By most measures, Liam is an outstanding professional. As Head of Operations for a global manufacturer, he’s used his expertise in process engineering to help grow the business exponentially. However, Liam has an Achilles heel: his presentations are awful. His internal and external audiences tune him out even before he gets to his second slide.
In the most recent Chapman University Survey of American Fears, 34% of Americans report being afraid or very afraid of public speaking. That number likely pales in comparison to the number of people who regularly experience ‘Death by PowerPoint’. Millions of presentations are given every day. Most of those presentations are mediocre, at best.
Over the past 25 years, I’ve coached hundreds of leaders on their presentation skills. Given that data set, I’ve seen a consistent pattern of mistakes that well-intentioned executives make that lead to dreadful presentations. Becoming aware of these mistakes is the first step in eliminating them.
Mistake #1: Building The Wrong Agenda
Most people start planning for their presentation by thinking about what they hope to get across to the audience. Some of these hopes can include: “I want to impress them. I want them to buy from me. I want them to buy-in to my plan. I want them to appreciate all the work my team did.”
There’s a major problem here. These thoughts are all speaker-centered. Speaker-centered thoughts lead to creating a speaker-centered agenda. Pardon the bluntness, but no one cares about your agenda. They care about their agenda.
Here’s the secret to proper presentation planning: Build your presentation from your audience’s perspective, not yours. Ask yourself: What’s in it for them to listen to you? For example, are you going to:
- Help them navigate a change?
- Make their workday easier?
- Reveal an exciting new opportunity?
Work backwards from their desired outcome to crafting their agenda. Then you can begin structuring your content accordingly.
Mistake #2: Thinking the Slides are the Presentation
Once you have figured out your audience’s agenda, clarify: What’s the purpose of your presentation? To educate? Motivate? Inspire?
If all you can come up with for a purpose is “just to share information”, then scrap your presentation, and send an email instead. The biggest pet peeve people have with bad presentations is presenters who project PowerPoint slides and then only read the text that’s written on the slide.
The PowerPoint slides are not the presentation. The interactive experience between you and your audience is the presentation. PowerPoint is just a tool to help you in that exchange.
Mistake #3: Doing a Data Dump
Understandably, data is important in your business. It helps you make good decisions. But when it comes to presenting information, a data dump is deathly dull. It’s extremely difficult to engage and inspire an audience only using rows and columns of spreadsheets.
If you want your presentation to move beyond bland and boring, spice your data up. Stories, analogies, even props are great ways to bring your data points to life. Researchers Chip and Dan Heath found that after a presentation, 63% of attendees remembered stories, while only 5% remembered statistics.
Mistake #4: Telling
Your presentation isn’t a talk. It’s an experience. Ideally, a very engaging one. If you want to up your chances at engaging your audience, find ways to turn your one-way monologue into a two-way dialogue. Ask questions and listen to responses. Build in breakout discussion groups, and even better, have those discussion groups stand up at a flipchart and scribe their answers and report back.
Include interactive polling, facilitate discussions, use appropriate humor. The possibilities are endless. The more active your audience is, the better.
Mistake #5: Confusing Reviewing with Rehearsing
Silently reading through your slide content in advance does not count as preparing to give a presentation. When I asked Liam why he read through his content like a book (and many leaders do), he said, “I want to make sure it all makes sense.” If you are a subject matter expert (SME), rest assured, the content will make sense to you. Sadly, if that’s your goal, you’re aiming at the wrong target.
Understanding your own content is one thing. Communicating it in a way so that other people understand and remember is a completely different skill set. This was a big part of Liam’s issue. Like many SMEs, Liam thought if it made sense to him, it would make sense to others. That’s now how public speaking works. This discovery helped Liam realize learn that he had never learned how to properly prepare to give a presentation.
How do you prepare? Assuming that you’ve effectively structured your content, then you rehearse your delivery.
The word rehearsal means to re-hear. Which means to practice by speaking out loud. Not just silently in your head. Yes, awkwardly out into the room.
The point of rehearsal is to connect the ideas in your brain to the muscles of your mouth. As a rule of thumb, speak the whole presentation out loud at least six times before you go live. If the stakes are high, rehearse even more. Rehearsal is your number one confidence builder. Most business presenters are dreadfully under rehearsed. And most of their presentations show it.
Communication lies at the core of effective leadership. Being able to present to others is an essential communication skill. Once Liam learned how to prepare, his communication skills improved to the level of his technical expertise. Eradicate these five mistakes, and your presentation skills will improve, too.
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