Confessions of a Public Speaker (15 page)

Most organizers never bother to collect feedback from the
attendees, and
of those who do,
often it doesn’t get passed on to the speakers. It’s a
shame because it’s most appropriate for the organizers to share feedback
with the speakers; after all, they invited them to speak, so technically
the speakers work for the hosts. But being as busy as they are, the
organizers don’t always communicate the gathered data back to the
speakers. They ask the good speakers to come back and leave the rest to
figure out life for themselves.

Some do provide feedback, and
Figure 8-1
shows a typical
report for a speaker at an event. This is real data from a real event,
and the speaker was me.

Figure 8-1. My scorecard from a recent speaking engagement.

At first glance, this looks good. Apparently 58 of the 129 people
who responded were “Somewhat satisfied.” That doesn’t sound too bad. I
even managed to score a “Very satisfied” from 38 additional people. But
a rating of “Neutral” from 29 people is worthless. I’d rather they were
forced to decide—if they’re not sure where they stand, I’d consider them
dissatisfied. Or perhaps they dozed
off. That would actually be fascinating data to know: how
many people fell asleep during the lecture? (That’s a stat I’d love to
see at all lectures, especially in universities.)

But the single most valuable data point is how my scores compare
to other speakers. Without it, this feedback is useless. Perhaps my
scores are the worst
of all scores in the history of presentations at this
organization. Or perhaps they’re the best. There is no way to know. And
what about the one guy who was very dissatisfied? Was he important?
Maybe he’s the VP of the division so his opinion matters more than the
others. Or is he, like my former boss, always dissatisfied by
everything? Maybe he has never given a score other than “Very
dissatisfied.” Or perhaps he showed up in the wrong room and thought I’d
be speaking about his favorite topic, which to his dismay I never
mentioned. Reading this report keeps me mostly in the dark.

The most useful feedback conveys what the dissatisfied people wish
I had done differently, and what the satisfied people want me to make
sure I do next time. Even if all 129 said they were beyond very
dissatisfied, and unanimously agreed on a law banning me from ever
speaking again, I wouldn’t know what it was that dissatisfied them. I’d
have to guess at what changes to make to do better next time, once my
appeal goes through and I’m put on speaking probation.

And then, of course, since there were 500 people in the room, what
did the other 371 think about my talk? I’ll never know. Because only a
minority of attendees fill out speaker surveys, the responses typically
represent the top and bottom of the feedback curve. Those who
passionately love or hate you are best represented because they’re the
most motivated to participate. The moderate majority is least
represented. Since surveys are black holes—no one is informed who
exactly will read them, and how they affect the future—there’s little
reason for most people to be thoughtful about what they say.
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Without a wise, patient hand reviewing the data, it’s easy to
misinterpret what it means or how the speaker could have possibly done a
better job. Most
of the time, the questions in the survey are framed wrong,
setting up misinterpretations no matter who gives feedback.

Here’s some
of the real feedback speakers need:

No matter what data is provided to a speaker, it’s easy and free
to simply ask people in the audience when you see them afterward. When
someone gives you a polite, “Great job!”, say, “Thanks, but how could I
have made it better?” Get them to move beyond pleasantries and think for
a moment. Give them your business card to encourage them to continue the
discussion. After the event, ask your host the aforementioned questions
and see what data he’ll share with you. Even if he doesn’t have data
from the audience, he can give his own opinions, which can be just as
valuable.

What would happen if, in 1942, I booked Mussolini to speak in
London? Mussolini was a passionate, perhaps excellent, speaker. But what
do you think his survey results would look like? Instead of evaluating
Mussolini, the only thing the survey scores would indicate is that the
organizer failed to match the speaker to the audience. Speakers can be
set up to fail if they are asked to speak to people who hate them, or on
a topic they do not care about. I spoke once at Cooper Union, an elite,
world-famous university in New York City, where all admitted students
get full scholarships. I was on a book tour promoting one of my books.
The talk I’d prepared was about all the things that go wrong on projects
and how a wise leader can handle them. It was good material, and I’d
presented it well many times. But when I arrived, I learned my audience
was made up entirely of freshmen: 18- and 19-year-olds without any
real-world adult experience. It was October, so they’d been out
of high school for maybe five months. I knew instantly,
minutes before I was to speak, I was Mussolini in London. Unless I did
something drastic, they’d ignore or heckle me as if I were a boring,
out-
of-touch, manager-loser type—the same way I would have if,
at 19, I’d had to sit through a lecture about life in the corporate
world.

A savvy speaker must ask the host, “What effect do you want me to
have on this audience?”, and a good host will think carefully about that
answer. And if he doesn’t, the speaker may very well be able to figure
this out, or interact enough with people in the audience to sort out
what they want to get out of the lecture itself. Most of the time people
are asked to speak, they say yes without knowing why they were asked or
what they are expected to achieve.

During my talk at Cooper Union, I did my best to remember my
perception of the adult world when I was 18. So, I dropped my slides,
opened with a personal story of my experiences working at Microsoft, and
joked about how I met Bill Gates in an elevator (I said hello and he
basically ignored me), which earned some mild laughs. I scored an ounce
of respect and grew it into a lively Q&A that lasted the hour. I was
lucky to pull this off; had I initially asked some basic questions of
the host, I would have been prepared from the beginning.

Sometimes the goal is a deliberate mismatch. The host wants a
challenging presentation that will inform people of opinions they don’t
want to hear to rile them up. That’s fine, provided at least the host
and the speaker are in agreement and whatever survey is done takes this
into consideration. Satisfaction means something very different if the
goal was to provoke rather than merely to please.

This points out the real challenge in evaluating speakers. Whoever
it is that invites someone to speak to an audience has to sort
out:

If these three things are not lined up well, the survey will
always have problems (e.g., Mussolini in London). If they are aligned,
the questions used to evaluate the speaker should be public.
Everyone—the speaker, the audience, and the organizer—should know how
the speaker is going to be evaluated. Then the speaker will know in
advance and can prepare, much like Dr. Fox, to do whatever he can to
score well on those evaluations. Rarely does the audience get a say in
surveys, but they should be helping the organizer form the
questions.

Better questions to ask attendees include:

Those last two questions sort out the Dr. Fox dilemma of how well
liked speakers were versus how much substance attendees felt the speaker
offered them. And if you really want to know the value of a speaker, ask
the students a week or a month later. A lecture that might have seemed
amazing or boring five minutes after it ended could have surprisingly
different value for people later on. If the goal is to change people’s
behavior in the long term, you have to study the long-term impacts of
whatever lectures or courses people are taking.

As cautious as we are about giving other people tough criticism,
we’re even more terrified of receiving it. However, it’s quite easy
today to get feedback on public speaking. In fact, you can do this right
now:

Five minutes will do just fine. Imagine you have an audience on
the wall opposite you, who you should be making eye contact with, and go
for it. Then sit down, perhaps with your favorite alcoholic beverage (or
seven), and watch. Despite how easy this is to do, most people, even
those who say public speaking is important and want to get better at it,
aren’t willing to do it. It’s just too scary for them. To which I say,
you are a hypocrite. If you’re too scared to watch
yourself speak, how can you expect your audience to watch
you? The golden rule applies: don’t ask people to listen to something
you haven’t listened to yourself. Just do it. If it’s unwatchable, be
proud you only inflicted a rotten talk on yourself and not an innocent
audience. You can delete the video. You cannot delete an hour of wasted
time from people’s lives.

We all hate the sound of our own voice. We scrutinize the shape of
our nose or our hairline in ways most people never would. Besides, those
are things that are difficult to change. It’s the other things—how
comfortable you seem, how clear your points are, any minor annoyances of
body language or diction—that are radically easier to improve.

If you don’t like what you see, make it shorter. Go for 30
seconds—short, commercial-length material—and practice it until you can
do it well. Then add more. If something feels consistently stupid, take
it out and repeat. You will always get better each time you practice
something, even if it seems otherwise.

I don’t watch video of every talk I do, but if during a talk it
doesn’t feel right, or something goes really well, I’ll go back and
watch. When I get feedback from an event organizer that’s difficult to
interpret, I’ll compare it with the videotape. I always want to match my
sense of how it felt to me to what it actually looked like to the
audience. Pro athletes rely on watching films of their games to see what
actually happened (Fred didn’t play any defense) instead of what they
think happened (Fred blames the rest of his team for not playing any
defense).
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There’s too much going on when you’re doing an intense
activity like sports or speaking to be fully aware of what’s happening
as it happens. Use technology to help show you what you actually did. If
you’re intimidated by critiquing yourself, make the video and give it to
a trusted friend who you know will give you honest, constructive
feedback. Keep in mind that a webcam is a tool orators and speakers
throughout history would have loved to have had. It’s simple, fast,
cheap, and private. You can get instant feedback from people nearby or
far away, making it easier than ever to experience what it’s like to be
in your own audience.