This past week I attended a lecture called ”On the Muslim Question” (or “Democracy in Islam and in the West”) which was given by Anne Norton, a professor of political science and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. I had originally learned about this lecture from a post on a page on Facebook and then I later read about it in the Liberal Arts Newswire. I thought the lecture would be about the way the West’s attitude towards Muslims and after spending the summer in Morocco and being introduced first had to some Muslim culture I thought I would really enjoy this lecture.
As it turns out, I was rather disappointed by it. Not necessarily by the content but by the speaker’s ability to make her presentation clear and easy to follow. I realize that speaking in front of a room full of people is no easy task, thank you CAS, but it is an incredibly important skill that sometimes gets over looked.
One of the things that I found didn’t really work during this lecture was the flow. The speaker had speaking points written out on a sheet of paper. Normally I wouldn’t mind his if the speaker can glance at them and keep the same rhythm, but in this case I found them to be very distracting. This was due to the fact that whenever she looked at her speaking points, which was sometimes in the middle of a sentence, there was this awkward pause and then by the time she got going again I was either lost or I had forgotten what she had said in the first part of the sentence. This made the lecture hard to follow at times. It also made her seem a bit unprepared for her talk.
I really feel that it was this lack of flow that made the presentation slightly unenjoyably. I was distracted by the pauses and I just had a hard time following along.
This experience has me thinking about how important good public speaking skills are to leadership. If you are in a leadership position you are going to have to be able to talk to groups of people and do so in a way that is clear and interesting in order to get people to listen to you. If you seem unprepared or the presentation is choppy the audience will tune out or get distracted and that’s no good.
I guess I am going on about this because I feel that many times, good public speaking skills are overlooked as an important aspect of leadership.