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02.08
Smile –
You’re a Presenter!
4 Tips for Better Technical
Presentations
By Susan
de la Vergne
“I hate making presentations! My knees shake,
I forget what I’m going to say, and I’m sure
everyone who’s watching me knows I’m a nervous
wreck.”
“In college, I studied calculus and
mechanical engineering, not public speaking! The
first time in my engineering career someone
asked me to make a presentation, I thought he
was kidding!”
“The worst thing about technical
presentations is how boring they are. Mine are
boring, too. I hate to think I’m boring people,
but I know I am.”
These are just a few of many such comments
from engineering professionals in my “Technical
Presentations” classes. Thousands of people have
expressed these same concerns. They’re
unprepared for this aspect of professional life.
They’re worried that their material is dull or that
they’re dull. They’re nervous. They’re afraid
they’ll be caught short without an answer to a
question. They worry they’ll lose control of the
session when a senior manager in the audience,
who has a different agenda, runs away with their
session.
If you’re nodding vigorously by now — “Yep,
that’s me!” — you have plenty of company. Here are
a few suggestions to improve your technical
presentation abilities and effectiveness.
(1) Smile. I’m not kidding. It’s a simple,
easy expression, and most people have one hidden
away somewhere they can whip out for special
occasions, like presentations. A smile conveys
energy and confidence, and it radiates
professionalism.
Most importantly, smiling counters the dreadful
unwritten rule that technical presentations are
to be dry, dispassionate occasions, that the
material can speak for itself and the presenter
need not infuse the occasion with any energy.
We’ve all seen presentations like that, and it’s
why technical presentations have a terrible
reputation. We dread them because they’re
lifeless.
If you want to be a presenter who doesn’t suffer
this fate, the one thing you can do is smile.
Enjoy your material, your topic, your audience,
and your energy will come shining through. You
don’t have to bring pompoms with you and be
unnaturally perky. Just infuse your talk with
respect for the material. Remember the value of
your topic. Know the purpose that your material
is fulfilling and the service you are offering
by delivering it to your audience. That will
reveal in you the kind of genuine enthusiasm
that will make the occasion — and your
information — memorable.
(2) Edit. It’s always tempting to put everything
you know into your PowerPoint slides. Technical
professionals are usually asked to present
because they’re subject matter experts. They
know their stuff, often at a detailed, complex
level, and they’re prepared to tell their
audience everything they know on the subject.
Trouble is, the audience can’t take it all in,
even if they’re very smart, even if they want
to. When a presenter has built into the slides
and handouts enough material for an entire
graduate course and attempts to deliver it in an
hour or two, the audience disconnects rather
than drown in too much information.
Some blame PowerPoint for that, the technology
that makes it easy to present copious detail too
thoroughly but with pizzazz. Some even suggest
PowerPoint slides should not be used — ever.
That’s a bit extreme. Technical material,
especially, requires visual depictions and,
despite the bad reputation we’ve just been
discussing, PowerPoint is a terrific tool for
that. It’s almost impossible to explain an
n-tier architecture or an interface design or
changes to a physical connector between two
devices without an illustration. A diagram can
make things clear quickly where language alone
cannot.
But detail should be limited to what the
audience can actually take in. It’s way too easy
to swamp your audience with more detail in
your slides than they can possibly internalize
during your presentation, so leave plenty of
white space. Limit your slides to three or (at
the very most) five concisely worded bullets.
And if you ever post a chart or graph you’re
prepared to apologize for (“Sorry if it looks
like an eye chart”), don’t use it.
So edit, and be ruthless.
(3) Listen. The most important thing any
presenter ever does isn’t speak. It’s listen.
Tune in to your audience. Are they with you or
have you lost them? Can they hear you? Are they
drifting? Are your visuals making the point?
What are you listening for? If your audience is
fidgeting, checking e-mail, talking to others or
asking irrelevant questions, they’re not with
you. Many technical presenters, when they see
these symptoms in their audience, forge right
ahead as if nothing were the matter because
they’re not be sure what to do. Or they may
think they don’t have time to address the
problem, that if they adjust their presentation
to rope in a drifting audience, they’ll run out
of time to say everything they have planned.
If you’re tuned in and you know your audience's
attention
has wandered off, it’s up to you to
bring them back. You must adjust your material
to better reach them; otherwise you’re wasting
your — and their — time completely. Stop and take
questions to clarify complexity. Intercept other
conversations, if they’re competing with you.
Your audience expects you to do that, just as
you would if you were in the audience.
Whether you’re leading a meeting of five people
or talking to an auditorium of 5,000, your job
as a presenter is to listen — and adjust.
(4) Practice. It’s the one thing you must
always
do to prepare for a presentation. Practice your
presentation until you’re really solid with your
material and have its sequence, key points,
areas of difficulty, etc., down cold. If you’ve
practiced, you can adjust on the fly, repeat or
cut out as needed, depending on how well the
audience is getting it. If you haven’t
practiced, you’ll be focused on remembering what
important points you have to be sure to cover,
what comes first, next, last. If you're
unprepared, your interior
monologue — “And then I’m going to say … and then
… and then I can’t forget the part about …” — will
be running at such a high rev in your own head,
you won’t tune into your audience at all.
Practicing helps you conquer
nervousness. If you’re at all anxious in front
of a group, the single best thing you can do to
get over it is to practice. Practice brings down
your adrenaline level, and if there’s one thing
a nervous presenter doesn’t need, it’s more
adrenaline.
In competitive, fast-paced technical business
environments, you may not get a lot of advance notice
that you’re going to be giving a presentation.
Someone could ask you to talk for an hour
tomorrow about the results of a product
evaluation you’ve been leading. Meantime, your
day is already booked solid in meetings. Where
will you find time to practice?
Here’s a triage list for just such occasions:
1. Practice your opening and your closing. Try
out different expressions and postures each time
until you hit one that’s “you” and that sets the
tone you want. (Don’t forget to smile.)
2. Practice any especially complex areas of your
discussion, whether they’re abstract
concepts or because the language is complicated
(long or foreign words or phrases, for example).
Practice them until you can say them slowly and
clearly and without tripping over your own
teeth.
3. Practice any stories or humor you plan to
include. Practice until you’re completely
comfortable telling the story, no “ums” and
“uhs” left.
Don’t just speed through these items once and
call it good. Say them over and over, until you
know it’s lodged well enough in your memory that
you don’t have to stop and think about what to
say; it just comes to you.
In Give Your Speech, Change the World, author
(and world-class communications coach) Nick
Morgan wraps up the case for practicing this
way: “Rehearse. It’s the single most important
step you can take to become a better speaker. If
you rehearse, you’ll be able to give the speech
to the audience. If you don’t, you’ll still be
getting to know it yourself.”
With technical material in particular, you can’t
afford the luxury of winging it. You have
complex subject matter to cover, and what the audience
gets out of your presentation is often the
difference between whether a project moves
forward or not, or whether a solution continues
to elude us or not.
Technical presenters face challenges far beyond
the average business presentation, not the least
of which is helping the audience connect with
complex material. These tips —Smile, Edit,
Practice, Listen — may not be part of your regular
preparation for presentations today, but adopt
them and you’ll become a more effective
presenter. Your audiences will thank you.
Susan de la Vergne is the
President of Alder Business Services, Inc. [www.AlderBusiness.com].
She is the author of two books — You CAN'T
Manage Time and Engage, Prepare, Deliver:
Effective Technical Presentations (June 2008) — and a member of the National Speakers
Association.
Comments may
be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org. Opinions expressed are the
author's.
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