Presentation Skills for Executives

Good presentation skills are good presentation skills, no matter what position or title you hold...right? Well, yes...and no.

While it's certainly true that there are many foundational best practices for effective presentations that are applicable for everyone, once you reach an executive level in your organization, there are a few necessary tweaks to adopt.

EXECUTIVE TWEAKS

1. As an executive, you need to be even more aware of how you come across and how people perceive you because you have more visibility and power both within and outside your organization. What you say and how you say it gets quoted, taken literally, interpreted and acted upon.

Assess how you show up by videotaping your presentations and analyzing tone of voice, demeanor, eye contact, body language and authenticity. Hire a communications consultant to help with this for a professional, objective viewpoint.

2. Although you may have detailed knowledge of how things work in your particular field, the executive presenter should focus more on the what versus the how. According to Scott Eblin, executive coach, speaker and author of The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success, "A common mistake new executives make is to focus too much on how they came to their conclusions. To do this is to risk getting labeled as someone who, when asked for the time, explains how to build a watch."

Your audience is looking to you to provide leadership, synthesize concepts and not get mired in the weeds of detail. Eblin says, "Focus much more on your recommendations and their implications than on the mechanics of how you arrived at them."

3. Making a vision and big picture goals meaningful to employees is a key objective of many executive presentations. Storytelling is an excellent tool for accomplishing this. Stories provide context, engage an audience, make the message memorable and give the executive a more conversational, down-to-earth tone. Here is a great example of executive effectiveness, using story, from communications consultant, Angela DeFinis.

Telling a story well is not an intuitive skill for most people. Craft your story(ies) well in advance of your presentation so you can practice your delivery, tone, pauses, inflection and facial expressions. Rehearse on videotape in front of colleagues/advisors who can give you critical, honest feedback.

4. Many executives give a substantial enough number of speeches and presentations that it may not be feasible to rehearse and internalize each of them to the point where they can be delivered with only minimum notes. Reading a speech, written by others, may be a necessity on some occasions. If so, learn how to do it properly.

Read through the script enough times to become familiar with the pacing and language. Practice grabbing a phrase or sentence in your head and then look up to deliver it to the audience. Keep eye contact front and center on your to-do list. Sound like you mean what you're saying. If some practice runs through the script don't result in a smooth delivery, find a coach to help you sound polished and authentic, even though you are reading your presentation.

And for pete's sake, if you are using a TelePrompter, PLEASE get some professional training/coaching on how to do it effectively.

While the above tweaks are certainly aspirational skills for every presenter, for an executive presenter, they are simply non-negotiable.

What other executive tweaks have you used/seen used to create a better experience for the audience?

Comments

[Kathy Reiffenstein]

Hi Jim,

Thanks so much for your insightful comments.

You are so right ... the better the speaker is at genuinely connecting and engaging with the audience, the more likely the audience will be to return the favor. I frequently coach my students to visualize that they are speaking to just one person, to help them hone their connection skills.

Best,
Kathy

[Jim N O'Co]

The secrets to succesful presenting are far simpler than most people think. Yes you have to be organised, you have to have a well articulated message that is clear and easy to follow. But how do you make sure that it reaches the greatest share of the audience. The real trick is to grab attention without using gimmicks. Although a gimmick or two can be useful to much reliance on them can take your message of focus or worse it can confuse your audience. No the trick to grabbing attention is to give attention, fully engage in a two way reciprocal relationship all with the intention of speaking to the audience as if you were speaking to one person. Attention, Reciprocal Engagement, Intention. If you build your presentations on these principles you will rarely go wrong.

[Kathy Reiffenstein]

Hi Tr3,

Thanks for stopping by.

Yes, I quite agree with you. Executive presentations have to frame the message in a way that tells the audience why that message is important, why the audience should care about it. This is really what I was talking about in #3.

If the executive can connect with the audience...through being authentic, caring and answering the why...the message will be much more likely to get through!

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Missing from this blog is the MOST important presentation need for execs of all - the why. The why (explained in a way the audience cares about) is where the real connection with an exec can be made. The impact of why? Well, if I ask the exec, what do you do and why do you do it, a good answer might be, "I am the CEO and I do what I do to make sure our customer experience is the best it can be for them. The what-CEO-I am impressed. The why-it is for me, the customer-NOW I CARE. The goal is to connect with the audience and it is the emotion of caring that can accomplish that.