Presentations

Few jobs exist that don’t require any public speaking abilities. Whether you’re talking with customers, discussing scenarios with clients, strategizing with your team, teaching children or adults, or interviewing for a job, the outcome of the communication scenario depends on your ability to organize your ideas, support your arguments, and make your case. The most direct and obvious application of public speaking concepts to a work environment is in making presentations.

Effective Presentations

When making a presentation at work, you might be tempted to think that only the information matters.  After all, your audience is there to hear the Q4 sales numbers, learn about a new counseling technique, or find out about the results of a customer survey – just the facts should be enough, right? Wrong! Whenever you’re presenting information, you need to approach the task as a public speaker: by considering the needs of the audience, collecting valid and credible evidence, and organizing your data into a compelling story.

Don’t deliver information this way:

Instead, deliver it like this:

Remember that a presentation is not an information “dump,” but needs to be as refined and controlled as a speech.

When you’re giving a presentation at work, you’re essentially giving an informative speech, so many informative speaking strategies and principles apply. But it’s also important to keep in mind that the way you approach a presentation for work may differ significantly from an informative speech depending on the context. For work, your presentation has a specific function, and before you begin putting it together, you need to find out as many details as possible about that function. Are you speaking to coworkers? Potential clients? Community leaders? Other experts in the field? Keep in mind that your presentation fits into a larger picture that includes workplace culture and may include community visibility, and/or brand identity. In some cases, it may be tempting to treat a presentation at work – for instance, an informative session for coworkers – as an unstructured information dump. Since you all work together, you can just give them the raw facts and data they need, right? Not quite. Just as much as any other speech, a presentation to coworkers should be thoughtfully structured and carefully delivered to help your audience learn what they need to learn in a context that makes sense.

The key elements of a good presentation are content, organization, and delivery. Content includes both substance and style aspects. Substance elements include the originality and significance of your idea, the quality of your research and analysis, clarity, and the potential impact of your recommendations. Style aspects of content include confidence and credibility, both of which have a significant impact on how you – and your message – are received.

Good organization starts with a strong opening and continues in a logical and well-supported manner throughout the presentation, leading to a close that serves as a resolution of the problem or a summary of the situation you’ve presented. The audience experiences good organization as a sense of flow, an inevitable forward movement to a satisfying close. This forward momentum also requires speakers to have a certain level of technical and information-management competency. To the latter point, good presentation requires a presenter to put thought into information design, from the structure and content of slides to the transitions between individual points, slides and topics.

Delivery involves a range of factors from body language and word choice to vocal variety. In this category, your audience is responding to your personality and professionalism. For perspective, one of the three evaluation categories on the official Toastmasters speaker evaluation form is “As I Saw You” with the parenthetical items “approach, position, personal appearance, facial expression, gestures and detracting mannerisms.” A good presenter has a passion for the subject and an ability to convey and perhaps elicit that emotion in the audience. Audience engagement through eye contact, facial expression, and perhaps the use of gestures or movement also contributes to an effective presentation. However, to the point in the Toastmasters evaluation, gestures, movement and other mannerisms can be distracting. What works is natural (not staged) movement that reinforces communication of your idea.

With these key features and presentation-evaluation criteria in mind, let’s add a disclaimer. The reality is that your features won’t matter if you don’t make the information relevant to your workplace audience. Whether you think in Toastmasters’ terminology – “What’s in it for me? (WIIFM)” from the audience perspective – or put yourself in the audience’s position and ask “So what?” it’s a question that you need to answer early.

In this speech, presentation coach Richard Mulholland offers a memorable formula for effective presentations: give the audience a reason to care; give them a reason to believe; tell them what they need to know; tell them what they need to do.^[1].

You can view the transcript for “Richard Mulholland provides a Formula for Delivering Effective Presentations” here (opens in new window).

Creating a Presentation

It may be helpful to think of your presentation as having three key moving parts or interlocking gears: purpose, audience, and message.

Purpose

Generally, the first step in developing a presentation is identifying your purpose. Purpose is a multi-layered term, but in this context, it simply means objective or intended outcome. To riff on the classic Yogi Berra quote, if you don’t know where you’re going, you might as well be somewhere else. That is, don’t waste your audience’s (or your own) time.Your purpose will determine both your content and approach and suggest supplemental tools, audience materials, and room layout. Perhaps your purpose is already defined for you: perhaps your manager has asked you to research three possible sites for a new store. In this case, it’s likely there’s an established evaluation criteria and format for presenting that information. Voila! Your content and approach is defined.

If you don’t have a defined purpose, consider whether your objective is to inform, to educate, or to inspire a course of action. State that objective in a general sense, including what action you want your audience to take based on your presentation. Once you have that information sketched in, consider your audience.

Audience

The second step in developing effective presentations for work is audience research. Who are the members of your audience? Why are they attending this conference, meeting, or presentation? This step is similar to the demographic and psychographic research marketers conduct prior to crafting a product or service pitch, and is just as critical. Key factors to consider include your audience’s age range, educational level, industry/role, subject matter knowledge, etc. These factors matter for two reasons: you need to know what they know and what they need to know. Understanding your audience will allow you to articulate what may be the most critical aspect of your presentation: “WIIFM,” or what’s in it for them.

Profiling your audience also allows you adapt your message so it’s effective for this particular audience. That is, to present your idea (proposal, subject matter, recommendations) at a depth and in a manner (language, terminology, tools) that’s appropriate. Don’t expect your audience to meet you where you are; meet them where they are and then take them where you want to go together.

Returning to the site analysis example mentioned earlier, knowing your audience also means clearly understanding what management expects from you. Are you serving in an analyst role, conducting research and presenting “just the facts” to support a management decision? Or are you expected to make a specific recommendation? Be careful of power dynamics and don’t overstep your role. Either way, be prepared to take a stand and defend your position. You never know when a routine stand-and-deliver could become a career-defining opportunity.

Message

The third step is honing your message. In “TED’s Secret to Great Public Speaking,” TED Conference curator Chris Anderson notes that there’s “no single formula” for a compelling talk, but there is one common denominator: great speakers build an idea inside the minds of their audience.

Ideas matter because they’re capable of changing our perceptions, our actions, and our world. As Anderson puts it, “Ideas are the most powerful force shaping human culture.”^[2]So if ideas are that powerful, more is better, right? Perhaps a handful or a baker’s dozen? Wrong. As any seasoned sales person knows, you don’t walk into a meeting with a prospective client and launch into an overview of every item in your company’s product or service line. That’s what’s known as “throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks.” And that’s an approach that will have you wearing your spaghetti – and perhaps the dust from one of your client’s shoes on your backside as well. What audience members expect is that you’ve done your homework, that you know them and their pain, and that you have something to offer: a fresh perspective, an innovative approach, or a key insight that will change things for the better. As Chris Anderson says, “Pick one idea, and make it the through-line running through your entire talk.”^[3] One message, brought vividly and relevantly to life.

Another Way to Approach Creating a Presentation: Story Metaphor

Another way to approach creating a presentation is to use Nancy Duarte’s metaphor of a business  presentation as a story.  Duarte, a presentation expert who has spoken and written in the field of business communication, says to think of a presentation as a story with a beginning, middle, and end.The story starts with “What is” – the current state. Describe this baseline state in a way that is recognizable to the audience, so your audience will be more receptive to your proposed change.The second step is to introduce “What could be.” The gap between what is and what could be adds tension and drama to your story and largely determines the significance of your presentation. If there’s no conflict, no proposed change, what’s the point of the presentation? The bulk of your the presentation is developing the contrast between what is and what could be in order to set up your proposed resolution of the conflict or challenge.

The objective is also to establish the validity of your arguments so your proposed call to action is perceived as a logical, ideally inevitable, conclusion of the conflict. The end is a resolution of the conflict introduced at the beginning, with a call to action that inspires your audience to support your vision of what could be, a state Duarte refers to as the “new bliss.” The new bliss articulates the proposed and desired future state, incorporating the WIIFM, what’s in it for me, that motivates your audience to buy into and work to support the required change.

For example, let’s say you’re an analyst on the new product development team of a retailer known for exclusive, trend-forward “house” branded products. Your company’s reputation and revenue depend on consistent introduction of new products. Marketing and distribution are key strengths, but new-product performance is off, revenue is below expectations, and the company’s stock price recently fell 30 percent. Your company keeps all research and development within the company; any ideas or innovations that weren’t developed in-house are blocked. The problem is, you can’t innovate fast enough, or with enough market demand accuracy, to meet financial and stock market expectations. You and the other analysts on your team have been tracking innovation trends and successes and you think the answer is opening the R&D works to outside ideas and innovations.

Here’s how you might lay out your presentation’s body:

• What Is: We missed our quarterly earnings numbers, largely due to a failure to meet our innovation success targets over the last six months.

• What Could Be: Initial data suggests we could get back on track by modifying our R&D model to incorporate external innovations.

• What Is: We currently bear the full cost and risk of developing new products and our innovation success rate—the percentage of new products that meet financial objectives—is running 25 percent below target.

• What Could Be: Sourcing promising innovations from outside the company could reduce R&D costs and risk while also increasing our innovation success rate.

• What Is: Our R&D process is taking so long that we’re missing trends and losing our market-leading brand reputation.

• What Could Be: We could license or buy promising innovations for a fraction of the cost it would take to develop them from scratch and leverage our marketing and distribution strengths to claim shelf and market share.

• What Is: Our below-plan performance and new-product pipeline is costing us political capital with executive management, and we’re at risk of losing budget and/or layoffs.

• What Could Be: Adopting an open innovation culture would allow us to create partnerships that leverage our strengths and drive revenue, regaining a position of value within the company.

The ending and call to action would summarize the main point of recovering revenue by opening R&D. The new bliss would articulate the proposed and desired future state, incorporating the WIIFM, what’s in it for me, that motivates your audience to buy into and work to support the required change (e.g., greater company profits, secures your job, pays off in employee stock value and profit sharing).

The following video explains why story is a good structure for a presentation.

You can view the transcript for “Nancy Duarte: How to Tell a Story” here (opens in new window).

For additional perspective on this structure, watch her TED Talk.

You can view the transcript for The Secret Structure of Great Talks  here (opens in new window).

Alternatively, you can read Duarte’s Harvard Business Review article, “Structure Your Presentation Like a Story (opens in new window).”

Bad Presentations

Once you have a macro view of the presentation-development process, review what can – and often does – go wrong in order to help avoid common mistakes. The common denominator of presentation mistakes is that they represent a failure of communication. This failure can be attributed to two errors: too much or too little.

The error of too much is generally the result of trying to use slides as a teleprompter or a substitute to a report, with the intention of presenting so much information that the audience will submit to it. Of course, this method tends to have an alternate effect, often prompting audience members to tune out, turning their attention instead to their phone or iPads. Bad presentations often have too little emotion. Presentation expert and author of the classic Presentation Zen (and four related books) Gar Reynolds captures the crux of the problem: “a good presentation is a mix of logic, data, emotion, and inspiration. We are usually OK with the logic and data part, but fail on the emotional and inspirational end.”^[4]There’s also a hybrid too-little-too much mistake, where too little substance and/or no design sensibility is, in the mind of the presenter, offset by transitions and special effects. Heed Seth Godin’s advice: “No dissolves, spins or other transitions. None.”^[5]

Avoiding Too Much/Too Little in Presentations

The 10/20/30 rule, generally attributed to venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki, is a good guideline to help you achieve a “just right” balance in your presentations. Geared for entrepreneurs pitching their business, his advice is a discipline that would improve the quality—and effectiveness—of most presentations. In brief, 10/20/30 translates to a maximum of 10 slides, a maximum of 20 minutes and a minimum of 30 point font.^[6]

While this rule is a good starting point, it doesn’t overrule your audience analysis or understanding of your purpose. Sometimes, you may need more slides or have a more involved purpose: for example if you’re training people in new software or presenting the results of a research study – that takes more than 30 minutes to address. In that case, go with what your audience needs and what will make your presentation most effective. The concept behind the 10/20/30 rule to make new learning easy for your audience to take in, process, and remember should still be your guide even if you don’t follow the rule exactly.