Presentation Skills - Basics For Leaders

[clabrat]

Presentation skills are very important in organizations and leaders make presentations all the time to board members, employees, community leaders, groups of customers, etc. It is possible to make or break an organization from a presentation and so top leadership should strive to have the best presentation skills.

List and prioritize goals
Listing and prioritizing the top goals that you want to accomplish with your audience is the most important of all presentation skills. You may think you know what you want to accomplish or what you want to say in your presentation, but if you're not clear with yourself and others, it is very easy for your audience to completely miss the point of your presentation.

Be clear
Being clear about who your audience is and about why is it important for them to be in the meeting is important since members of your audience always want to know right away why they were the ones chosen to be in the presentation. You should therefore make sure that your presentation makes this clear to them from the start.

Design openings and closings
This is one of the most neglected of the important presentation skills. The presenter should design a brief opening, about 5% to 10% of the total time presentation time, to present goals for the presentation, clarify the benefits of the presentation and to explain the overall layout of the presentation. A closing should also be designed and it should also be about 5% to 10% of the total time presentation time, covering a summary of all key points from the presentation.

Keep time
This is one of the most important of the negotiation skills, but many people think that the longer their presentation takes the more its effect will be. Well, this is not so because people often get tired when a presentation goes on for longer than they had expected.

Effective delivery
Effective delivery means that you observe presentation skills such as maintaining eye contact with the audience so that they can feel like you are talking to them personally, varying the speech to prevent monotony and making sure that the audience doesn’t notice you looking at your notes for too long.

Other presentation skills include setting a clear tone such as hopefulness or teamwork among others from the onset and setting aside a Q&A session after the presentation.

[Hanselich]

I would also like to add, you should not try to hide any doubtful information from the audience, but rather explain it to them. It's also important that your presentation isn't too long, because most of the people can't listen concentrated for more than 20 minutes.