Today I sat through a most amazing speech by a celebrated toastmaster. He has a very subtle sense of humor, a great command over his diction, confident body language, uses really simple vocabulary in a beautiful manner and establishes wonderful rapport with the audience. Did I tell he was blind? And yet, he was able to establish a great connection with the audience. This made my thinking: how does one go about ‘getting’ feedback from the audience when there is no way to know how the audience is responding to your speech? How does a visually impaired ‘read’ the language of smile, the language of silence and the language of silent appreciation?
A very important part of every communication, written or verbal, formal or informal, is that the sender of the communication must be able to get a sense of how it is being perceived and understood by the receiver of that communication. The best speakers are constantly searching for those subtle cues among their audience – the slightest sign of boredom creeping in, or the type of anecdotes that elicit a positive response, and so on. The best speaker experiences are simply not about delivering a prepared speech, come what may. Instead, it is all about careful listening, reading their faces, decoding their body language and sensing the general ‘mood’ of your audience while you deliver your prepared speech – but making those right adjustments to enhance the overall experience.
Similarly, a project manager’s reporting and communication is also kind of visually challenged! Many of your important stakeholders are not in your direct line of sight – they might be sitting twelve time zones away, or in another town, or in simply another floor, but pretty much ‘invisible’ to you. You might meet them maybe twice a year (or more, if you have a liberal travel budget) but for rest of the year, you are pretty on your own guessing how they ‘might’ be perceiving your textual communication or phone conversations. In the age of reduced team budgets, tighter deadlines and an overflowing work schedule, chances are that unless the house is on fire, you are not likely to qualify for your manager’s attention. So, how do ensure your stakeholders understand you when you can’t see their reactions to your communication?
Then there are equally important stakeholders who are visible to you, but don’t speak much – yes, your team. It might vary with culture, but generally, I haven’t seen team members speak much, or at least give a lot of feedback, unless you do a major screw-up! This poses a different type of challenge – that of guessing what might be cooking in people’s mind when they won’t share it – not that you can’t see, but a lot of it doesn’t still meet the eye.
So, how do you read people’s mind when you can’t see them? Simple – you ‘listen’ to folks when you can’t see them! You listen to the ambience and understand your communication’s causal and collateral impact! You give enough pauses in your communication that allows you to listen to how people are responding. You speak slow so that you can listen what you can’t see…
What would you do - blame your ‘handicap’ or turn it on its head???
PS: Just search for “Rajdeep Manwani” or watch this video to know more about Rajdeep.
