Never Deliver a Disastrous Presentation Again: The Best Three Question to Ask Yourself Before You Start

Successful people learn how to be outstanding public speakers, and that means robust preparation

Created by author on Canva

Delivering a disastrous presentation is like falling down a black hole of despair. Cold, dark, and you think you’ll never live down the horror.

Just to be clear, that’s a bad thing.

OK, let’s start and make sure you never fall down that hole…

How many boring work presentations have you been to? Think of a number.

You know the presentations I mean. The ones where your colleague is at the front of the room, droning on and on, and you’ve got no idea why you were invited or the point of the presentation.

Everyone is looking at their phones, your bestie is making faces at you, and you feel embarrassed for your co-worker because they are messing up so badly.

As you leave the meeting room, you hear someone mutter, ‘That’s a wasted hour that I’m never getting back’ or ‘What the f*ck was that all about?” Yes, there will be swearing.

Back to my question about how many boring presentations you’ve attended. I bet nobody answered zero.

And don’t you think that’s odd? Delivering presentations is a vital part of corporate life, but many organizations expect their employees to pick up presentation skills by magic. Or maybe osmosis.

Convenient (and cheap) for the organization, but not so convenient for you.

Luckily, we have the internet now, so you can use the interweb instead of magic and osmosis. Practically the same thing if you ask me.

Let’s get back to those disastrous presentations…

Terrible presentations have several things in common:

• There is no clear outcome

• Attendees don’t know why they’re there

• No one knows what they are supposed to do afterwards

• The information in the presentation doesn’t make sense

• Information is presented in the wrong order

To deliver a meaningful presentation, you must make it meaningful by planning what goes in.

Otherwise, it’s a garbage-in, garbage-out situation. Or rubbish in, rubbish out, if you are English.

No one wants to give the worst presentation in the world and embarrass themselves.

So let’s make sure that never happens to you.

If you ask these three questions before you even start, you’ll have a good grounding for the content, which will help you look good in the presentation.

1. Is this a presentation or training?

I’ve worked in Learning & Development for decades, and I’ve seen many occasions when something that should have been robust training was delivered in a presentation.

Not because people were incompetent or careless but because they simply didn’t know the difference.

The difference between presentations and training are around their format, duration, and purpose as shown in the image below.

Created by the author on Canva with a lot of swearing and re-dos. This is version six!

A presentation is the best vehicle for a speech, project update, or launch.

Safety sessions, employee onboarding, and leadership competencies must be taught in a training session.

If you are still unsure whether your presentation should become a training session, consider the consequences of your attendees not remembering what you’ve presented.

Low consequence - presentation

High consequence - training

If your presentation turns out to be training, prepare accordingly. If you aren’t a trainer or don’t know how, get help from your L&D team or someone who does.

Remember, if this is a training issue and you are delivering a presentation, the consequences of failing to provide a proper training session could backfire on you.

So do your due diligence and make sure this isn’t going to come back and bite you in the arse.

2. What are the desired outcomes of the presentation?

Now that we know we are creating a presentation, not a training course, we need to know what to include.

I’ve sat in many presentations, wondering why I was there.

Was I meant to do something?

Was I meant to be aware of something, maybe because I’m on a particular team or have Manager as my title?

Who knows.

To avoid this, you must be clear about why you are creating the presentation.

Created by author on Canva - Not so much swearing this time

Ask yourself these questions:

• Who is the presentation for?

• Do their bosses need to come too?

• What about people who cover them for holidays?

• What do they need to know at the end?

• Do they need to do anything?

• Do different people need to know different information or at different levels of detail?

• What do you want your attendees to feel at the end?

• Is it a touchy-feely presentation about change meant to make everyone feel safe?

• Or a telly-offy presentation to put everyone in their place?

• What would you say if you had to explain why you are creating the presentation?

• If there are other stakeholders, what do they think is the purpose of the presentation?

Answer these questions, and you’ll have a much better idea of the purpose of your presentation. Then, you can start working on the content.

Remember that bad presentations are full of irrelevant information. Be clear about what your audience needs to know rather than what is nice to know.

3: What questions might the audience ask?

Now that you’ve sorted out your presentation outline, it’s time to consider how your audience will respond.

You’ll have included answers to all the obvious questions in the presentation, but there are bound to be some you haven’t thought of.

You don’t want to be standing there with your mouth open when some smart alec asks a question you don’t know the answer to.

What questions are the following people likely to ask:

• The MD and the senior team

• Your boss

• Your team

• Department heads such as HR, Operations, Finance, IT, H&S, D&I

• Supervisors, Team Leaders and Team Members

• The people most affected by the contents of the presentation

• Clients

• Customers

• Head office

• People who need to know details

• People who need to know the big picture

• People who want to sabotage you or your presentation

Created by the author on Canva - got the hang of it now

Remember that even though you know who is supposed to come to your presentation, you never know when some visiting dignitary might ‘pop in’ to mix with the plebs.

So make sure you know the answers to the high-level questions the CEO and their cronies might ask.

Once you’ve compiled a list of all the questions that are likely to arise, write down the answers and practice giving them.

The more contentious the question, the more you must practice your answer.

Depending on their nature, you can include these answers in your presentation or an FAQ sheet or deal with them ad hoc when they arise.

It’s up to you.

Takeaways

Creating and delivering presentations doesn’t come easily; a whopping 75% of us find public speaking difficult.

That’s why preparation is so necessary.

Knowing your audience, the content, and the outcomes you want makes it much easier to prepare a meaningful presentation.

Poor preparation means poor content, which won’t go down well with your audience.

Remember to:

• Decide whether your presentation needs to be a training session or a presentation

• Write down why you are holding the presentation and what outcomes you want

• Anticipate all the questions you may get, prepare the answers, and practice delivering them.

That’s all for this week…

This edition of L&D Rocks was made with the support of caffeine, swearing, and chocolate.