Bite sized nuggets of leadership development wisdom for HR and L&D professionals

HR and L&D professionals are often called upon to give a presentation. From running training sessions to persuading senior managers that training is necessary, mastering the art of presentations is essential to your success. Leaders such as Barack Obama, Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King know how to connect with and move an audience. But these men are exceptional, and as your own personal experience would probably confirm, many people just do not know how to present well. In exploring why this is so, we discovered seven recurring themes that are frequently the root of poor presentations. We call them the Seven Sins of Poor Presentations, for they are tempting traps that busy presenters can easily fall into.

1. Vague intent
2. Not understanding your audience
3. Poor structure
4. Low engagement
5. Insufficient rehearsal
6. Lack of presence
7. Poor use of visuals

Read on to find out more about each of these sins and how you can stop them from hindering your presentation’s success.

Vague Intent

If you are not clear about what you want your presentation to achieve¹, then its success will be a hit-and-miss affair at best. What is the purpose of your presentation? While the specifics will vary, you generally give presentations for one of two reasons²:

1. To inform and educate
2. To persuade and build buy-in

Having a clear understanding of the presentation’s purpose enables you to set more specific goals³. If your aim is to inform, then your goals will describe what you want people to know and/or be able to do by the end of the presentation. If your aim is to persuade, then your goals will describe how you want people feel, what you want people to believe and/or what you want people to do at the end of the presentation. Being clear about what you want your presentation to achieve will enable you to make wise decisions about how to best structure and deliver it.

Not Understanding Your Audience

A great presentation given to one audience may fall flat when repeated with another. Why? Because people are different and you need to personalise your presentation for the specific audience concerned⁴. Personalised presentations help you build a connection with your audience and frame your ideas in a way that resonates with the realities of their world. Therefore, you need to devote some preparation time to better understanding your audience.

• What have they been up to recently? What have they achieved?
• Will they be hostile or receptive to what you have to say?
• What do they already know or believe about the matter at hand?
• What do you know about their learning styles and personalities?
• What challenges do they face in their workplace? What help do they need?
• What do they like and respect?

To truly understand your audience, you need to avoid the clinical, somewhat removed method of answering these questions and try to view things from their perspective. If your aim is to:

• Inform and educate, you need to ensure that you explain the material in a way that is relevant to them.
• Persuade and build buy-in, then you need to show them how your idea will help them achieve something that they desire and/or avoid something that they fear.

In either case, you need to show your understanding and highlight how you are similar to them early in your presentation.

Poor Structure

I am often amazed at how little attention presenters give to the structure of their presentation. Structure will allow you to deliver a cohesive presentation that achieves your intent.

A basic structure you can use to organise all of your presentations is introduction, body and conclusion. However, it is not as simple as the popular “tell them what you will be saying, say it, and tell them what you have said” formula. If your aim is educate and inform, then your introduction should provide a road map of how you have organised the content⁵. Then, if it is a long presentation, show the slide again as you conclude each section. This helps your audience keep track of where they have been, and where are going. However, your introduction is far more than a contents page. A great introduction needs to capture your audience’s attention⁶ and build a connection between you and them⁷.

The body of an informative presentation is usually organised into chunks of related content. This structure makes sense because it mirrors what we know about the way the human mind stores information⁸, and connects it to what the audience already knows. You then need to sequence these chunks of content so that new information connects to and, if possible, builds on what has gone before⁹.

You need to structure the body of a persuasive presentation differently. In essence, you follow the problem-solution model¹⁰, in which you convince the audience that they have a problem and then persuade them to accept your proposed solution. It may be tempting to launch straight into your proposal and the reasons behind it. However, it is far more effective to establish consensus on the problem your audience faces before telling them what they should do and why they should do it.

A great conclusion is far more than a boring rehash of your main points. Rather, it is future focused, pointing your audience towards what they should do as a result of what they have learned from your presentation¹¹.

Low Engagement

Whether you are presenting an in-house program or you work as a corporate presenter, you are working with adults who are not used to sitting and listening all day. Therefore, you need to think of ways to actively engage them.

One of the most powerful ways to accomplish this is through storytelling¹². A good story is engaging because it sparks our imagination and plays to our innate desire to know what happens next. We naturally project the messages contained in stories onto our current situation and our past experiences. You can source stories from pertinent personal anecdotes, from popular movies and from both traditional and business parables. You can also extend the use of stories through case studies, simulations and drama.

Of course, there are other ways to engage your audience¹³. These include using:

• Questions both real and rhetorical, to get people thinking about what you have said
• Games that reinforce the key messages in your presentation
• Movement to wake people up
• Literary devices such as parallel structure, word pictures, triads, metaphors and the antithesis

Poor Preparation

To deliver an effective presentation, you have to know your material well¹⁴. Audiences can sense when you are relying on a script or using your slides as a crutch to hide your lack of knowledge. A lack of preparation can also throw off your timing, leaving you to:

• Cram an overload of information into the time you have left, or
• Come up with ways to fill your remaining time

To get your timing right, you need to rehearse your presentation¹⁵. Actors, musicians and other performers understand this all too well. Yet many presentations are not practiced until they are conducted live in front of the audience. Rehearsing your presentation will help you speak with confidence and stay on track. It also helps you to move away from vague ideas about content into the more concrete realm of what you will say and how you will say it. This does not mean that you need to learn a previously prepared script word-for-word, although I do recommend that you do this for the first minute or so. Rather, it involves saying words aloud, listening to yourself and reworking any dull, cumbersome or rough patches. The exact words may change slightly each time, but the gist of your speech remains the same.

Lack of Presence

A presenter with presence attracts the attention of the audience like a living magnet. People will focus on and listen to this sort of presenter, regardless of the topic. This is important because if your audience is focused on you and your words, your presentation has a much greater chance of succeeding. If your delivery is boring and lifeless and you fail to capture the attention of your audience, your message will likely fail to reach them.

Presence is very much about who you are, but not in the way that you might think. Authenticity and genuine desire to communicate with your audience are more important than a glib tongue and a gregarious personality¹⁶. You need to embody the power of your message, fully believe what you are saying and communicate the emotions behind your words.

Expressiveness and body language are important. However, you do not develop presence by artificially forcing yourself to adopt certain gestures or vocal techniques. Rather, you exude such things naturally when you care about both the topic and the audience.

Imagine how more effective you would be if you never uttered another word that you did not truly mean.

Inappropriate Visuals

Visuals, when used well, can enhance your presentation. In fact, research shows that over 75% of what people know has been obtained visually and that speaking combined with effective visuals is six times more effective than speaking alone¹⁷.

However, we are all too familiar with the idea of “death by PowerPoint™”, characterized by poorly constructed slides each overloaded with too much text and irrelevant clip art. Sadly, many unskilled presenters rely too heavily on their slides, attempting to hide their lack of knowledge and preparation. This problem is compounded by well-meaning software developers and novice slide authors who respectively create and use all sorts of irrelevant, distracting gizmos that detract from your message instead of enhancing it.

The answer to the problem starts with recognising that it is not the software that is to blame, but rather the way you choose to use it. Whether you are using PowerPoint, flipcharts or OHTs, you need to ensure that your visuals elucidate rather than compete with your message. For further details, see Deb’s post The Ten Commandments of Effective Visuals.

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It is estimated that about 75% of the information that people take in occurs visually¹. Therefore, it is a basic mistake to present without visuals². However, we are all too familiar with the dreaded “death by PowerPoint” phenomenon. So how do you make effective use of visuals? To begin with, stop blaming the software and start looking at how you use it and other visuals. Then, follow these ten fundamental commandments for using visuals effectively.

1. Thou shalt use visuals sparingly. The fact that many people learn visually does not mean that you should try to cram every element of your verbal message into a visual³. Focus less on quantity and more on quality. Do not be afraid to turn off irrelevant or competing visuals while you are talking and during other parts of your presentation.
2. Thou shalt only use visuals for a reason. A good visual should add value to your verbal message ⁴, not just repeat it. In fact, text-based visuals can distract your audience from what you are saying ⁵. Too often, presenters create the visuals first and then decide what they will say. This is akin to the tail wagging the dog. Try deciding what you will say and what activities you will use before you create any visuals. Then only create visuals that enhance your message.
3. Thou shalt ensure thy visuals look great. As obvious as this sounds, I am often amazed to see presenters who should know better using ready-made backgrounds in PowerPoint, making poor font choices and using colour indiscriminately. You should customize your background to suit the purpose of your presentation, the image of your organisation and the nature of your audience ⁶. You should choose a serif font style ⁷ and ensure that the size of your font is easy to read. Finally, you can consciously use colour to grab audience attention, amplify a message and persuade people to take action ⁸. However, indiscriminate and irrelevant colour hinders your audience’s ability to understand your message⁹.
4. Thou shalt use minimal text on any visual. If you must use text, turn sentences into phrases, paragraphs into lists and single lists into grouped lists. The popular notion of seven points per slide and seven words per point is a myth¹⁰. The less text you use, the more impact your visuals will have. Clarity and conciseness are the key¹¹.
5. Thou shalt use simple diagrams. Diagrams are great at showing nearly any kind of relationship, from chronologically related timelines to categorically related hierarchies, and from procedurally related cause-effect chains to ongoing cycles. If you can put it in a diagram, do so. However, you need to ensure that your diagrams are simple enough for the audience to read and understand¹².
6. Thou shalt use graphs well. Statisticians agree that one of the best ways to intuitively grasp the significance of numbers is to show a graph¹³. Different graphs are suitable for different types of data. Line graphs work well for showing trends¹⁴, bar charts are best for showing comparisons ¹⁵ and scatter plots are an effective way to show relationships¹⁶. Research also suggests that horizontal bar graphs are more effective than vertical bar graphs¹⁷. Regardless of which graph type you use, you should generally avoid 3-D graphs, as they are visually misleading. However, you should make extensive use of effects that simplify and clarify your message, such as titles, labels, thick lines, simple numbers and callout boxes¹⁸. Generally, your graphs should follow the overall colour scheme used throughout your presentation, unless you are consciously using a colour to highlight a key point in the graph. Finally, it is important that you interpret the graph rather than just reading it.
7. Thou shalt not use clip art…ever! Clip art is an example of a meaningless graphic ¹⁹ whose sole purpose is to fill up space. You can use pictures, but only if the picture is relevant and adds to the impact of your message. Some pictures add value subconsciously through the power of association, while you can use others as explicit talking points.
8. Though shalt not make indiscriminate use of transitions and animations. Transitions are the optional effects that you can use within presentation software when moving from one slide to the next. You should not use transitions because they distract the audience with irrelevant visual detail. In fact, research shows that the indiscriminate use of transitions between slides is worse than using no visuals at all ²⁰. Animations are a different type of effect where you make content items move or appear within a single slide. Most animations add no further value than static graphics and, as they are also visually distracting, you should generally avoid them. However, you can use animation in a small number of your slides if the animation has a specific purpose, such as telling a story or sequencing complex processes.
9. Thou shalt not give out handouts before you have finished speaking. Giving out handouts before you speak embodies the very essence of why visuals are dangerous: distraction. You want people to focus on you and what you are saying. Handouts compete for your audience’s limited attention. If your audience is busy reading your handouts, they are not giving their full attention to you and your message. And, if they are not giving their full attention to you, they are less likely to remember or be moved by your presentation ²¹. Handouts are themselves an effective visual and they can be used to provide detail that cannot be conveyed on a slide or flip chart. However, handouts should always be given out after you have finished talking.
10. Thou shalt let visuals do their work. At the more obvious end of the mistakes I see are presenters blocking a visual with their body, showing a visual so quickly that it can’t be understood, and competing for the audience’s attention while they are still trying to understand a visual.

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