a journalist add value to their viewers and readers. Journalists will always respond to a good story. They would never – in my experience – say I am not running or writing that story because I don’t like the PR.

For journalists, it is always all about the story.

Final Irony

And as a footnote, there is a final irony to all this. Many of those grumpy self-obsessed journalists may one day decide to become – guess what – a PR person! What is more many will try and fail because it is a very different job. I will leave the last thought with Neil Henderson, once a television journalist and now a senior PR. He responded, on LinkedIn, to this post’s opening quote:

‘I could paper the walls of my entire house and my neighbours with CVs from journalists who want to work in PR. Some of them were truly awful to me or my colleagues. When I first moved into PR/Communications from national television news in the mid 2000s I quickly realised that a lot of the PR people much derided by journalists, are more intelligent and better writers.’

 

Images:

iStock
Insight Discovery

 

 

 

Shape of Sheeran
Eric Dixon

The Shape of Sheeran

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As a multi award-winning musician, songwriter and lyricist, you’d expect Ed Sheeran to be able to turn a decent phrase.

And with years of performing experience behind him, you’d also expect him to connect successfully with his audience.

Last week he combined several of these skills when he appeared in his own video, following his success in a court case after he was accused of plagiarism.

The High Court judge ruled that an element of his 2017 hit ‘Shape of You’ was not copied, “neither deliberately nor subconsciously”, from the Sami Chokri (stage name Sami Switch) song ‘Oh Why’, released two years earlier.

You can listen to a comparison of the two clips for yourself here:

Whilst Ed’s words were spoken a little too quickly for our liking – and consequently he lost some of the natural stress and emphasis of normal conversation – here’s what we liked about it:

Short duration

Even if what lasted 1’04” should ideally probably have taken around 1’15” to say, he’s packing a lot of material into a minute and a bit. No one is going to resent spending that amount of time hearing his response to the ruling. The single ‘Shape of You’ lasts over three times longer than this; it was short, punchy and to the point.

Good eyeline

OK – it looks like he’s reading an autocue (probably why he’s speaking so quickly) and so has to look at the camera. But, crucially, this means he maintains eye contact with his audience throughout, and that creates connection and adds credibility.

Natural gestures

Occasional, simple hand gestures are used throughout, helping to emphasise what he is saying, and making him appear more natural and relaxed.

Conversational language

Despite the seriousness of what he’s just been through, no long words are used when they’re not necessary. Instead, the approach is direct and chatty: “Hey guys… I wanted to make a small video to talk about it a bit… claims like this are way too common now…”. What’s more, he doesn’t resort to legal jargon and say ‘sub judice’, but instead “I’ve not really been able to say anything whilst it’s been going on.” The result – everyone understands what he’s talking about immediately.

Numbers as evidence

Numbers do the heavy lifting of convincing in the moment – even if the details are quickly forgotten afterwards. Here, Ed uses three persuasive statistics, two of them rounded up or down for impact: “60,000 songs every day on Spotify…”, “22,000,000 songs a year…”, “only 12 notes available…”.

It got personal

This is the real crux of the video – by far the most personal and powerful part of the whole thing. As a result, it’s the bit which was destined to be quoted and used in newspaper headlines (as indeed it was). This section contained two ‘Power of Three’ statements (known in the trade as ‘tricolons’).

Firstly:

“I’m not an entity, I’m not a corporation, I’m a human being.

Directly followed by:

I’m a father. I’m a husband. I’m a son.

It offered humility

Whilst he could have been seen crowing over his success, that’s simply not Sheeran’s style. Instead, we get “I don’t want to take anything away from the pain and hurt suffered by both sides in this case…”.

He used a contrastive pair to finish

Contrastive pairs are ‘see-saw sentences’ – phrases which hinge around a mid-point, balancing each other in style and structure. They are powerful and memorable:

“Hopefully we can all get back to writing songs, rather than having to prove that we can write them.”

So, all in all, as far as the writing and structure of his statement were concerned, we think it was – in the title of another of his number one hits that year – ‘perfect’.

As you can see, powerful presentations are far from being down to just luck. With careful crafting, you can create the best possible opportunity to make sure your messages hit home too – something we explore in our Presentation Training sessions.

And you don’t even need to have had a number one hit single to get involved…

Refuse to answer a question on air
Lindsay Williams

How to refuse to answer a question on air

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What do you do in a media interview if you get a really uncomfortable question?

The answer is remarkably simple: tell the journalist you are choosing not to answer.

Daniel Radcliffe demonstrated this on GMB when asked about the Will Smith slapping incident at the Oscars ceremony.

Radcliffe did not hesitate: he said he was so dramatically bored by hearing other people’s opinions on the incident, that he wasn’t going to give one.

There are lots of ways to tell a journalist that you are declining a question. My advice is, where you can, give a short clear reason but the reason is not essential. Here are a few suggestions for close down phrases:

‘I’m sorry that is commercially confidential.’

‘I don’t have that number to hand.’

‘This is not a question for me’

‘I think I’ll leave that for others to comment on.’

‘That’s a question for the regulator or the politicians.’

It sounds so obvious. And it is liberating to realise that you have a choice.

However, having these lines to hand is not the whole answer.

The real challenge is to be in the right mindset during any interview. You should know what you are there to say, and be clear where your red lines are. Journalists are allowed to ask anything…that is the deal. It doesn’t mean you have to answer them.

When I suggest this close down strategy, I get push back:

‘Am I allowed to say that?’

‘Won’t the journalist think I’m rude?’

‘I don’t want to sound like a politician not answering questions.’

First of all, there are no external rules about what you say to a journalist, only internal ones – from your employer perhaps. I don’t think they will ever include a ban on declining a question.

Second, journalists are hard to offend and declining or ‘closing down’ a question would barely register. They hear such responses all the time.

Finally, I believe politicians rarely say ‘I am not answering that because it would be speculation’ or ‘I haven’t looked at it this week’. Interviews would be much less annoying if they did.  Politicians, for reasons I do not fully understand, normally try to ignore the question and answer something else. That is what is so irritating.

It’s much better to be upfront and say ‘that’s not a question for me’.

Practising how to deliver a close down is just one of the many techniques we cover in our media training courses, which can be delivered in person or via video link.

 

 

Voice of a woman feature
Lindsay Williams

The Voice of a Woman

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One of the best news stories of the year so far, was the return of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe after 6 years imprisoned or held in Iran.

She and her husband Richard Ratcliffe held a press conference in Westminster, and I was stunned at how composed and articulate she was after her ordeal. And also, how fearless she was in her criticism of the UK Government. She appeared to speak without notes and even disagreed with her husband in public (whilst also thanking him for his incredible campaigning to bring her home).

It would have been completely understandable if Zaghari-Ratcliffe had appeared tearful, and ready to give an Oscar-style thank you speech and no more, but that is clearly not her style.

I particularly noticed this because I am suddenly aware of lots of calls for women to find their voices, be inspired by women in history, and speak more in public.

Voice of a WomanRecently, waiting for a train, I was browsing the book section in Oliver Bonas, a fashion and knickknacks shop. I was stunned to realise I was looking at a shelf and half of the books were about women speakers. From beautiful books about the words of Michelle Obama and Dolly Parton to ‘She Speaks’ Yvette Cooper’s anthology of women’s speeches that changed the world.

I also found comedian Viv Groskop’s book ‘How to Own the Room: Women and the Art of Brilliant Speaking’. Groskop is not looking at the words you use but the mindset you need to acquire, to speak up as a woman. I have found no new tricks in her book, but it is an easy, entertaining read with a clear theme that speaking in public is something you can learn.

Seven years ago, a New York Times article written by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant was headlined ‘Speaking While Female’. It pulled together a raft of evidence that shows often when women do speak up at work they are spoken over or ignored. I wonder if that is true today? I meet so many impressive women it is hard for me to judge.

‘Speaking While Female’ is now the name of one woman’s project to put together a Women’s Speech Bank. American former journalist and now executive coach, Dana Rubin pops up daily on my LinkedIn feed. Her purpose is explained on her website:

Voice of a woman

Madeleine Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State

Historically women have not been silent, but their words have scarcely been noted in the history books. What they said was seldom valued, recorded, or remembered…..It’s time to change that. Because it wasn’t just “great men” who gave great speeches in history. 

And in the week as Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe stepped briefly into the limelight, another slipped out. The world lost Madeleine Albright – the first woman to hold the post of US Secretary of State, who died at 84. “She famously said in an interview with Huffington Post in 2010 “It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to remain silent”.

I am privileged in my work to help people including many women, to find their voices: to overcome nerves, to stand proudly facing forwards using a few tricks of the trade to lead an audience through an argument in a way that is clear and memorable. But perhaps there is more that can be done to help under-confident women to develop a voice? Answers on a postcard, please…

 

Images:
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe – YouTube
Madeleine Albright -https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Madeleine_Albright_(30716699231).jpg
slgckgc, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Rapport Feature
Eric Dixon

Do you know how to build rapport?

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Rapport is that easy-going relationship which good speakers have with their audience, indicating that they understand their world.

But in business presentations, the quality is often as elusive as it is desirable.

Like the concept of gravitas (which we can help with too, by the way), it’s also something that critics suggest presenters try to convey when talking to others – even if they are at a loss when it comes to explaining how to do so.

These three tips are essential:

Engage

The best presenters seize the audience’s attention from the very start, indicating immediately that they understand where their listeners are coming from. Of course, this is considerably easier if you are recognised as “one of them” already.

Take the brilliant Rita Pierson, a teacher for 40 years, carrying out a TED Talk to fellow educationalists in 2013 just before she died. Her opening words did lots of heavy-lifting on her behalf: ‘I have spent my entire life either at the schoolhouse, on the way to the schoolhouse, or talking about what happens in the schoolhouse.’ That sentence also demonstrates clever use of the “power of three” approach and is gently amusing (a genuinely useful quality; the audience’s positive reaction can be heard before the line is finished):


Eye contact helps, it’s true. Pierson manages this admirably – but despite the fact her presentation is in-the-round, even those seated behind her seem to be following her every word. As Terry Wogan, probably the best broadcaster of his generation, proved on his Radio 2 Breakfast Show; rapport doesn’t need a visual connection at all.

Empathise

But what if you as a presenter have little in common with your audience? What if you have little or no connection with their world? Perhaps you don’t even speak their language? None of this need be a barrier to building rapport – as Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky has demonstrated repeatedly in the last few weeks. When he addressed British politicians in the House of Commons via video link, as his country continued to battle the Russian invasion, he quoted the English bard Shakespeare (‘The question for us now is to be or not to be…’) and echoed Britain’s wartime leader Churchill (‘We will fight in the forest, in the fields, on the shores, in the streets…’). His words eliminated the one-and-a-half-thousand miles between Kyiv and London, and was nothing less than a stroke of genius:

Similarly, when speaking to the US congress, Zelensky made reference to Pearl Harbour and 9/11 and, over the weekend, when addressing Israeli parliament he quoted the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, saying ‘We intend to live, but our neighbours want to see us dead’.

Despite the huge losses to his country and the considerable risks to himself, Zelensky’s ability to take time to strike a chord with each of his separate audiences is remarkable – as my colleague Lindsay Williams points out in a recent interview with Fortune magazine (‘He does what all good public speakers do – he looks at his audience and thinks, “How can I make them relate to me?”):

Enthuse

Finally, rapport is impossible if you are dull. Not only do you need to use simple words (even if you are conveying complex material – indeed, I would argue especially when you are conveying complex material; we call it “coming down the language ladder”), but you should also craft powerful key phrases so that they become more memorable. Using metaphor and simile can both help here (we call it adding “sizzle”). It’s also about using the full bandwidth of stress and emphasis so that – even if you are reading from a script – it sounds like you are having an animated and interesting conversation with your listener by “lifting the script off the page”. Our presentation training course covers these aspects in full.

I am also teaching exactly this, and a few other tricks and tips, to a new generation of broadcasters in my Podcast Training.

So, as you can see, rapport doesn’t need to be that hard-to-pin-down, ethereal quality which many recognise but few can explain. It should be as much a part of your nuts-and-bolts planning as preparing your slides.

And if you are not sure where to start, that is where we can help.

Like everything else in our bespoke training sessions, we convey real-life practical tips; genuine ‘views-you-can-use’, all of them honed after years of experience in the field, where our ideas and methods have been tried and tested against a harsh dose of reality. Although, admittedly, not quite as harsh as a schoolhouse in an under-privileged neighbourhood in the US, or an underground bunker in Kyiv.

weaponising history feature
Lindsay Williams

Stories Leaders Tell

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Three things came together in my head this Monday morning:

  • On BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, I heard a BBC reporter talking about ‘weaponising history’. He was referring to the story, or the narrative, President Putin has crafted around why Ukraine needs to be part of a greater Russia.
  • This reminded me of a very good book by Gavin Esler – Lessons from the Top, Three Universal Stories All Leaders Tell.
  • And this directly sparked a previously missed connection with the Public Narrative Training of Harvard Professor, Marshall Ganz, a version of which is sometimes taught by my former colleague, Laura Shields, in Brussels.

weaponising history

 

Weaponising history is a very interesting phrase. The BBC interviewer, Amol Rajan, was introducing Professor of International Affairs, Nina Khrushcheva from The New School in New York, and together they explored the historical perspective or in other words the ‘stories’ that are motivating Putin and that he is using to justify war, including of course the evidence that Ukrainians and Russian are in fact the same ethnic group. Interview was on BBC Sounds at 8.52am Monday 14th March

‘Weaponising history’ is just a way of saying that a leader is telling a story that motivates, inspires or justifies aggression. Whilst it is a great and emotive phrase, the truth is that we have long understood there is not one version of history. To some extent, all leaders do this all the time.

A leader will create a ‘narrative’ – from selected facts, from half facts or (at worst) from fantasy, that influences others. That is what leadership is all about.

So, while we may hate the message, there is nothing new about the tactic.

One of the interesting challenges is that it is easier to make a compelling story out of great battles, do-or die-dilemmas, moments of decisive action, and so on. All the stuff of action movies. Finding wonderful narratives for peace, reason, not over-reacting, and living peacefully with one’s neighbours, is much harder.

weaponising historyGavin Esler’s book Lessons from the Top came out nearly ten years ago. His premise was that there are three stories all leaders must tell: Who am I, who are we, and where are we going together?  He uses examples from Barack Obama, Jack Welch and even Lady Gaga and Angelina Jolie to demonstrate this idea. He doesn’t mention Putin, but he could have done.

At the time, these ideas were new to me, and I thought the book a great read. I actually bought a dozen copies and gave most of them away.

It was a few years later that my former colleague Laura Shields introduced me to Public Narrative Training – as taught originally, I think, by Marshall Ganz; a left-wing thinker and activist. Funnily enough, his thinking is almost exactly the same – I assume Ganz influenced Esler, but I am not sure.

Anyway, Ganz believes any leader must have three strands to their core narrative. Self, Us and Now.

By the way, if you have worked with me and know how I teach the use of a Message House, you can see that these ideas map straight onto a Message House.

weaponising history

Of course, not all leaders chose to do this. Boris Johnson talks little of himself but a great deal about who ‘we the British’ are. Keir Starmer similarly does not have a powerful story about who he is. Margaret Thatcher did, of course; famously often referring often to her father’s grocery shop. One current British politician who comes to mind is David Lammy MP: a man with a rich heritage of Caribbean ancestry, north London immigrant poverty and English Public School. All laid out in his book Tribes. So, some politicians do and some don’t.

I think those that don’t are missing a trick here.

Working with senior leaders as I do, I often find that this narrative is missing. If I suggest that as an ambitious person he or she should perhaps put some thought into how they tell their personal story and what motivates them, half the time I will be met with resistance. People feel it is ‘not about me’ or ‘I am uncomfortable talking about myself’.

The point for me, is that if people know why you think what you think, they are more likely to trust you.

Hopefully, none of the people I train will use this to justify aggression, hatred or harm.

Presentation Feature
Lindsay Williams

5 Tips for Delivering a Good Presentation with a Bad Slide Deck

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‘Please can you help us improve our pitch – but, by the way, we can’t change the deck’.

This is a brief we get all too often, ahead of Pitch Training or some Presentation Training.

Presentation

In these cases the people we work with know that their slides have too much information on them, too many bullet points, the font is too small and with three different charts and a tiny legend any audience is likely to turn off in three minutes flat. But there are legal and regulatory reasons why the slides have to be as they are.

So how can you do a good presentation with a slide deck that is also a pitch book or a handout?

Well, the first things to say is please don’t carefully and diligently verbalise every bullet point on the deck. Just accept that the deck is not really a presentation, it is a document that has another purpose. Your job is to simply guide people through the document and highlight the points they should not miss. You should make available a copy of the deck and invite them to read it at their leisure.

That is tip number 1.

          Tip #1.   Be prepared to provide a brief expert guide to the information, rather than deliver it all.

Presentation

Secondly, understand that your job is to simplify, clarify and focus. And to achieve that, try to work out an opening key message. It doesn’t have to be complicated but it does need to be clear. Feel unembarrassed about stating the obvious.

For example:

‘In the next 15 minutes I hope to demonstrate that we are a great fit as a consultant for your project.’

You should also consider circling back to this message at the very end. For example:

‘So I hope I have demonstrated that we are a great fit as a consultant for your project.

               Tip #2.  Have a clear message at the beginning and circle back at the end.

My next tip is to clearly summarise or headline the purpose of each slide as you change slides.

For Example:

‘Next, let’s take a quick look at our org chart.’

Or

‘In the next slide, we have pulled together the numbers you need to compare us to our key competitors.’

This really helps any audience keep track of the whole argument. Do not expect them to work out what the slide means while you are talking.

                  Tip #3.  Summarise the purpose of each slide as you introduce it.

Presentation

The slide above would greatly benefit from an opening phrase: Now let’s look at the timeline for the project and a few key markers.

Now, assuming every slide has way more information on it than you want to actually say, my next tip is to give the audience permission to ignore most of the information on the slide (or read it later), and highlight one or two key points. I think of this as a verbal highlighter.

For example:

‘There is a lot of detail here on how we choose each investment in the portfolio and our process of evaluation before we buy. But perhaps I can draw your attention to two key things that make us different…’

                 Tip #4.   Use a verbal highlighter – giving permission to ignore some detail.

If you do use this technique, it is important to ensure you appear open and transparent, not trying to distract from the detail. To ensure this, I suggest regularly giving the audience permission to ask questions.

‘I am happy to take questions on any of these points’  or

‘If there is anything you want me to explain please do just ask’

This has the added benefit of making the presentation more interactive.

                 Tip #5.  Let the audience choose the focus. Be open, to answering questions as you go along.

So, there you are. My five top tips for delivering a bad slide deck. Of course, you also need to speak slowly and clearly, use good intonation, look at the audience not the deck and all the other best practice that all presentation trainers and coaches will tell you.

And always, always, ask, can we not just simplify the deck? It will make it so much easier to present well.

My final bonus tip is to consider creating a copy of the deck, strip out all the less important information and while you provide the original deck to the audience for them to study if they want to, you put the simpler version up on the screen.

Images:

campaign-creators-gMsnXqILjp4-unsplash
malte-helmhold-m0r4a8nMarw-unsplash

Leadership
Lindsay Williams

How Zelensky Rallies a Nation

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Volodymyr Zelensky is the man of the moment and reams of video and comment are hitting the internet, analysing his chances of survival and his effect on history.

As all readers of this blog know, we look for the communications lessons in current affairs and Zelensky is giving us all a text book illustration of not just leadership, but the use of modern communications skills. He uses not just words but mobile phone video to mobilise and galvanise his country.

The short self-shot videos from the President’s own phone are likely to become part of the way leaders communicate in the future. Zelensky used them last week to dispel rumours that Ukraine’s leaders had fled the country.

One shows him in front of a known landmark, openly walking the streets of Kyiv, despite the death threats against him.

In this next video – very short, filmed on his phone at night – he shows five of the country’s leadership, naming each one, and saying: “Everyone is here.”

 

In both cases, simple, unsophisticated and yet so powerful. Note the very short sentences such as ‘Everyone is here’. And lots of repetition.

These simple often very short, adlibbed messages are in stark contrast to Russian President Putin’s set piece addresses. Putin is professionally filmed, flanked by the uniformed and decorated officers of the Russian military and often speaks for more than an hour.

The Zelensky style is clearly resonating with his countrymen and women. It is also perfect for western audiences including the young. And the style is much more likely to appeal to those younger Russians who, it is said, are busy sharing alternative material on the war in contrast to that put out by the state-controlled media.

Even Zelensky’s more formal addresses are short and stunning in their simplicity. The President has repeatedly appeared behind a podium in olive green clothes that could be combat wear although there are absolutely no medals or military paraphernalia in sight. The sub text is – I am one of you. This is not about my position and the trappings of state. It’s about the fight at hand.

 

 

There have also been some inspired and history-making quotes. Offered ‘extraction’ by the American military, Zelensky said:

“I don’t need a ride. I need more ammunition.”

Later, in a longer address,  he explained that Ukrainians will defend themselves:

“By attacking us you will see our faces. Not our backs, our faces.” In this speech he is directly addressing the people of Russia and he does wear a shirt and tie, and has a picture and the Ukrainian flag. A different staging for a different audience.

 

 

This whole speech is in my view brilliant on a technical level as well as historically, chillingly important, from a man with a target on his back.

Short sentences. Lots of personal anecdote. Simple language.

The former actor, former comedian, former sit-com President, is using the skills of that trade to shape Europe’s history. As my own brother put it to me: whatever happens to him he has, in some ways, already won. He will never be forgotten.

Lindsay Williams

The most powerful element of any message….

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When my parents married they were dirt poor.  My father had walked away from a life in the steel mill in South Wales and wanted to be a journalist.  Living in a rented flat with two young girls in the early sixties, every penny was counted. He taught himself Pitman’s shorthand – a skill now almost extinct. After a badly paid spell as a reporter on the Oxford Mail he got an exciting new job as a Press Association journalist, in the lobby. For a poor lad from the backstreets of Cardiff, it was a big break. But he had no suits! Nothing he could wear in the Palace of Westminster. Mum’s father gave him some cast-offs but he was a much shorter rounder man than my Dad. Mum altered those suits and sewed turn-ups on the bottom, something that at the time was definitely not in fashion. But they did the job for a while. And my father went on to become a BBC reporter and presenter.

My parents’ struggle to get ahead, to have a professional and intellectual life rather than working in a factory is one of the stories that, 60 years later, still influences me. I feel so lucky to have interesting work.

Message

And everyone has those stories. Stories of where they’ve come from or moments that defined the rest of their lives. All businesses have those stories too. They are too rarely told.

Most courses I run these days are just two or four hours, and very intense. Senior time-poor people who need to get ready for a media interview, a town hall or a presentation. There is no time to go digging for story gold.

But just occasionally we are booked for longer courses with the luxury of time to really help our clients glimpse the world through our lens.

Persuading people to tell stories as part of their professional communications is hard work. Sometimes, they can’t quite see the point.

However, when we create the safe space and the time to get a group of people to share a story, lots of magic happens. People connect with each other more and enjoy the experience.

But more importantly, we can demonstrate the power of stories: how they shift people’s perspective, how they touch something other than the analytical brain and yet still influence it.

It is not just stories about where leaders have come from. I remember helping with messaging to launch a ‘pick and mix’ home insurance product: all very dry until we dug out the story of a letter from an elderly customer. ‘My husband and I are in our eighties’ she wrote ‘our cycling days are long behind us so why am I paying to insure 2 bicycles as part of my home insurance.’ That letter had – in part – inspired the new product.

Many years ago, I worked on messaging a new pension product inspired by a CEO who said: ‘I watched my grandmother outlive her pension’. I remember that man saying to the room ‘but is that really interesting?’ Everyone shouted emphatically ‘yes’.

And the story of the Reverend Henry Duncan who founded the world’s first mutual savings bank in 1810 in Dumfriesshire, as a way of helping his parishioners manage poverty, is an inspiring story retold many times. The bank went on to become TSB and the Henry Duncan story is a pillar of that brand.

If your business is looking to talk about purpose, the hunt should be on to find stories to communicate that.

Learning to find, chose and create stories to use professionally, is simply about creating awareness.  To use an analogy: If you not interested in nature, a bird in the garden is just a bird. But, once you stop to look, it is clearly a busy solitary blackbird or part of a gang of noisy sparrows. You just need to look.

If your job is to explain or lead with purpose look more. Tell more stories!

Lindsay Williams

How to Speak Human…

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‘Things could go crazy quickly.’

‘That’s a world war when Americans and Russians start shooting at each other.’

speak human

If you want people to listen and take note of what you say, keep it really, really simple. President Biden wants Americans to leave Ukraine, and leave now. So, he chooses very compelling language. The Guardian pulls out the key clips for us here.

‘Go crazy’ or ‘shooting at each other’ are the sort of phrases most business leaders would strike out of a speech, substituting more cautious or sophisticated language.

But if your audience is the man and woman in the street, or perhaps your staff, they will take a lot more notice if you use simple, colloquial language.

Sounds obvious huh!

Obvious but not so easy in my experience. It’s probably one of the things professional people find the most difficult when learning to be a spokesperson or give a professional speech.

And just to add one basic point often missed: written English and spoken English tend to be different, so even if you are writing a speech or the script for your podcast, you want to write to be heard, not to be read. We teach this in all our training and is a central feature of my colleague Eric Dixon’s ‘podcast training’.

Here are five tips to ensure you find the right vocabulary:

Imagine someone you know

Putting a real person front of mind and noting the words you would use to speak to them, can really help. I often ask people to speak to their Mum, or their son or their son’s best friend. I find people often automatically find different words and better explanations.

Use the short word

Utilize should always be use.

‘Procure’ or ‘purchase’ should be replaced by buy.

‘Remuneration’ can be replaced by ‘pay’ or ‘pay package’, (or ‘pay and benefits’ if you must).

‘Adhere’ is not something you would say at home. You would say ‘stick’.

‘Accordingly’ can usually be shortened to ‘so’.

Don’t be afraid to use several words rather than one long one

‘Beneficiaries’ might become ‘the people we help’ or ‘serve’.

‘Products’ is best explained as ‘our face creams’, ‘bank accounts’, ‘loans’ and so on.

‘Access to services’ is a phrase whose meaning is often completely lost. Try ‘installing ramps and widening                     doors’ or ‘ensuring people can use the phone, get cash out, etc.’

Have a back pocket phrase

Some phrases you may want to use but need a neat explanation to hand just to help those who are not familiar. For example:

Quantitative easing – a form of printing money.

Reduced footfall – fewer people walking past, less often.

Burrito method – sew inside out, like a burrito.

Try it out on someone else

Spotting the jargon or group-speak of other professions is easy, it’s much harder to work out which of the words you use every day are not fully understood by others. Fortunately, you just need to ask. You can ask colleagues, but it is even better to ask someone not as familiar with your professional world.

The one question I always get…

Aren’t you patronising your audience?

I can only say that I think shrouding the meaning of something in language that only those ‘in the club’ understand, is much more of an insult than over-explaining. If you carefully consider who is in the audience, you will almost certainly pitch your language at the right level. But if you do over-explain here and there, is anyone really going to leave the room feeling ‘patronised’.

Need help with all this? You could book a short online training session with one of our team. To reach us, click  here.

 

Biden Image from YouTube