We talked before that communication is very important to executive presence. Being able to communicate effectively with executives of course, that's an important thing. Now let's talk about actual formal presentations. This isn't when you bump into somebody in the hallway or when you're sending an e-mail but when you prepare weeks in advance for a very important meeting where you make a presentation. Now, some people love public speaking. It's rare, but there are some people who have a real talent for it. They love being at the front of the classroom. They love being in front of people. Most of us aren't like that. Most of us get just a little bit nervous. Most of us would rather not do that. This framework that you've seen before, the head, the heart, and the hand for great presentations it takes everything intellectually. What's the content? What's the context? Who's in the audience? In terms of heart do you have accountability for what you're talking about? Are you throwing yourself in understanding the message, really fully expressing yourself? Then mechanically with the hands, is your PowerPoint actually any good? Are the words you're speaking actually useful? For today, let's talk more about the ones that are in the check-mark. How do you practice? How do you get good at this stuff? More importantly, what can you do far in advance? Like any good consultant, I broke this thing up into a couple of buckets. What can you do weeks in advance? What can you do one day in advance? Then finally, what do you do on the day of the presentation? Let's focus right now on the first two. There are many things you can do in advance. The more you prepare, it's like a wedding or a big event where the more you prepare, the more confident you'll feel because you don't have to worry about all little small details. One, prepare because it'll give you confidence. Number 2, stack the deck, stack the odds in your favor. Engineer anything that'll help you to remember the right things, do the right things. Therefore, here on the right, when it is game day, when is that important day, you can be yourself. What do you do before? Just think really deeply about why you're there, the location, the people. Think really strategically. What are we trying to do, and what's going to help us to get there. Let's go through some of these bullet points real quick. First, do the work. If you do really poor work and very sloppy analysis, it doesn't matter how good of a presenter you are. You're going to get caught. You're going to be exposed for not having done good work. If you do good work, you'll have a point of view and that competence, and I think this is the main point, that competence will give you confidence. You can talk really loudly and have a point of view. Why? Because you did the work and you're willing to back it up and you're willing to defend the work that you did. Two, think globally, like what are the meeting goals? What are we trying to do? Are we just informing them or we want them to make a decision, or we want them to stop doing something like, what is the call to action? For the audience, how big is it? Some meetings are three people, some meetings are 15 people. Very different. For a three-person meeting, you typically are going to have printed handouts on paper and you're going to share that to them. You're going to give them a printed copy and you'll probably sit around a table and just write on it. If it's 15 people, you may do the paper thing or you may be presenting it behind you. If you're presenting it behind you, you need to make sure that the font size, F-O-N-T is actually big enough that they can see it from the back of the room. Also in that room, who is the decision-maker? Who's the one who really matters? Also, do you have people in the room that are already informed about this thing? Or do you need to start at the very beginning of the story and tell them all the process, what you did, how you got here. The background. The last one is, so true is create a presentation, a PowerPoint that actually works. Sometimes in our home late at night we're creating PowerPoint and it makes so much sense. But then you come here on the day of the presentation and you're like, dude, this thing does not help because what's on the page doesn't match what you're trying to say. I'll say this again later, but the PowerPoint is there to help you. Make sure it's helpful, make sure it earns its salary and then also match the duration and the tempo. If it's a one-hour meeting, make sure you don't have a three-hour presentation. It won't fit in that time. Let's say you did all that presentation. You've done the hard work in advance and the presentation is actually tomorrow. What do you do? Well, one is let's do our best to make sure that there's no typos or some strange animation or alignment is wrong, or the fonts are different. More than likely you've reviewed the presentation so many times that you can't even see the mistakes. What I would do in case is send it to your colleague and say, hey, Tammy, would you mind proofreading this really important presentation tomorrow and I can't find the mistakes. Can you do that? Also think about in reverse engineer, anticipate the audiences most difficult questions. What are the jerk, difficult, grumpy questions that they could ask you? Think about what those are. Then more than likely you have backup data that you can add to the appendix, and it's like a safety net. There's no better feeling than in a client presentation. They asked you a question and then you can smile and you can say, great question. Let me share with you the appendix slide that I have that has a detailed breakdown of that data you just asked me for. The second bullet point is just the basics of knowing the location, making sure your computer works, making sure that the lights work, the audio visual, and ask yourself, do I have a backup plan? What happens if my computer breaks? What happens if the lights don't work? What happens if there's traffic? All these things play into making sure that the presentation works fine. Then finally, practice. What you can do and what I do sometimes is on your phone, just push record, and while you're driving to the client site or in your hotel room, record yourself. See what you're doing well, what you're not, what you need to edit, how you can be more expressive when you can pause. Those are all elements in very great presentations. This is a super important tip. When possible, consultants, they pre wire the meeting, which means they make sure that for tomorrow's meeting or the one later on this week, the important stakeholders, they get to see a draft of the presentation in advance. There are no surprises during the meeting. Sometimes in consulting projects, you're making very difficult recommendations. We're getting rid of a product. We're shutting down a manufacturing facility. We're laying people off. We're raising prices. These are tough decisions. You would never want to surprise the client with that because it's just too much to handle at once. Here you can see in McKinsey Way, and this is a really useful book, very simply written. One thing they say is a good business presentation should contain nothing new for the audience, nothing at all. Walk all the players of the client through the findings before you gather in-person. Another good friend and consulting partner that I've worked for said, ''Never have a meeting in a meeting.'' The meeting should actually happen before the meeting. In Japanese language, they have a business jargon phrase called Nemawashi. Basically, it means pre wire. Before the meeting, making sure everybody's on the same page. The meaning of it apparently stands for when you transplant a small bush or plant from this pot to a bigger pot, you have to loosen and move the roots around the plant to jiggle it out and get it loose so you can move it. Same idea. Before you're transplanting an idea from here to there, you want to loosen the roots and get it ready to transplant. I'm sure you've done this before where you've Nemawashid something before the big presentation? I did it just recently. I was sending an email to my boss's boss and I showed it to my boss first. I said, ''Hey, I'm thinking about sending this to these five or six people. Could you take a look at it? Are you okay with it?'' Just making sure that the likelihood of that email being well accepted and not creating problems, same thing with the presentation. Pre-wired the meeting, make sure you do the Nemawashi. Key takeaways. You can get better at public speaking. I'm not great, but I've improved. You do improve over time. It takes a long time. Practice the public speaking. Start now, don't wait until you become famous and it's a very important situation. If you're a recent college graduate think about different opportunities where you can practice. There's an organization called Toast Masters, where you get together with a group of people, typically you don't know, and you practice public speaking and they give you feedback. One thing we all do is we have filler words. These strange words that don't mean anything, stuff like, uh, you know, like, kind of, right, uh-huh, so. Whenever you can, don't use those and just practice pausing. Also, here the second bullet point is, there is a perception and maybe it's a little bit true that people who are good talkers, smooth talkers get promoted first. Well, that may or may not be true. What I would do for those of you who are embedded in corporations and internal consultants, find low stake, low-risk, common opportunities to prepare, to get ready to do the presentations. For the more experienced people, you also have bad habits and mannerisms. But you're so used to presenting that maybe we don't even see them anymore. For you, maybe like me, you need to actively ask for it. What are things that I can improve? Then many of us, it makes sense to even get an executive coach. The longer you've been doing something, the harder it is for us to break those habits.
