Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Even if people don't say, oh, that's AI, it's just gonna come off as not what you intend, and not what they need, and not what you wanted. And so, for all those reasons, I do think that soft skills are literally the most important thing today.

I don't care what your job is. Your technical skills are the given, right? You gotta have them, but it's the soft skills, that's what's gonna get you promoted.

The soft skills, two equivalent engineers, the one who can actually speak like a human, they're gonna be the ones who get ahead.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast. I am your host, Roberta Ndlela. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning in to.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development. And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify and leave a so reading in the review. Now, let's get communicating.

Now, let's get communicating with our guest today. Joining us, this is a first for the show. Joining us from New Mexico, Bill Shander is a LinkedIn learning instructor with over two million students.

He is a public speaker, the author of Stakeholder Whispering, who's here to help us to communicate to our stakeholders and understand their needs. And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show. Hi, Bill.

Hello.

Thank you very much for having me.

Thank you for being here. Welcome. I have yet to meet someone who actually talks about stakeholders in the way that you did.

Can you just please explain to our listeners what you mean? Who are the audience?

Yeah. So we all have stakeholders. And the guy who invented the whole idea of stakeholder management defined a stakeholder as anybody who can affect or is affected by whatever it is that you're doing.

So like your boss is obviously your stakeholder because they can affect what you're doing. They're literally asking you to do things. But it's also the people affected by what you're doing.

And so let's say if you're communicating, you're creating a brochure that maybe you're marketing, the people who are going to read that brochure, the people who might buy that product, etc. are also stakeholders.

And so anybody involved in the process they're working on as a stakeholder, we have to realize that when we're doing things for stakeholders, whoever they may be, we have to really understand what they need from us.

Your boss may say, do X, but X may or may not be what's actually needed. And so it's that the process of really figuring out what they need before you jump to it and start doing stuff.

I think that's easier now because we live in the age of Google and now AI. But when some of us started working back in the 90s where there was no Google, you just had to do what your boss said because he's got more experience, he's more of an expert.

You hardly questioned what he asked you to do, you know, things like that. So how will you know if he assigns you a task or how do you actually step back and say, wait a minute, is this what I should be doing because the project requires this?

Yeah, it's a really good question. And the thing is, you know, interestingly, I'm not even sure that it is easier to do now with Google and AI. It's certainly easier to investigate and find information.

But, you know, AI hallucinates and Google has spam all over it. And so are they more or less right than what we would have maybe figured out on our own? It's hard to tell.

But to your point, yes, when your boss says do something, your tendency is to do it. And listen, you know, you're lower in the food chain. There are experts, et cetera.

But at the same time, you know, you're at your desk. You're in your role for a reason. You got hired to do your job for a reason.

And yes, your boss is in their job for a reason, too. But we're all driven by our subconscious.

And so when your boss says, do X, a lot of times it's because X is just what everybody else does, or because X is what we've always done, or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so I really think your job is to always investigate.

And so it's not assuming X is wrong. It's saying, okay, X might be right, probably right. But hey, boss, tell me more about X.

What is it about X? How are we going to make sure that X is exactly perfect, that I'm really doing what's going to be needed by you and your stakeholders?

So it's just sort of going beyond the accepting the initial request as a given, and just probing even just a little bit further to make sure that the nuance of what you do, or as close to perfect as possible.

Would you say what you just described is what we call employee engagement? Because we usually debate the term and we always ask ourselves, what does it mean to be engaged?

Yeah, I think engagement is a really good example of it. If you're disengaged, you certainly aren't going to do this. No question about it because if you're a disengaged employee, you're just like, yeah, I don't care.

Sure. I guess I'll do what my boss said. If you're engaged, it does imply that you're interested.

And that's one of the things in the book that I talk about is that one of the key attributes you need to be a good stakeholder whisperer is curiosity. And in order to be curious about something, you have to care.

And yes, to care about something does imply that you're engaged for sure.

5:31

LinkedIn Learning Instructor

Right.

So now let's talk about being a LinkedIn learning instructor. What exactly does that entail?

So LinkedIn learning used to be a company called linda.com, L-Y-N-D-A. And Linda started this company doing mostly it was for designers. It was like training and using like Adobe Photoshop and things like that.

But LinkedIn bought them about eight or 10 years ago. Microsoft bought LinkedIn and now it's a massive learning catalog, essentially. So companies all over the world subscribe to this catalog of courses.

I teach a whole bunch of courses on data visualization, data storytelling, and related skills.

And so a learner who wants to learn things, whether it's about data or it's about AI, or it's about employee engagement or communications and soft skills, all of it, essentially you go on and you watch videos of an instructor explaining concepts.

And there are like little quizzes and other features as well. But it's just a massive collection of learning content that millions of people around the world have access to. I create the course concepts.

I generate all the content for the course. And then I go to California and shoot the videos on site at LinkedIn Studios near Santa Barbara.

Oh, wow. That sounds fun. Yes.

It is fun. I can imagine. Because the reason I ask is we would love to just have a very lengthy discussion on data, how to make a presentation.

Because we do talk about those concepts. And there's so many different ways in which some of our previous guests have shared on how best to make a presentation.

And especially now, people say, okay, now that there's AI, it looks like literally everybody has information on hand, but the distinguishing factor is going to be how you present the information.

7:26

Effective Data Communication

So first, let's talk about data. How best can you communicate data and make a presentation without being boring or without it being too technical?

Yeah. One of the things I teach very, very frequently, and it's really important, is that data is just an ingredient in your story.

Most of us, we fail at data communications because we get so obsessed with the data, so obsessed with the math, the numbers, the statistics, the whatever, and it is very technical.

And when you're neck deep in it, you think you have to communicate all those numbers. The first thing to remember is that you don't. The fact of the matter is your audience, your stakeholders, they don't need all the numbers.

What they need is whatever it is you're presenting to them for. Oftentimes in a business context is to make a decision. Okay, I'm supposed to make a decision based on this data.

What is the data telling me? The data is saying is that we're going to succeed incredibly well if we do A, B, and C. Okay, that's the message.

So therefore, your presentation could just say, we're going to succeed really well if we do A, B, and C. No numbers whatsoever. Now, sometimes you have to include the numbers.

Maybe you do need to say that 82% of the time XYZ happens. Okay, maybe that's one number is all you have to say. Do you have to show a chart with 8 million labels all over it and like some complicated thing, et cetera?

No, you don't. Now, at the same time, I'm a data visualization person, so visualization of data is very powerful and effective, but only if it helps the story that you need to communicate.

So if I'm going to show visuals of data, which I do very, very, very frequently, it's going to be very simplified, not overwhelmed with information. That's what sort of takes all that technical mumbo jumbo out of it.

So it's just the visual expresses an idea. It expresses the meaning in the numbers, not so much the numbers themselves.

So when you're putting the story together and when you're putting your visuals together, forget about the data, forget about the numbers, step back from it for a moment, and then only add back in the detail that's required for you to succeed in what

Because I'm thinking, since you talk about stakeholders, depending on who you make the presentation to, that will feed into how much data you share, right?

Definitely.

So like a very junior person who doesn't have the technical know-how, you're going to minimize the data. A very senior person, same thing, because they just give me the facts, they just give me the bottom line very quickly.

Right.

Middle managers who are like neck deep in the data also, yeah, maybe you give them more detail for sure.

Or sometimes do you think middle managers want to see if the people who do the data entry and visualization are the ones, if they did their jobs, if everybody entered the figures on the spreadsheet correctly and whatnot.

Yeah, that's true. And by the way, if I'm presenting even to middle managers, I still might keep it fairly minimal for the presentation, because that's the other thing. A presentation is storytelling.

A presentation is I'm explaining something to you, and I want you to understand it, and I also want you to remember it. And the more detailed, the more technical information I include, the less likely you're to remember stuff.

Now, I'll put all that stuff in the appendix. I'll make it available to you. But even for the middle manager, even for the person who can probably handle more detail, I'm going to give them less than you would think, generally speaking.

You say that you need to make the data interactive.

So you've just given us examples of where it shouldn't be too much of it. It's just for decision making. So how do you make a presentation where you make it interactive?

Yeah.

And it doesn't always have to be interactive, but often interactivity will give an added layer. It'll just be more effective frequently if you add interactivity. But interactivity gives your audience the ability to see themselves in the data.

And so for example, I'm doing a presentation and I can give my audience the average. You know, on average, this is what happens. Okay, that's all well and good.

But my audience on Tuesday is very different from my audience on Thursday. The Tuesday audience want to know, okay, the average is interesting, but what about me?

And so if you give them a little drop down, they can select their region or their role or whatever it is that makes it more about them. Now, the story is personalized and personalization is a much more effective communication strategy.

So it can be as simple as one drop down that filters the data or segments the data in a particular way. But of course, you can do all kinds of interactivity to make it that much more nuanced and specific a presentation.

But it's all about how do I speak directly to my audience? And I can't always do one-to-one communications, but I can at least do group focused communications by letting them see themselves in the data as best as possible.

Right.

12:32

Crafting Presentations

Do you have any of the learners who come to you and they say, Bill, even though I try to implement these strategies, I just really struggle on making a presentation at work?

Or my leader, my boss has given me feedback that I'm not really good at making presentations. How do I improve?

Yeah. I mean, it happens all the time for sure.

And what I would say is this, one of the pieces of advice that I give, and one of the ways I teach data storytelling, and it applies to any presentation, it's really not just about data storytelling, is always start off at the highest level.

Let's say you're putting a presentation together next week, it's going to be an hour-long meeting. Fine. Can you put together the story of that presentation, like a 90-second or even a 60-second version?

And by the way, I always say outline your story first. So put your chunks of content in order, that you know you're going to talk about this and then this and then this. Then describe that story in 60 seconds.

Because there's magic in proving to yourself that that structure of that narrative is going to work.

And the example that I always use is that random facts can be put in order, but when you read them, when you say them out loud, they still just sound like random facts. That's not a good story. That's not a good presentation.

But you can connect seemingly random facts together, simply by thinking about how one idea flows into the next, flows into the next. And if you just do that, if you find flow, that's a story and your boss will love hearing a story from you.

So if you have the idea of your presentation, even if it's an hour long, but you're able to express it in a 60 second, the elevator pitch version of it, then you know what? You know you have a good story on your hands.

Now you're going to have to attach more content, get an hour's worth of stuff onto it, but continue to go back to does this hold up? Does that 60 second story still exist in here? Am I following a structure that flows in a natural way?

So think through the narrative, that flowing story. Forget about the data, forget about the visuals, forget about what the slides look like. Start with that.

And once you're comfortable, and by the way, say it out loud, because thinking in your head about a narrative is not the same as actually saying it out loud. When you say it out loud, you prove to your own ear that it's actually flowing.

So once you've got the narrative down, okay, now you can go back and make the slides and throw the stuff in there, blah, blah, blah. But you can always circle back to, is the structure still holding up?

And then, by the way, the other thing to do is to practice, right?

Because you can have your 60 slide deck, and if you don't remember how you're going to get from slide 42 to slide 43, and if there's a slight transition there, the worst thing you can do is, and I've seen this happen a million times, is you go like

this. You're in the presentation and the slides are up here, and you look at your slides, oh, yeah, I can't remember what that's about. But let me just read it for you. That's terrible.

But when you practice, you know how you're going to get from slide 42 to 43, that's flow. And that's what storytelling and good presenting is all about. Just can you make it all flow together?

Which we have 50,000 plus years of evolution in our bones that tell us storytelling. Everybody knows how to tell a story. We just forget how to at work.

So stop forgetting, trust your gut, trust your ear, because everybody knows how to do it.

Because the thing about storytelling is that usually we say, sometimes people may even forget parts of your speech or your presentation, but the story they never forget.

That's it. It's the most memorable thing proven by research. There's been tons of research that finds random facts, data, all that stuff goes right out of my brain.

But you tell me a story, I will definitely remember it. And by the way, it's more influential.

You mentioned the elevator pitch earlier. I remember we've had guests who have clients that they help with pitching to Silicon Valley investors if they want to start something that is tech company and whatnot.

How would you advise them if they say to you, Bill, this is our brilliant idea. We are looking for the investors. Because usually, investors are not actual tech people or they don't know your idea or don't understand it exactly the way they should.

How would you then have them understand enough? Because they sometimes say, you know what? Each team has like five minutes.

So they don't have much time, but you want to have that impact so that they say, okay, we'll put millions into your company.

It's true. The entire meeting is the elevator pitch, to your point. They may have almost zero time sometimes.

And we're back at the beginning of the conversation, stakeholder whispering. So if I'm presenting to, let's say, a potential hire, like a potential CTO, Chief Technical Officer hire, I'm going to be very technical with them.

I'm talking all about the technology because they'll be so into it. If I'm pitching to a VC to raise money, I'm not going into the technology at all maybe. What do they need from me?

What do they care about? VCs.

Well, sophisticated VCs will understand the technology to some degree, but mostly they care about, tell me about the market, how big is this market, how much of this market can you get, do you think, and how much money do you need to do that?

And tell me how you're going to spend my money. That's it.

And yeah, the technology may be part of the answers to those things, but their needs are very, very different from like a potential technical hire, or from if you're meeting with the media or any other types of audience. So it's about them.

Think about what they actually need from you and talk to them directly. Now, like I said, now some VCs do have a lot of technical experience. Some of these people are very domain specific and they really do understand the tech in their domain.

But even with them, do they need to know how many servers you're going to buy and how much bandwidth you're going to have in your office? Maybe, but probably not.

What they really need to hear from you is, we need $12 million because we need enough servers and enough bandwidth to do blah, blah, blah, blah. Right?

So, again, the story, the meaning of what you're explaining without getting to all the nitty-gritty detail, and allow them to ask for the detail and have in your back pocket. But the story doesn't necessarily have to go that deep on the detail.

Yes. It seems as though you need to understand your stakeholders enough to know which ones need headlines, which ones need a summary, which ones need detail.

So it's the onus is on you in understanding them to that level, so that your presentation matches those needs.

That's it. And by the way, you can even assume that everybody just needs the headline. Let me give you the story, Roberta.

I'm going to tell you a 60 second story about my product that I'm going to build, and how we're going to make a bazillion dollars together. I'm going to give you the headline version. Boom, boom, boom.

I give you the headlines, and I say, now, Roberta, tell me which one of those you want me to dive into, if any. But we can also stop here if you have any questions you want to ask me. So you can even have a conversation that looks like that.

I'm just going to give you the headlines and then entice them to push you into the details that they want more of, because then you don't face that risk of boring them or just confusing them or all the other risks in giving them too much detail to

Like you said, you have the data in your back pocket.

You'll reserve it almost like for the Q&A session in case they want to know more.

Absolutely. What I always advise people, if you have an hour-long meeting next week, plan for a 15-minute talk at most and have an appendix. I love the appendix.

Every presentation, the appendix is the best part because I can put all the junk down there that's going to distract my audience. It's hidden. But then yes, Q&A.

Someone's going to ask some crazy question with all kinds of detail in it, and I have it. It's in the appendix. But I didn't ruin the presentation, the story, by reading a slide with 8,000 numbers on it.

Right.

And speaking of the presentation, earlier when you made the example, I would assume because you said slide number 42 going to 43, we've had discussions where we say, do you really even need to have that many slides?

And would anybody be paying attention by this time you get to slide number 35?

Here's my take on that. And I know a lot of people say, limit your number of slides, etc. And I agree with the idea behind that, but I actually have no problem.

In fact, I often do. I gave a presentation last week. It was an hour long and I had over 100 slides.

Now, it works because some of my slides are literally one word or a picture. And so I'm like making little jokes and jamming through my slides, super fast, it's high-paced, it's fun, it's engaging, et cetera.

If you have 42 or 100 slides and it's like a wall of text, that's bad. So it depends on what kinds of slides and how good you are at jamming through them in an entertaining, quick way.

Even if it's 10 of them, if it's a wall of text, first of all, we're going to read faster than you. We're not going to pay attention to you while you're still reading.

Exactly.

Not a good idea to be text and you read word for word.

21:56

Human Skills with AI

Now, you also focus on soft skills, which is literally the basis and the foundation of this show.

What have you found when working with clients as some of the soft skills that they come to you for and they say, Bill, I need help with this, now that I deal with people, now that I'm a leader.

Yeah. It's all the things we've talked about. Stakeholder whispering, really understanding what stakeholders need, that's a soft skill.

That's not like a technical, you learn it in an engineering school or whatever.

All the communication stuff that we're talking about, in addition to how to present, it's the empathy and the curiosity and the emotional intelligence and all those things that help you understand what your audience needs from you, but also helps you

have productive, fruitful conversations with colleagues, bosses, etc. It's all the human stuff. And ironically, here we are in the age of AI, and AI can do everything that we do, but better, faster, etc. Except all the human things.

So those soft skills are where we can still not just differentiate, but probably the only thing we have left and what's going to keep humans in the loop in the future. So can AI write an email? Of course it can.

Can it write in 12 different styles in about 22 seconds? Yes. But you're going to write a better email because you really know the context.

You're going to be able to infuse a little humor and sarcasm and things that AI, I don't think maybe we'll ever be able to do as well as a human, because it can't understand what the other human actually needs.

So it's the combination of the stakeholder whispering and these other soft skills where the magic really lies.

That's the thing about it. Yes. You can ask it to write for you this perfect email if you explain that, oh, my boss Bill is looking for me to say this, and it gives you the email.

So my cousin, she's a group HR director for the mining company she works for. And her boss, the CEO, is from Chile, so he's Spanish.

Usually when he writes an email, there will be one or two, I'd say English phrases that he just uses differently, you know, because it's not his first language.

It was a public holiday and he was wishing everybody a public holiday the other day in South Africa. And so he used AI to create the email for the public holiday.

And it comes out as perfect English, and they all asked each other, like, who wrote this? Because it doesn't sound like him.

You know, because that authenticity, that characteristic of him sounding a certain way whenever he writes emails to the team was lost in the one that it got from Chachipati.

It's totally, and like you said, everyone knows it, right? And so I guess there will be a point where we all know everyone's using AI to write their emails, and I guess maybe it won't come off as strange.

But on the other hand, like, I know somebody who had to write a, it was a work email, but it was sort of meant to be sort of an emotional email. He used AI to do it, and it had no emotion whatsoever in it. He was afraid it was going too far.

And I was like, this thing doesn't, there's no emotion whatsoever.

Long story short, even if people don't notice, even if people don't say, oh, that's AI, it's just going to come off as not what you intend and not what they need and not what you wanted.

And so for all those reasons, I do think that soft skills are literally the most important thing today. I don't care what your job is. I don't care if you're a data scientist.

I don't care if you're the most technical engineer in like some sort of hardware manufacturing. Your technical skills are the given. You got to have them.

But it's the soft skills, to your point about leadership development, that's what's going to get you promoted. The soft skills, two equivalent engineers, the one who can actually speak like a human, they're going to be the ones who get ahead.

And that's always been the case. And so people just have to realize how powerful that is today more than ever.

And the one who doesn't speak up, they turn around and they say, oh, they stole my idea. They were the ones talking about it at the meeting, but because you were quiet.

Yeah, that's true, too. That's tough. Introverts have a tough time, always have.

But yeah, people need to learn to speak up and do it in a way that isn't off-putting at the same time, right? Because sometimes if you speak up too much, you're the one who always is trying to get attention or whatever.

It's like, it's a tough balance. But that's emotional intelligence, which is something that you can develop, another soft skill.

Any last words of wisdom, Bill? Anything you were hoping to share today that I haven't asked you yet?

I don't think so. I think you covered a really good ground. I think that soft skills are where it's at.

I'm really glad that you talk about this with your audience because it's so important and always has been, and the phrase soft skills, it's a bummer because it implies that it's less than.

But I'm sorry, soft skills are more than, like I just said, they are the most important thing. And if people just develop them, if they just work on them. And the beautiful thing about soft skills is there, some of them are just, they're intuitive.

Like we know how to tell stories. Everybody tells stories all the time. And so you don't need to be Shakespeare to explain your work.

So when it comes time to put that presentation together, forget about the details, step back, remember you're a human and speak to other humans about the meaning behind it. And you'll remind yourself you are good at it.

I don't care who says they're not good at presentations. It's because they've convinced themselves, they've been intimidated out of their inherent skills.

So I'm really glad you're talking about this stuff, and I'm glad that I was able to come on and talk with you about it as well.

And I appreciate you being here. Thank you so much for that. And here's the thing about people thinking they're not good at presentations.

I had a guest say to me, we need to stop saying that stat of, oh, more people are afraid of public speaking than dying, because then everybody thinks that they're not good. Yeah, that is so dangerous to everyone.

It's like, so I'm glad that you say that everybody literally can be good at making presentations. And then please give us details on where we can find your book, Stakeholder Whispering, and your website as well.

Yes, of course. Thank you. My website is billshander.com, and you can find a link to the book there, but it's also available on Amazon.

And the phrase, I guess, is wherever books are sold.

And then when it comes to your LinkedIn courses, is there a way that you can tell our listeners on how to access them if they go on LinkedIn?

You can just Google LinkedIn Learning and it'll take you to, I think it's linkedin.com/learning. And it's a subscription, so it's like a very low monthly fee.

Or a lot of times, your company probably already has enterprise licensing to it, especially if you work for a larger company. Universities, many universities across the world have it.

And it's also available in a lot of public libraries across the United States. So you can access so much good content up there in addition to mine. So you'll definitely find me and a lot of other good learning on LinkedIn Learning.

LinkedIn Learning.

You've lectured at Stanford, Harvard, North Eastern. What did you find? Because we always say that the soft skills are what's missing when you are learning your technical expertise at a tertiary institution.

What did you find with the feedback that the students gave you when you used to teach them at these institutions?

That's a great question. You know, it's funny. I would probably say it really depended on the students.

So just as a ridiculously small sample size, but I think indicative example.

A lot of times when you're talking to undergrads, you know, they're young, to your word earlier, they're sometimes disengaged and they just sort of tolerated what I was telling them.

But, you know, they liked it, but they were like, yeah, you know, whatever. I don't know how this applies to me because they don't, they don't know what the world looks like for them yet. Right.

They're trying to figure things out. When I speak to the grad students who are, maybe some have already been working a little bit, but they're also students. And so they're sort of in that in-between world.

They really get it. Like they know, and because they've experienced how important it is to actually communicate effectively in addition to doing whatever their technical job is.

And the same thing when I was teaching staff at some of these universities even more so. So what I've found is that the more experienced people are in the world of work, the more they understand how powerful and important these soft skills are.

In undergrad, they're so focused on learning their specific skill set that they don't quite often appreciate it yet. But the further up that chain you go, the more obvious it is how important this stuff is.

Because they haven't entered the job market yet. Thank you so much, Bill Shander, public speaker, LinkedIn learning instructor, author of Stakeholder Whispering, and former instructor at Harvard, Northeastern and Stanford.

We really appreciate you helping us remember how important soft skills are.

Thank you so much for having me. I really had a good time.

I did too as well. My pleasure, Bill. Don't forget to subscribe, leave a rating, and a review on Apple and Spotify.

Stay tuned for more episodes to come.