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- [00:00]
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Welcome to Manager Tools.
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This is Sarah and I'm Mark.
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Today's podcast presenting mistakes Chapter 2 Rigidity Part 1 of 1.
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As always, our content has been crafted by humans and we're now certified by proudly human. The questions this cast answers are what does presenting rigidity mean? Why is presenting rigidity a problem? And how can I eliminate presenting rigidity in my presentations?
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Want answers to these questions and more? Keep listening.
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The effective manager conference, the training with a money back guarantee that has changed how thousands of managers lead is available virtually same one on ones feedback, coaching and delegation curriculum. Same practice time, zero travel required. If you're ready to manage better starting Monday, register at manager-tools.com hello folks, welcome
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A
back to another edition of Manager Tools. Today we're talking about presenting and this is the second chapter in our presenting mistakes guidance. The first part we put out a couple of weeks ago. Mark, what was it?
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B
Chapter one, Front of the room behavior.
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A
Front of the room behavior. Good. Yes, yes. And folks generally know that in our experience, the vast majority of of presenters are under prepared. Sadly though, many presenters actually think of themselves as really good presenters or even over prepared. Yes, yeah, exactly. And it's usually because they spent hours on their slides, which violates one of the core principles of presenting. That is you are the presentation, not your slides, but you or the presentation. And hours spent preparing slides makes one focus on the accuracy of the content rather than on the persuasiveness of the message they're trying to send.
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B
When you focus on your slides thing in there, your present the presentation and getting them just right, you end up becoming rigid about presenting your slides rather than persuading your audience. And so there we we said one of our questions was what is presenting rigidity? What it is is you giving the presentation that you have prepared without any flexibility at all in terms of how much time you take on any given item. And you come across as rigid and therefore unprepared, even though you spent hours preparing because you were preparing your slides, which aren't what matters. So here, here's our outline. First, we recommend you create a presentation that is time flexible. You have to know what your most important points are. Then you expand and collapse your presentation based on the time you have. And then we also want to cover what happens if you're actually presenting a preformed slide deck where you didn't get to choose how many slides you had. We'll cover that at the end.
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A
Yeah, exactly. But let's start with the part about creating a presentation that is time flexible. Folks, when you create any presentation, you need to consider first how much time you have. Don't think about the content first. Think about your time first. Now, we present a lot at Manager Tools more than almost anyone in our community. Most of our audience think that we create content first and then we create an agenda. But we actually do the exact opposite. We think of the topics only generally and then create an agenda that fits the time allotted to us for that presentation we're meant to deliver on that topic.
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B
Yes.
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It's only after we've created the agenda that we can then start creating slides that support the agenda while also knowing the slides are not the presentation we and what we say are the presentation itself.
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Yeah, and I think the vast majority of managers kind of know how much time they have, but the vast majority, 95, 98% of their preparation has been on slides on content. And if you start with content, then you will focus. Trust me, I've coached hundreds of people. I've written hundreds, probably not thousands, but hundreds of speeches and gone over individual word emphasis on which syllable to put the hammer down on. So on. If you start with content, you will focus on saying as much as you possibly can. In other words, you're going to put everything you can into your slides and presentation and then attempt to say it all. Okay. This almost always leaves you with too much content. Now, when you're presenting and you think that you're just going to go through all of your content, you're racing against time to get everything said and that leaves you no flexibility.
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You know, And Mark, this happens sometimes when we're getting speakers ready for our Executive speaker series.
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Oh, I didn't even think about this. But you, you're the one that goes over it with them.
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Yeah.
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And by the way, we should put in the plug here for Executive Speaker Series because it is really good. It turned out way better than I thought it would. It's fantastic. And who's available to come to Executive Speaker Series?
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All Executive Tools licensees.
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Okay. Yeah, we have a couple of hundred on each call every time.
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You know, I think our average is probably, if I had to guess, like 180 maybe.
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Okay.
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I think it varies on topic. I mean, you don't have to come to every call if you're an Executive Tools licensee. Not only are all Executive Tools licensees invited to the call, but they also have video access to the video for 30 days afterward. And then the audio only version is put into the Executive Tools audio feed. I think there's. Yeah. As a bonus content. Exactly. There are just so many options to consume the material.
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B
Yeah. But going back to our point, in this cast, you are living this. When you go over the presentations, we don't let people just come in and talk to our audience. We're going to vet your presentation and we're going to make some suggestions about what will work and what won't work. Because we do this a lot and we're good at it and we want to help you shine and we want our audience to have a good experience.
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Yeah.
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So. Yes. You find them with too much.
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Too much. Yeah. Well, they only have 60 minutes and they're 60 minutes. You can. They can do with it as they wish is how I say that. They can pack the whole thing full of presentation. They can do 50% Q&A 50% presentation. They can do whatever they want. And so many presenters, and this isn't only true of people preparing for the executive speaker series, just so many presenters in general have over full presentations mistakenly think that the lack of questions they have in their overly full presentation is an indication of a good presentation.
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Exactly. Because I mean, it's not.
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You, you, you want to deliver value and you think that the more value you give, the better the presentation.
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The more content, the more stuff, the more talking, the more words.
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Exactly, exactly. And folks, unfortunately, the audience is simply bored by your speed when it comes across as nervousness and a lack of preparation.
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Yeah. It's literally backwards.
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Yeah. And I think one of the, for, for myself as a presenter, one of the moments that I think I learned that the most. Mark, I'm sure you remember this. We were in Chicago, you and I showed up. Andrew Spillman was presenting.
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Yep.
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An item, a topic on our effective communicator that you and I would normally present and talk. Andrew was actually just asking them, the audience members, to talk and share. And it was just backward from how I would have done it. I would have just filled all of those, that void with my words and people just ate it up. People just loved it.
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Yeah.
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They thought it was amazing. They thought it was great. And folks, when presenters assume that a full presentation is of a benefit really, truly to the audience, the audience actually sometimes thinks that the full audience is a lack of preparation, which we never think is true. But because you fill the presentation with your words, they assume you don't want questions because you can only talk at the very highest level. And you're using your overly full content to avoid questions, which is not what any of us intend. We actually intend the opposite. But it's how the recipients See it?
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Yeah.
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Which brings up a good point. If you're ever asked, if you're giving a presentation, this would not be a staff meeting presentation. It would be something broader than that and so on. If you're ever asked, are you willing to take questions in line or do you want to wait and have questions at the end? Okay, now here's why they do that, okay? Because the vast majority of speakers would prefer that the questions be at the end. Okay, what the event organizers. Let's say you're going to a conference somewhere where you're a speaker. You have, what do you call it, a breakout session where you're talking about a topic that you're knowledgeable about, you think that you can choose. And most presenters choose questions at the end. That's a mistake. Okay? The people who are organizing don't know anything about presenting. What it does do. It allows you to get through your presentation if you go really, really fast because you don't have to worry about any questions. The problem is, by the end, people don't have any questions because they forgot the question they were going to ask 10, 12, 15, 18, 24 minutes in. So you end up with no questions. You therefore assume that you did really good. Wow. You wowed them. But here's the thing. The moment you get done and there's 15 minutes left and they have another talk to go to in 15 minutes, not only they've forgotten their question, that you have to go over an additional bar which is, oh, he finished his talk. I don't have any really burning questions. I can take 15 minutes off.
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Yeah.
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And that's exactly what they do. They're like, no, we're good. Thank you. That was great. You were awesome, dude. And now I'm going to go take a break. So if you have a choice, and you do, you say, no, I'm happy to take questions during that shows a professional speaker that you can be interrupted. Now, when I say professional speaker, people misunderstand because the vast majority of time when they're hearing speeches, there are no questions, there are no interruptions. But that's not what professional presentations are. And so people are able to ask questions. Well, if you're going to get questions, you're going to have to answer that question and then in your head, know how much time you have and know what's really important and know what things you were going to say in those three minutes. You answer the questions, which three minutes of your presentation need to be dropped out because it's not nearly as important as answering that question or covering your other two or three main points.
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And generally, if one person has a question, folks, it's because you were unclear about something or there's a gap. I mean, not always, but often. And what that means is everyone else in the room also had that question. So that is a better use of time. Everyone is confused every single time about that item.
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Yeah. And if you have an overflow presentation, which we guarantee you do, you don't have time for questions or expansion and contraction based on your most important points and what the audience wants to know, you just lose that ability because you want to avoid any disruptions, you want to avoid any speed bumps, you want to get through the stuff that you prepared, but that just suggests that you're actually not fully prepared, that you're not a master of your topic. And you've got to remember what. What matters is the audience and not your slides and actually not even what you prepared. What matters is what the audience wants. And that may not be in perfect alignment with what the audience with what you prepared.
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Yep, that's absolutely it. And folks, on the flip side of having too much content, there's nothing wrong with having too little content and finishing a little bit early. Knowing that you can finish early allows you to expand to cover your key points, or while also allowing you to cover any and all questions that might come up. Remember that many of the questions you'll get will be from information you know that is probably not on your slides. So if you fill your slides full of everything, you're going to find yourself trying to cover everything.
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Everything.
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Exactly. And end up rushing and looking unprepared when that's not the case. But again, because you have got so much, you're going to have to go quickly. And. And it's just that, yeah, it all results in people thinking you are unprepared when you're not.
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Right. And here's the ultimate problem. Out of all this, you can see this happening. You've overfilled your content, and for whatever reason, good or bad, you get a lot of questions. And there are reasons, bad reasons for questions like you literally are not following logic that the audience is understanding, you've left stuff out that they need. Or there are good questions like, oh, this is of interest and I want to go a level deeper to see how I might use this or implement it or whatever. Now you've got all this stuff to go through and now you're getting questions and now you're panicking because your presentation, your practice, was just you riding on A log down a river and you're out. You know, it's just you're going to ride the river for 45 or 50 minutes and then you're done, and you just start talking about the stuff on your slides and you just keep talking. You can neither ignore the questions nor answer them and still get through all that too much content you have on your slides. So what ends up happening is you race even more through the rest of your presentation. You skim and skip through your two full slides, again showing your audience you prepared poorly because you're not willing to drop some stuff out. In contracting that content to allow expansion, to address questions and so on, you're rigid rather than flexible. And those slides you skim and skip through will be seen as unnecessary to begin with. Why did you load them up with all kinds of content you're now throwing away?
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Right. If it was important, it's important. If it's not, it's not. That's exactly it, folks. We have an analogy for your presentation. It is that of an accordion. In fact, Mark almost named this podcast the Accordion Presentation Rule, which is objectively a better title.
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It is. It totally is.
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Everybody will remember it, but no one's going to Google that. So also, we create a world where the presentation is, or, sorry, sorry, the podcast isn't found because no one's going to Google that. But it is. It's a great analogy. It really is.
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Somebody out there in the world has an accordion podcast, and they're going to try to find that, and they'll find ours, and they'll find ours.
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And this has nothing to do with an accordion. I don't get it. Exactly. So, folks, again, going back to the accordion analogy, some of the content will be expanded because there's questions or you think of something while you're presenting that you want to add because you don't think the audience has quite gotten your point. And you cannot do that if your content is over full. No expansion.
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No.
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No room for expansion.
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Right. Other times you'll be contracting. You only have to make one or two points to support your slide. And please, dear heavens, do not read your slides and you can move on. Maybe somebody asked you a question on slide 2 that you incorporated some of the information from slide 3 or 4 in it, and you could say, we've actually already covered these points. Great question. Earlier. And so we can move through here. Right. Again, don't worry about finishing early when you find yourself contracting because you feel like the audience understands these points and you don't need to beat them to death. Okay, your audience will love you if you finish a lottery that will show how better prepared you were that you had. You knew exactly how much time you had, you knew what that meant for the content and you put the right content in. Most managers today, even if they cut 25% of their content out, still would not finish early. In a standard sort of timed presentation, whether it's 30 or 40 minutes or whatever, you would just be able to slow down and be confident that you will cover everything you need to and answer any questions.
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Exactly.
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A
Okay, so folks, that takes us then to the next piece of our guidance. That is know what your most important points are. To be able to use this accordion of expanding and contracting as needed, you must know what your most key points are. You cannot contract during your key points and you need to cover your key points entirely. And your key points for each slide. These are the anchors that you can both expand and contract if need to and as time requires.
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Yeah, so you're constantly thinking about your presentation. I hate to use this analogy, but it's living and breathing and the audience is interacting with it through you. And so you're like, oh, okay, they really want to know about that. I'm going to expand that and I'm going to contract that. Now by the way, sometimes you're wrong and that's okay, that's okay. But what's definitely wrong is rigidity is just saying I'm going to run through all these bullets, I'm going to touch on every bullet, I'm going to spend about the same amount of time on each bullet and I practice enough. Let's please. Dear God, we hope you are hers and you have a 45 minute talk and you talk for 45 minutes. Well, that is literally a death knell. If you're going to have, if you're talking about anything that's relevant, if you are talking about something that someone else is going to have to do something with they're going to have questions. You're not that good that you can get all their questions answered in a perfect presentation. There's no perfect presentation unless you yourself are perfect. So having said that, then let's talk about our next point which is expanding and collapsing based on time. The best general rule for preparing slides that allow you to expand or contract your presentation is, and we know you're not going to like this, but it's the real deal. 10 minutes per slide. Okay, note engineers, software developers. We did not say 10 slides per minute. We said 10 minutes per slide. That's a good general rule for, for how to prepare your slides. What that will mean for many of you is you'll have less slides, which means there'll be less content and stuff that can drop away. If it's written on a slide, you'll be fast forwarding through three or four slides that you wouldn't have to show if you made less slides and made your bullets higher level points that you knew what we were going to talk about and therefore could eliminate one of them to contract. Or you could expand one, you could talk more about one to expand it.
- [20:47]
A
Yeah, folks, remember what did, what did you say earlier, Mark? We were talking about the presentation and the fact that the presentation itself, the slides you're delivering, are not the presentation, you're the presentation. On top of that, the slides aren't a manual for replication of the topic you're presenting. When people go back home. That's not, that's not what your slides are, are meant to do. You are the presentation. You can't be persuasive by giving them a series of slides that you're not going to present because you don't have time for it and they're probably never going to read again. It's all about the conversation. It's about the delivery. And having less slides makes you able to slow down your presentation when you have an audience that's got some questions about it. When you have too many slides and too much content, again, you tend to rush, which again is a sign of lack of, of preparation.
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B
Yeah, because it basically says if you're rushing, it says you didn't expect any questions. Either you think you're that good or the audience isn't interested or you're rushing to avoid getting questions. We've talked about this enough. I'm sorry, I'm beating a dead horse. So look, suppose you have an hour long presentation. Let's say you have six slides or no, eight slides, right? Not quite six. 60 minutes. Divided by 10 minutes per slide is six. But you have eight and that's close. Most people with a 60 minute presentation. 20.
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Yep.
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20, 25. No, no. Surprise. And again, that's fine. It's a general rule. You definitely don't want 20 slides for an hour long presentation. That is way too many. Okay, now you have two overall key points in this presentation you're giving. One of them is on slide three, one of them is on slide five. You expect questions on those two slides. But think about it. If you don't prepare your slides with that in mind, you're almost always, because you're getting questions on slides three and five, going to have to rush through six, seven and eight. If the questions are relevant and you have solid answers, you're still going to have to take time away from the back end of your presentation. Six, seven and eight. That's fine as long as you already know how to get through those slides quickly by covering perhaps only one or two key points on those slides. So you've expanded three and five and you've protracted six, seven and eight. And you've thought about that doing in advance. And you're not being rigid, you're being flexible and you're avoiding a major presentation failure. And you have to know what your key points are on each of the slides. And overall, certainly the two on page three or five, you have to know what those are so that you'll cover the key points on those slides while not covering every point on those slides. And that's because you know where you're likely to expand and therefore have to contract.
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A
Exactly. And folks, generally, as a general rule, it's better to have your main points earlier in your presentation. Like front load the presentation with main points so that you have more time later on to gain ground.
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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A
All right, now let's cover. What about a preformed slide deck? Well, folks, many managers have to present using a predetermined slide deck, which is often true in monthly or quarterly business reviews or project status reviews. When you are presenting on behalf of our organization, generally they'll give us a slide deck that we need to use.
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B
Yeah. And the reason for that is because if there are eight people presenting the same basic information, like the business review. Yeah. Like how we did financially or how we did operationally. How we did. People, wise strategy, operations and people. For instance, it's much easier for the audience for everybody to have a standard template that everybody's going to use so they make sure that people aren't skipping stuff they don't want to talk about. So all the topics are covered. Well, the solution here is really simple. Keep the amount of information on each of your slides to a reasonable minimum rather than filling it with everything relevant. If someone at higher levels than you adds stuff or wants you to add stuff, tell them no. I just had a conversation recently with a vice president of a company who was presenting quarterly and he discovered his slides, which he had to have a week in advance. He had to give week, give them to corporate a week in advance so corporate could go over and put them all in a massive single slide deck and so on, that they added stuff to the slide that he didn't know about.
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C
Oh.
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B
Which I consider the absolute kiss of death. You know, if you're going to put somebody else in front of an audience and then they're going to be surprised by the slide that they prepared because somebody else added is just horrible. So you may have to defend against that. Okay. But a little bit less information on the slide than maybe your peers have. When you see your peers rushing through trying to cover everything, remember, the bullets don't have to be covered. What most people think when they create a bullet on a PowerPoint slide or a keynote slide, they think it's literally their outline and everything is equal and it's not. That's why you end up with the title of being unprepared or being rigid. Because you don't know how to be flexible. You don't know the accordion technique. So when you put less on a slide that allows you to not be rushing and to use the accordion technique to spend more time on questions. And your key points, which as often happens, are often the same.
- [26:20]
A
Absolutely, folks. So if the template you're given is rigid, that's also fine. You know what the key points you're going to talk about on each slide are? Don't assume that you have to talk about everything on your slide just because that's the template, which is often overfull and has tons of items on it. Know what your key points on each slide are. Highlight them if you can using the highlighting text function in PowerPoint or Keynote. And this is going to help draw your audience's eyes to what you actually want to cover versus everything on the slide to an equal degree.
- [27:02]
B
And so many slides, not only is the presentation overall over full, each slide is over full and you're confronted with a cacophony of stuff up there, like, I don't know where I'm supposed to look. Usually the titles are bad, right? They're not telling a story. They're just saying what it is. It's a title rather than a caption. Yeah, it's terrible. Now, look. Yeah. You have to be prepared to cover everything okay, on every slide if there are questions. Okay. But if there are not questions, you are simply using the accordion technique to make sure you spend more time on your main points and less on the less important areas. And. And allowing you to handle audience energy in a way that even if they're not asking about the main points, you can continue to do your accordion effect. Expand some stuff, contract some stuff in order to meet your time limit, because you thought about that first. And give the audience what they need, which usually means answer their questions.
- [28:06]
A
Absolutely. Absolutely. All right, so to wrap it all up, folks, you are the presentation, not your slides. Do not overfill your slides. And what you say is more important than what is on the actual slides. Your slides are not just an encapsulation of a speech. They're an outline, some of which is more important than other parts of the slides. So use the accordion technique in combination with your knowledge of the time that you have got in order to cover your key points and. And answer questions as well. And one more reminder, if you want to be really great at presenting.
- [28:47]
B
Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.
- [28:51]
A
Practice, practice, practice. Exactly.
- [28:54]
B
Yeah, absolutely.
- [28:55]
A
All righty. Thank you all for joining us, folks. We hope this one helped you. Now, help us help others. And tell your friends. And of course, follow rate and review our podcast. And remember, five stars only, please.
- [29:09]
B
Yeah, five stars only.