Episode #265: Where Should The Formality Line Be When Presenting

Sometimes we read that when we are presenting it should be just like a conversation with your friend. The idea is we should be relaxed, inclusive, totally focused on the people we are speaking to. Now will that work in the boardroom when presenting to the senior executives, none of whom are particularly friendly? Will this work with an audience of legitimate experts in your field? Will this work with clients when pitching for their business.

We need to determine from the very start what it is we are trying to achieve. Are we going to pass on a lot of recent and relevant information that our audience will appreciate, because they can then use that in their work or use it to add to their own presentations? If it is a technical topic and the attendees are experts, then an inform style speech will work very well. Should it be chatty? Probably not. The audience may feel we are not taking them seriously enough.

This doesn’t give us a blank cheque now to be dull and boring. We need to tailor our talk to our audience and to how much they know about the subject. Too high level and full of insider jargon and we, the great unwashed, will feel stupid, isolated and diminished by the speaker. Then we will get angry at our unfair treatment.

As the speaker our job is to be an effective communicator, so we need to be using power in or power out to highlight certain words we want to stress. We should be using gestures which are congruent with what we are saying. Our eyes should be on the audience the whole time picking up visual clues as to how well they are receiving our message. We should be telling stories to make the points easier to recall. Where possible we should include aspects of our own experience both good and bad, to be added to the mix to make it real for the listeners.

If the object is to impress your audience and convince them of your suggestions. then we need lots of evidence in the talk. This is not a backyard over the fence chat. This is well structured to layer on so much evidence that the audience can only agree with our ideas. We need oodles of logic, facts, data, statistics, testimonials, evidence etc. We may need a little showmanship to bring these dead numbers to life. A distance expressed as a numeral is an abstract idea for most people. But if we expressed it as so many football pitch lengths, then people would have a much better idea of how far we are talking. The same with volumes. If we compared it to a Sports Stadium or an Olympic pool, then the concept of sizes is easier to grasp.

If our aim is to persuade or get people to commit to action, then we need to be highly energised. If we don’t look enthusiastic about the idea then the audience may well be asking themselves why they should bother to get behind this suggestion from us. We will need plenty of word pictures to draw out the end result such that the audience can see it in their mind’s eye. Getting from the abstract to the concrete as fast as possible is critical. We need to be describing what the future looks like after they take up our ideas and suggestions. If it was a course in financial accounting, for example, we need to be talking about the types of complex analysis the graduates will be able to perform. Now comes the important bit, relate that new found facility to the business and how it will either save or increase money. We cannot leave the outcomes at the general directional level, we need to nut out the concrete gains.

If our job is to entertain the audience, then the conversational manner is a good one. This is disarming, because we are inviting people to relax through our own informality. The storytelling will need to be on fire. We will be relating incidents and filling them out with people, places, seasons and all manner of detail to make the scene come alive. This is the verbal equivalent of the novelist setting the scene for the action. In novels, the writer doesn’t just say an exchange of spies took place. The author constructs the tense drive to the bridge, outlines the bleak surrounds, paints in the fog encased atmosphere, injects interesting personalities into the mix. As the speaker we need to be doing the same thing.

Chatty, witty talks are fine for when we should be chatty. At other times, we need to be more circumspect and formal. Not dull, but formal and the difference is mightily important. In some cases we may need to come armed with a battalion of bar charts and tie our audience up with our line graphs and then hit them with our pie charts. We belt them with detail and data until they surrender.

We might also need to be at our pulpit, preaching our doctrine, making our strident calls for obedience to our ideas and words. Fully indoctrinated, we attempt to infect others. Definitely not a chat. Or we might need to be topical, on point, deep in the zeitgeist as they say, informing others of what is the state of play. The key is to decide which approach you will take from the very start, before you even get anywhere near a slide deck. Do that and you will be well on the way to exceeding your audiences expectations.