TEAMBUILDING SESSION. Presentation Skills for Dummies

Transcription

1 TEAMBUILDING SESSION Presentation Skills for Dummies Presented by: Joelle Becker, IRP, Inc. January 2005

2 How Visual Aids Undermine Presentations Words, Words, Words The visual aids are nothing but the presenter s notes, which the presenter proceeds to read from the screen to the audience. Imagine you are sitting in an audience waiting for a presentation to begin. The presentation is scheduled for one hour. The presenter walks to the front of the room, clicks their clicker, and a large blue screen fills with a yellow, bulleted, run-on sentence that flies in from the left. For me, this is when dread sets in. Glaze is starting to form over my eyes. Fog is rolling in on my brain. The battle to stay alert and appear interested has begun and it intensifies with every bullet that appears. When visual aids say as much or more than the presenter does, one of them is not necessary. Reading from wordy slides is not only boring, but also insulting to an intelligent audience. Many presentations I have suffered through would be more economical, less stressful, and better received as memos, special reports, or CDs that the audience could read individually on their own time. Unless the audience is taking notes, as in a training situation, wordy visual aids undermine a presentation. The point of a visual aid is to make the presentation more interesting not boring. Tired Graphics If your audience is thinking, This is the 762nd time I ve seen that piece of clipart., your visual aids are undermining your presentation. Similarly, if your audience recognizes your visual aid background as one of the popular software templates, your visual aids are undermining your presentation. Graphics are the solution to the wordy visual aid problem discussed previously. However, freshness now becomes the issue. Ideally, all visual aids would consist of simple, powerful, interesting graphics. In reality, time and money may be constraints. Let the nature of the presentation dictate how far you will go to secure fresh looking graphics. For high profile or high opportunity presentations, more time, money, and effort should be placed on creating visual aid graphics. My recommendation would be to have a graphic artist assist if talent is not available internally. Examples of high profile, high opportunity presentations include the unveiling of a new product or service and sales presentations. Just Like Everybody Else If your visual aids fall into either of the previous two categories, Wordy or Tired Graphics, present without them unless the audience needs to take notes. Because most presenters use wordy or tired visual aids, audiences are conditioned to become bored at the first sight of a bullet. A bulleted list is like a timepiece on a chain that sways in front of the eyes chanting, Sleep sleep sleep I have discovered that being contrarian and forgoing visual aids can actually make a presentation a huge success. I was presenting to 120 salespeople at an annual conference. I was the only non-industry, soft-topic presenter on the multi-day program. I arrived early and attended the presentation before mine. There were two presenters standing on an elevated stage behind podiums with a huge screen centered between them. The room was darkened as the PowerPoint slides clicked by. I surveyed the salespeople. No one was jumping out of his or her seat with excitement. My host asked if I had any visual aids. I had PowerPoint slides but claimed that I had none and that I would work from my handout. I asked them to turn all of the lights up and requested a wireless microphone. Just turning the lights on had a huge impact on the audience. I moved around freely and referred to the handout periodically so the salespeople would feel anchored and take notes. When the conference was finished, I was the highest rated presenter. They invited me to come back immediately for the next year.

3 Seven Strategies for Handling Difficult Questions - Honesty is the only policy when presenting to a group. However, blatantly admitting, I don t know, in response to a direct question from an audience member can be disastrous. The solution is to be honest and maintain credibility at the same time. No one can know the answer to every question. It s how the inevitable situation is handled that separates great presenters from amateurs. Study the following seven strategies and keep them in your back pocket so that you can field even the toughest questions with confidence. 1. Reflection Repeat the question and toss it back to your audience, Does anyone here have any experience with that? When you allow the audience to help you, they will save you without ever realizing it. In fact, the audience will revere you because adults love to be involved and share their knowledge. After you have fielded all of the contributions, be sure to summarize and add your own ideas if any have been sparked by the interaction. Summarizing at the end helps you to maintain control and authority. Always repeat questions before answering for the same reasons. 2. I ll Get Back to You This is an old standard and it works well if you do three things. First, write the question down. Be conspicuous. Make sure everyone knows you are writing the question down. I go so far as to tell the audience, I am writing this question down. Second, tell the questioner exactly when you will get back to them. Be honest. Then do it. Can you get back to them by the end of the day? If it is an all-day program, can you get back to them after lunch? Third, be sure to get the questioner s contact information if you don t have it. All of these things make this strategy very powerful. It is not smoke and mirrors. It is an opportunity to go the extra mile, expand your knowledge, and impress your audience. 3. Defer to the Expert This is a more sophisticated version of the Reflection technique. Sometimes a question is legitimately outside of your area of expertise. You may be a marketing expert and someone asks a question about the engineering aspects of a product. This is a question that requires an engineer. If there is an engineer in the room you could say, Sally, you re an engineer. Do you have any insights into that? If there are no engineers in the room, state that you will confer with an engineer and get back to them. Notice I have just combined two techniques. 4. Compliment the Questioner For this to be effective, the compliment must be sincere. Sometimes I get lulled into thinking I have seen and heard it all on a particular topic. It never fails though, someone comes out of left field with a question I have never thought of and I say, That s a great question. I ve never thought about it that way. Does anyone here have any ideas on that? (I have just combined two techniques.) When I use this strategy it is usually not a conscious decision. It s a reaction. That s how sincere it needs to sound. It always works when it s sincere because audience s love to be complimented. I might also combine this technique with I ll Get Back to You. 5. Answer a Question with a Question Sometimes questions are too narrow or too general to answer. Reserve the right, as the expert, to open a question up or close it down by asking a question in response. Once upon a time I was a software trainer. One day a woman asked me a very specific question, What does that button do? I had no idea, but I didn t confess, I don t know. Instead I asked her a question, What is your goal in pushing that button? She elaborated for me and explained what she wanted to accomplish. I knew a way to help her and it didn t involve pushing that button. She was happy. I was honest, credible, helpful, and very happy. 6. Parallel Answer If you don t know the bull s eye answer to a question, offer what you do know quickly to demonstrate some credibility and then combine with a previous technique. When I was a software trainer I used to be an expert in the Lotus spreadsheet package. However Microsoft s Excel began to gain popularity and I had to learn it so I could teach it. In the beginning I was on a learning curve. Sometimes I would be asked a question about Excel that I didn t know the answer to, however I did know the answer in Lotus. Quickly I would say, I know that is possible in Lotus. I m not sure if that is available in Excel. I m writing this question down. I ll research it at the break and get back to you. Refrain from droning on and on about your parallel knowledge. Brevity is the key to this technique. 7. Set the Rules You can avoid many difficult questions simply by setting rules for questions in the beginning. Whenever you present to a group, you are the leader. You are accountable for everything, so lead. My experience is that if you set rules and follow them, the audience respects you. If you make rules up as you go along, you lose credibility. The number of rules you set will vary depending on the topic. When I taught technical subjects, I set lots of rules because I knew the questions would be many and varied. I would start a software seminar by saying, I welcome general questions at any time about anything on the agenda. If you have a specific question about a project you are working on or a subject outside of the agenda, please see me at a break for a private consultation. Because we have limited time together, I reserve the right to stop taking questions and comments. This is not personal. It is to make certain we cover every topic today. Summary You can t know the answer to everything. It s how you handle yourself. Study these seven strategies and use them to maintain credibility and confidence.

4 WHAT DID I DO WRONG?

5 BECOMING AN EFFECTIVE PRESENTER

6 THE SEVEN ASPECTS OF PRESENTING 1. SPEAKER 2. MESSAGE 3. AUDIENCE 4. CHANNEL 5. FEEDBACK 6. NOISE 7. SETTING

7 SPEAKER: Don t forget that You are part of the presentation. MESSAGE: Refers to everything said and done, both verbally and non-verbally. Includes content, style, structure. AUDIENCE: Identify who will be listening to the presentation and why they are there. CHANNEL: Non-verbal, pictorial and aural channels used to communicate to the audience.

8 FEEDBACK: Ask audience questions. You should analyze how your message has been received and respond to those cues. NOISE: External/internal. To avoid confusion, you should use one or more channels of communications at the same time (verbal & non-verbal) and use repetition and restatement. Restating items will get their attention. SETTING: Does the room enhance or interfere with your presentation? Determine ahead of time what the facilities will be like.

9 PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE!!!!!!!