Does it make the message any clearer? No

Does it annoy me? Yes, it annoys me a lot!

With these three short paragraphs, business communication coach Helen Wilkie introduces a short rant in her excellent e-newsletter Communi-keys.

Of course, she could have written: “Recently I’ve noticed strange new pattern creeping into people’s speech. It sounds very irritating, and doesn’t make the message any clearer.” Direct and to the point. Doesn’t that sound better to you? My guess is that it does.

But Helen, of course, doesn’t need to be taught how to communicate. She was using the very style she wanted to attack in order to drive home her point.

One hears this round-about way of talking in many places today, especially from public figures, politicians, business executives and other people who are frequently interviewed in the media. When asked to elaborate on a point or provide information, instead of making a simple, straightforward statement, they phrase their message as a question and answer.

This is the result:

Do we have all the answers? No.
Do we still have a long way to go? Yes.
Are we moving in the right direction? Yes.

A silly way to speak, right? A simple, straight-forward statement would get the message across more clearly and concisely than a gimmicky mini-session of one person asking and answering his own questions.

Helen laments that the virus is spreading and she’s hearing these one-person Q&A’s from people in the workplace. She says she’s tempted to interrupt before they answer their own question and retort: “I don’t know. I thought you did!”

Sometimes, concedes Helen, the self-directed question can be useful if the person you’re conversing with doesn’t make his or her own question clear. You might then say: “If you’re asking me if we will be expanding our product line this quarter, then the answer is no.” This is obviously an attempt to clarify the subject in order to be sure you are answering the right question, and is perfectly acceptable–once.

But when a series of factual statements is turned into a list of artificial questions, it’s just plain silly. Not only that, but it soon becomes irritating, and verbal irritants make for poor communication.

At all times a good rule to follow is: never say in ten words what you could just as easily say in five without loss to clarity or meaning. So use questions to get information from other people, not from yourself! Forget about the flourishes. Just say what you have to say.

For another kind of irritating habit in verbal communication that’s becoming increasingly common, see here.

In her column on careers in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, Joann Lublin wrote about an improvisational acting troupe in Chicago that coaches managers on how to give better presentations. The columnist reported that the participants were given “gentle pointers to help them alter their nervous habits, poor posture or soft voice. A woman too tense to look into listeners’ eyes was urged to gaze at foreheads.”

Senior voice coach Susan Berkley criticizes very strongly – quite correctly, in my opinion – this last piece of advice, calling it “disastrous if followed.” Writing in her ezine The Voice Coach, Susan pointedly observes: “Try having a conversation with a friend or colleague while staring at her forehead. They’ll think you’ve become possessed!”

“When a speaker fears eye contact,” she continues, “it’s really a symptom of a deeper problem: a rejection of affection. Phobic speakers will often say they feel shy because they are afraid the audience will reject them. This is a delusion.

“Audience members tend to be optimistic and receptive until they have reason to believe otherwise. With the exception of the occasional jerk, most audience members are eager to hear what a speaker has to say and grateful for the speaker’s contribution.

“Why, then, the fear of rejection? Psychologists call it projection. The speaker is actually rejecting the audience, before the audience has a chance to reject him or her. When we are afraid to look someone in the eyes, we are also rejecting any affection and friendship they might be trying to send our way. This process is unconscious, but it can generate feelings of guilt and even shame, causing us to avert our eyes even more.”

Apart from the quality of the content of your talk itself, eye contact is undoubtedly the key factor in gaining your audience’s attention and keeping it. And it’s no wonder. In a very real sense, the eyes are the windows to the soul.

Is your speech or presentation a burden, a bothersome but unavoidable chore that you’re secretly anxious to get over and done with the moment it’s practically possible? Or do you have a sincere interest and desire to help the folk you’re trying to communicate with?

You can’t have it both ways. There’s simply no way of faking it.

(For more well-meaning but potentially dangerous advice on speaking in public that’s often dished out by so-called “experts”, see here.)

“The temperature outside right now is 70° C., or 21°F. The weather people estimate that the maximum variation during the next 12 hours will be around 7%. The UV Index is 4 Moderate. The wind is blowing from the west at 1.5 m.p.h. Dew Point is 55°F, or 13°C. Visibility is 4.3 miles…”

Only after this lengthy meteorological and statistical excursus does she arrive at the punch line: “Want to join me for a stroll in the park?”

Sounds a lot like putting the cart before the horse doesn’t it? (Not to mention longwindedness of the “cart” itself.)

Yet top business people are using this back-to-front style of communication far too often, according to Roly Grimshaw, a London-based consultant. This is especially the case when they are presenting a proposal to colleagues or superiors in the boardroom, reporting on their company’s progress to shareholders or other interested parties, and other similar occasions.

And one can only wonder how often it happens when a salesperson is making an important pitch to a highly desirable potential client.

By way of proving his point, Grimshaw describes an event that he happened to attend: the annual results presentation of a major international company. The chief financial officer had started off by saying: “I’m going to go through the numbers and then hand [them] over to the chief executive.” He was true to his word. Painfully so.

The CFO spent the next half-hour taking the audience through two or three dozen slides, each dense with numbers. Then he handed the presentation over to the chief executive, who painstakingly ploughed through a review of the previous year, division by division, slide by slide. By conventional standards, the performers performed very well. They had plenty to say, their diction was clear, and they delivered in a nice professional and methodical style with no “ums” or “ers”.

But when question time finally arrived, it became clear that the audience hadn’t listened to either speaker! Not one of the questions related to anything in their presentations. Apparently, not a soul in the target audience had “got it”!

Why not?

Both presenters had given the audience a wealth of evidence. But evidence of what? What were they trying to prove, exactly?

After each section of the presentation was over, members of the audience sighed and asked each other “So what?” When some of them sat down afterwards to compare what they had gleaned from the talks, they couldn’t even agree on what they key points had been.

All this, of course, underscores the need for a strong opening statement that will capture the audience’s attention and set the tone for the “meat” of the presentation that is about to follow. Grimshaw gives the illustration of an imaginary division head who is introducing a presentation to his marketing and sales team:

“Thank you for coming here this afternoon. I’m afraid the news isn’t particularly good – our performance this quarter was weaker than expected. The numbers I’m going to put before you say one thing loud and clear: We need to redouble our efforts to identify and serve our clients’ needs.”

We often talk of the “magic of numbers”. Many of us – and not only accountants and statisticians – love to juggle figures around. We enjoy playing with facts and sharing all kinds of data.

But nothing exists in a vacuum. The smallest snippet of information is useless without a clear context.

The horse really does come before the cart.