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Public Speaking Tips for Company Leaders: Have a Plan B

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• published: 26 Jul 2016
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VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION Hi, Steve Farber here. Coming to you today from Santa Rosa, California, on a little bit of a road trip to work with my friends at Keysight Technologies and attend a conference. So anyway, over on the blog at stevefarber.com, we've recently put up an infographic called "10 Public Speaking Tips for Company Leaders." Now these tips would apply to anybody, you don't have to be a leader to use them, but you know I've been doing this public speaking thing for two and a half decades and I have learned a few things over the years from doing this kind of work that I tried to encapsulate in a nice handy format that anybody can use. So whatever you are doing that requires you to stand up in front of a room, whether you're addressing your team, or you're speaking to your company, or you're talking to clients or customers, or you're just you know, getting up in front of your family for that matter I suppose, these principles will help you. But I do think they are particularly important for people taking on a leadership role. So I outline ten of them for you. And today, I just wanted to focus on one, which I refer to as "Having a plan B." So a lot of times, you know, if we're gonna be giving a talk to somebody, we spend a lot of time rehearsing, we get our stories right. You know, we go over the slides again and again and again, if we're using PowerPoint slides, which by the way I think it's okay. So let's say, for example, you know, you've got your whole speech set up around slides and you know the flow of this thing, man, I mean you have it down cold from slide one to slide two to slide three to slide four, and you're now wondering your timing and you get all worked out, then the day finally arrives, you step up to the front of the room, you fire up your computer, you hit the clicker and nothing happens. Your PowerPoint presentation fails to load. What do you do then? If everything you've done is predicated on your knowing what slides coming next, you're kind of...what's the technical term for it? Screwed, in that moment, or what would happen if the power went out in the venue, in the room, in the building? Now you have no lights, no microphone, no computer, no nothing, just you, you and the darkness and your audience. Now that's not a hypothetical scenario. Early on in my career, that's exactly what happened to me. I was responsible for delivering a very important pilot workshop to a new client that the company that I was working for at that time. And this was about 120 people in the room. It was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And this was kind of a way to launch the program and if this program went well, we had the opportunity to do a really big project that was gonna last for several years, bringing lots of revenue, keep a lot of people working, and do a great job for our clients. So it was a lot of pressure on me, and I was fairly new to this company and new in this profession as a matter of fact. So I got up there in front of this group of 120 people in the back of the room, there were some of the executives from the company just there to check it out and to check me out, frankly, to see if they would, you know, if they thought I was appropriate for the company and if I was going to do a good job and all that stuff. So tons of pressure, and I made it through the morning, it was going really well, the group was really engaged. We broke for lunch, we came back, and this was in the middle of summer, and late in the afternoon, all the power went out in the building. So that meant no lights, no microphone, no air conditioning, no nothing. Now, if I had been entirely dependent on my slides, I would have been dead. Not only would I've been dead, the project would have been dead most likely. And I don't know how long it would have taken me to live that down, but fortunately, I did have the content down cold, I knew it inside and out. So instead of freaking out, I would say something like, "Hey, just you know, imagine that you're looking at a blue slide with a cartoon of you know, whatever. I was talking it through, but the hotel staff were wonderful. They brought in candles, and we actually ran for the next hour or so on candlelight, and we had a great time. And what was interesting about it in retrospect was the clients, you know, the executives they were there from the client company, were so impressed by the fact that it didn't even cause a hiccup, that power outage, and that people really had a great time and everything went along as planned. It actually made it better. It gave me and the company, even more, credibility because we were able to ride through the unanticipated mess. So that's what I would like you to consider is, if you're giving any kind of a presentation, whether we have a little piece of the agenda at an upcoming meeting, or you're responsible for you know, entire full-blown presentation, know it cold.