Skills
Skills
Skills
Those seeking to manage a change need to be able to present their ideas to others.
Change managers need to be able to make formal and informal presentations to a
wide range of stakeholders. This paper on presentation skills aims to help you
recognise the ingredients of an effective presentation and to understand what you
can do to develop your presentation skills.
You can practice your presentation skills when making individual and group
presentations as part of your course on change management.
Introduction
There are many occasions when change managers have to present information to
others. This paper aims to help you recognise the ingredients of an effective
presentation and to understand what you can do to develop your presentation skills.
• Understand the steps a presenter can take to gain the attention of the
audience at the start of a presentation.
• Recognise five presentation skills that can be used to get the message
across.
This paper will consider the ingredients of a good presentation and what you need to
do to ensure that the presentation is successful. Attention will be focused on:
• preparation, what you need to do beforehand;
• getting and keeping interest, i.e. what you need to do to involve the audience
from the start and to keep them involved until the end;
• getting the message across;
• making effective use of visual aids
• closure, the best way to end the formal presentation;
• managing the question and answer session.
Preparation
There is an old saying that those who to fail to prepare, prepare to fail. Good
presenters invest time and effort in preparation. You need to define the objective of
your presentation, research your audience, identify what information needs to be
presented, plan how the presentation is to be structured and, finally, consider how
the physical setting (room size, seating arrangements, availability of projection
equipment) might affect your presentation.
Clarifying the objective. A change manager might want to brief others on the
nature of a problem, explain the consequences of maintaining the status quo and
propose a plan of remedial action. When your aim is to explain your prime objective
is normally be to help others understand a cause and effect relationship. For
example, you might want to explain why profits have been affected by the time it
takes to get new products to market. There will be occasions, however, when you
want to do more than than offer an explanation. You might want to sell an idea or
persuade others to support a particular course of action.
The background and experience of the audience will also influence how much they
already know about a subject and their level of understanding of technical
vocabulary.
Defining the content. A key first step is to decide what information the listener will
need if the objective of your presentation is to be achieved. This involves identifying
the main factors or categories of information and how they relate. For example, if
your objective is to persuade a sales team that a new performance management
scheme will be to their advantage you might decide that the presentation should
include information that will facilitate a comparative review of how the existing and
proposed schemes operate.
Pemberton (in her book A Guide to Effective Speaking, 1982) suggests that where
the purpose of the presentation is to persuade people to your point of view an
effective structure is to:
1. State the proposition.
2. Anticipate objections and concede possible flaws in the argument. (Even if you
decide not to disclose such flaws it is useful to have identified what they might
be).
3. Prove the case. Do this by focusing on the strongest arguments. She argues
that quality is better than quantity and cautions against overloading the
presentation with too many arguments.
4. Provide practical evidence.
5. End by repeating the proposition.
Reviewing arrangements. On many occasions you have little choice about venue
and the arrangement of seating and other environmental factors. Even so it can be
worth the effort to review the arrangements, test the equipment and note the best
place to stand so as to ensure that the audience has a clear view of whiteboards, flip
charts and screens.
Keeping the audience's attention
Motivating the audience to listen. When you are making a presentation you have
to motivate each person to listen. If people are to be persuaded to attend they must
be helped to anticipate that the presentation will be useful, interesting or entertaining.
It has been suggested that people will not be interested in salvation until they have
experienced the fear of damnation, which is possibly the reason why some
preachers start their sermons by proclaiming the inevitability of judgement day and
familiarising their congregation with the torments of hell. In the business context a
change manager might begin a presentation on the need for greater effort by
forecasting the possibility of cutbacks and redundancies.
Fortunately inducing a state of fear or unrest is not the only way of capturing
attention. The rhetorical question can be used to intrigue or interest the audience,
for example:
'What do you think is the major reason why people buy our product?… This
afternoon I want to share with you the results of our latest market survey and
recommend how they should influence our marketing strategy for next year.
Introductions which use rhetorical questions, pose intriguing problems, include
controversial statements or simply offer a concise statement of the purpose of the
problem in terms that will appeal to the audience, increase the likelihood that the
audience will be motivated to attend to the our message
Keeping their interest. Even if you are successful in gaining the audience's
attention at the beginning of the presentation there is no guarantee that people will
continue to attend. The shorter the presentation the more likely they are to attend
throughout.
A number of studies have produced evidence to show that after as little as ten
minutes (and in some circumstances this may be an optimistic estimate) attention
begins to wane, but as the audience begins to sense that the presentation is
reaching a conclusion, attention begins to rise again. This has important
implications. You should avoid presenting key points in the middle of a long
presentation unless you deliberately taken steps to ensure that the audience will be
motivated to listen to what you have to say.
Attention can be heightened if you break up the body of the presentation into logical
elements and signal the end of one element and the start of another: 'The third point
I want to discuss is …'
Another way of keeping their interest is to anticipate the questions that members of
the audience might have in their mind at various points in the presentation:
'You might be wondering where this is leading. Well …'
'You could be asking yourself whether the market survey was worth the effort
…'
Directing questions at your audience can also be a useful tactic if you suspect that
the audience is losing interest. General questions, targeted at nobody in particular,
might fail to evoke a response whereas targeted questions that offer members of the
audience an opportunity to contribute can encourage involvement.
'Mr. Smith. You have been involved in similar projects in the past. Do you think I
have missed any major points in my assessment of how the market is likely to
react?"
"Mr. Brown. You are the person in the room with the most practical experience. Will
the proposal work?"
However, take care not to embarrass those whose attention may have drifted and,
therefore, could find themselves unable to offer a sensible answer.
Visual aids can also be used is to gain the audience's attention. You can often
anticipate those points where attention is likely to flag and introduce a chart, slide or
practical demonstration to maintain attention. Examples or amusing stories that
illustrate a point can also help to maintain interest, so long as the audience can
relate to them. Visual aids, demonstrations and stories that are perceived as
irrelevant can distract the audience, as can certain gestures and body movements.
The speaker who jingles coins in a pocket can be very annoying and the actions of
the unconscious nose-picker can either disgust the audience or divert their attention
away from the presentation to a consideration of what the presenter might do next.
Delivery is also important. When most of us read a script we keep our head down
and avoid eye contact, and our voice lacks variety in terms of volume, pitch, timbre,
rate, rhythm and inflection. We come across as dull and uninteresting. It is often
noticeable that when a presentation is followed by a question and answer session,
the presenter's voice changes. It becomes more alive. Two factors account for this.
The answers are fresh and unscripted and the presenter uses spoken rather than
written English. However, it can be dangerous to attempt to deliver completely
unscripted presentation because you may miss out key points or get lost and "dry
up" part way through.
The important points to remember are that presenters who drone on in a voice that
lacks any variety, who evidence little movement, who avoid eye contact, who provide
the audience with few signposts regarding the structure of the message and who
make little use of visual aids are unlikely to keep the audience involved.
There are five skills that help to get the message across.
You can discourage the asking of mid-point questions by signalling, during the
introduction, that questions would be preferred at the end.
Visual aids and demonstrations
Visual aids serve three main purposes. They introduce variety thereby capturing the
audience's attention, they can aid understanding and they can assist recall.
It has been said that a simple picture can be worth a thousand words. However,
visual aids do have a number of disadvantages. They can take a lot of time to
prepare, they can divert attention from main thrust of the presentation if used
inappropriately, and they can go wrong. The bulb may fail in the projector, the
computer may malfunction, the plug may fuse, the film may tear or a slide may be
lost or projected upside down or at the wrong time. To get the best out of visual aids
we need to plan their use and to have a contingency plan in mind if things do go
wrong.
Some general points to bear in mind when using visual aids with the degree of
congruence between the spoken and visual message, visibility, complexity and
variety.
• Congruence with spoken message. Your audience may fail to concentrate on
what you are saying if your spoken words do not fit with the message provided by
the visual aid. If you continue to speak when projecting a slide, pause from time
to time to give the audience time to read what is on the screen.
• Visibility. Care needs to be taken with sight lines. Ensure that everybody can
see the visual aid.
• Complexity. Slides and charts need to be kept simple.
• Variety. Visual aids and demonstrations can introduce variety but too much
variety can disrupt the smooth flow of a presentation.
Closure
It also involves focusing the audience's attention on the essential features of the
material covered and encouraging members to relate this material to the purpose of
the presentation. This aspect of closure can be achieved by offering a selective
summary of the main points. After starting the presentation by telling the audience
what they will be told, then telling them, we can conclude by telling them what they
have been told.
Managing a question and answer session.
Where questions are reserved until after the end of the formal presentation there is
no guarantee that someone will be ready with a question as soon as you stop
talking. It may take a little time for members of the audience to adjust to the
possibility of asking a question and it may also take a little time for them to reflect on
what they have heard and to formulate a question they want to ask. There is also
the possibility that nobody will be comfortable asking the first question and an
embarrassing silence may ensue. One way of avoiding this is to have a chairperson
or a friendly plant in the audience who is prepared to ask the first question just to get
the 'ball rolling'. Another technique is to propose that the audience divide into small
groups to discuss the presentation and identify points that deserve to be challenged,
or require clarification or elaboration.
People at the back of a large audience may not hear questions asked by those who
are sitting near to the front. This problem can be eliminated if you repeat the
question so that everybody can relate to the answer.
If you are faced with no alternative other than to take the hostile questions there are
way s of limiting the damage or even gaining an advantage. One way of limiting
damage is to be aware of traps that questioners might try to set. Ask yourself 'Why
are they asking this kind of question?' Hostile questioners might ask the kind of
question that they know you will find difficult to answer and then try to destroy the
your case by demonstrating how inadequate the answer is. This kind of trap can be
avoided by not attempting to provide an answer. The safest response, if you do not
know the answer, is to say so. The rest of the audience might appreciate this
honesty. It might also be possible to move the attention away from the hostile
questioner by asking the rest of the audience if anybody else can provide an answer
(without re-engaging the questioner in eye contact) and then seeking a 'next
question' from somebody else.
Summary
Consideration has also been given to the ways in which you can attract and maintain
the audience's attention. A variety of techniques for capturing people's attention
have been considered including creating a sense of uncertainty in the minds of
listeners, thus motivating them to listen to allay their anxiety, the use of rhetorical
question, the posing of intriguing problems, and the use of controversial statements.
It has been noted that attention often begins to flag in the middle of a presentation
and therefore the presenter needs to behave in ways that will maintain audience
interest. The use of interesting examples, visual aids and demonstrations are a few
of the techniques considered.
Five presentation skills that help to get the message across have been identified.
These are clarity of expression, the use of examples, emphasis, sensitivity to
feedback and the ability to pose and answer questions effectively.
It has been noted that visual aids and demonstrations can be used to introduce
variety and interest into the presentation, to facilitate explanation, promote a better
understanding and provide an aide mémoire.
References