Presentation Skills are Foundational Skills Part Four: Know the Situation
We are nearing the end of the “Presentation Skills Are Foundational Skills” series, with this week’s focus being on the situation of your presentation. Knowing the situation means that you’ll present differently depending on the circumstances - this is the most important part of presenting.
As a reminder, here are the five main things to consider the next time you find yourself delivering a presentation:
Know your audience
Know your subject matter
Know your limits
Know the situation
Have confidence in your presentation
Using these five things, you’ll be able to come up with an effective presentation that helps your audience get the most out of your time together. Over the series of posts, we’re diving into each of these topics a little bit further…and this week we’ll be focusing on number 4:
Know the situation
In the first several parts of this series, I’ve referenced that the context would impact everything that we had been covering, and now we are going to unpack what that means. I will assume that you’ve read the first three parts of the series already, and we can jump right in. If you haven’t, please do that and come back when you’ve finished!
Not every presentation is the sharing of knowledge from an expert to a captivated audience looking to learn. Sometimes you might be presenting to an audience that needs convincing. Or maybe you’re presenting a request for support from a superior. Or maybe you’re interviewing for a job. Any way you slice it, the situation that you’re presenting in will have the most drastic impact on how you need to prepare and position your material - and when considering the other topics we’ve covered so far in the series, you will leave this post with the guidance to push your presentations to the next level.
Let’s consider four different types of presentations for the remainder of this post:
Expert Presentation - this presentation is what we often think of as a presentation or a talk. You’ve been asked to bring a perspective and knowledge on a topic and present it to an audience that’s interested in learning more about it.
Job Interview - this might be a panel presentation, a demo, a live white boarding session (in-person pre-COVID typically), or some other means of conveying your expertise to an audience whose express purpose in attending is to evaluate you based on the presentation.
Sales Pitch - this doesn’t mean that you’re trying to sell someone a thing or convince them to buy a service, but often during this sort of a presentation your audience might be in a state of mind that they’re against your perspective or battling with the challenge of doing nothing and your goal should be to convince them that your perspective is one they should adopt and help them to drive action.
Executive Ask - this is a presentation where you need to get approval or buy-in from a superior on something. While this could be one of many different things, we’ll think of this in terms of presenting a case to get approval on a project or budget.
Let’s first dig into the expert presentation. We’ve all been conditioned through our educational journey that a presentation is a reciting of facts in a way that makes us sound smart on the topic. We’re taught that this is the general underlying purpose of any time we need to get in front of a group to share our expertise. This is certainly one type of presentation, and it’s the one we get the most practice with when we’re doing science fairs and school projects or watching Ted Talks - but these are actually fairly rare as part of most jobs.
The expert presentation can also be under the guise of a status update or enablement - but ultimately, the audience has come to this presentation with the expectation that you’re the expert on the topic you’re presenting to them. While this may or may not be true, remember that perception determines much of reality from your audience’s perspective. This type of presentation is often not one that requires handling interjections and many times will be accompanied by slides or some other presentation material. While it’s important to know your material, this presentation is also the most likely of the four to be boring and sound scripted.
As an expert, you need to know what you’re presenting, the order of the content, the message you’re hoping to deliver, and who your audience is. The least likely way to accomplish an effective presentation is to sound like you’re reading at your audience. Notes are good, preparation is good, scripts are often not. Remember that your audience can’t see your script unless you share it with them, so it’s okay to stray from a word-for-word script in most instances, and it will probably sound like you’re more present and interesting. There’s a meaningful difference in audience engagement if your words are all chosen perfectly but you sound like you’re a robot and your words not being perfectly on script but you sound passionate and knowledgable on your subject matter. Hopefully this is intuitive, but the latter generates much more audience engagement. Trust me when I say your audience will thank you for being more engaging.
That being said, a script may be appropriate - but it needs to be practiced (out loud) and refined to sound as though it’s not being read directly. Here’s an example:
You have 5 minutes to present a complicated topic for buy-in to an audience of peers and need to ensure that your case is very clear to them at the end of the time. You may need to call on three or four major points, perhaps quote a recognized expert, have an introduction, and a closing. Juggling these things with a very specific and tight time limit can be really tough if you’re not properly scripted. Contextually, the added stress of hitting on all of these points in a very succinct way might lead you to needing to be scripted.
Most of the other presentation types are not as likely to be subjected to a script or reading to your audience, as most of the time there’s a chance for your audience to interject with questions or challenges to your points. This doesn’t mean prepare less (I’d argue more preparation is required), but it does mean that you shouldn’t plan to stick to a script and you will likely need to rely much more on your knowledge of the subject matter to make the presentation compelling.
If we shift into the job interview presentation, there’s a very obvious difference from the expert presentation. Putting together 50 slides on a topic to share your expertise with an audience and convincing a group of people that they should want to work with you and hire you are two very different things. Perceived expertise on the subject matter you’re presenting (sometimes an actual presentation based on a prompt or a demo, other times yourself and work history), is being weighed alongside how you present it and the fit to the culture and team. At the core, an interview is a kind of sales pitch, but in most cases the audience is all there because they’re hoping to find a person to fill the opening. Your goals are aligned. Any grilling is likely focused on your expertise or to see how you handle yourself in times of stress.
While presenting yourself at an interview, you need to have done preparation (“why do you want to work here?” should never be answered with “my current boss sucks” or anything about why you’re looking to leave your current job) to show your interest in the specific job and company that you’re interviewing for. Depending on the job, you may need to present on a subject as well - and presenting when you’re unfamiliar on a topic and unprepared will come through very clear to your interviewers. Treating every one of the interviewers with respect when you’re asked questions also helps them leave with a positive overall feeling of your fit with the team. You should always assume that each person in an interview has the power to say no to hiring you…because most of the time, they do.
Your history is yours to tell, but you also need to understand how that history applies to the job you’re interviewing for. Having a computer science degree or a marketing degree or a biology degree may influence your prospects with a certain job, or it really might not. Having a degree at all might be enough, and you can focus on the relevant things you learned while getting that degree. Underlying much of this is the need to understand the job that you’re trying to get, and you should use the opportunity that most interviewers give to ask questions as a way to get insider information to help you in the next phase of the interviews.
As a last point on the interviewing style of presentation, many of us have heard of some of the crazy interview questions that might come from high profile companies:
“How many windows are there in New York City?”
“Does the weight of all the ants in the world add up to more than the weight of all the humans in the world?”
“How many bouncy balls fit inside of a two-story house?”
Sometimes the answer isn’t what they’re actually looking for - they’re looking to see how you approach a problem with critical thinking and likely nowhere near enough information to actually provide an answer. In these cases, you should share how you’re thinking about the problem. How many windows are in NYC depends a lot on how many buildings, and how tall those buildings are, and how you define a window (is it a barrier between indoors and outdoors? is it a pane of glass that you can see through? do you have to be able to see through both sides? etc.). Simply responding with “27,842,117?” will not actually help your interviewer without follow-up questions. The context is the key to the approach here.
In the future, I’ll also be creating a post about how to approach different types of questions based on their context.
If we shift our focus to the sales pitch type of presentation, there’s an additional layer of complexity worth discussion. Yes, you need to be an expert and not sound scripted. Yes, you need to convince your audience of something. However, you also need to be prepared for the fact that some people in your audience might not be on your side. They might ask questions in an effort to derail you. They might be focused entirely on how your presentation might directly impact them. At the end of the day, the complexity lies in focusing on converting your audience with your message. There might be landmines you need to address, and there might be landmines worth avoiding entirely.
To be perfectly clear, the sales pitch is not always tied to selling something. It’s just a way to think of the preparation required, and how to target your presentation to the audience.
When preparing for a presentation of this nature, it’s really important to understand if there’s animosity and ultimately how much educational foundation needs to be laid as part of the presentation. Presenting facts and demonstrating expertise is only a small part of this kind of presentation. More than that, you need to connect to the audience members and help them understand the benefits and drive them to action. Telling a story is important, aligning to the benefits of your position, addressing animosity, and delivering the message in a way that focuses on building buy-in from all parties in the audience.
Knowing your subject matter and audience are crucial here, as the context of ‘selling’ can be dramatically different if you’re working on driving action with people that are on your side vs having to convince people that your perspective, which differs from theirs, is the right one. Sharing your perspective in a way that convinces and drives action is the key to this sort of presentation. Answer the “so what?” and “why do anything?” points of view in your preparation and delivery of message.
The last type of presentation we’re going to cover in today’s post is based around presenting in a way that you need to ask for something. We’re putting this under the “Executive Ask” header, but it’s not always to an executive.
It’s important to understand your audience’s perspective, and who the ultimate decision maker is. You’ll need to tailor the presentation to this person’s level without ignoring the rest of the audience. This is similar to the sales pitch in that you need to demonstrate expertise and connect with the decision maker with the additional layer of complexity that you need to help them understand what you’re asking for up front. This can be as part of the preparation you share ahead of time, or it can be early in the presentation - but you need to make your ask clear early and weave the purpose throughout the remainder of the presentation.
A good opening statement might be something like the following:
“I am here today to present the case for why we should spend $10,000 on books.”
This comes across very differently than starting your presentation with a lack of defined outcome:
“Thanks for the time today, I want to start by letting you know that we have a lot of missing books in the corporate library.”
The former lets the decision maker know the context within which they should be hearing your presentation. The latter simply presents a problem statement, without clarity that you’re actually proposing a solution as well, that may or may not help them to understand the purpose of your presentation. The problem statement should include your ask rather than laying out a problem without context. You need to do this preparation as it will set the entire context of the presentation and likely discussion about the ask.
Next, you need to help them understand the benefits of the decision you’re looking for them to make. You should have a perspective. Based on your initial ask, you should clearly deliver a message that resonates with the level of the decision maker. Clearly defining the problem and presenting your perspective will allow them to effectively make the decision that they believe is correct.
Let me frame it differently for a moment:
Books are missing > People taking books > Company growing > Replenish books > $10,000 please
Through the first several steps of this presentation, a decision maker might be wondering what you’re building up to or what you’re asking for. The “bury the lead” move is not effective in a presentation like this. Instead, a presentation that puts the context before the facts will help them interpret the presentation with an end goal in mind. I would instead frame the presentation like this:
$10,000 of books are needed > The company is growing > People are taking books > Replenish and increase the company library
While presenting the same points in a different order (and with slightly different phrasing) what I’ve done is frame that I’m asking for an investment in the company library due in some ways to the company growing, but also that people are taking books and we should replenish and grow the library for employees to pursue reading. For the decision maker, they know up front that this is not simply a presentation about a problem statement. You’re not bringing them a problem, you’re bringing them a proposal. That’s the difference.
Much like the rest of the topics in this series, there is a lot more that we could do to dig into the various aspect of presenting - but with the first four topics now finished, we only have to cover the last and final point for the foundations of presentation skills…confidently presenting your material. I’ll be posting that next Sunday.
