loader from loading.io

304 Never Fear The Q&A When Presenting In Japan

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Release Date: 01/21/2024

357 Sabotaging Your Conversations? show art 357 Sabotaging Your Conversations?

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

 We are often good talkers, but poor listeners. We have many things we want to say, share, expound and elaborate on. For this we need someone to be talking it all in. We like it when people do that for us. It soothes our ego, heightens our sense of self-worth and importance. We are sometimes not so generous ourselves though when listening to others. Here are six nightmare listeners you might run into. By the way, do any of these stereotypes sound a bit too familiar to you? The “preoccupieds” are those breathless types, racing around, multi-tasking on steroids, permanently distracted....

info_outline
356 How To Win Business With Japanese Buying Teams show art 356 How To Win Business With Japanese Buying Teams

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Selling to companies in Japan usually means sitting in a meeting room with a single buyer or perhaps two people.  There are occasions though where we may need to present to a larger number of buyers in a more formal setting.  It may be a pitch to secure the business, or it may be a means of getting the buying team more easily coordinated on their side. Before we know how to present to a team, we have to analyse the people in the team.  That means we need to know ahead of time, who will be in the room from their side.  A team comprises multiple layers of...

info_outline
355 How To Make Your Employees Actually Like You show art 355 How To Make Your Employees Actually Like You

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

We often hear about the need for bosses to do more to engage with their teams. The boss looks at their schedule and then just checks out of that idea right then and there because it seems impossible. The employees for their part, want to get more praise and recognition from the boss, to feel valuable and valued. Bosses are often Driver type personalities who are extremely outcome and task orientated. People are there to produce, to get the numbers, to complete projects and to do it with a minimum of boss maintenance needed to be invested. The snag in all of this though is employees don’t...

info_outline
354 Presenting Elicits Valuable Lessons. Capture Them. show art 354 Presenting Elicits Valuable Lessons. Capture Them.

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

 Today is a good time to start reviewing and reflecting upon the presentations you have over the past few years.  What have you learnt not to do and what have you learnt to keep doing?  Those who don’t study their own presentations history are bound to repeat the errors of the past.  Sounds reasonable doesn’t it. We are all mentally geared up for improvements over time.  The only issue is that these improvements are not ordained and we have to create our own futures. Do you have a good record keeping system?  When I got back to Japan in 1992 I was the...

info_outline
353  Build Relationships That Last: Get Your Re-Order Mojo Happening show art 353  Build Relationships That Last: Get Your Re-Order Mojo Happening

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Here is an important mantra: We don’t want a sale, we want the re-orders. That task however is getting harder and harder.  Customers today are more educated, better prepared and have more alternatives than ever before.  Satisfying a customer is not enough – we have to exceed their expectations and provide exceptional customer service.  Customer service has only one truth – how the customer perceives the quality of the service. Forget what we think is good customer service.  We have to be really clear about what is the customer’s perception of good customer...

info_outline
352 Let’s Build Our Personal Brand As A Presenter show art 352 Let’s Build Our Personal Brand As A Presenter

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

The New Year’s resolutions concept is ridiculous, but only because we are weak, lazy, inconsistent and lacking in discipline.  Apart from those small barriers to execution of desires, the concept works a treat.  The idea of a new start is not bad in itself and we can use the Gregorian calendar fantasy, to mark a change in the year where new things are possible.  We learn as we go along and we add experience from year to year to hopefully make life easier. So as a presenter what would be possible? There are around 4.4 million podcasts around the world.  Blogs are in the...

info_outline
351 My Boss Isn't Listening show art 351 My Boss Isn't Listening

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

351 My Boss Isn't Listening f you reading this title and thinking “this has nothing to do with my leadership”, you might want to think again. We hear this comment a lot from the participants in our training. They complain that the boss doesn’t talk to them enough because they are too busy, don’t have much interest in their ideas or do not seek their suggestions. In this modern life, none of these issues from staff should be surprising. There have been two major tectonic plate shifts in organisations over the last twenty years. One has been the compression of many organisational layers...

info_outline
350 The Rule Of Three show art 350 The Rule Of Three

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

350 The Rule Of Three   Our financial year ended in August and we were up over 20% on the previous year’s revenue results. I should have been ebullient, chipper, sanguine, fired up for the new year, but I wasn’t.  Was it because we were back to zero again, as we all faced the prospect of the new financial year?  That sinking feeling of , “last year was hard and here we go again, but this time with an even higher target”.  Maybe that was it, but it was hard to tell.  There were three other things which were gnawing away at me, regarding incidents which...

info_outline
349 Success Speaking Formula show art 349 Success Speaking Formula

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

 I was invited to an English Speech contest for Middle School students.  The students must have home grown skills and are not eligible to compete if they have spent more than six months abroad, in an English speaking environment.  This was pretty grand affair.  The organisation running it is run by students at university, who took part in the contest themselves when they were in Middle School.  Many of the graduates become business patrons and supporters as they work their way up in their business careers.  It a perfect Japanese storm.  Japan loves uniforms...

info_outline
348 Open The Kimono Leaders show art 348 Open The Kimono Leaders

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

The supervisor has super vision. The leader knows more. The captain makes the calls. The best and the brightest know best. The cream rises to the top. We accept that there will be leaders either our “superiors” or “the first among equals”. We put leaders up on a pedestal, we expect more from them than we expect from ourselves. We judge them, appraise them, measure them, discuss them. When you become a leader what do you find? There are rival aspirant leaders aplenty waiting in the wings to take over. They have the elbows out to shove the current leader aside and replace them....

info_outline
 
More Episodes

Obviously we all have some trepidation when it comes to Q&A, but Japan is quite far behind the rest of the advanced countries when it comes to public speaking.  Let me put it on the table. The level of presentations here is abysmally low and excuses abound.  People here talk about a “Japanese style” of doing public talks.  This is their excuse for not being at the global standard for communication skills and it allow them to get away with amateur hour presentations. What they actually mean by “Japanese style” is they speak in a monotone, with a wooden face, use no gestures, make no eye contact, employ no pauses, Um and Ah with gay abandon, engage no one in the audience and are supremely boring. They kill everyone in the audience with their unprofessional slides - 8 point sized font, four different font types, five garish colours. They turn their slides into a psychological weapon of warfare which decimates their audience.  Because everyone is so bad, this is thought to be a “style”, obviously different from “Western” presentations.  It isn’t a style.  It is just plain bad.

Not being properly educated in how to give professional presentations, the trickier bits like Q&A are even scarier territory.  For any speaker, once the bell sounds for Q&A, the struggle is on.  As the well-known American philosopher Mike Tyson once said, “everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face”.  Relatively speaking, Japan is a kindergarten for Q&A compared to Western audiences.  The ferocity of questions here is kids stuff.  So you would think that everyone would be very chipper about handling the Q&A, but that is not the case.  Here are some areas of the concern we found, when we polled our Japanese students of presenting.

1. If the audience is not familiar to us we get nervous

The reality here is that strangers are confronting for Japanese. The chances of having a lifetime of speaking to familiar audiences would be statistically impossible, I would say.  The inference here is that it is less daunting to speak to a “tame” audience who, because they know us, won’t unleash fury upon our heads during the questions component of the talk.

Unfamiliar audiences should be the considered the norm. I have delivered over 550 speeches so far and I cannot recall every giving a talk to the same audience twice. The way to deal with this “unfamiliarity” is to be well prepared and to have thoroughly rehearsed beforehand.  This is a tell. I would guess 0.001% of Japanese presenters have ever rehearsed their talk. 

2.  I am not sure if I can understand the question properly and also not sure if it is okay to ask them to repeat the question

Japanese society is very polite, so that is why until recently, you would be lucky to get any questions at your talk at all.  The thinking has been that it is impolite.  The nuance is that by asking a question, you are implying the speaker wasn’t clear enough in their oration.  Also I don’t think any Western audiences would even consider the possibility that it isn’t allowable to ask the questioner to repeat their question.  In Japan, that request implies the questioner wasn’t clear enough the first time and so is a veiled criticism.  Because the request for the repeat of the question is made in public, there is the possibility that the questioner will lose face and we can’t have that.

My advice - politely ask the questioner for clarification on their impenetrable question.  Japan is a polite place, so ask politely and put yourself at fault and not the speaker.  You might say, “Thank you for your question. I really want to answer it correctly, so would you mind repeating it once more for me?”.

3.  Not clear on how to answer the question

This will happen to all of us.  In my case, I do a lot of public speaking here in the Japanese language and I always find the Q&A the most difficult.  This is not for the ferocity of the questions, but because of the fog of the language.  Japanese is a highly circuitous language and vagary is a prized achievement.  Sometimes, I have no clue what they are asking me.

If we can’t answer the question, then we are human.  We cannot always be the font of all knowledge and there will always be occasions where we just don’t have an answer for that question.  We should apologise and fess up straight away.  “Thank you for your question.  I am afraid I don’t know the answer to it at this point.  After the talk, let’s exchange business cards and I will do my best to come back to you with an answer after I do more research on that topic”.  No one will complain about handling it in this way.

4.  No questions emerge because the audience weren’t paying any attention to the speaker

Most talks in Japan are supremely dull, so naturally the audience escapes to a more interesting place like their smart phone. Suddenly the Q&A springs up and as they haven’t being paying attention, they have no idea what to ask about.  The call for questions goes unanswered, so there springs forth this painful, embarrassing silence, as everyone carefully scrutinises their shoes, ensuring zero eye contact with anyone.  The speaker is left high and dry and the talk finishes on a low note of disinterest.  It feels like all of the oxygen has been sucked out of the room, the speaker deflates and then in short order, departs.

If no questions are forthcoming, ask your own question: “A question I am often asked is….”.  This will often break the ice for someone else to muscle up the courage to ask their own question.  I am always amazed at well his works in Japan.  No one wants to go first. But interestingly they are happy to go second after you started with your own question to yourself. After doing this, If nothing is still forthcoming, then do a final call for more questions. If none emerge then give your final close and finish the proceedings.

Here are two basic rules for answering any question.  Always repeat the question if it is neutral, to make sure everyone in the audience heard it and to give yourself valuable thinking time before attempting to answer it.  If it is a hostile question, then paraphrase it by stripping out all the emotion and invective and make it sound neutral.  For example, “Is it true you are losing money and that ten percent of the staff are going to be fired before Christmas?”.  “Thank you, the question was about current business performance” and then you answer it.  We call this taisabaki in karate – you slip off to the side, away from confronting the full force of your opponent’s attack.

We will face Q&A when giving our talks.  Changing our mindset about welcoming the opportunity is a good place to start.  We can add more information, we couldn’t squeeze into the talk. We can elaborate on a theme we raised.  We get a chance to engage more deeply with our audience.  When we shoot down a nasty, vicious, brutish, hostile question and destroy it, this makes us a legend of pubic speaking and adds serious luster to our personal brand.  Bring on the questions!