Even the very best public speakers get nervous when delivering a presentation to a crowd.
You might not be articulating your new strategy to a thousand people however it is natural to get nervous when everyone in the room is focused on you. In fact, it can be even more nerve wracking when everyone in the room isn’t focused on what you are saying.
In this blog we want to give you some tips for delivering a killer work presentation whether it is updating a small team on your progress or speaking to a larger group of people on the ‘big picture’.
Conceptualising Your Story
Every presentation should have an overriding theme. If it doesn’t then you are simply talking about random slides in an unsystematic order.
Let’s say you are delivering a presentation on a project you have worked on. Does everyone in the room know the specifics of the project? Do they know what it was meant to achieve?
Don’t just talk about the results even though this is important. Have a beginning (what the project was created to do), a middle (what you actually did) and a conclusion (what results were achieved and what could have been improved). This creates a story line that everyone can follow.
Don’t ‘Read’ To Your Audience
Most people have had that one professor at university that simply read off a sheet in the lecture hall. Don’t be this person.
Simply reading out sentences to your audience or, even worse, reading the bullet points from your slide is going to lose your audience pretty quickly. No-one wants to be lectured to.
Engage your audience by using your slides as something they can read on their own. Speak in a way that expands on these points and look directly at people in the room – this will make your presentation feel more personal even if it is on a boring subject!
Encourage Discussion
We touched on this when we spoke about how to lead meetings effectively and the same rings true for delivering a presentation at work.
A lot of people think that a presentation is a one way thing. Someone speaks for a while then everyone leaves with a copy of the slides. You can do it this way but it isn’t going to make your presentation very memorable.
Create room for discussion within your presentation and don’t just focus on this at the end. Even opening the floor to some questions after you have finished one section of your presentation will make everyone feel a lot more engaged. It can also help clarify points that you may have went over too quickly.
Delivering That Killer Work Presentation
Presentation skills don’t suddenly appear overnight. Like everything it takes work, time and a bit of confidence.
The good news is that these skills can be developed by pretty much everyone.
A work presentation doesn’t need to be boring. By implementing these simple tips you can really nail that next dreaded project update presentation that is looming on the horizon.
