Why It Still Pays to Meet in Person

No matter what industry we are in, we are all in the people business. Forming relationships with our clients and colleagues is a vital part of success in any field. While it might be more convenient and perhaps more economical to text, email or Skype, nothing beats the power of a face-to-face connection. It's the best way to explore and build consensus and encourage discussion. How else can we expect to get to know one another?

But sitting across the table from someone, sharing a glass of wine or a cup of coffee seems to have become a luxury. Some suggest that our nation wouldn't have found itself on the edge of a fiscal cliff if our President cultivated more personal relationships with members of Congress. The same can be said of both the Republicans and Democrats in Congress: if our politicians committed to socializing across party lines, discussing and forging personal relationships, it might help build trust and lead to solutions. 

Lyndon Johnson used to invite 20 members of Congress to dinner every week. They brought their spouses and Lady Bird would give them a tour of the White House before dinner. By the end of his term, Johnson knew every member of Congress and members of Congress knew each other. These face-to-face meetings helped build relationships that helped Congress carry out the business of the nation.

How you say something is often more powerful than what you say. The subtle nuances of communications - body language, gestures, facial expression, tone of voice - cannot be translated into a text or an email. In fact, sometimes your words can be misinterpreted when then are typed rather than spoken.

Information can be shared virtually, but when it's done in person, it helps to build long-lasting relationships and trust that will inevitably grow your business. The bottom line is that today's technology can help us on our journey to becoming master communicators by providing an addition, not a replacement, for face-to-face communication.

Are You Addicted to PowerPoint?

If you use PowerPoint when speaking to an audience, understand that PowerPoint is not the presentation, it is simply an enhancement to the presentation. 

With that said, don't even think about writing your entire speech on the slides. PowerPoint is not a teleprompter, nor is it an alternative to a written report. The slides should be meaningless without your commentary. And when using bullet points, limit yourself to 3 bullets per slide. And consider - strongly consider - incorporating graphics and pictures to avoid dull, wordy, bullet point ridden slides. And do not, not even for one minute, turn your back to the audience and read the slides. In other words, don't let PowerPoint become your crutch. Slides with lots of bells and whistles give your audience something to look at, but they also give them an excuse to not listen. 

It's hard to imagine professional business presentations done without PowerPoint. That's why I'm challenging you to present - just once - without it. Without PowerPoint, you can be the visual effect and the sound effect of your presentation. And perhaps your audience will be more interested in what you have to say since there won't be any slides to distract them? It will mean that as the presenter, you need to be well-prepared and well-versed in your topic. Or course, you should always be well-prepared and well-versed, but taking the crutch of PowerPoint away makes it that much more important.

But if you can't go cold turkey, and insist on using PowerPoint, at least strive to be more visually interesting to engage your audience.When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled Kindle Fire HD he wanted to stress that the new and improved e-reader had an 8 week battery life. He could have added that feature to a long list of bullet points. Instead, he chose a graphic to make his point. On one of his PowerPoint slides, he showed a calendar with the months September and October. September 6, which was the day of his presentation, was highlighted in red. Bezos explained that if turned on during his presentation, the Kindle Fire's 8 week battery would last until the end of October. That's a powerful image that most likely will not be forgotten.

Used properly and prudently, PowerPoint does a fabulous job - if you remember that it is not designed to be the star of the show.

There's Not an App for That

 

I am a big fan of Slate.com, the online current affairs and culture magazine. I listen to Slate's podcasts, I read all of the regular columns, and I especially enjoy Farhad Manjoo's short videos and articles. Manjoo writes about technology in a way that I can get my head around it. Together, he and his handy sidekick, The Hand Model, review some of the best applications for the web, mobile phones, and social media. 

So, you can imagine my delight when I came across one of his videos entitled Get Better at Public Speaking where Farhad Manjoo reviews apps that help you speak in front of a crowd. I watched his video and then downloaded all of the apps he mentioned. SlideshowRemote allows you to control a PowerPoint presentation from your smart phone. While presenting to an audience, you can view the current slide and your notes in portrait, or you can view the current slide and the next slide in landscape. Simply swipe forward to advance, or swipe back to return to the previous slide. This is a perfect app to help you rehearse your presentation.

Presentation Clock is an app that does one thing extremely well: it displays large, easy to read numbers that change colors at intervals that you determine to help keep you from speaking too long. When the timers hits 0, the colors invert (from red on black to black on red) and continue counting up indicating how long you've gone over your time limit. It's fully customizable with simple touch controls.

But here's where Manjoo's video is misleading: none of these apps actually make you a better speaker. There are tools that will help make a difference in your ability to communicate more effectively, but you already have those tools - they can't be download in the form of an app.

So, what are the tools that you already have?

You've got the basics - a voice, a smile, eyes, gestures, body language. You've got a message. You've got two ears. You've got your personal style. And you've got fear. And believe it or not, even fear is a tool that you can use. Learning how to put each of these tools to work will lift you from where you are now to the level of master communicator in a way that no app will ever be able to do for you. If you put these tools to work, you can change from the inside out. Your outlook on yourself and others will shift so that personally and professionally - you will soar. That's not a claim that we at Ty Boyd, Inc. don't take lightly.