How To Do A Management Presentation

Hi, I'm Simon Bucknall and in 2008, I won the European Championship of Public Speaking. At the Art of Connection, we help ambitious professionals to connect with their audience and we do it by bringing world class communications expertise into the training room to enable our clients to persuade, influence and inspire others. As a manager within your organization, you know what it's like to confront challenges and you have a set of clear priorities, specific actions that you feel need to be taken by the team to meet those challenges.

But when it comes to giving the management presentation to the team, far too many of the presentations that I've seen focus solely and exclusively on the management priorities. Now, I'm not saying those priorities are not important. Of course, they are.

But what I am saying is that if you want to sell the need for the team to act on those priorities effectively, you need to connect with them first because, guess what, the team may not necessarily share the same priorities as the management. They may be in a totally different place. So, what that means is that at the start of the management presentation, it's worth finding common ground first.

What can you agree on? What could you say that will show your audience, whoever they may be, what can you say that will show that audience that you understand where they're at? Because if you do that, you'll gain permission from them for you to talk to them and they're more likely to listen. So once you've done that, once you've connected and found the common ground, that's when you can start to look at what needs to be done differently to improve, to move things forward and it's worth being honest. It may be, at this point, that you want to reach out to the group and ask them what they think.

What are their thoughts? What's gone well? What's not gone well? They'll b honest if you create a safe environment for them to open up. But by reaching out to the audience and inviting them to contribute, you'll stand a much better chance of securing they're buying. Final thought is that when you come to the close of your presentation, it's worth giving them a really clear call to action.

It's a bit like branding, almost. What is it that you want your team to do? If they take only one thing from your presentation, what is it? Maybe it's a new attitude of mind, or maybe it's a new technique or just a new way of thinking. Get a really clear call to action and your management presentation will have much greater impact. .