Communication versus conversation with crowds and colleagues

Image from Getty Images

Imagine it's time for you and your partner to sit down and have a heart-to-heart. A significant discussion, one that can have a lasting impact on your relationship.

Your partner enters the room.

And there you are standing up next to the podium you’ve wheeled into your living room. You welcome your partner to the conversation and ask “How y’all doing today?!” all amped up. You say you’re “so excited to be here, and before we get started, I’d like to share a short video.” After the video, you start up a slide deck, with compelling images, crisp charts, concise copy. You scan the room as you are talking, occasionally looking directly at your partner. You emphasize your key points with big hand gestures while you pace the room purposefully. Your partner looks askance and begins to question their relationship decisions.

Power Skills Series

Check out more articles from this series

Now imagine it’s time for you to give a presentation on a big multi-team project that you are leading at your organization. Tens of people have filed into your building’s biggest conference room. The bustle of side conversations fills the air, and the buzz dies down to silence as you gesture toward starting. Everyone has your undivided attention.

You get ready to go.

And you turn your seat to the person next to you. You make prolonged, direct eye contact, share facts and couch other thoughts with statements like, “I feel X. Here's why I feel X, and here’s what I want.” You tilt your head and actively listen to the other person talk when they say things like, “What are you doing?” and, “Is this part of the presentation?”  You finish talking to your completely weirded out colleague, then turn to the person on the opposite side of you and begin this process over again. After the third time you do this, people quickly file out of the room, worried about your grasp on reality.

Context always matters, especially in how we communicate. Communication techniques that are designed for big presentations don’t work in one-on-one conversations and vice versa. Strengthening your understanding of the goals when communicating in those two different settings is a power skill that will serve you well throughout your career.

Communication vs. conversation

Kicking a soccer ball in the neighborhood park. Kicking a soccer ball in England’s Wembley Stadium. Both use our minds and muscles, our legs and, if you're doing it right, our core. But while the actions are the same, the situations are wildly different. Communication and conversation uss a lot of the same tools. Our voice, our nonverbal gestures, our ability to analyze how the room is responding. But the circumstances of the two call for different methods of using the shared tools from that toolbox.

Presentations, whether in front of your team, your organization, a conference audience, are an act of communication, a one-to-many broadcast from the person on the stage. You have information that you are looking to share with multiple people, including an intended call to action at the end: Follow this best practice; Invest in this capital project; Switch from Pepsi to Coke products in the vending machines. Your voice, your gestures, your reading of the room act as a megaphone, like a carnival barker attracting an audience to step into the tent to observe wonders never seen.

Conversations, whether with your direct report, a small group of colleagues, your supervisor, are an act of conversation, a one-to-one dialog between people.  Conversations evolve as the wants and goals each participant presents are voiced, heard and synthesized through a response: the impact of the requirements of new responsibilities on work/life balance; the outcomes of our respective teams’ interactions with one another in working on a shared goal; the need for support due to inappropriate behavior from a team member. Your voice, your gestures, your reading of the individual you are speaking with act as a barometer, reacting to the conditions of the conversation.  

How to communicate better as a public speaker

In a room with 10 people, seven of them are glossophobes, meaning they have anxiety about public speaking. One of the few ways I made it through my Masters of Product Design & Development program was being one of the only people on my team who would happily stand on stage and mouth whatever the incredibly smart chemical, mechanical and electrical engineers on the team where telling me to say (the other way was always bringing both sweet and salty snacks to study sessions).

Improving your public speaking skills is a prerequisite if you hope to advance into management as part of your career goals. Marjorie North, an executive communication skills coach and Instructor at Harvard University’s Division of Continuing Education, lays out 10 tips for people seeking to improve their public speaking skills:

• Practice and prepare to respond to nervousness.
• Know your audience before you present so you can frame the presentation to answer their question, “Why is this important to me?”
• Organize your material logically, starting with topic, then general purpose, specific purpose, central idea, then main points.
• Read the room for feedback, and respond to it in real-time if you can.
• Share your personality to keep people engaged.
• Remember to tell stories, as most people respond well to narratives.
• Look at your audience, don’t read your slides. Write an outline, not a book report.
• Nonverbal gestures should convey your ideas, not your nervousness.
• Grab the audience’s attention at the beginning, and end with a dynamic finish.
• Be thoughtful in how you use audiovisual aids.

Much like her recommendations, the tips that Marjorie shares in her article build on one another, with the general purpose being how to be less nervous when public speaking. Preparing your speech helps you feel comfortable with the material. Organizing the material logically helps you ensure you are working toward the desired action you want from your audience. Reading the room gives you encouragement when they are attentive and a signal to up the razzle-dazzle when they are not. Working from an outline rather than a a script ensures that what you're saying feels fresh, which keeps your audience engaged. Thinking about your gestures ahead of time will help you to avoid nervous habits that will draw away your audience’s attention.

Last year, my supervisor and direct report both recommended that I take a public speaking course. They discussed how my ideas were great (geez, brag much?!), but that they were getting lost in what my direct report called with care, “your brain rebooting mid-sentence.”  That two-day training helped me get over the crutch that my lack of public speaking nervousness was as an excuse not to practice presentation. It helped me think about my nonverbal gestures and helped me improve the speed and emotional range in my speaking voice.

If you’re nervous about public speaking, that’s great! You’re part of a large group of humans. But if you’re allowing that nervousness to impact your career development, that’s not so great. Figure out when your fear of career stagnation will outweigh your fear of public speaking. And then figure out which of the public speaking tips above you’re going to get working on.

How to become a better conversationalist

As a middle-aged Gen-Xer, I grew up on MTV. And one of the greatest legacies of MTV, besides Downtown Julie Brown (Wubba Wubba Wubba), was “MTV Unplugged.” The program excelled in a special art — taking out all the brash distortion of Nirvana’s “All Apologies” and turning it into a chamber piece with acoustic guitars, cellos and brushes on the snare drum or removing the studio sheen and watching Mariah Carey’s brilliance shine through regardless on the Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There.” What works on a big stage doesn’t work on a small stage, and the best of the best adjusted and still mesmerized. If public speaking is your spotlight on the big stage, think of conversations as your “MTV Unplugged” performance.

Conversations, whether serious or small talk, require being finely calibrated with the person you are speaking with. It is the impact, not the intention, of your words that matters, and that reality is magnified when speaking directly with a person in a one-on-one setting.

Author Patricia Fry, writing for Toastmaster magazine, provides a helpful set of eight tips to leverage to improve your ability to excel as a conversationalist:

• Push past your nervousness and be more social to get more comfortable speaking with others in a more intimate setting.
• Be a good, active listener to communicate to the person you are speaking with that you are really hearing and internalizing what they are saying to you.
• Encourage the other person to talk to give them a chance to talk about themselves, their feelings about the situation, and to indicate to them that you are interested in them.
• Ask questions to clarify, to give people openings to share their thoughts, to keep a conversation in a social setting going.
• Use body language to express interest, realizing that people can tell your actual intent when your words and your body language aren’t in alignment.
• Know when to speak and when to listen to ensure there is give and take within the conversation.
• Be prepared, especially when it comes to a conversation at work, so that the person you are speaking with sees the importance you place on the discussion you are having with them.
• Model yourself after someone whose conversational skills you admire, whether someone at work or in your personal life.

The meta message Fry’s tips provide is to remind yourself that a conversation is not a monologue. The best conversations are a dance between two people’s intellect and perspective, hopefully working in tandem to achieve a new understanding of a shared reality.

All the world’s a stage

A mentor early in my career told me a story about old lions and young gazelles. The old lions weren’t fast enough to hunt anymore, so they would line up behind the tall grasses. The younger lions would chase the young gazelle toward those tall grasses, and the old lions would roar as loud as they could. The young gazelle, frightened and not knowing the roar was coming from those old lions, would turn around and run away, right into the clutches of those younger lions. The lesson of the story being to run toward the roar, to not turn around when fear creeps up, but to run through it.

Whether it is the bright lights of the big stage or the tight confines of small talk that make the butterflies in your stomach start to rumble, think back to the communication tips above and run toward the roar. You’ll be better off and feel pretty powerful when you get on the other side.

Adam Bazer, MPD, senior director of thought product development, ASHE.