When we need to deliver a formal presentation at work, we usually have an unstated emotional reaction toward the moment.
We might be fatalistic. “I just need to get through this.”
Or excited. “I’m going to leverage my theatre background and make this fun for everyone!”
Or petrified. “I’m going to bomb, lose my job, and starve to death.”
Our attitude drives how we prepare for the event. If we’re eager to strut our stuff, we focus on being creative in our presentation design and delivery. If we’re nervous, we lean into our content and usually overwhelm people with details. If giving presentations is routine in our role, we might recycle our go-to format and delivery approach, which might come across as if we’re “phoning it in.”
The next time you are asked to give a presentation, consider adopting a different attitude. Ask yourself, “What do I owe this group of people?” Thinking about meeting the audience’s needs and goals as your obligation will help you decide not only what information to share and at what depth of detail, but also what level of energy you need to use in your delivery. It forces you to hold yourself accountable to meeting the needs of others and might help you prepare differently and deliver more effectively. You’ll have shifted your focus from yourself to the audience.
My first job out of college was as a high school English teacher in Kingston, Jamaica. As a 22-year-old, I was shy and incredibly soft-spoken. I hadn’t learned to project my voice and, as a student, had often been asked to speak up when responding to questions in class. On my first day as a teacher, I walked into a long narrow classroom and faced a group of forty teenage boys in four long rows of ten desks each. The shuffling and scraping noise as they stood to greet me was a wake-up call. I knew intrinsically that as a teacher, I owed my students an education. That was my purpose in the room. And I knew that if I didn’t bounce my voice off the back wall of the classroom, they wouldn’t hear me, I wouldn’t be able to control the class, and no one would learn. In that moment, I raised my voice louder than ever before and greeted the class. I felt like I was shouting. And I continued to shout for the rest of the day, the rest of the school year, and the rest of my career. In fact, my shouting is really just comfortably loud enough to fill the room, and not more. But it ensures that I will have met my obligation, at least on the most basic level.
Asking yourself what you owe any particular audience on any particular day puts your brain in the right frame of reference as you prepare yourself and your material for the discussion. That “debt” to the audience will vary. Do you owe them:
Insight into the details?
Encouragement to meet their goals?
Enthusiasm for a new initiative?
Tenderness regarding their struggles?
Reassurance that we’ll be okay?
Conviction that we can accomplish the task?
Confidence that I can do the job?
In all cases, we owe our audiences a valuable use of their time. We need to articulate a clear message, prepare materials that are easily understood, and consider the likely next steps based on how we think the discussion will evolve.
With regard to your message, ask yourself, “After this meeting, if my audience remembers only one sentence about my topic, what is that sentence?” Keep that message short – no more than ten words if possible. Use simple language. Your content might be complex and full of necessary jargon, but the key message should be easy to remember. Repeat your message often to highlight it for your listeners. You should not only tell them the message, but tell them that it is the message. Use lines like,
· “The most important thing for you to know is….”
· “If you only take away one thing from this discussion, know….”
· “The key idea is….”
If they all have the same clear, succinct message resonating in their head, you’ve accomplished your goal. If they all leave with a lot of information on which to ponder and to craft their own conclusions, you have lost control of the message. In that case, you have had no impact, and you’ve wasted their time and yours.
Your supporting materials for the meeting will be effective if you again think about what you owe your audience. If you are speaking to a regulator about your risk controls, you’ll need to go into much more detail than if you are speaking to an internal audience about something more benign. Think about your audience’s knowledge base and what jargon they will and won’t understand. On any slide that includes a graph or chart, explain the parameters of the visual before sharing your main point. In short, tell them what they are looking at, before you tell them why they are looking at it. Doing so will increase their comprehension of the data and create better buy-in for your recommendation.
Showing a complex graph and starting with, “As you can clearly see,” confuses your audience since they are busy trying to understand your visual. Instead, starting with, “On this pie chart, the blue represents X, the red represents Y, and the yellow represents Z,” acclimates your audience to the content. Then you can share, “We’re here today to discuss how to these elements have shifted relative to each other over the last year.”
At the end of a meeting, people need to know where we’re headed. Accountability for executing on next steps is vital to move a project forward. Everyone in the room should know who is responsible for what and by when. Without that clarity, you’ll likely be revisiting the same conversation in your next meeting, which again, sounds like a waste of time.
Obviously, all of this depends on the purpose of a meeting. Let’s say you have to introduce some impending changes at your organization. Your first meeting on the topic is to socialize the idea of the change and assess pain points for people. You owe your audience a sense of stability and confidence that their needs will be addressed. This will involve more conversation and less directives. Nevertheless, there is still a focus on using the attendees’ time wisely.
If the purpose of the meeting is for them to spend a lot of time asking questions, expressing concerns, or just venting, make sure you don’t overtalk and have structured the meeting so everyone has a chance to be heard.
In addition to learning content, your audience needs to believe in the sincerity of the speaker. You owe them a feeling of confidence in you and your abilities to get things done. How you share the information is as important as the information you are sharing. Take your time. Look at one person at a time for a full thought rather than scanning the room. Use your gestures to emphasize key points, which will help you modulate your voice appropriately.
By focusing on what the audience needs from you, you’ll automatically relax and focus less on yourself and more on the needs of the group to whom you are speaking.