Top 9 Bad Habits Of Technical Presenters

Perhaps you were looking for a top 10 list? I've spent some time thinking about all of the technical presentations that I've given in the past and I was only able to come up with a list of nine really, really bad things that I've done over and over again. Let's take a look at the bad habits that technical presenters make and, as a bonus, we'll see if we can find ways to stop doing them!

1. Technical Presenter Bad Habit #1: Reading Your Speech.
   I don't care how technical the material that you are talking about is, you need to connect with your audience during your presentation and you won't be able to do this if you are tied to your notes, your slides, or even a script. Instead, practice, practice, practice. Once you really know your material, then you'll be able to deliver it without notes. Steve Jobs over at Apple does this and that's why he is so good!
   
   
2. Technical Presenter Bad Habit #2: Poor Eye Contact.
   They say that the eyes are the windows to the soul. Well, you've got to be looking in those windows in order to be able to determine what is going on inside of your audience's heads. Too many of us will spend an entire presentation looking at something, anything, else besides our audience. You need to consciously make an effort to make eye contact with your audience at least 90% of the time that you are speaking.
   
   
3. Technical Presenter Bad Habit #3: Dressing Badly.
   As a speaker, you always want to be the best dressed person in the room. While you are speaking, your clothes will be speaking to the audience also. You want them to be saying that you are both successful and confidant. A good looking speaker gets the respect of the audience even before he/she opens their mouth. If you don't feel confident selecting clothes, then get a friend or a salesperson to help you make the right decisions.
   
   
4. Technical Presenter Bad Habit #4: Bad Body Language.
   While you are talking, your body may be having a conversation with your audience at the same time. If your hands are fumbling with a pen, coin, or a ring; or if you are pacing, swaying or other wise making movements that distract the audience from what you are saying, then you are sabotaging your own presentation. The best way to stop doing this is to practice in front of a mirror or videotape your practice. You just might be surprised at what you see!
   
   
5. Technical Presenter Bad Habit #5: Winging It.
   If you feel that you know your material or your audience so well that a rehearsal is not needed, please print out the following words and place them on your desk where you can see them: "YOU'RE WRONG!" The first time that you give a presentation is the worst time that you give it. You just keep getting better each time you run through it. John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco, spends countless hours practicing every part of every presentation. If a big & important guy like him is willing to spend the time, then why wouldn't you?
   
   
6. Technical Presenter Bad Habit #6: Being Too Stiff.
   This bad habit is in a fight with bad habit #4. Although you don't want your body parts to flap around and distract from what you are saying, you also don't want to be a statue - this will also distract from what you're saying. If you assume a frozen position, then that will result in a boring presentation for your audience.
   
   
7. Technical Presenter Bad Habit #7: Shooting Your Audience w/ Bullets.
   I've got great news for you - chances are that your audience can read! This means that if you spend your presentation reading bullets that are listed on a slide that everyone in the audience can read for themselves, then you will have done everyone a disservice. Remember the slides are there to serve the speaker, not the other way around.
   
   
8. Technical Presenter Bad Habit #8: Going On, And On, And On.
   Although you may love to hear yourself speak, studies show that you'll start to use your audience after about 18 minutes or so. One of the golden rules of presentations is that an audience will never hold it against you if you wrap up early; however, they'll blame you if you take too long. This all gets back to practicing your presentation before you give it - trim it ruthlessly!
   
   
9. Technical Presenter Bad Habit #9: Being Boring.
   Your audience has other things that they could be doing instead of listening to you. You need to do something to grab their attention and make them care about what you are talking about. This means that you need to have a powerful opening that seizes their attention from the get go and a closing that wraps it all up.

There you go - a top 9 list of things that happen all to often when a technical presenter has bad habits. How many of this habits do you have? Have you ever been able to overcome a bad technical presentation bad habit? How did you do it? Leave a comment and let me know what has worked for you.


Tags: public speaking, training, speech, eye contact, body language

Group Meetings: More Gain, Less Pain

We've talked about the fact that group meetings, especially for technical teams, can be a large expense and a big waste of time if not set up and run correctly. These are great opportunities to communicate with the entire team and you really don't want to blow it. If you get picked to set one of these meetings up, I've got just a few more suggestions on how to make the meeting memorable not a memorial.

1. Bridge Virtual and Real Worlds: all adults learn differently and they don't stop doing this just because there's a large group meeting going on. Blogs, podcasts, wikis all play a role in day-to-day life and have become the way that some team members prefer to learn. Don't fight this, instead embrace it. If you don't have time for everyone associated with a project to present their part of it, why not record a podcast and make it available to attendees to download. This way you can reduce the amount of time spent on that topic and yet still provide complete coverage. Use the tools to enhance the meeting experience.
   
   
2. So What Did You Think About That? Providing the audience with an opportunity to comment on speakers and sessions is the key to completing the circle. Especially with Gen-X & Gen-Y'ers there is a need to be able to provide feedback in order to feel as though their participation really counted for something. This also helps shape the next meeting by telling the organizer what worked and what just flat out bombed.
   
   
3. Context Gives Meaning To Content: Identify what you want the attendees to get out of attending the meeting. Why are they coming and what do you want them to be able to do when they leave? With this knowledge you can plan the day's events to start everyone out in the same place and then gradually lead them to where you want to get them too. This sure beats just throwing together a bunch of speakers to fill a day.
   
   
4. Is This Going To Be Graded? How the meeting is viewed after it is all over will be the summation of how each individual speaker was viewed. You really want to get the audience's opinion of each speaker; however, having one of those one-size-fits-all speaker evaluation forms never really seems to provide any useful feedback. Instead, create a set of different evaluation forms based on the presenter's content - technical, motivational, strategic, etc. This way you can truly learn who made a difference with your audience.

There you have it - everything that I currently know about putting on a good team meeting. I'm sure that there is more to it than I have been able to share here, so let me know what I missed. Have you ever had to run or help out running one of these big team meetings? How did it go - can you remember anything that was discussed and, perhaps more importantly, did the meeting cause any positive changes? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.


Tags: virtual worlds, feedback, evaluation, training, speech topics

Group Meetings: Group Hug or Group Mug(ging)?

Every technical organization seems to have a big annual meeting of some sort. The last one of these that I attended was put on by an Executive Director at a firm who liked to do these twice a year. He would fly in all of his direct reports and have them spend 30 minutes each talking about what their team had accomplished. Some awards were given out, the Executive Director spoke some words of encouragement and then his vice president who had also flown in for the meeting wrapped things up with a motivational talk. This took the better part of a full day and for the life of me, an hour after the meeting was over I could have told you how many emails I had waiting for me once I got back to the office, but not what was discussed.

The motivation for these meetings can be quite different from group to group or even from year to year; however, each meeting seems to be painfully familiar. Although the scope of the meeting often depends on the size of the company. Now that we've got the inner game of public speaking taken care of, let's talk about the outer game of how to throw a BIG meeting - those are often the biggest communications disasters.

What's the purpose of these meetings? Often the firm has so many different products / projects / programs that they decide that a big meeting is just the way to ensure that everyone knows what's going on at the company. These meetings are, on the surface, quite expensive to put on, and if you take an even closer look they turn out to be really, really expensive once you take into consideration the lost productivity that they cause. They could be a good use of time; however, here are a few reasons why they generally miss the mark:

1. Who You Talking To? Most of these technical organization meetings are planned and put on by the same set of non-technical folks (the people who drew the short straws). What this means is that the topics that are covered and the sequence in which they are covered tends to be the same from meeting to meeting - why mess with success? How can you possibly expect an audience to "stay in the moment" for these types of presentations? What makes a great meeting is when controversial topics are included. Yes, this can be dangerous but that's exactly why people will remember them.
   
   
2. My Way Or The Highway. Who is invited to do what and how they are permitted to do it can be a real sticking point at these meetings. If every speaker is required to have 25 slides and to talk for 30 minutes and participate in one big panel session at the end, then congratulations - everyone is going to look the same and be forgotten just as quickly. If instead, each presenter is encouraged to do what they need to do in order to get their message across, then at least you'll have some variety. Sure, there will still be some with 25 slides and 30 minute presentations; however, you'll also have others that just might have their message stick.
   
   
3. You're So Popular To Me. Just because someone who is presenting during one of these meetings is popular, doesn't mean that anyone is learning anything. I have seen plenty of presentations where a well-liked manager delivers a presentation to a packed house. However, afterwords I realized that he/she really hadn't said anything. What a waste of time! Making sure that everyone has a point to their presentation is a key preparation step.
   
   
4. Complex Meetings Need Simple Solutions. The more complicated the subject matter, the more simple it must be for the audience to attend and to understand what is being discussed. If the discussion requires detailed charts or process flows, then make sure that handouts are available and that the slides only show a subset of the information - no need to remind your audience that they aren't getting any younger by making them squint at tiny fonts on a screen all the way up at the front of the room. Likewise, if everyone is going to be in one room listening to one speaker who is talking about a complex subject, make sure that everyone can see the speaker - ensure that there is a raised platform. This will go a long way to help keep their interest.
   
   
5. Watch Those Awards. The one part of a meeting like this that can kill the whole deal is the awards show. This introduces two problems: first, they are boring and second, if I'm not winning an award then I'll start to resent the person who is. Keep in mind what you are trying to achieve with the whole meeting and make sure that an awards show fits. If it does, then make it like a hotel room tryst - quick, pleasant, and forgotten once its done.
   

There are more communications keys that you need to keep in mind when planning a large meeting like this; however, we'll cover those next time.

Have you ever had to plan one of these meetings? How did it turn out - huge success or crashing bore? Did you get picked to do it again or did someone else get lucky? Leave me a comment and tell me about your experiences.


Tags: group meeting, training, speech topics, organization, project management

Huh? Learning To Stay In The Moment

So there I was, on one of those conference calls with way too many people and all of a sudden it started to happen. The moderator would ask a question of someone who was on the call and that person would say "Huh? I'm sorry, but could you repeat the question?" This happened over and over again with different people. I just sat there and thought to myself - "Man, is nobody paying attention to this call?" Although it sounds simple, it turns out that staying in the moment is getting more and more difficult to do...

What's really going on here? It's always been difficult to get people to remember & retain what has gone on it a meeting; however, now we seem to be having problems with people not being able to keep up with the flow of a meeting. According to author Cherie Kerr we may have the wrong focus. Outside of those folks who are deliberately doing other work during a meeting (BlackBerry anyone?), the people who are actually trying to participate often make the mistake of focusing on the goals of the meeting instead of what is being said right now.

The real goal of a meeting is achieve some sort of result. This can be an agreement, determine a next step, or reach a decision. That's the end point. How you get there is the responsibility of the person who is running the meeting. If that's you , then what you want to have happen is for everyone in the meeting to build on what has already been said instead of coming up with completely new directions for the meeting to head off in. Note that we're not talking about Brainstorming sessions here, but rather normal business meetings.

By building on top of what has already been said, there will be a clear path from where you started to where the goal of the meeting is. Each discussion in the meeting will have a clear start, middle, and end as you lead into the next conversation. It will also quickly become clear if you've gone off the path and you'll be able to bring the meeting back in line. Your participants will be more engaged because they'll have a better understanding of where the meeting has been and where it is going.

This suggestion is not new. In fact the folks who do improv comedy do this all the time. Their skits flow from one character's actions to another's quickly. Hey, if it works for a 30 minute TV show, then surely it will work for your next business meeting!

Are you ready to keep your next meeting in line? Do you think that an incremental approach to conversations is the way to go or do you like a more open and free ranging approach? What works best in your life - leave a comment and let me know.


Tags: attention, focus, retention, meetings, groups, teams, training

Arrgh! Isn't There A Law Against Giving Bad Presentations?

I probably need to apologize in advance for this rant -- I've finally reached my breaking point.

I somehow got myself trapped in a presentation on changes to my 401k retirement program. I guess that I should start by admitting that I really can't think of a much more boring topic to talk about in the first place even though I know that I should be really interested because, after all, it is my retirement. However, the person giving the presentation was beyond bad -- they were just awful. To make matters worse, the presentation went on for over 1-1/2 hours. Well before the end I was wondering if I could sneak out the back door, but alas, it was not to be.

When I finally stumbled out of this colossal waste of time, I found myself wondering how I could avoid getting trapped in any such presentations in the future. Yes, I did for just a minute dream of a world in which presentation police would show up and arrest anyone who did a poor or careless job of presenting information. I was thinking that the charge would have to be something along the lines of "... intent to do bodily harm."

Since we don't live in that world, what do ALL presenters of complex information need to know (we'll leave motivational speakers out of it for now)? At the end of the day I believe that there are two critical skills that all speakers must have: (1) the ability to understand and use how adults learn when constructing a speech, and (2) the ability to appeal to all types of learning methods during the same presentation.

The days of sitting in school and having a teacher talk at us are over. We get bombarded with way too much information every day. Ultimately, I believe that it's the presenters responsibility to deliver information in a way that we can understand and remember it. So there you go, there are no presentation police, but if there were would you have an arrest record?


Tags: training, adult learning, public speaking, memory, retention