Presentation Skills Are Foundational Skills Part Two: Know Your Subject Matter
As I covered last week, I strongly believe that presentation skills are crucial to success regardless of your role and seniority. This week’s focus is subject matter and how you should focus on it differently based on your audience.
As a reminder, here are five 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 next few weeks, we’ll dive into each of these topics a little bit further…and this week we’ll be focusing on number 2:
Know your subject matter
Building off of last week’s post about understanding your audience and what they expect, we can start to craft a narrative around the subject matter. While it’s true that your subject matter will not necessarily change based on your audience, the way you present it absolutely should change depending on audience expectations or needs. Some of this discussion falls under point four on the list, but there is a lot that we can cover about subject matter before even digging into the context of the situation. Let’s take three examples of one subject matter:
Cricket migration patterns
Before we even start to consider the presentation or the various presentation types, we have to answer one very important question…
What do I want people to know about this topic when I’m finished?
It’s one thing to be able to present a thousand facts on a topic - but what is it that makes those facts compelling? You need to tell a story, or lead your audience to their own level of understanding on your topic. What’s your call to action? Why are people taking the time to attend your presentation? Make it clear.
Now, I’m not an expert on this topic by any means…in fact, before now I didn’t even know with any certainty if crickets have migration patterns - but if I had to present on the topic, I would research and present differently depending on my audience. For the first example, I’ll focus on presenting the topic to peers.
Presumably when my peers and I are discussing this topic we likely have a similar baseline of knowledge, and when I’m presenting to them that shared baseline can be used in the presentation of the topic. I might know more about certain aspects and they might know more about other aspects - however, it can most likely be assumed that I am not going to have to cover topics about our shared knowledge.
In my presentation, I can be a little bit more conversational and have some back and forth. Share an interesting tidbit. Catch their attention with something pertinent that might help them out in their own lives. For example, something like “crickets migrate for fear of cannibalism” might be just interesting enough that it warrants a call-out in your presentation to your peers, assuming that it wasn’t a well known fact amongst your peer group and that your peers aren’t specifically known for their understanding of cricket cannibalism.
The approach you take in researching and presenting for this might be more relaxed than either of the other two types of presentation, as peers are more likely to have a pre-existing relationship and understanding of one another. You’ll need to know your stuff, and a relaxed presentation does not mean you don’t need to prepare - it simply means you’re more likely to be operating in a place of shared understanding and (often) lower stakes than the two other types of presentation.
Next, we’ll unpack the “audience” presentation - keeping in mind, but not addressing the complications associated with, that there are times where you might be presenting to an audience of peers, superiors, and a blend of all of the above. When you’re presenting to an audience, the key is to establish the baseline of understanding relatively quickly before diving into your subject matter. How you present the baseline will have a big impact on how your audience either connects with your message or pulls out their phones to check the latest COVID numbers.
Going back to our cricket migration example, we have to help the audience understand that not all crickets migrate and that while we’re talking about cricket migration, we need to consider the various reasons they do or don’t migrate. Again, understanding the context of the presentation is important, but we’ll get into that in part four of the series. If you’re like most people, attending a presentation on cricket migration might not sound like your cup of tea, so in the context of your presentation you need to understand if that’s the group you’re presenting to… or if you’re a featured speaker where your expertise is highly coveted.
My expertise at work is something that most people are interested in from afar, but ultimately it’s a topic that they don’t have the desire to understand the same way I do. I work to find ways to make the content relatable to my audience and not bog them down in the technical details to lull them to sleep. This is where understanding my topic comes into play - I not only need to understand my topic, but I need to understand how my audience wants to learn about it and how to connect the two in an effective presentation.
It’s one thing to understand the topic, but it’s another entirely to be able to connect it to an audience. Why did they decide to take this time out of their life to join your presentation? Is your presentation simply a recitation of facts or are you delivering it in a way that they’ll remember later? This is the most important part of knowing your subject matter. It’s knowing it in a way that your audience will connect with, and delivering it in that light.
Lastly, we need to dig into how a presentation to someone up the corporate ladder might impact the way you need to know your material. Keep in mind that you might be presenting to someone that doesn’t know the premise, the underlying question or ask, and they ultimately might not think of the presentation in the same terms that you do. Let’s say you work at a retail company and you have to present to executives on cricket migration patterns and ultimately how it will impact the cost of your materials as an organization. This is not the place to lead with a “cricket Donner Party” joke.
It’s crucial to understand that the time these folks are spending with you is time away from other pressing matters. You need to deliver your message in as short an amount of time as possible, and you need to be specific and explicit early with your purpose. This means you have to understand your subject matter and your ask in a way that none of the other presentation types require. You are not generalizing. You are not necessarily discussing. You are likely presenting more about the impact of what your topic is rather than on the topic itself.
Don’t think about this type of presentation as a recitation of facts, and don’t think of the subject matter in the terms that your peers are interested in - instead you need to think about how you want the executive to respond to the presentation first and foremost. Are you proposing a shift in approach to sourcing materials? Are you asking for budget for a project? Are you saving the company millions of dollars by controlling what you know about cricket migration patterns?
You will need to understand your subject matter in a way that’s even more challenging than any of the other types of presentation. Simply presenting some facts will not help an executive make a decision about something. You need to tell them why. Help them by leading with the question. This is your most important piece of subject matter. Everything you’re presenting should help lead them to an answer to this question. You may have a vested interest in one answer to the core question, and you should present the material in a way that’s not misleading, but that leads them naturally to the answer you are looking for. You should, however, keep your perspective open to other answers that might have a different scale to them.
This is why the “up the ladder” presentation is the hardest. It’s often asking for something, and you may not always get what you ask for. Especially if you’re not clear with the question. Putting the right amount of effort into the question and how you present it will be the basis for success in this kind of presentation…which requires having an even deeper level understanding of your subject matter. What if they ask about how your companies relationships in other continents can be leveraged to counteract the challenges presented by cricket migration? It’s another perspective with a wider lens that you may not normally need to consider.
There you have it - subject matter is important…but how you present it is equally as important. Know your subject matter. Next up (in two weeks), we’ll cover knowing your limits when it comes to your presentation.
