People make fun of engineers–ribbing them for their introversion and poor communication skills.  I don’t feel that way.  Whenever I work with them on their speaking skills, I find them to be eager and open to new ideas.  When I give them a process to follow, they try to make it work, and generally they succeed.

I recently worked with a chief engineer on an elaborate and complex presentation of a global HR initiative that would have significant impact on the careers of all the engineers in his company.

When we met, the presentation was long, and all about the features of the program.  The slides were also crawling with bullet points.  When we finished, it was about one-third as long and not a bullet point in sight.

How did we do this?  We changed the structure of his talk from all about the new HR initiative to all about what the HR initiative could do for the engineers.

Within that structure, we described the features of the program, but only after we had built an emotional reason for taking an interest in it.

The emotional reasons were that the old one was vague, overly-comlex, rigid, and unfair–while the new one put them in the drivers seat, gave them the keys to their career, and a road map to the position of their choice.

So not only did we emotionalize content that could have been very dry, but we made the benefits concrete by using the metaphor of being in the driver’s seat.  Plus, we had a great picture of a young woman sitting in a brand-new car being handed the keys and smiling from ear to ear.

Words and pictures.  Much better than words alone.

Tags: communication skills, Effective Communication, effective presentation, emotion, emotional appeals, executive coaching, metaphor, Presentation Skills, public speaking, sales skills, scientific presentations, speech coach, speech coaching, technical presentations