Episode #179: When Do We Hit Our Limit As The Presenter

Sometimes you see a confident leader really bomb their presentation. It doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does, the contrast is vast. If they are totally hopeless and they bomb, well that is understandable. But a competent leader shouldn’t bomb their presentation. He did and I was wondering why that happened? It was only at the end, when it was too late to do anything about it, that he realised he had bombed completely. The tepid applause reaction was a give away. The lack of questions a more immediate one.

The issues were a misreading of the audience and an arrogance. The audience had been lured to the venue with bold promises of goodness and light. The content wasn’t good enough to back up the advertising and the audience spotted the gap straight away.

The arrogance was an assumption about the leader’s credibility being sufficient to justify the content of the presentation. When we emphasise our years in business, we are aiming for increased credibility, linked back to our stupendous track record. Our speaker had not properly prepared the presentation. He was a good speaker and a competent presenter. He thought his track record stood for itself. The only problem was the content of the talk was rubbish.

We tread a fine line with the longevity thing. Track record, sustained over many, many years is a credible thing for the audience. The only concerns are that the whole affair may be perceived as dated. When we talk about the good old days we like it because we were there, but the audience only cares about what is the relevance for them. We have to be skilled to make it fresh, new and connected to their current business reality. Our speaker failed in that regard.

Our pride in our track record can make us blind to the fact that people don’t really care all that much. We like strolling down memory lane, but so what. We arrogantly assume that what we did was important. Where is the link to the audience’s current problem right now?

This is the skillset needed in the leader presentation. Getting the audience need properly understood, suspending what we like to talk about and instead focusing on what the audience is keen to know about is our task.

I am getting older too, so I took copious notes from this speech on what not to do, if I am ever tempted to talk at length about my good old days. I think we all should avoid that temptation too.