Management Insights

Making Effective Presentations

You have a unique opportunity to change minds when you make a presentation. Unfortunately, it's an opportunity that is frequently wasted. Presentations are often a waste of effort for the presenter and a waste of time for the audience. Before subjecting your audience to a slow death by PowerPoint, consider the best way to engage them.

Start by asking yourself if you even need to make a presentation. Seth Godin notes that the best presentation is no presentation at all. If you can get by with a memo, send a memo. Alternatively, meet one on one, look the other person in the eye and make your case.

If you decide that a presentation is the best approach, make it interactive. You don't like to be talked at and neither does your audience. Frame the dialog by defining the questions that need to be discussed. Then let people ask questions. If this is not practical, pose rhetorical questions instead. Answer questions by telling stories and by providing relevant examples.

If you must use slides, keep them simple. One slide, one point. No bullets, just pictures. For great examples of this technique see Steve Jobs keynote presentations or this presentation by Stanford professor Larry Lessig.

When you present, speak from your heart not a script. Don't worry about trying to get the words exactly right. People remember scenarios not words. Your audience are more likely to be influenced by your passion and authenticity than by any particular choice of words. And finally, look at your audience when you speak, don't read from your slides. Your audience is quite capable of reading them. If you need to read from your slides, you are either unsure what your point is, or your slides are unclear.

Simply presenting one fact after another - slide after boring slide - is unlikely to change anyone's mind. We use metaphors to make sense of the world and most of our thinking is organized as stories. If you want to change minds, make an emotional appeal to your audience by telling compelling stories and by engaging them in a conversation.

Ground Rules For Effective Meetings

You may have experienced the growing problem of "continuous partial attention" during meetings. With a laptop, iPhone, or other electronic device nearby, attendees simply cannot keep their focus on the meeting. Perhaps you've noticed them furtively glancing at their phone under the table as they check email, or heard the click-clack of a keyboard as people on speakerphone use their laptops. As this article describes, while a quick log-on may seem, to the user, a harmless break, others in the room receive it as silent dismissal. This problem is growing with the proliferation of devices and as people, especially younger employees who have grown-up using text based electronic communication, become less sensitive to the nuances of body-language.

This is just one of many challenges facing managers trying to run effective meetings. People arrive late, aren't prepared, engage in side conversations, or they don't participate and then have the real meeting in the hall afterwards. To overcome these challenges, I have found that establishing firm ground-rules with the group helps to set boundaries and define norms. Typically, during the first meeting I'll suggest a few ground-rules and then the group will discuss and customize them, and brainstorm additional ones. Once a final list of ground-rules has been agreed, a copy is posted on the wall and they are added to the meeting agenda. During the next few meetings, they are reviewed to ensure that everyone understands and remembers them. Lapses in behavior are then called-out by any member of the group; "Do you think that was consistent with our agreed ground-rules?"

Here are a few suggested ground-rules that I have personally found to be effective:

1. Everyone participates - Use of laptops and other devices should be limited to making presentations, keeping notes, or looking up relevant information.
2. Start and finish on time - Don't punish the prompt by making them wait for stragglers or reward late-comers by repeating discussions or revisiting decisions.
3. One conversation at a time - Show respect for others by listening to their point of view and refraining from side conversations.
4. Silence is agreement - It is unacceptable to remain silent during a meeting and then later say you don't agree with the group decision.
5. Different opinions are welcome - Contrary views need to be encouraged to support robust decision-making and to prevent group-think.
6. Challenge ideas, not individuals - Emotions can run high and criticism can turn personal if attendees aren't reminded to focus on the issues.
7. Disagree in private; unite in public - Irrespective of how individuals voted, once a decision has been agreed to everyone should support it and speak with one voice outside of the meeting. Also known as Vegas rules (what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.)
8. Do what you say you'll do - Individuals are accountable for following though on agreed actions and the group should hold each other mutually accountable.

Remember, it takes a good meeting to be better than no meeting at all.

The Hidden Cost of Meetings

We all intuitively recognize that meetings can have a significant cost. By far the biggest cost is the time of all of the participants. Not only the time required to attend the meeting, but also the time to prepare, and get to and from the meeting. Even an effective meeting takes significant time and can disrupt the rest of our day. This article by Paul Graham argues that the cost of meetings to creative professionals is far greater than for other people.

People in management and creative roles are on different schedules. Managers are able to compartmentalize their work into discrete blocks of time - typically an hour or so - and switch easily between them. For managers, scheduling a meeting is mostly a practical matter of calendar management. However, creative professionals such as programmers and writers - or what Graham refers to as "makers" - have difficulty doing something creative in units of one hour; that's barely enough time to get started. They typically use time in blocks of at least half a day. The cost of switching from one activity to another is far greater for creative professionals. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything worthwhile.

Consequently, managers should be sensitive to the far greater cost of lost productivity that meetings have on colleagues in creative roles. Unnecessary meetings should be eliminated altogether. The real need for people in creative roles to attend meetings should be be considered. Finally, if a meeting is necessary, it should be scheduled at the beginning or end of the day to minimize disruption to the workflow of creative professionals.

Meetings Are Management

Many managers consider meetings to be a huge waste of time. They often grumble that they spend all day attending meetings rather than doing "real work". However, if the objectives of meetings are to solve problems, make decisions, and communicate with others, isn't this the job of management? Meetings are an essential part of management. I'm all for eliminating unnecessary meetings, but it is unrealistic to expect that you can eliminate them all. Your challenge is to make all of your meetings effective, both as a leader and participant.

The first step of improving the effectiveness of your meetings is to make them more efficient. Prepare a well thought out agenda, and start and finish on time. If people have become accustomed to arriving late, start the meeting without them - they will soon get the message. Once you start paying attention to the efficiency of the meeting, it's amazing how quickly meeting effectiveness improves as people become more focused.

I often encounter managers who spend all day running frantically from one meeting to the next. They have no chance to follow-up on their commitments from previous meetings, or to prepare for their next meeting. Like dominos falling, later meetings are increasingly delayed as earlier meetings run over. My suggestion for these people is to schedule 15-30 minutes between meetings to allow time for the inevitable delays.

Another critical discipline for effective meetings is to keep a log of decisions taken and actions agreed to. I'm not talking about minutes, which often take days to transcribe and distribute, and are seldom ever read again. Instead, I recommend a simple action log capturing a brief description of each issue discussed, the actions agreed to, who is accountable for following-up each, and when they will get it done. At the start of each meeting, review the action log from the previous meeting. At the end of the current meeting, review the updated action log combining incomplete actions from the previous action log with any new actions. Distribute a copy of the action log immediately following the meeting, or better yet, distribute it before people leave the room.

For additional ideas on improving meeting effectiveness, Seth Godin offers some suggestions in his excellent blog.