Speaking in class: How to get out of wallflower mode
If you are not comfortable speaking in public, you will probably feel pretty intimidated by the MBA classroom experience. This is especially true in the first few weeks, where you haven’t gotten to know your classmates yet, and everybody is afraid of making a bad first impression. But it is important to get speaking as soon as you can. The three following pieces of advice can help you break the mental sound barrier and get into the discussion.
1) Get used to guessing
Depending on what you did before the MBA, you may be more or less comfortable offering up educated guesses in class. From my own experience, I noticed that people with an engineering background in particular would often speak up only when they were 100 percent sure of what they were saying.
But in business school, you will practically never be sure of what you are saying. In fact, you are not supposed to know what the answer is; if you were, there would be little point in discussing the cases in class. It becomes easier to participate when you remember that nobody expects you to have cracked the case, least of all the professor. The professor only expects you to come up with some reasonable guesses, small nuggets of insight that he can then use to paste together the big picture, aided by the rest of the class.
So, get used to the idea of guessing your way forth, and remember that you also get points for trying, even if you aren’t always spot on. (Even being completely wrong is often better than being quiet; professors often give the worst grades to the people who never say a word.)
2) Practice making your points
When you read a case (or whatever preparation you were assigned), think about which points you could make, and make a note of them. Then, try speaking them out loud to yourself when you finish reading the case, exactly like you would say it in class. Also, use your team meetings to practice delivering your comments before the class starts. If you really find it difficult to do, ask your teammates to help you.
When we started our team meetings, the person who was responsible for presenting a particular case would basically give a small lecture to the team, going through his findings. But we quickly found out that this didn’t work very well for the more participation-heavy classes like Marketing and Organisational Behaviour. The guy doing the lecture would get a lot of practice expressing his ideas, but the rest of the team didn’t really gain that much from it.
We decided to change this. We started using the team meetings to run small 20-minute simulated classes. Instead of lecturing, the person who had prepared the case in depth would take on the role of the professor. Then, he would ask questions of the team, exactly like in class: “So, what do you think is the key problem in this case? Yes, Peter?”. Sometimes we would even cold-call each other, so that it wasn’t always the eloquent ones that did the talking. Running these mini-classes was a fantastic help in getting out of wallflower mode, and often gave our team an edge in the class discussion.
3) Find other opportunities to improve your public speaking skills
For instance, if your school has a Theater club or a Public Speaking club, go to some of the meetings and give it a try. The more you train speaking in public, the easier it will become. Several of the wallflowers in our class gradually became good at speaking up, simply because they grabbed all available chances to practice their public speaking.
Once, in the middle of one of our second-year communications classes, my friend Juliaan (who wasn’t part of that class) tried to sneak into the room to pick up a jacket he had left there during the previous session. However, the professor spotted him and challenged him to deliver a speech right there and then. Juliaan, who had practised his improvisation skills in the Public Speaking club, effortlessly picked up the glove and launched into an impressive two-minute oratory, to the wild applause of the class.
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