Ross Saunders (00:00)
Hello everyone and welcome to This Is Not What I Signed Up For, the podcast for new managers teaching you how to swim so you don't sink with your new responsibilities. And today it is my pleasure to introduce Chris Graham. Now his posts that he has on LinkedIn on today's topic is, they're really spot on and I love reading them and I'm very keen to share his knowledge with all of you. Now Chris teaches lawyers and other professionals how to connect with their clients and their teams.

Over the years, he's trained over 15,000 people at North America's leading law firms, large and small companies, government agencies, charities, and not to give away too much about today's topic, though I suppose you've probably already read what the topic is. In 2022, Chris was the head of speaker coaching for TEDx Toronto, so Canada's largest TEDx event.

Chris's company is Tell People and before that he worked for one of the world's top banking law firms and one of Canada's top indigenous rights law firms. He studied at Oxford University, University of Toronto Law School and Acadia University and this one I really like and it's very interesting and we'll get into this in our talk I think. He's a graduate of the stand-up comedy program at the Second City in Toronto. So Chris, welcome, very excited to have you.

Chris Graham (01:21)
That's very kind of you to say all of those nice things, Ross. Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. It's great to see you, man. Thanks for having me on.

Ross Saunders (01:28)
Good. Chris, the first thing I always ask all my guests, ⁓ what is some of the worst management advice you've ever received or heard in terms of managing people in teams? Or in general?

Chris Graham (01:42)
You know, I'm glad you,

yeah, I know I'm glad you sent me this question in advance because one thing that occurred to me is it's been a long time since I've been managed. I've been doing my own thing for 10 years now and I freelanced off and on for a while before then. So I had to go way back in my mind to when I first started working at this giant law firm in New York City. So this would have been in 2004, 2005, no, 2007, give or take.

And the worst advice was ⁓ the entire feedback process at this place was, quote, we'll let you know if something's going wrong, end quote. Period. That was the whole policy. No positive feedback ever. You just kind of like swim around in this fog and wait for a hammer to descend from the earth or from the sky. And I gave the date like 2007 because times have changed and it didn't seem like a weird

Ross Saunders (02:18)
Hmm.

Chris Graham (02:36)
at the time. It seemed very normal or at least, I don't know, my dad's a lawyer so maybe I just inherited his outlook. So it seemed sort of normal to me. But I now think it's nice to tell people when they do a good job. I think that's very helpful.

Ross Saunders (02:51)
Absolutely, yeah. I'm one of those that thrives on being told that I am at least on the right track and carry on doing what you're doing. I'm not one for liking the hammer from the heavens.

Chris Graham (03:00)
Yeah, I'm not.

Yeah, so that's I think is the worst. I think that counts as management advice. That's the worst thing. Yeah.

Ross Saunders (03:09)
yeah.

Yeah. No, geez. think there, there are previous podcast topics that I've recorded on this and there are future ones coming on the same subject. So that's Cool. But today, ⁓ we are going to be talking about presentation skills, you know, and I think this is something that is very, very frequently left out of the kind of arsenal that

the new manager needs. mean, you're perhaps coming from a technical role or something you're being promoted into management. And sure, you're going to put a couple of PowerPoint decks up at some point in time or some statistics or a status update. ⁓ But rarely do we speak about the presentation skills that go into giving a valuable presentation and buy-in and things like that. So Chris, I see you posting about this kind of stuff.

so much, which is where this conversation started. If we look at the most kind of basic levels of sort of presentation, then speaking of presentation skills, why would someone who's moving into management like really need to hone these skills?

Chris Graham (04:25)
Well, that's really interesting. Well, I guess in a way you've answered the question in your preamble there, at least I heard an answer, which is previously you're in a role that's more technical and it's more individual contributor. I deliver on a deadline sort of thing. And in a management role, there's all these different responsibilities. So you have to lead other people. You have to coordinate activities amongst other people. And at least in my experience, you're often dealing with people who are not in your group as it were.

So I used to be a lawyer. so, you know, when you're a junior lawyer, you just work on, let's say contracts, for example, every day you read contracts. But then when you get more senior, you got to talk to the like the employment people, the litigation people, the bankruptcy people. And none of these people have your professional expertise. And of course you talk to them in conversation, but you're generally speaking to like meetings of people and you need to be able to engage with them and connect with them in order to advance projects that involve many more people. So yeah.

Ross Saunders (05:22)
Mm.

Chris Graham (05:22)
rain is a totally different skill set that people are often surprised to discover.

Ross Saunders (05:26)
Yeah, I think with what you're saying there as well, and you're kind of going into, you know, it's perhaps different audiences and things like that. There's a communications and a translation component that comes into it as well. I reckon, because you're needing to, mean, if you're coming from a technical role, you're probably having to explain some of the technical components that that's understandable and that you can't just start throwing acronyms around and things like that.

Chris Graham (05:52)
Yeah, well, it's all relative though, because, you know, even in your, if you're like talking to a fellow technical person on your team, I'm sure you can think of acronyms that they don't understand. There are fewer of them, but like it's the same basic communication challenge all the way down. And I think, you know, this is one of the things I wrote in my notes about this question is recognizing that you are, if you're speaking to a group of people, you already know how to do this. Like that's just being a person. You go to dinner, you talk to people, you have other people on your team.

And I think it seems like categorically different because now you're management and it's different people. Maybe it's even in a different part of the building. Like all of these things make it seem very different. And so you can forget to do like the really obvious stuff that has served you well, literally your entire life, which is, you say, like, who are these people? Like, what is the audience here? What is my role vis-a-vis them? What is it that I would like them to do with the information that I'm sharing in this meeting?

And if you ask yourself that question, all of these translation problems immediately present themselves and you can instantly solve them. Right? These are all solvable challenges. ⁓ I think, I don't know, maybe this is hard for people to hear sometimes, but I think the main challenge of public speaking is having a conversation while other people watch. Just remembering. Yeah. Just remembering to be yourself. Like, cause that's what's gotten you into this position in the first place.

Ross Saunders (06:46)
Hmm.

⁓ That's a very good point.

Yeah, that's one of the things that I mean, related but unrelated, I also speak to in the book ⁓ is, you you get into this management position and then suddenly like, I must prove myself. But you've kind of already proven yourself to get to the point that you're at at the moment. And it's important to remember that fact that you are here for a reason. ⁓ And how you are is part of that reason that's there. So I really love that.

Chris Graham (07:43)
Hmm.

Ross Saunders (07:44)
and you know, I think one of the things you said there, and I can't remember the exact wording you use, but I think it does come into there. There is a buy-in that you're trying to get in a lot of presentations as well. And, and, I don't necessarily want to say it like an emotional response, but you want that, drawing someone in to what you're presenting on, particularly if you want a decision or something from that, I think.

Chris Graham (08:11)
Yeah, no, for sure. ⁓ I mean, I can't remember where we are in the list of questions here, but something else that I wrote down to talk about is, ⁓ like the whole point of public speaking presentations, whatever is to connect with other people. I that's actually the whole point, because, ⁓ I think the normal way people think about presentations is as an exercise in information transfer. So I have this information and I'm giving it to the audience and that's fine. That is absolutely happening, but that's not all that's happening.

Ross Saunders (08:25)
Hmm.

Chris Graham (08:41)
And in fact, if the whole point of your presentation is just to share information, you shouldn't talk at all. You should just give people a memo. Because this is true that average reading speed for professional people is 300 words per minute. That's not like speed reading. That's just reading emails, right? The average public speaking pace is 160 words per minute. Half as fast. So if all we're doing is like giving the information out, it's literally a waste of our time. Literally.

It's a waste of time. And so this connection that you're talking about, yeah, it's the same connection that we're having in this conversation here that you have with your colleagues, et cetera. And I think in the, whatever reason, in the group context, gets couched as like persuasion or commanding the room. No, I mean, sure, but it's really just, I'm a person, you're a person, and we're connecting as people here. are present to each other in a meaningful way. And you already know how to do this.

Ross Saunders (09:11)
You

Chris Graham (09:38)
You do this with your colleagues, people you love, people you trust, and again, you're just sort of bringing this into yet another venue.

Ross Saunders (09:46)
Yeah, and I think, you know, this is what I was saying about our posts on on or your posts on LinkedIn that I enjoy reading is that comes across from you a lot and it's refreshing there. And I absolutely agree with you on kind of ⁓ it was one of the questions I wanted to speak to you about as well is that slapping the stats on a deck? You know, I think

The space I come from quite a bit is that software as a service and that side of things in the consulting world as well, where I think there's a lot of presentations for the sake of presentations. It's the whole thing of this meeting could have been an email and things like that. And I think you hit on it really nicely there with the reading speed versus your decks. And I think one of the other things that we've all seen and I...

guarantee you everyone listening if they've been in meetings have had death by PowerPoint as well. And this death by PowerPoint of bullet point after bullet point can really be distracting for the people in the room as well. I know if someone puts a whole slide up in front of me, I tune out to what someone's saying and I start reading the whole deck and then I've read the slide and it's like, okay, can you wrap this up already? Let's move on.

Chris Graham (11:09)
Yeah,

no, it's true. There's actually so, ⁓ there's some really good work on this. It's pretty old stuff, like turn of the century stuff, but ⁓ people are who are thinking about the difference between speaking and writing and like literate culture. like literacy, the technology of writing and speaking like oral culture. And it's kind of hard to imagine what it would be like before literacy, because it just permeates all of our existence. has, we don't know any other space like this.

But one of the thought experiments or ideas that have that has been sort of articulated is ⁓ reading shatters unity. So if you are speaking to a group of people in the audience, the audience is like capital A audiences, a group of people having a shared collective experience. They all listen together. It's one voice into many years. So there's a unity there. But if you give people a handout to read quietly by themselves or put the handout on the slide sort of thing.

they instantly shatter into a million or into as many people as there. They become individuals reading something as opposed to a collective hearing something together. And so I think when you mean death by PowerPoint or when I hear death by PowerPoint, what I think about is the death of this unity. Like add a, it's a like, actually you've probably done this. Have you ever been to a silent disco?

Ross Saunders (12:24)
Mmm.

Yes, yes I have.

Chris Graham (12:31)
Yeah,

so if listeners have never heard of this before, I don't know if this is a big thing in North America. I encountered it only in England. ⁓

Ross Saunders (12:40)
I encountered it in South Africa. We used to have it quite regularly there.

Chris Graham (12:43)
⁓

Yeah, so the idea is it's actually great for your neighbors. So instead of having like an all night party where the music is super loud, everybody has headphones and the headphones play the same music. ⁓ But there's a huge difference between being at like a live concert and we're all hearing it together versus like looking out at the sea of people all in their own world and you have no idea what they're hearing. Often at the Silent Disco, there are different tunes that you can dial into so you don't actually know what people are hearing.

And it's again, this like shattering of the unity. ⁓ So yeah, if you put a text heavy slide on the screen, you are literally killing the room. Let's make that the soundbite. You just literally.

Ross Saunders (13:15)
Hmm.

Yeah, let's do that. You know, I think what there's a fantastic ⁓ speaker from the US, Dr. John Molodore, and he's done a lot of work on the neuroscience of speaking and I would encourage any of the listeners to go look up some of his work as well. ⁓ And it comes into like even the design of slides and kind of the positioning of images versus text can affect how you perceive it and how you stay connected in the room.

paraphrasing here and maybe I'm getting it totally wrong. But depending on your handwriting culture from left to right, right to left, you would have a different way of perceiving a slide in front of you as to where the image is and where your eyes are gonna be drawn to for the material. And you can disrupt a room like that. I think that again, speaking to the skill of all of this, there is something to be said for being very deliberate in what goes into your slides, how you present there.

or else you do risk losing the room or having loads of points on there. I'm a big fan of icons on a desk. I have a slide with just the pictures and I speak to the pictures and then people have to listen to me.

Chris Graham (14:37)
Yeah. No, it's a real, I mean, I don't want to belabor this point, but I think it is a real tension because people have certain expectations about what they'll see in a presentation, whether it's at a big conference or even in a meeting. And those presents, those expectations consciously or not are literate expectations. ⁓ and if people, mean, I really do think people expect to see detailed slides, detailed handouts, and this is part of like how they code in their mind, like quality present. Have I gotten value?

Right? And so you can see like, yes, I got three pages of bullet points. There's clearly I can see the value I got. And that's a, that's, I know, you know, that's just a real expectation. It's a reality. And it's, think the main thing is to be mindful of the tension and you feel intent. Like I feel intention with this. You clearly feel intention with this. Um, the best response is not to just say nothing. Fine. We're having no slides in my show. Could do that. Um, it's hard. Like that's a particular road and just being conscious of.

Ross Saunders (15:08)
Mm, yeah.

Hmm.

Chris Graham (15:37)
Like that choice has entailed certain outcomes and certain challenges of its own. ⁓ Yeah.

Ross Saunders (15:42)
Yeah,

I think that when I when I say that I'm probably referring to more to me kind of keynoting and training when it comes to a boardroom presentation, then yeah, there will be certain things that you need to include, but also know what include be deliberate on what you include, you don't have to overkill the information for everyone. But I figured we can go into a bit of a lighter point of this. ⁓ And I noticed

I mean, from your bio and all that, you've done standup. And one of the things I think that I've had over the years, because something I really want to bring into my presentations, even if it is in the boardroom, is bringing in a little bit of humor. ⁓ And, you know, I think part of honing your skills, at least for me, is looking at other speakers you enjoy. for me,

Chris Graham (16:14)
Mmm.

Ross Saunders (16:37)
some of the speakers I enjoy most and I'm most captivated by are comedians. And I honestly, if you hear me speaking in a meeting or something like that, and you hear my humor, it's probably, you can probably hear it's modeled after Suzy or Eddie Izzard and the way my humor fits with that. So, you know, from your side, how do you feel about kind of humor in speaking and a place in the boardroom and that side?

Chris Graham (16:41)
Mmm.

Yeah.

I mean, I feel good about it. I don't think there's a surprise there. ⁓ Maybe just a couple of things. So one, while you were talking, I reached over. So I absolutely agree, like studying comedians that you love. this is a guy I like is Mike Birbiglia. He's a very story-based narrative guy. So this is eight pages and I'm about 20 minutes through one of his specials. I write down all of the jokes, how they fit together, how the callbacks are, how does he structure it. Because I agree. I don't know how else you learn.

without diving into it. And for me at least, I don't see a lot of presentations that I like, like speaking and training stuff. I guess I don't watch a ton of it, but I, so I try to look outside for the models. ⁓ Cause there are different constraints that apply to a standup show or a comedy special than would apply to a boardroom or something. So that's one point. In terms of like its usefulness. Yeah, I absolutely think it's, it's been helpful for me. I think because my personality is a little bit irreverent.

I don't like, take my work seriously. I'm serious about doing a good job, but I also like, I don't take myself very seriously. Like, come on, I teach communication. Like we're all doing fine here. And so I think for me, at least having humor has been a way to just like keep everybody's expectations like in the right zone. but I think, I think the reason that works for me is that it really fits with my personality. Like I'm a pretty silly person in hopefully in this conversation, you and I have talked offline a bunch, obviously like.

It's a pretty silly time generally. So it works for me. ⁓ lots of people ⁓ are very keen to incorporate humor. I guess I just want to say, you don't have to be super funny. I think the main thing is just to be honest and sincere. And yeah, and for lots of people that ⁓ it doesn't really mean humor, but there usually is bit of lightness there.

Ross Saunders (18:49)
Hmm.

Yeah, I

think that's the key word ⁓ perhaps I'm looking for is that lightness. ⁓ I think of many ⁓ meetings I've been in and I, there are meetings that I will loathe going to because I know that this is just going to be terribly dry and generally those are have like somewhere in the title status update or something like that. ⁓ But when there is a

Chris Graham (19:02)
Yeah.

more.

Ross Saunders (19:26)
Just a hint of lightness in things. It makes the meeting that much more palatable for me, I suppose. And I like to see that around me. And I've seen it ⁓ quite a bit in boardrooms where it lightens the moments. I find it helps me remember certain things as well. I don't tune out as easily. Yeah, that's just me in my view as well. So yeah, I think the lightness is the correct word there.

Chris Graham (19:52)
Yeah, no, I agree with that. agree with that. One other just sort of like bullet point here is, the people you're talking to don't know how many times you've used the joke. So Ross is nodding if you're just watching this, if you're only listening. like, if you hear Ross saying something funny in a meeting, I guarantee you he has said it in 15 other meetings. And that's a good thing. Like let's go with the reliable joke. So all of which is say sometimes who people don't.

Ross Saunders (20:06)
Hahaha

Chris Graham (20:18)
make jokes a lot, they feel like I have to be spontaneous all the time, I have to be creative. That's absolutely not true. Find something that's really funny and deploy it as much as you can.

Ross Saunders (20:28)
Yeah.

And you, you've hit on something else for me that that's like, you just kind of triggered a memory, which is some of the best, ⁓ advice I've ever received in terms of speaking as well. And like, if you are giving a big presentation or something like that, ⁓ particularly if you're not used to being in front of people, it's daunting. So many people are terrified of speaking and

I've seen it so many times with new managers where they are rehearsing and rehearsing and rehearsing a short presentation. And it could be that conversation that we were talking about, like you're just having a conversation with people. you know, folks will rehearse like crazy and then in the, in the room, ⁓ perhaps go blank on a point or something like that. And it totally derails what they're doing. And I think

leading on from what you've said there and some of the best advice I ever received is that whoever you're talking to don't know what you're going to say next. So it is okay to miss a point or come back to it in a lot of cases or something. you're struggling, you're in front of a room, you have gone through this in your mind, it's not going the way you thought it was because you've missed a point or something like that. No one in the room knew that you were going to make that point lightly. So don't beat yourself up about it.

was game changer for me, ⁓ what, 20 years ago, in terms of getting in front of someone. And I still remember to this day, and you reminded me of it there.

Chris Graham (22:01)
I love that. Yeah, absolutely. You're the only one who's seen the script. The other thing I guess for later, what that brings up for me is this notion of ⁓ maybe this is more of a speaker type thing, but I think in meetings it's the same. ⁓ The audience's job is not to take care of your feelings. So you're there to do something meaningful for them. And if you ⁓ articulate how you messed it up or you should have said something else, all you're really doing is taking away what for them could have been a really

incredible experience. ⁓ I was at a music festival once and I saw Solange perform Beyonce's sister. Fantastic performer, incredible. But like midway through the first, after the first song, they said, Hey, there's some people on stage here. Our drum line's not working properly. So we're just trying to figure it out. And like, that was cool. But like four more times in the half hour set, she talked about how it wasn't what they wanted. She's really sorry, et cetera. And so what for me was like, this is incredible to see this person.

Ross Saunders (22:31)
Hmm.

Hmm

Chris Graham (23:00)
⁓ Actually, what I did was I saw her like complain about this thing and I'm sure it was very frustrating for her. But like, it was still amazing for me and it would have been like, can I just have this great experience? ⁓ So yeah, it's the same, think ⁓ you're there in service of the audience and sometimes that service is just like keeping it to yourself that it might have been funnier or it might have been pointier or something. Next time.

Ross Saunders (23:22)
Yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely. Chris, as we're sort of coming up on time here, do you have any final parting thoughts for new managers in terms of presentation skills and speaking and things like that? Anything we haven't touched on?

Chris Graham (23:39)
Filler words are not bad. It is not, yeah, it is not the depth of your presentation. If you have, the technical term for them is disfluency. They are a normal part of conversational English or whatever it is, whatever language it is that you're speaking. Presumably it's, one of them is English if you're listening to this. ⁓ Yes, they help people pay more attention to what you're saying sometimes. If you have a lot, that's an issue, but.

Ross Saunders (23:44)
⁓ ready?

Chris Graham (24:09)
If you have just a few, this is no problem. Ross is looking at me very skeptically. Okay, great, great, great. But I have like, there's a great book that I love by this woman, Sedevi. She's a linguist. Psycholinguist is the name. And there's a whole bit in here about how Toastmasters is terrible because they hate filler words. Don't shoot the messenger. Buy the book and burn it.

Ross Saunders (24:14)
no, no, I am so with you on this one.

I have my own thoughts there as well. I think Toastmasters is fantastic for learning to speak, but I think when you're in a...

Chris Graham (24:39)
Yeah, for most part,

Ross Saunders (24:46)
I hesitate to use the phrase real world situation, but when you are in the boardroom or something, it's a different game. Even up on stage, keynoting, I say um, I say ah, I look up into the sky and be like, yeah, well, and it's a natural part. And I think it sounds a lot more natural than not hearing it at all.

Chris Graham (25:08)
Yeah. ⁓ and there's also, so there's a great, can I say other software programs on here? I don't own them. perfect. The one that I like is it's called yodely.ai y o o d l i dot AI. And so you just, looks kind of like this interface actually. So you say a practice into the software and it transcribes instantly what you said and gives you your filler words as a percentage of the total. So it'll just count all of the ums and ahs and so on. And what they recommend, and I agree, as long as you're below 4%.

Ross Saunders (25:13)
Yeah, sure.

Hmm

Chris Graham (25:37)
of the total, you don't really need to worry about this. It's actually really hard to get more than 4 % of your speech ⁓ like, et cetera. Most likely, everybody's fine, which means if you hear yourself in a room using filler words, I don't want you to panic. That's not cause for panic. There's no need to spiral. It's a totally normal thing. ⁓ sometimes having this empirical support can be helpful for you letting go of that. That's something that you're feeling.

Ross Saunders (26:06)
Hmm. I think just to add to that on the software side as well, if you're in an organization that's using Microsoft and you've got Microsoft Teams and ⁓ I think it's on one of the higher licenses, I'm not sure, but check it out. Teams also has a speaker coach function as well in it on some of the licenses, which will talk to you about filler words and things like that. So nice other service there. Chris, what else are you busy with at the moment? Where can people follow or connect with you?

Chris Graham (26:36)
thanks for asking. There are only two places to find me. One is on the internet at www.tellpeople.ca and the other is on LinkedIn. It's pretty easy to find, but I think the actual handle is Chris Graham, tell people in the bar there. Pretty easy to find. ⁓ Right now I'm working on, I have ⁓ a session, like a training session or an interactive keynote, I guess is what I call them. It's where you listen, but also do stuff.

Ross Saunders (26:52)
Wonderful.

Chris Graham (27:04)
on thinking on your feet, answering questions on the fly. So I'm going to debut this in December at a conference. So I'm very excited to be working on that. That's why I have all this knowledge about filler words at my fingertips, which they come up on when you think on your feet. And I am slowly working on this book project. The working title is How Smart People Give Boring Talks.

Ross Saunders (27:26)
I like that.

Chris Graham (27:26)
⁓ And

it's on the back burner right now because other things are coming up, but I am slowly chipping away at that. And let's say 2026, I'll go out on a limb and say it'll be available in 2026. ⁓

Ross Saunders (27:40)
Wonderful.

I'll sign up for a copy there. ⁓ Great. Chris, we'll pop all of that information for our listeners into the show notes. So take a look under the show and you'll be able to get those links there. Chris, thank you so much for joining us today. This was fun. I enjoyed the conversation and I am sure a lot of folks are going to get value out of this. And I look forward to putting this out there and then to our listeners.

Chris Graham (27:42)
decline.

Ross Saunders (28:06)
Thank you very much for listening and we'll chat to you soon. Till then, keep swimming.

Chris Graham (28:13)
Thanks Ross