Archive for the ‘business’ Category

Bad Business News: A Speech That Speakers Need To Be Able To Give

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011
Image Credit Delivering Bad Business News Is Like Getting Ready For A Storm To Hit

Delivering Bad Business News Is Like Getting Ready For A Storm To Hit

Being asked to give a speech is a great honor. Being asked to give a speech that is going to deliver bad news to part or all of business is not such an honor. However, in order to be a truly good speaker, this is exactly the type of speech that you need to be able to step up and give. The keys are knowing how to organize this type of speech and what not to say…

How To Organize Bad News

When you’ve been asked to give bad news to people who work for a business, how you organize the information that you are going to be delivering is very important. Your audience is going to know why you are there so you are going to want to get to the main point of your speech as quickly as possible.

Kathy Berger has looked into how bad business news can be structured when it is delivered. She’s come up with four pillars of information that always need to be included in this type of presentation:

  1. Neutral Statement: Before you launch into delivering bad news to your audience, you’ll want to take steps to get them to see the world the way that you currently see it. The best way to make this happen is to start your speech off with a neutral statement that everyone can agree with. This can be a simple observation of how things currently stand.

  2. Bad News: Now is the time to deliver the bad news. You don’t want to put this off because your audience is expecting and anticipating this news and if you delay giving it to them, then they won’t be able to focus on anything else that you say until you do. You need to keep this very short – strip out all unnecessary words and simply focus on saying the bad thing that is going to happen.

  3. Impact: Bad news is just bad news. What’s really important to your audience is what this news means for them. If you don’t tell them, they’ll make it up on their own. This is why after you relay the bad news to them you need to quickly follow this up with clear statements that let your audience know how their world is going to change because of the bad news.

  4. Details: When we receive bad news a 1,000 questions start to run through our minds. We’re not happy and we want to see if perhaps some sort of mistake has been made, maybe something has been overlooked. That’s why it is so important that you include the details that will provide answers to these questions in your speech. By tackling them in your speech, you improve the state of mind that your audience will end up leaving your speech in.

What Not To Do When You Are Delivering Bad News

So now that you know how to organize the bad business news that you are delivering, now we need to make sure that we know what not to do while delivering this information.

Don’t lie. Although this seems like some basic advice, the desire to lie or even just stretch the truth a bit can be a powerful motivator when you are delivering bad news. Don’t do it. Anytime that you try to tone down the bad news by saying something that is untrue it will always come back to bite you.

Don’t be unclear. When what we have to say is difficult or painful to say, we often like to wrap it in a lot of words that we think will soften the blow. Don’t do this. Your audience will have to work that much harder to understand what you are trying to say and they may even end up being confused.

Don’t be insensitive. Bad business news will cause an emotional reaction in your audience. As a speaker you need to realize this and be tuned in to understanding how your audience is reacting to what you are saying. During this speech you are going to have to acknowledge this and show your audience that you understand how they are feeling.

Don’t talk about you. In order to shield yourself from having to think about how this bad business news is going to be affecting your audience, we sometimes tend to make our speech all about us: how we feel about the news, what we are thinking, etc. Don’t do this – your audience really doesn’t care about you, they want to hear what all of this means for them.

What All Of This Means For You

Not all speeches are inspirational speeches – sometimes bad news has to be delivered. Giving this type of speech is never easy and that’s why it’s so important that we learn to do it the right way.

Organizing the speech correctly is the first step in effectively delivering bad news. Clearly telling your audience what the bad news is and then immediately following that up with words that will tell them what the impact of this information on them will be is the key to doing a good job. In this type of speech, how you say it can be as important as what you say. We’ve covered several things that you’ll need to avoid.

Speakers who master the art of delivering bad business news will find that they have become more valuable. This type of speech will never be easy to give, but learn to do a good job of it and you’ll always be in demand…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: How long do you think that a bad business news type of speech should be?

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Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So what makes a speech a really good speech? Is it that you are “on fire” when you deliver it? Does your audience need to be “in the mood” to hear what you are going to tell them? Or is the magic of the words that you’ve put together that will allow you to connect with your audience and move them to action? Actually, it’s none of these – practice is what makes a speech work or not work. Do you know how to practice a speech?

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Business Speaking Is Unlike Any Other Speaking

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010
Image Credit
When You Speak In A Business Environment, You Need Special Skills

When You Speak In A Business Environment, You Need Special Skills

Welcome to the world of business: do you know how to give a speech here? All too often speakers spend their time studying how to connect with customers and community members. That’s all well and good; however, that style of speaking is completely different from the style that you need to use when you are giving a presentation within the company. Do you have the right stuff?

The Four Skills That You Need To Know

When you are giving a speech or presentation within your company, you need to take the time to do it in a business manner – there’s a whole bunch of rules that you need to know about. A business audience has an expectation of how you are going to talk to them and what you’re going to say. If you don’t do this right, then they are going to tune you out very quickly.

There are four specific skills that you need to have mastered in order to make your next business presentation go well. Here they are:

  1. Make Your Brain Big: business is all about what is happening right now. This means that any time that you are giving a business presentation you need to make sure that your presentation is packed with current events. World events, industry changes, etc. are what your business audience wants to know about.
  2. Practice Verbal Dancing: Business speeches rarely go as you had planned them. What this means is that you’ve got to be ready for interruptions, questions, and redirection by senior management at any time during your speech. The key skill that you need to have is the ability to remain calm as your carefully planned speech does a 180-degree turn and heads off into a direction that you had never planned on going.
  3. Become a Tailor: In business, there is no such thing as a “canned speech”. You may have a basic set of points that you want to communicate to several different audiences, but you’ll need to change the words that you use and how you deliver the speech to meet the needs of each audience that you give it to.
  4. Use The Power Of Words: Ultimately all we have to work with is words. A business audience is like any other audience and it’s the words that you use that will determine if your speech ends up having any impact on them. Picking the right words to use for the right speech can make all of the difference in the world.

What All Of This Means For You

There are many different types of speeches that we may be called on to give, but a business speech to the members of our own company can be one of the toughest speeches to give.

These types of speeches require a special set of skills. We need to take the time to make sure that our speech will meet the business need of our audience. Sorry, there is no generic speech that will work here.

The real power comes from delivering this type of speech correctly. It’s a skill that too few speakers have. If you can develop the skills that are needed to do this well, then you will have made yourself irreplaceable.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills

Question For You: do you think adding stories to your business presentation will help you to connect with your audience or is this the wrong venue for that kind of speech tool?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you’ve ever wished that there was a formula for giving the perfect speech, are you in luck! Chris Matthews is the host of a couple of TV shows including Hardball with Chris Matthews. He gets paid handsomely for the work that he does now, but he got his start as a humble political speechwriter. Based on all of that experience, he’s come up with a way to give the perfect speech…

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Posted in business | 1 Comment »

“Once Upon A Time…” – The Role Of Storytelling In Business Communication

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

Business Storytelling Can Be Effective If Done Correctly

By Dr. Jim Anderson

In the eternal quest to communicate better and have our message “stick” with our audience, a powerful tool is often overlooked by us technical types. A good story, told at the right time, in the right way, to the right audience can have a lasting effect that can transform an organization. Proof of this can be found on the business best seller list over the past few years: “Who Moved My Cheese“, “Zapp: The Lightning of Empowerment“, “A Message From Garcia“, etc. have all proved that everyone loves a good story. Ah, but as always, the devil is in the details. Done wrong, a story can backfire and send your career down in flames. Let’s see if we can discover how to tame this wild stallion so that we can ride it to career success.

We’ve got lots of ways to communicate information, why bother with stories? We all know how to create and use analytical charts and their associated graphs (3-D pie chart anyone?), written reports, etc. A story is the right tool to use when your standard tools just aren’t working. Joseph Badaracco, a Harvard Business School professor, says that “People don’t simply hear stories. It triggers things – pictures, thoughts, and associations – in their minds“. The end result of all of this triggering is that a story can communicate your point in a very powerful way that fully engages your audience.

As always there is a catch. The catch to storytelling is that you need to know where to draw the line between making a dry business story more compelling by embellishing it and changing the story into an outright lie. I can’t even begin to stress just how important this rule is. An embellishment is when you transform “I took the test on a hot day” into “As I walked to the most important certification test in my life, the hot Texas sun felt like it was hovering just 10 feet above my head and the melted asphalt splashed as I walked though it.” See? You’ve made a dry story just a bit more interesting. A LIE would be when you say “I worked at ACME products for over 10 years in the Coyote specialty division where I invented the first rocket powered shoes.” If you weren’t there for 10 years or if you didn’t invent that, then that’s a lie.

In order for your story to have the impact that you want it to have, it has got to ring true with your audience. If your audience doubts even one part of your story, then they will spend the rest of the time looking for other holes in your tale. However, if your story is true and contains a powerful message that your audience can both picture and feel, then you will have accomplished what very few other communicators can do — you will have gotten your message across.

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Posted in business, communication, impact, lie, story, storytelling | 2 Comments »