Increasingly it’s no use pretending that how you look and how you sound is irrelevant to how you are perceived as doing your job. A scruffy, grumbly and mumbling dentist will do less business than someone who is cheerful and looks well-kempt. There was a dentist in New Barnet when I was young called Dr Screech but that’s another story.
These days your competence and potential as an executive will be judged by how well you present. And in a global economy there is no longer anywhere to hide. So even if you are a success at your job, good at the key skills of project management, people management and creativity, if you can’t do compelling presentations your career prospects are shackled.
‘Can you present?’ is top of the job-panels list
It’s 9.30 and the interviews for the big job on procurement have started. There are three external and two internal candidates. One of the internal guys is a woman who’s very good and very nervous. She’s also very tired because she’s currently doing three jobs brilliantly – hers, her boss’s (who’s on holiday) and her assistant’s (who’s not yet been appointed). You know what happens. One of the untried and unknown external candidates gets the job because ‘That was simply the best presentation … brilliant. And frankly Sheila was a disappointment … didn’t hack it on the day.’ Sheila had been doing a good job for three years, a great job for one year and a slightly flustered presentation for 20 minutes. All those great appraisals were to no avail, it was PowerPoint and body language that did for her.
Whose fault: the panel or Sheila’s? Panels, however professional, tend to be very subjective and impressionable. They take against a candidate’s tie or their voice. They seldom really study the CV except for gaps. But they tend to love that presentation because it’s their chance to, in automotive parlance, ‘kick the car’s tyres’. So in the end, panels being panels and their expectations being for the exam question to be brilliantly answered, this is the fault of Sheila’s holidaying boss and the HR people in failing to help Sheila understand this and prepare properly. But Sheila is also to blame. She hadn’t listened to the way the company worked and what it wanted. Which was a dazzling presentation.
Your presentation in a job interview is a clincher. Don’t underestimate its importance.
In a situation in which Sheila had the job sewn up, all she could do was let it slip from her grasp by being careless. A presentation is the easiest way to achieve a baffling defeat or an unforeseen victory. Like exams (where the real skill is to conceal your ignorance and parade your strengths) they are an easy way to mark a candidate there and then. As a panel member you get to see people under pressure and judge their ability to organise their thoughts.
Corporations love presentations
They really do. I’ve heard people describe themselves as being sucked into their own company’s way of doing things. At IBM in the bad old days the way to the top lay in having the best slide deck. Someone told me he went to a company presentation over two days and saw so many presentations that his head ached with bullet points and wonderful slides. There were over 1900 slides, he said, which the organisers strangely seemed to regard as something of a triumph.
Presentations are business’s way of creating collective buy-in and information flow – in theory, in theory. Jack Welch, ex CEO of GE and perhaps the most successful and famous business leader in our lifetime, said of creating slides:
‘I’ve always thought that chart-making clarified my thinking better than anything else. Reducing a complex problem to a simple chart excited the hell out of me… I love doing charts and got so much out of them. The crazy thing about it was that we always felt the last presentation was the best ever.’
The story here is that if people like Jack Welch think presentations are that important you had better listen. Especially in tough business environments where senior executives love shining the spotlight on you and asking tough questions just as you are getting into your flow. At one fast-moving consumer goods company you are told you are only as good as your last presentation. This means your working life is a bit like running a non-stop Grand National, and if you fall at Bechers Brook you are toast!
Just as meetings feed the business day, so presentations are the currency by which many places judge their executives.
Meetings feed the business day and your presentations at them are the way they judge you.
So the best survival tip I can give anyone is to get your presentation skills up to scratch ahead of anything else. In a tough world you can present your way out of trouble but, however smart you are, a bad presentation is a public and unerasable black mark.
How else do you pitch an idea?
Houston, we have a problem. I have a great idea: a career-accelerating idea, an idea that could make us all rich. But I have a problem. My audience:
- has a very low attention span;
- is intolerant of ideas because it hears new ones the whole time;
- has had its fingers burned countless times;
- is minded to give all who present to it a hard time … just because it happened to them.
And I am not very good at presenting.
So what are my chances of success?
Well, how I can I put this? Not that good or, to be more precise, probably zero.
Remember what Greg Berns said:
‘A person can have the greatest idea in the world but if that person can’t convince enough other people it doesn’t matter.’
So it’s how you present it that makes your idea matter.
If you have a great idea you’ll kill it by presenting it badly. So learn to present brilliantly as well as creating ideas brilliantly. Both matter as much as each other.
The man leapt on to the desk
That man was Kevin Spacey pitching a film idea to the top guys at Pathé Films in London. In fascinated horror they watched as he tap-danced and sang on the CEO’s treasured desk just feet away from their embarrassed faces.
I’ve seen Kevin present and he’s one of the very best, helped by an uncanny knack of mimicry of Bill Clinton, Morgan Freeman and Jack Lemmon. He is of course an actor and he nervelessly held the audience in the palm of his hand, talking about why governments and business needed to support the arts and why cutting funding was, to any sane person, not only unthinkable but an act of criminal vandalism.
You are unlikely to be as good as Kevin. He’s to presenting what Lee Westwood is to golf or Marcus Wareing is to cooking. But with constant practice you can be very good. Use a great coach and you too can be brilliant.
Kevin Spacey got brilliant through hard work.
Improving your reputation in your business
Ask to go on a presentation coaching programme. Say that you realise how important it is to be a better presenter. If there’s a great presenter in your business, ask if he or she can help you. The key is to go public about wanting to be great at the art of public communication.
In doing this you are staking a claim to be a presenter to keep an eye on. Once you do that you have to keep your side of the promise by proving you are really good. And you’ll do this by practice, practice, practice and by working with experts on improving all aspects of what you do.
Your career is reliant on your ability to be a great communicator, so start getting good by putting in the hours.
If you put a priority on presenting you’ll find you create time for it. You’ll start rehearsing and thinking about it when you’re in a traffic jam, when you’re showering or when you’re waiting for a call. You can rehearse anywhere if you’re keen enough.
Do not leave getting good at presenting too late. It takes so much longer and is so much harder if you wait until you’re a senior executive before confronting the fact you don’t like it, don’t want to do it and aren’t any good at it.
And if you are quite good at it, get better – get brilliant, because brilliant presenters are more hirable than mere brilliant operators. Brilliant presenters change minds, sell change and influence the way things develop in a business.
It’s this simple – if you want to transform your career, become a brilliant presenter.