Susan Warren's [ v ] Blog

Soft Skill #5: Public Speaking

Public speaking is an “advanced” soft skill: the ability to speak well in front of audiences large and small can take years of training and practice to truly master.  But the 80/20 rule works here too, so I've listed my tips for the first 20% that can make anyone an effective public speaker.

#1 Public speaking is a people thing.
Only heads of State and PR pukes deliver meticulously-practiced, pre-written speeches word-for-word.  And there's a reason: it's tedious to listen to such speeches.  So unless you are delivering new information where the slightest mistake could cost you your job or your life, don't orate.

People enjoy watching other people -- it's human nature.  One of the most effective ways to engage your audience is to be yourself!  Act in a way that is natural for you, and give folks a glimpse into your personality.  Your audience will feel like they are getting to know you, in addition to learning about your topic.

Being yourself in front of an audience, of course, requires an excellent command of the proto-soft skill: acting with confidence.

#2 Make good use of your Communications 101 skills.  Know your material, know your audience, give your audience a reason to care about your topic, and organize your thoughts.

#3 Don't read your slides.  Reading your slides word-for-word can be insulting to the audience since it implies they can't read.  Oops.  It also broadcasts that you don't have any additional knowledge or perspective to add on your topic.  In other words, you are wasting their time.  Reading the slides is a guaranteed way to kill your speech dead.

There are two techniques you should apply to avoid the pitfall.  First, know your topic (d'oh).  If you don't know the topic, cram before the speech or get someone else to give it.

Second, distill your slides down to just a few words: a good goal is no more than 5 bullet points per slide, and no more than 5 words per bullet point.  If you can, try not to let a bullet point exceed one line!  This lets the audience get a gist of what you are going to talk about, but makes them listen to you for the information.  Which is cool, since that's the point of attending a speech. ;-)

Soft Skill #4: Traction

“Traction” is another one of those Microsoft-speak words (like “rathole” or “dogfood”). It means a person's ability to drive for a specific result.  For example, “JoeN has amazing traction right now on getting generics into C#.”

You might also think of traction as “achieving results” or “meeting goals,” but the term - and the perspective - is focused on the process rather than results.  And that's a good thing.  As individuals there are many factors we can't control that may prevent us from meeting a goal.  For example, when your project is cancelled you aren't going to meet your goal of shipping on a particular date.  But by developing the soft skill of driving to a specific result, you'll consistently meet your goals when circumstances allow.

There are some simple steps you can take every day to improve your traction.

#1 - Know where you are headed.  As George Harrison sang, “If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there.”  The catch is, of course, when you arrive 'where ever' you will probably wish you ended up somewhere else. ;-) Know where you are headed, and you will likely to take a fairly direct path to your destination.

#2 - Aim for milestones along the way.  If you've ever taken a road trip, I'm sure you can relate to this.  Your ultimate destination might be Miami, but you are very likely to stop for food, rest and gas along the way.  At minimum you need to plan your next gas station before your tank runs dry.  But not too often!  If you stopped at every gas station along the way, it would take a looooooong time to reach Miami. 

Milestones make reaching a goal more manageable.  Choose a milestone, you put your head down and push forward your progress for a bit.  When you reach it you can stop, take a look around and course correct if necessary. 

Set milestones that let you process enough work to make reasonable progress, but don't scope them so broadly (to an entire project, for example) that your course corrections when you finally reach the milestone are massive. 

#3 - Clear your unknowns as early as possible.  In our business, it's generally the 'unknowns' that force the really big course corrections.  Identify what you don't yet know about your project, and make a milestone to figure it out up front.  For example, maybe you are considering using ASP.NET 2.0 for a project.  Set knowing the answer to the ASP.NET 2.0 question as an early milestone toward your project's destination.

#4 - Communicate your progress toward your current milestone and final destination.  Let your co-workers and client know where you are headed, and how you are progressing.  Milestones and destinations are much easier to communicate than your entire “to do” list, and folks often find ways to help you arrive when they know where you are headed.  They may even think of tactics and resources that you've missed.

The 'when' and 'how' of communicating your progress is up to your individual style.  I personally like the 1-minute “elevator” speech: keep it simple, and deliver it personally to folks you see in the halls or in the lunchroom.  By keeping it “bited-sized” folks can probably stash away a couple of important details.  And by delivering it personally, you've also delivered a personal invitation for feedback and support later on -- and, in effect, added another part-time member to your team.

Soft Skill #3: Decision making

I haven't shared my definition of a soft skill yet, so I'll do that before I talk about decision making (which is the poster child of soft skills IMO).

A soft skill is a skill that lets you be effective in your job, but isn't directly related to your profession.  So teamwork is a 'soft' skill, whereas programming in .NET is a 'hard' skill.

So let's talk about decision making -- the ability to make timely, high-quality decisions.  It's one of the most essential soft skills once you advance past an entry-level job.  In a consulting company like Vertigo, it's indispensible: our clients come to Vertigo because they need the right thing built, not just anything.  They are paying for our exceptional professional judgement, the Vertigo 'secret sauce' of technical knowledge, experience, and (of course) decision making.

Decision making is a two step process.  First, you need to gather and understand the facts and the context for the decision.  Next, you apply analytic ability and common sense to the data to reach a decision.  Sounds simple enough, but there are some common pitfalls.

Analysis Paralysis.  This catchy term means getting stuck in the decision making process without ever reaching a decision.  Good decision making has to be timely in order to be effective, so analysis paralysis can be fatal.  Analysis Paralysis seems to mostly afflict folks without much decision-making experience. 

The cure for analysis paralysis is practice, practice, practice.  I specifically prescribe making 80/20 decisions.  Try for an 80% perfect decision, with just 20% of the effort require to get to the 100% perfect decision.  This is where that proto-skill confidence comes in handy.  You will make a few bad calls with this approach -- be sure to fess up to 'em and most importantly, learn from them.  But you'll also gain a lot more decision-making experience this way, and the quality of your decisions will improve dramatically.

Unteachable Factors.  Every skill, hard or soft, can only be acquired if you have some abilities as an individual.  For decision making these include native intelligence, common sense, and motivation.  It's really not practical to teach common sense, for example.  At best, you can approximate common sense by developing and using a 'play book' of good decisions for well known situations. 

We do a great job of testing for these factors in our interview process via the chess log exercise.  Be sure to watch for them as you interview potential co-workers as well.

Practice, Pay Attention to Your Results, Build Experience.  That's how you become better at decision making.