I haven’t shared this story with many people, but I almost gave up on studying accounting after two years at the University of Lagos. I was doing quite well in the more general subjects, but was struggling in my core accounting subjects. Our financial accounting lecturer contributed in no small measure to this. He was obviously a well-grounded lecturer in accounting, but spent most of the lecture time facing the chalk board, and racing from one end of it to another, turning back once in a while to see most of us utterly confused or making jest of the entire classroom proceedings. As the lectures went on, he would ask questions, and inevitably answer them himself. His teaching style was focused on himself, and it was no surprise that yours truly and quite a good number of his students were not connecting to his classes, and were lagging behind in our grades.
On a more personal note, I learned in my years as a facilitator, and public speaker to be more audience centric drawing from that experience from Unilag. In the early years of the pension industry in Nigeria in 2006, rival Pension Fund Administrators (“PFAs”) would typically be given an opportunity to pitch their services to staff members of the prospect-organization in a town-hall “contest”. Those were perhaps the most fun days of my banking career. I do remember a particular occasion where the number of PFAs had grown from about 7 to 12 or thereabouts, and our host organization had to prune the time slots allotted to each PFA from the usual 30 minutes each to about 10 minutes. It was interesting to watch my colleagues from other PFAs struggle to go through their 72 page power-point slide decks in 10 minutes. Impossible – Yes, but they weren’t thinking too seriously about the audience, and thought that perhaps they could over-run the time, or perhaps do the impossible and squeeze in all that detail into 10 minutes. For most it was a disaster!
As I led our presentation, I decided to ditch power-point, to the great surprise and trepidation of my colleagues, and jotted down 5 points on a piece of paper which later became – ‘the 5 reasons to choose IBTC”, and just spoke to the audience. We delivered in 7 minutes, the clients were happy, we were happy, and trust me, we won! As the industry grew larger and more competitive, we cut down our slide deck into a 5 minute presentation, and named it “IBTC Presentation – 5 minutes”, all in a bid to be audience-centric. Two or three years later when I was leaving the industry, I still found that some of our rival PFAs were still using their 72 page slide decks for 5 minute time slots, but thankfully, a number of them had caught on to the 5 minute presentation templates with fewer slides.
The point is simple – communicating and connecting with people is not about you, your slides, or your fancy presentation. Your audience, be they your students, colleagues, prospects or clients should be the center and focus of your presentation. A combination of immaturity, ego, insecurity or an absolute lack of creativity and out-of-the-box thinking sometimes forces us to focus too much on ourselves while communicating, rather than on the audience.
Earlier on in my speaking career, when I was younger, I often felt so good about the content I was delivering that I seldom cared about whether or not my audience was participating. I just delivered my “perfectly scripted” presentations and awaited the applause from the audience. I often spoke too much and outside the allotted time, and tried to use my talkative nature as an excuse. Somewhere between my ego and immaturity, I like many others just loved to hear my own voice. Nowadays as I facilitate, I take a 2 minute break every 20 minutes to ask – “any questions”, and really try to encourage participation from the audience. I currently employ a variety of engagement approaches including walking around, sitting in the middle of the class, and getting participants to co-facilitate, and most importantly, I try to keep within the allotted time, and indeed talk less. In one-on-one conversations, I often used to dominate every conversation, and was very opinionated. As I built my interest in coaching, I learned that asking engaging questions, practicing active listening and being less prescriptive actually allowed people to “Think for a Change”, and come to realize their full potential by themselves, rather than rely on your “expert” opinions. I also found there was so much more to learn from others.
According to John Maxwell, every time we are in front of an audience – our clients, prospects, colleagues or students, we should reflect on three questions that the audience will like to see you answer in the affirmative before you can make a real connection:
• Do you care for me?
• Can you help me?
• Can I trust you?
If your communication style doesn’t show a genuine care for people, a desire to help them or the fact that you are authentic and can be trusted, it is no surprise that you aren’t winning the hearts of the people you are engaging. The key to impactful communication is not in just being eloquent or having a good command of language. It is really about showing that you care by being audience centric, providing help in a non-prescriptive manner, and building trust by being open about your foibles, and sharing some of your personal struggles and stories.
Remember these three audience expectations next time you have a one-on-one or group conversation, and watch your connections grow!
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