Episode #193: It Is Not Back To Normal As A Presenter – Part One

Gradually people are streaming back to the office, after having been sequestered away at home for many months. As a presenter, whether you are the boss, one of the troops or representing the company in public, things are not going back to what they were pre-Covid-19. The chances of making a public speech in front of a live audience are slim to none at the moment and likely to remain that way for a little longer. Because of physical distancing protocols, our favourite venues can’t handle the same numbers as before, so that changes the dynamics of the money needed to pay for the space. People are just staying with online presenting as a result. In the office though, bosses have to lead and team members reports have to be given.

A lot has been forgiven of public presenters since February. Online presentations are pretty bad. The audio is usually dodgy at best. The people delivering the presentation are rarely in charge of the tech. They compound this ignorance with a dead dog style delivery. Their monotonous voice deliveries are on full display. They point the laptop camera up their nose and they are constantly looking down at the screen, rather than up at the camera, so no engagement with the audience is possible.

People’s exposure in Japan to excellent talks and presentations was pretty much missing pre-Covid-19. So for the vast majority of the population, the ugly experience of dealing with failing presenters, has just moved out of the meeting room or the public venue, on to the online world of trapped tiny faces, in tiny little boxes in the corner of the screen.

This is such an opportunity. I doubt many presenters have been busily honing their craft during the lockdown. So again, those with excellent skills are going to stand out. They will be more persuasive and more powerful in their messaging, than their colleagues and competitors. In any aspect of professional work in business, reaching the top one percent in any category is extremely difficult. Well, that is except when it comes to giving presentations. It is certainly not crowded at the top.

Being highly effective in getting people to buy your message makes an enormous difference in how many people will follow what you recommend. These are the types of people, the company upper echelons love to promote into leadership positions. They do this because they recognise these individuals can move people and therefore move the needle and produce out performance. No matter how smart or technically skilled people can be, if they are inarticulate, hesitant, lacking in confidence in what they are saying, can’t be clear and concise they will not be convincing when speaking to others. Those on the receiving end will not follow them at all or with much enthusiasm. They are totally reliant on position power, because they themselves have zilch in terms of personal power.

Where do we start? No matter what the occasion or the audience, we need to begin by determining what is the purpose of this talk. Is it to inform, convince, inspire or entertain? This is such a simple step that most presenters miss. They dive straight into the details, labouring over the slide deck assembly, debating which slide to include and which to drop. Don’t do that. Instead, start with your WHY. Once we know why we are giving this talk, we can begin to construct the format we need to deliver it.

Next, who is our audience? What degree of knowledge do they have already on this topic? What are their preconceptions about this subject? What is the age and gender range? What are main their interests? How will this talk fulfil a need they have? Forget about what you want to say. Knowing what they want to hear is the key and then we build backwards to make that a reality for them. How do we work out what they want. What has Covid-19 done to change people’s expectations and outlook? We can’t just mope back to February and pick up the threads, as if nothing has happened in the last four months.

If we don’t know most of the audience members already and if we are not working together every day, we won’t have a lot of pre-knowledge of who they are and what they want. We can query the organisers of the talk about why they chose this subject matter. Who has signed up and what sectors are they from? We can ask people we know in the same sectors about what are the current hot topics or the main pain points. If the hosts will release the details, we can call a small sample of those who registered and ask them what we could cover that would give them the most value.

In Part Two, we will go deeper on how to structure the talk, the delivery finer points and how to handle difficult or even outright hostile pushback to what you are saying.