Presentation Skills Are Foundational Skills Part Three: Know Your Limits

We are at the midway point of the “Presentation Skills Are Foundational Skills” series, with knowing your audience and subject matter already having been covered. Knowing your limits means, essentially, don’t make things up to sound like you have all the answers. There’s a lot more to it than that, but that’s how I’d summarize it in a sentence.

I didn’t post anything last week, as it was the official launch of my book. If you find yourself here on my blog but have not read it, welcome! The book is called Earning What You Deserve: The Guide for Building Long-term Success Starting From Graduation Day and it’s available on Amazon.

As a reminder, here are five things to consider the next time you find yourself delivering a presentation:

1. Know your audience

2. Know your subject matter

3. Know your limits

4. Know the situation

5. 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’ll dive into each of these topics a little bit further…and this week we’ll be focusing on number 3:

Know your limits

Knowing your limits when presenting builds on the ideas of knowing your audience and subject matter. For example, knowing your subject matter 80+% (I’d call this solid expertise) or 20-30% (while this is surface-level knowledge) has a significant impact on how you should present it based on your audience. I’ll use an example from my day job to illustrate the difference:

My team are technical experts on a specific part of my company’s product - the APIs. We work with developers to help them do a lot of heavy lifting programmatically at companies of all sizes. Most people in the company would fit into the 20-30% knowledge bucket - they know we have APIs, they know we have a lot of integrations, but they wouldn’t dream of building a solution on our APIs with a customer. The entire purpose of my team is to take conversations to that next level so other teams can focus on doing the thing that they’re experts at.

People call on my team as “the experts” in this particular area - but not for every area. Think about asking a BBQ Pitmaster about something. Odds are, it won’t be about vegan diets. That’s how my team works. We get called on for the “what wood should I use in my smoker?” and “what’s the best blend of spices for brisket?” kinds of questions. My team’s purpose is not to be the expert on every aspect of our product, but instead we have surface-level knowledge of these other topics where others are experts. When time comes for my team’s expertise, our limits of knowledge are often tested by adjacent expertise and we need to toe the line of shared understanding.

Adjacent expertise is the idea that “all doctors are medical experts” to non-doctors. However, between doctors there is a lot of difference and specialization in specific topics. A neurosurgeon and a burn specialist will have a lot of overlapping knowledge, but very different expertise. For a doctor that’s not used to reading MRI scans, speaking to one that is, their “medical expertise” can quickly seem challenged. Obviously, their specialization is just different and their expertise isn’t at risk - but to an outsider, there’s one doctor that knows what’s going on and one that doesn’t.

This is where limits, subject matter, and audience all overlap. Your presentation can quickly be derailed if you’re presenting something to a group of adjacent experts. Knowing your limits also applies to knowing the limits of your topic as well…and managing the presentation will be covered in more depth over the next two weeks.

Having perceived expertise in a topic immediately adds extra weight to what you’re saying. This perception may be right or wrong, but eventually the influence on the audience is the same. This means your responsibility in presenting is higher as an expert than if your role is introducing “the experts” - i.e. if people believe that you have the 30% knowledge vs the 80%. Being a doctor and endorsing smoking is very different if you’re a pulmonologist vs a psychiatrist, though both are absolutely doctors and the general public could perceive them as having the same expertise regardless of their perspective on the subject.

In my book, I talk about this concept in greater depth in a different light (i.e. have confidence in yourself and your message) - but if you’re confidently delivering false or misleading information, it can be interpreted as fact and do longer term damage to your audience’s understanding of your topic and potentially your reputation as an expert. Part of delivering a message with confidence is also confidently knowing where your expertise ends. If, for example, you’re leading a Q&A session and you get stumped… you should acknowledge and embrace it!

“That’s a really good question - I can give you a partial answer, but not likely a sufficient one - let me get back to you on that as a follow-up.”

This sort of a response does two fundamental things to your audience:

1. It prevents you from burning credibility. I wish I could tell you that anyone asking you questions about a presentation would be out of sheer curiosity, but that’s not always the case and a question could be designed to undermine you. We’ll unpack this a bit more in next week’s post on knowing the situation.

2. It adds more weight to the things you are able to answer with confidence. You might not have all of the answers, but if you’re a perceived expert that’s willing to say “let me get back to you” then you’re adding credibility to the answers that you do deliver, including the eventual answer you provide to the question that’s stumped you. It builds trust with your audience. You’re displaying a level of vulnerability, honesty, and integrity by answering truthfully.

Ultimately, when you’re thinking about a presentation, your goal is almost always to deliver a meaningful and often actionable message to an audience that perceives you as an expert. When you know what your audience knows and expects, you’re deeply familiar with your subject matter, and you’re willing to admit when you don’t have an answer…you’re well on your way to being perceived as a credible expert that’s delivering meaningful presentations to your audience.

These limits come in many shapes and sizes, and ultimately they’re just one part of the broader preparation for a presentation. Next week, our focus is on knowing the context of the presentation. This will ultimately influence the perspective you need to take on your subject matter. It’s a crucial aspect of the preparation, and will prove to be the most complex part of this series.