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Think for a moment about the hundreds, possibly thousands, of presentation you’ve sat through in your career. You can probably categorise them into three modes of delivery and as leaders, we typically have a natural strength and tendency to one of those modes which says a lot about our primary leadership style.
Not let me say upfront, this is not a poo-poo on PowerPoint, after all, PowerPoint is a great aid to augment your presentation in a meaningful way. Yet if the laptop dies and you’re left exposed with the audience, would you be able to carry on just as well? Somewhat surprisingly, Microsoft PowerPoint was actually first designed for the Apple Mac, but even Steve Jobs said that ‘people who know what they’re talking about, don’t need PowerPoint’.
Nonetheless, and despite so many poor presentations, PowerPoint has remained the primary presentation tool in our work-life today. So many of us hate it that we’ve coined the phrase ‘Death By PowerPoint’, which in some cases, is exactly what happened. The Washington Post demonstrated that the Columbia space shuttle crises was not resolved because key information was “so buried and condensed in PowerPoint as to be useless”. This means that even some of the world’s smartest people, still struggled with the basics of effectively getting an important message across.
So what does your PowerPoint style say about you?
The Informer
This person’s primary motivator is to advise, which means they typically provide as much information as possible, usually way too much, under the misguided belief that armed with ALL the facts, people will make the right decision. Worse yet, some informers do this to relieve themselves of leadership accountability by transmitting it to the listener. You know who I’m talking aboaut. These people have slides with size 8 font to fit all of their text, believing the text is so important they read it back to you verbatim. Graphs are so detailed and complex that no manner of resizing can make them legible or sensical. Consequently, this person is detached from the audience and so deep in their stuff that it all feels quite pointless.
The Instructor
This person sees their role as a coach, to provide prescriptive direction. Their slides often feature checklists, process flows and timelines. ’You are here’ indicators with a path to achieving tomorrow’s goals. Consequently, listeners find themselves lacking the sense of purpose in the presentation because it’s missing the gravity of ‘what’ and ‘why’.
The Influencer
These are the visionaries, they tell a motivational story and their slides may not feature a single word in favour of an image that illustrates the big idea. However, they can spend so much time in the conceptual sphere that they miss the detail people need to execute. You may walk out thinking ‘so-what-now’, exposing a gap between idea and execution. The presentation might be dripping with purpose and effectively draw the audience’s attention, but is actually powerless because the energy fails to translate to understanding and action.
None of these is wrong, but a single one of these isn’t right either
As leaders we need to master the craft of effectively moving between all of the modalities, starting with The Influencer, building the strong why, followed by The Informer adding the flesh of context that makes it real for the listener. Then comes The Instructor to help translate that motivation and context, into an achievable and desirable action plan.
That’s what the world’s best presenters do, it’s how TED speakers are coached and how masters of human engagement effectively lead their people.