Effective human resource or other executives must be able to communicate to an executive group, a prospective employee, or business partner. To make sure that you’re communicating effectively, follow these guidelines:
- Tell a story. People love stories. Stories have a beginning, middle, and end.
- Don’t engage in death by PowerPoint. Too many presenters overwhelm their audience with far too much information in their PowerPoint. It’s called PowerPoint, not PowerParagraph. Don’t have more than three bullet points on any slide. Don’t use entire sentences, just a snapshot of the point to be made. Even better, see how just one picture can express many words. An excellent book to consider is Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds.
- Begin logically and end emotionally. Move from the left side of the brain to the right side. Give people powerful information and the emotional “why” for applying it.
- Less is more. Sometimes it’s better to communicate from a single page of bullet points than from an extensive handout. You can always make more information available later on.
- Ask powerful questions. What can you ask that would be thought provoking? What questions keep your audience up at night? What questions will develop a rapport with your audience immediately?
- Get feedback regularly. Be sure that your audience understands your point. Do they agree with you? For example, after making a point, superstar presenter Tony Robbins will ask the audience to say “Ay” in unison to help reinforce the point just made.
- Wrap it up with action items. Identify the actions that you and your audience should take next. Give them a form or checklist to apply the information shared in your presentation.
Follow these presentation essentials and you too will do a great job of communication.
To learn more about presentations, see our Form of the Month: Powerful Presentation Techniques.