Projecting Confidence, Conviction, and Authority

John Baldoni: Well I think public speaking is a challenge for anyone in the public spotlight and the public forum, and that can be in the business, your organization, volunteer organization or whatever, I think anyone who aspires to lead others needs to be comfortable on his or her feet, so that's really the impetus and there's lots of literature on public speaking, but I think I come from it from a little bit different way, my background was originally in communication, I'm an old speech writer, but I've worked on leadership development for at least 15 years or more and so my route into leadership was originally through communication, so I saw lots of ways of how people put together presentations and very often the presentation might be very good but the delivery falls short. So that was the impetus for writing this because I think I had some things to say and as part of my executive coaching practice I do spend a little bit of time with those who want it, we work on presentation skills and I find it a great avenue for opening up their ability to connect with others, not simply on a public forum but also one on one within their leadership context.

Rachel Salaman: So who is the book aimed at?

John Baldoni: It's aimed at anyone who needs to speak in public, so it's obviously any executive or rising executive, a manager, managing director or whatever throughout an organization. It's also aimed at salespeople who are always making presentations, so sales folks will find value in this, but basically anyone who has to speak as part of his or her job, or in their community as a volunteer will find this book of value.

Rachel Salaman: Now one of the first things you say in the book is that leaders need to be authentic, but for some shy people authentic means the opposite of projecting confidence, so how do you marry the idea of authenticity with the need for leaders to act in a certain way, whether or not that feels natural to them?

John Baldoni: It's a very good question and I think if someone who is shy, and there are many of us, there is such wonderful literature on quiet leaders, I've worked with them and the great benefit of a quiet leader is that he or she tends to be sometimes more patient, but certainly very observant and even better, a good listener. So the sense of authenticity is really allowing people to see the real you, and that's not putting on airs, it's not acting with falsity, it's letting people see who you are. So at the same time public speaking or being in public as a leader or being in front of others as a leader, there is acting involved but that doesn't mean dissembling, it means you are projecting your personality, so the sense of authenticity is you might call it the right stuff of leadership, the real you, and so I would say anyone who is shy or reserved in this, the real you is probably very sincere and very genuine, just simply let people see that, so there is not a false note in it, it's not pretend, it's more an act of projection. After a while it becomes part of you so you're not acting as a theater actor, although in public speaking that we borrow from the theater certainly to project our voice and those types of things, but it's actually letting people see who you are, so it's more the act of projection, being the real you and at the same time there are people, many leaders, executives, are extroverts and voluble, if you are a quiet leader you do not have to do what they do, you simply have to, as I say many times, get out of your skin and meet and mingle with people, and when necessary speak. So an introvert will not become an extrovert but an introvert, and I've worked with many of whom rise to the very tops of their organizations, they've learned to project, they've learned when to turn on their personality in ways that engage and bring people together for common purpose.

Rachel Salaman: You say that people should think of a speech as a piece of music, a very interesting idea, could you expand on that a bit?

John Baldoni: Very definitely, we do this with women's voices actually, and it's why I know in the UK they have women's voices over train announcements; why, because a woman's voice has more melody, more notes in it than a male voice, it's less of a monotone just naturally, but a presentation rises and falls, there are high notes, there are low notes, but most of it is probably in the middle, and so that's why I compared it to a melody, as a piece of music. It's an opening and a close, there are crescendos, descendos, a speech has rhythm, very often in a piece of music there are rests, there are pauses, a pause is one of the most powerful things in a presentation when applied appropriately. So very much so a presentation can be thought of like a piece of music.

Rachel Salaman: And how does that help people to think of it that way?

John Baldoni: I think it gives them a sense of a beginning, a middle and an end, but also the variance, I think if there is one thing to take away from a sense of melody, think of the variance, there are high notes and there are low notes and there are mid-range notes, and most of your presentation will be in the mid-range, if it's all high it becomes white noise, if it's all low it becomes a monotone. It's the variance that catches our attention, think of it as a song, so that's what I'm doing, and also a piece of melody, a piece of music has its own momentum to it so a presentation must have its own momentum otherwise it's like a stodgy piece of pudding, it just stays there, so you've got to think of it as how do I activate my words, how do I activate my message, so perhaps thinking of it as a song might help.

Rachel Salaman: You note in the book that most people are afraid of public speaking, what are your tips for overcoming this fear?

John Baldoni: I think it's to look at it realistically, now there are some folks who genuinely are petrified and they would need to seek the counsel of a therapist who can deal with these kinds of "real stage fright," I think that's a small segment of our population but all of us, and I speak regularly, there is a little bit of anxiety, butterflies in the stomach before going out on stage, I think recognizing that you're going to be nervous and how do I channel it, and feeling that you're going to be nervous going on stage is a good thing. There are famous performers who get physically ill before they go on stage, why, because they want to give such a good job and they feel that they might fall short so it makes them physically ill. Now I haven't dealt with anybody like that in the management circles but you have to understand it. One technique I knew I think accepts the fact that I'm going to be a little bit nervous and so find out a way how do I come to peace with the audience, that is one thing. Another thought, and one of the things and I talk about in the book, but I've been sharing this advice for a long time, one of the fears we have in public speaking is that we're going to make a mistake, we're going to fail and actually in most instances the audience is on your side, they want you to succeed, at least they want to hear your message, they don't want to see you mess up, why, because when they see a speaker struggling, it makes them feel uncomfortable, they feel sorry for you, they feel pity for you and no one likes to be that, so here's a thought, before you go on stage, as you go on stage, look out at the audience and say these folks are my guests and when I have a guest in my home I want to make him or her comfortable, and I will do my best to make that person comfortable, I will bring them refreshments, I will offer them a chair, I will engage in conversation and when I want them to leave I will find ways, cues to nudge them gently out the door, and I always say if you have a guest in your house, assuming they're not relatives, who is in control, you, you own your home, you own that space, so the same kind of mental leap, take that to the stage, you own the stage for that moment and those folks are your guests, so if you think of more or less I am in control rather than they are in control, that is the difference because I think that's what gets people upset, they feel they cannot react to this feeling that I am not in control. Well you have to adopt the mindset you are in control and guess what, you are because you are the author of your message, you are delivering it, for that moment the audience is listening to you, you are the subject matter expert, they need to hear from you, so it's a control thing.

Rachel Salaman: Now in the book you cover how to use PowerPoint effectively, obviously a very common business tool, what do people tend to get wrong with their PowerPoint presentations?

John Baldoni: I think quite simply they forget delivery, they create the slides with everything on it and very often the PowerPoint has too much stuff on it. Now PowerPoint is a wonderful tool but we use it in different ways, as a presentation tool it must be minimalist, if you use it with spreadsheets and things that is fine for a table discussion, but not really a full presentation. But the most important thing is they think well I've got the slides so I'll just sort of wing it and they don't rehearse their presentation, they don't think about their delivery. Now here is the big part and I do talk about it in the book, a successful PowerPoint delivery is a balancing act, now for example when we see a statesman, a civic leader or an elected official or a CEO deliver a presentation very often it's a scripted presentation, they might work from a teleprompter, so they are essentially reading the script, if they are very good you can't tell they are reading it, they are delivering it. Now that is a one track form of our brain, you are only focusing on reading and delivering, with PowerPoint you have two things going on, you are creating the words of your presentation as you deliver, it's a balancing act and that is really difficult and I think that's what people forget, oh I've got the slides so I will just talk to them, so they haven't really worked out what their actual delivery is, so they hem and they haw and they fumble and there is no coherence to the presentation, the slides chunk along but there is no rhythm to it and people get really bored and that's why they check their smart phones in presentations. So that's part of it, it's finding the balancing act between creating your content and delivering it.

Rachel Salaman: Yes and you talk in the book about turning PowerPoint into performance art, and within that you offer five things to consider to help with that. The first is context, so how can someone build this idea into a presentation?

John Baldoni: Well context is why you are giving the presentation, what's on the agenda, what's your message all about and how does the message complement, challenge, cajole the audience that's listening, so a speaker always must know the context, what's on the audience's mind, what do they want to hear and what should I deliver. Now that's not an excuse for pandering, that's not telling an audience exactly what they want to hear but it's understanding where they're coming from, so context is important, and most importantly with your context understand why I am here talking about my message.

Rachel Salaman: And the second point to consider is segue, so could you give an example of this and how it helps a presentation?

John Baldoni: Well segue is simply going from one point to another and doing it smoothly, so think about how I can go from one topic to another, it can be as simple as I have just told you about these factors, I am going to tell you about other factors that affect our business, it's a neat, smooth segue and many polished presenters do this, they give a little mini conclusion and they jump to the next step. So it's that, you could do it with a story, you could just make it simple, simple, simple.

Rachel Salaman: So they set the context, they think about their segues and your third thing that you present in the book to consider is headlines, how do they play into a presentation?

John Baldoni: Headlines are critical for PowerPoint, it's your punctuation points and very often the headlines are the literal words, the biggest type on your slide, what is it you're going to say and you grab that word and you punch it, so it goes our challenges, if that's the slide, you say our challenges, what are we going to do about them, how are we going to face them, so you give enthusiasm to that and every slide should have a headline. Very often as I just said, it's the big words on the page but you can be creative with it, it doesn't always have to be just those words and so it's that grabber and if we go back to what I was talking about earlier about melody, these become your punctuation points, these are your high notes if you will, this is something that you accent.

Rachel Salaman: And from headlines, the big picture, you then talk about specifics and you say that a good presenter balances content with reason, what do you mean by that?

John Baldoni: Well you have to say why am I talking about this, now this is where anyone in a business presentation often fumbles, they put everything but the kitchen sink in their presentation, so the typical audience doesn't need to know all of that, so prune your data, prune your words, make it very crystal clear, less is more is the philosophy, so the reason, it's the logic, why is it here in this presentation at this point, but it's also why am I telling you about this at this point, you need to know this and if you don't need to know this then I should not mention it.

Rachel Salaman: And your fifth point is delivery and we've touched a bit on the importance of delivering a presentation, but what are your delivery tips for presenting with PowerPoint specifically?

John Baldoni: Well I still think you want to consider the highs and the lows, and this is where the practice comes in and so you look at your slides and where will I punch it, what numbers might I call out, what facts might I highlight, where might I employ a pause. So for example, and very often we see in PowerPoint graphs, rather than discussing the entire graph just say here you can see this is an upward flow or a downward flow, let me call your attention to the crisscrossing of lines here, this is our sweet spot, this is our aim, this is our challenge, whatever it is, find these high moments in your presentation and in your delivery you want to be comfortable, PowerPoint lends itself to a sense of informality, conversational speak, but not so informal that it's deadly dull and boring and that you speak in a monotone, or worse you read the slides and turn your back on the audience. What you're doing, out of one corner of your eye you are grabbing the headline and directing to the audience, so you're just simply using it as a visual aid, not the focus of your entire presentation.

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Rachel Salaman: You talked earlier about people who write scripts for their presentations, what are your thoughts on that?

John Baldoni: I think it's a very good thing to do when time permits, now senior executives or politicians or elected officials have teams of speechwriters so they do that because they simply don't have the time to do it, but many of our world leaders, certainly your own Winston Churchill or our Ronald Reagan wrote many of their own presentations, their own speeches, of course if you have the time then do it. Now that certainly does not mean they have to stand up there and read it, the point about writing it out is that you organize your thoughts and you think of the good flow of words, your phrases, things will come to you and so very often I say write it out as much as you want and then internalize it, and you go over it a few times and you'll be surprised that some of the phrases that you came up with, you'll deliver them as you speak.

Rachel Salaman: Now you suggest that people should leverage the energy of the room when they give a presentation, could you give an example to explain what you mean with that?

John Baldoni: There are a couple of ways, specifically I gave an example of a colleague of mine who had been on a presentation where there was a very powerful speaker in front of him who spoke before him and this audience brought the house down, and so my friend had to come out and speak. The same thing happened to me earlier this year, we have a senator in the U.S., Cory Booker, he was then the Mayor of Newark, he was on before me so Cory Booker is a handsome man, tall, six four, ex-athlete, great story, powerful presenter, wonderful type of thing and he brings the house down so I am the one that goes on next to him, so what I did was leveraging the energy in the room, I go I'm not going to pretend that Cory Booker was not before me, so I came out and I talked about Cory Booker, I made some light-hearted comments about him and then the audience sort of adjusted to oh we have John Baldoni on stage, not Cory Booker. The problem is that if you go on cold then it's a dissonance, it's a clash and the audience is not quite adjusted to you, so you've got to borrow from the aura of the person before you. Now the same thing can happen if the person on before you is deadly dull, and this probably happens more times than not, how can you pep up the audience, what is it that you can do, so you may not be leveraging the energy of the room, you're accelerating the energy level of that room, you're building on it, you're pushing it up and there are tips and techniques, maybe ask the audience to stand up for a moment and stretch or get them to look at one another or shake hands or do something, your own message, what is this little quip you're going to say to get them focused on your, so that's what I'm talking about, leveraging energy in the room.

Rachel Salaman: In the book you also talk about the need for leaders to be optimistic, but that optimism should be realistic, so how can a leader strike the right balance and ensure that they don't over-promise and become a Pollyanna?

John Baldoni: Well over-promise is not the same as being optimistic, but thank you for raising that issue and Pollyanna is exactly the antithesis of it. Leaders have to look at their world as the glass is half full rather than half empty, why, because it's potential because they're leading people, they're bringing people together for common cause and if it's sort of well I don't know if we're going in the right direction but let's just try it, what do you want to do today kind of thing, then it's lackadaisical but at the same time if they're focused only on what's negative then they make people feel uneasy. You know it's a characteristic that we say that dogs can sense fear in humans and so people who are skittish around dogs, what does that do, it makes the dogs skittish, and when dogs are skittish they bark and they growl or they get their hair up and they're tense and that only exacerbates the situation, that makes the person who doesn't like dogs even more nervous. The same thing happens in a kind of way with leaders, people in an executive position, if they don't radiate confidence about themselves, if they make people uneasy, we are fearful of that because they say this person is in charge of us. So the long way round you have to be optimistic and at the same time your optimism is rooted in reality, you are clear eyed; what does that mean, you talk about problems and you may offer solutions but very often you invite others, what are our solutions, how are we going to overcome this. So you're not necessarily the person with all the answers but you're the one who is marshaling the resources, marshaling the ideas and marshaling people to solve them, and at the same time your framework is optimistic, a way of bringing people together and saying that's our challenge and let's go out and do it, that type of thing.

Rachel Salaman: Another area in the book that you talk about is nuance which you call subtle unspoken communication, and you suggest that this should be avoided when speaking out loud, could you expand on that idea?

John Baldoni: I love nuance, especially in drama, and television lends itself to that where it's a raised eyebrow or simply a look and there are actors who excel at doing this and it just makes a performance rich. It's hard to pull that off on stage even as a stage actor but also it's hard as subtlety doesn't always work with an audience because they may not understand you, so you have to be explicit, and that doesn't mean you can't be clever but explicitness in the sense of being crystal clear and coherent is what's important, don't let people draw their own conclusions, you draw it for them. Now that might sound a little pedestrian but for a public presentation you need to connect the dots, in other words you need to connect your message to the lives of the people in your audience and if they are your employees or your followers or whatever, connect their lives to the mission and vision of the organization, so that's what I mean by being explicit. Another way of doing that is closing the loop, don't leave unanswered questions, that type of thing, and at the same time it is acceptable to pose a question to an audience to have them think about it, that's fine, but your overall message, you want to be crystal clear and coherent in what you're saying so that people walk out of that room knowing what you said and if there's an action step, what they must do.

Rachel Salaman: Now you include a chapter on meeting and mingling, you mentioned this a little earlier, what does it have to do with speaking with presence?

John Baldoni: Well a presence is radiated by the personal connection, one person to another, connecting with them and good leaders are those who meet and mingle, they walk the hallways, they eat in the cafeteria, they engage in questions, they ask people and more importantly they listen. So it's very simple, people want to see and hear their leaders and in our 24/7 global condition this is hard because the leader very often is not in the same place as the employees, and so the good executives, the really powerful ones physically visit these places, so their physical presence is there. But the sense of meeting and mingling is actually two ways, the leader needs to listen and learn from the organization but also anyone who wants to rise in an organization needs to know how to make small talk with people in positions of power, they need to know how to talk about themselves, their ideas in ways which are informal, it shows that you are more comfortable in your own skin and when we are evaluating talent for promotion we want people, men and women, who are comfortable in their own skin. Now that doesn't mean they can't be nervous at times or whatever, but you want people who know how to carry themselves, can carry a conversation, can initiate a conversation, can make small talk, and very importantly know when to exit, so you don't want to corner the CEO about your pet project and just bore into all the details, and by extension bore that individual to tears, you want to be able to say hey, it's been great to speak to you, I hope we meet again or something like that.

Rachel Salaman: At the end of the book there's a very useful section full of really concise tips for different situations and one of the situations is pitching, what are your key points here?

John Baldoni: Well pitching is a form of selling, it's generating enthusiasm for your ideas and so all of the principles of public speaking apply but most importantly you have to know what your audience is and you need to know the context. If you're in sales, what's their mindset, are they in love with the competitor's product, are they less disposed to switch vendors or are they amenable to your product, do they want to hear your message or not, you need to know these things before you go in, so that's what it is but it's also just being clear and concise about what it is you have to offer. And at the same time since you're pitching, be very careful about not overstaying your welcome, or don't hammer home points that don't need to be hammered home, touch on them and say if there's any other questions, let's move on, so it's that.

Rachel Salaman: We've covered so much ground in this conversation, if a leader wanted to start speaking with more presence today, what are the main points you think they should take away?

John Baldoni: I think it's know yourself and what it is you want to share about yourself in the sense of my leadership self, my expectations for my organization, my expectations for myself, that is the point of view that maybe isn't explicit but it fields into your command presence. It's also the sense of knowing your message, following through on it, being there for questions, before your presentation know your audience, prepare your content, match your content points to what the audience needs to hear or they want to hear. Also feel a sense that when I walk on stage I am the expert, I own the stage, that will help you deliver a sense of confidence as you present.

Rachel Salaman: John Baldoni thanks very much for joining us.

John Baldoni: It's my pleasure, thank you.

Rachel Salaman: The name of John's book again is "The Leaders' Guide to Speaking with Presence: How to Project Confidence, Conviction and Authority." You can find out more about him and his work at www.johnbaldoni.com. I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview, until then goodbye.