Presentations Skills

•      We’ve probably all sat through a poor presentation. But what makes you leave the room thinking “That was a complete waste of my time”? There are several reasons, and if you can avoid them when you’re planning a presentation, you’ve got a good chance of making your presentation effective and full of impact.

•      First of all, was the message pitched wrongly? At a sales conference, you need to tell sales people about the key points about your new products, so they can convince others to buy them. The sales people don’t necessarily need to know about the clever new production process, or how product development is financed.

•      Next, the message may have been relevant, but was it badly delivered? Common communication barriers include a mumbling presenter who didn’t look you in the eye, or one who spoke too fast. Equally, perhaps the presenter simply read from a terrifically detailed set of slides but you, sitting at the back of the room, couldn’t read them because the text on the slides was so small.

•      Finally, was it ill-prepared? The material needs to be rehearsed, and the room and logistics need to be ready. The last thing any presenter wants to deal with is the fiasco of a projector not working, or of people being unable to hear at the back of a large room.

Tips for Effective Presentations

•      Start by understanding why your audience want to listen to you. Do they want to be informed, motivated or persuaded, or do they want to have something demonstrated to them?

•      Use three to five main points. Many people in your audience won’t remember any more, anyway.

•      Use a three part structure: Tell them what you’re going to tell them, then tell it to them, then tell them what they’ve just been told.

•      Use notes, but don’t read from them – they should just be reminders. If you rehearse enough, this won’t be a problem. So…

•      Be prepared

•      Improving Your Presentation Skills

•      It’s now time to work on the areas for improvement in your presentation skills. These articles and resources will help:

•      Managing Presentation Nerves: Coping with the fear

•      Delivering a presentation is common source of fear and nervous anticipation. Learn the tips and tricks that help you channel your fear and nervousness, and deliver cool, calm presentations that inspire and impress.

•      Delivering Great Presentations: Communicating effectively with the right content, delivery and slides

•      Learn more about the four principles of great presentations, and ensure that yours are always engaging and memorable.

•      The Presentation Planning Checklist

•      There’s a lot to remember when you’re putting together a presentation, so make sure you don’t overlook anything. Use our comprehensive checklist to do this.

Email-Writing Skills

•      Emails have become one of the most common forms of written communication. Yet how much attention do we pay to writing them clearly and concisely? The easier you can make it for the readers of your emails to understand them and act on them quickly, the more effective you’ll be. (If they’re easy to process, you’ll get your answer in minutes. If they’re difficult, be prepared to wait for days… or weeks.)

•      Writing an email is, in some ways, no different from the old practice of writing a business letter. Email communication tends to be a little less formal, but it still usually works best when it’s well-structured, and when writing is clear, well spelled, and well punctuated. For example, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with starting a business email “Hi James”, but if James is a senior partner in a law firm, and you’ve never met him in person, it might not be appropriate for this situation. If you start off on the wrong foot, your reader may well be irritated before he or she even starts to consider your message, making them less open to what you’re saying.

•      The first barrier to communication by email is where the recipient does not receive, or does not read it. But why would this happen? First, it might not be delivered if the recipient’s mail system decides that it’s spam. For a legitimate message, the most likely reason for this to happen is that there is no subject line.

•      Even if a message without a subject line is delivered, there’s still a chance that the recipient won’t read it. He or she might decide that it is a “suspect” message, and delete it without opening it, just in case it is carrying a virus. And even if they don’t take such drastic action, a message without a subject is hardly going to be the one jumping out at them from a crowded Inbox saying “open me first”.

Tips for Effective Email

•     Always include a subject line, and make sure it’s personalized to distinguish it from generic spam messages.

•     Make the subject line work hard for you. If your message includes a deadline, put this in the subject line – “Agenda for 3 December meeting – please send items by 27 Nov.” And if you send out a regular email, make sure you distinguish each one “Program report Nov 07” rather than “Latest Program Report”.

•     Stick to one topic per message. This makes your emails easier to handle by the recipient, who can delete or file each as it is read and actioned. (A great advantage of emails over old fashioned letters is that it costs no more to send several instead of one!)

•     Only use Reply to All if everyone really needs to read your reply.

•     Write your message clearly and concisely, and format it so that it’s easy to read (using line spacing, bullets and so on). And make sure especially that any action or response required is very clearly explained. 

•      Improving Your Email-Writing Skills

•      If you have identified areas for improvement in how you could be more efficient about using email, these articles and resources should help:

•      Effective Email: How to communicate powerfully by email

•      Ensure that your emails are read in the first place and stay useful to the recipient.

•      The Art of Filing: Managing your documents or inbox… and your time

•      While filing is boring, simple filing techniques can help you become much more efficient at work. Use these methods to save time – and help people quickly and efficiently.

Meeting Management Skills

•      The saying that meetings “take minutes but last hours” is all too true for most of us. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Provided that the right people are invited to meetings, that they are well planned, and that they try to achieve the right things, meetings are a powerful way of moving your team’s work ahead.

•      One important way of ensuring that you’re not wasting people’s time is to invite only people whose presence at the meeting is essential. Make sure that everyone invited is there because you need their input to the discussion, or need their agreement with its conclusions. In general, don’t invite people who simply “need to know”: You can tell them what has been decided after the meeting. (OK: if someone is an important “stakeholder” in the decision, albeit they may not have much to input or power to decide, it may make sense to at least invite them!)

•      Once your meetings develop a reputation for being effective, those you invite will make space in their diaries, if at all possible, to attend. But if your meetings are renowned for being long and ineffective, those key individuals you need may be reluctant to come along, and you’ll be left unable to achieve what you wanted without them.

•      Chairing a meeting successfully demands quite a lot of active work before and during the meeting. If the meeting is a regular one, don’t just use last time’s agenda with new dates. Instead, always construct a new one from scratch, and only include the topics which have to be covered and discussed in a meeting. Other material can be distributed before or after as appropriate.

Tips for Managing Meetings Effectively

•      Avoid using meetings simply to report things that just as effectively could be distributed by paper on via email.

•      Put the most important items near the beginning on the Agenda, so that they get the time they need. Allow less important items to be cut at the end if you have to finish for a certain time.

•      Step in quickly if the discussion starts going off-track.

•      Don’t recap what you’ve already covered for latecomers – it just encourages them to be late next time.

•      Limit participants to 12 at the most, to maximize the effectiveness of discussions.

•      Issue minutes promptly after the meeting, and clearly mark actions that people had taken away from the meeting. 

•      Improving Your Meeting Management Skills

•      If you have identified areas for improvement in how you manage meetings, these articles and resources will help:

•      Running Effective Meetings: Establishing an objective and sticking to it

•      Meetings can either be great time wasters or great ways to move objectives forward. By learning the key elements of effective meetings, you can ensure your meetings are well received and successful.

•      The Role of a Facilitator: Guiding an event through to a successful conclusion

•      Facilitation is the art of guiding a group or meeting, impartially, and towards a successful outcome. Learn what it takes to be an effective facilitator, and how to develop the range of skills for the role.

•      Avoiding Groupthink: Avoiding sometimes-fatal flaws in group decision making

If you’ve ever held back from speaking out against an idea because everyone else present seemed to think it was a good idea, you’ve suffered from groupthink. Find out how to stop it taking hold, and how to avoid its potentially disastrous consequences.