An under-appreciated skill

There is an art, or a skill, called Oratory, or Public Speaking, and in my current career it’s part of the required tool set: without the ability to speak well in a public setting I couldn’t make a living delivering interesting lectures, something I take great pleasure in doing. However, the art of eloquent speaking goes far beyond formal lecture delivery: it is what people do all the time in a business setting, whenever they present a PowerPoint presentation or just speak to assembled colleagues or managers in order to impart information and influence a decision.

And the problem is, many employees have little skill for doing that. Business meetings, of course, are notoriously ineffective for a number of reasons – and lack of speaking skill is one of them. You’ve seen it yourself: some hapless engineer, manager, or other corporate citizen stands up before some group and presents data in support of a decision, and nobody follows – some read their email (of course), some daydream, some just fail to understand. The failings of PowerPoint take some of the blame – many presentations are simply abominable – but the inability to just speak well is obvious. Indeed, the advent of PowerPoint may have played a role in making speaking skill seem less critical – why not just let people watch the pretty colorful charts and bullets?…

Bottom line: the business of the organization is run less effectively because people don’t have the skill of wielding words to achieve the objective at hand – and nobody pressures them to attain this skill.

Who cares? You should!

So why should we care? After all, nobody expects a corporate pitch to be like the Gettysburg address, or “I have a dream…”. And yet there are many reasons why you should care when your employees can’t speak well:

• In many cases, a poorly made presentation can mean not getting what you want – or what is good for the organization, if they coincide: a boring, ill-spoken pitch will be more likely to be rejected. As the biblical proverb says, The tongue has the power of life and death – and (less dramatically) it also has great power when it comes to getting project funding approved…
• Ineffective speaking wastes everybody’s time. Good oratory is focused and succinct – and moves faster to its conclusion. Just think: if you’re a manager and spend a few hours each day in meetings, how much of your lifetime did you lose to the endless “Err”s and “Ahh”s and “Okay”s of poor speakers? Not to mention speakers that take twice the necessary time to get to the point?
• Ineffective speaking can annoy people out of their minds. For instance, some people have annoying mannerisms in their speech – like the aforementioned “Err”s and “Ahh”s – that are repeated ad nauseam.
• Ultimately, many employees will need to present to outsiders – customers, business partners, the media… and they represent your company when they do so. If they strike a ridiculous figure when they speak, the company’s image will inevitably suffer.
• Being a proficient speaker adds to a well rounded professional personality. Do you really want employees that can’t express their thoughts effectively?

So what can you do about this gap?

In the olden days, people were taught the art of oratory in school: it was considered one of the classic Liberal Arts that a free citizen needed to be proficient in. It was included in a proper education as a matter of course. Today, alas, this is no longer the case. This is highlighted for me when I have occasion to listen to college students making presentations: even the brightest students show a wide range of speaking skills, with the lower end being pretty dismal. Obviously, speaking is not a subject they learn in college (sadly, the same may be said of some of their professors as well).

So if the education system won’t do it, it remains up to us in the workplace to teach our employees how to express themselves in public. This can be done in two ways:

• The company can require employees to take speaking courses, focusing on such presentation skills as are useful in its business setting (many such courses are included in corporate training curricula, but usually they aren’t mandatory. They should be).
• Managers can take responsibility and coach their employees to be better speakers and presenters.

The second approach has the advantage that managers get to hear their employees a lot, and are uniquely positioned to guide them – discreetly – to improve their technique. This can be invaluable, because experience shows me that many poor speakers are quite unaware of their failings, and sometimes a simple bit of feedback – “you may not notice it, but when you speak you tend to…” – can work wonders.

Skillful speaking involves many areas – mastery of the language, diction, inflection, use of humor, body language, audience rapport… a lot to teach, a lot to learn. And if you work for a multinational organization, you may need to teach people to do it in more than their mother tongue.

Be a good teacher!